Nearly 60 years after Malcolm X’s assassination at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan, his family filed a federal lawsuit Friday claiming that the New York Police Department, CIA and FBI played a role in his killing.
The suit, filed in Manhattan, claims that the agencies knew about threats against the civil rights leader but “failed to intervene on his behalf.” It says that they had “intentionally removed their officers from inside the ballroom” before he was shot and left him even more exposed by arresting his security detail in the days before the event.
The family also claims that the agencies engaged in “fraudulent concealment and cover-up” after Malcolm X’s death by keeping information from his family and hamstringing efforts to identify his killers.
Three men were arrested and convicted in the killing. But after spending more than 20 years in prison, two of them — Muhammad A. Aziz and Khalil Islam — were exonerated. (The third, Thomas Hagan, was paroled in 2010.)
“It has taken us a long time to get to this point,” Ilyasah Shabazz, Malcolm X’s third-eldest daughter, said Friday at a news conference announcing the suit.
Shabazz said she and her sisters were grateful for the help of a legal team led by Ben Crump, who has become the go-to lawyer for families of Black people killed by law enforcement, “as we seek justice for the assassination of our father and that the truth will be recorded in history.” The suit seeks “in excess of $100 million” in damages.
The Police Department and the FBI declined to comment Saturday. The CIA’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Born in Nebraska in 1925, Malcolm X rose to prominence in the Nation of Islam, the Black nationalist group, and became an at times controversial but fiery and persuasive leader.
A year before his killing, he had left the Nation of Islam and started the Organization of Afro-American Unity. On Feb. 21, 1965, as he began to speak in Washington Heights about the new group, three gunmen rushed the stage and shot him in front of his pregnant wife and three of his daughters. He was 39 years old.
For decades, historians cast doubt on official accounts and on the guilt of Aziz and Islam. A joint investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office and lawyers for the two men found in 2021 that prosecutors, the police and the FBI had withheld key evidence at the time. It also found that authorities knew that the Nation of Islam had been targeting Malcolm X.
Days before Malcolm X was killed, his family had escaped a firebomb attack on their home in Queens. A bomb had been thrown into the nursery where his four young daughters were, Shabazz said Friday.
Anthony V. Bouza, a police detective who worked on the original murder investigation, wrote in 2011 that it had been “botched.” Bouza, whose estate is named as a defendant in the suit, wrote that a “parallel tragedy lies in the NYPD’s obvious stonewalling of any release of records likely to help our understanding.”
The actions and inaction of the law enforcement agencies led to the conditions that allowed the gunmen to kill Malcolm X, the suit claims.
“For decades, Malcolm X’s wife, Betty Shabazz, the plaintiffs and their entire family have suffered the pain of the unknown,” the suit says. “They did not know who murdered Malcolm X, why he was murdered, the level of NYPD, FBI and CIA orchestration, the identity of the governmental agents who conspired to ensure his demise, or who fraudulently covered up their role.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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