Gunmen assassinated five prominent Americans in the 1960s, and a cottage industry developed around questions of who really “dunit.”
I figured along with others that we knew who killed Medgar Evers and Robert Kennedy. But I remained steadfast in my belief that Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray were not lone actors in the murders of President John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, respectively, and that two of Malcolm X’s three convicted assailants were probably innocent. I also believed J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had a hand in activities surrounding Malcolm X’s death.
A critical break occurred recently in the case of Malcolm X, the murder with fewer conspiracy theories than some of the others. On November 19, 2021, the NY State Supreme Court judge ruled that two of the three convicted Black men were innocent of killing Malcolm X over 56 years ago.
These two men, Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam, were railroaded into prison for decades. No physical evidence tied them to the murder, and both had alibis. Yet, they spent many years in prison for a crime they did not commit and for which they had always proclaimed their innocence.
Their exoneration is a tiny bit of vindication for these two men and those of us who suspected quite strongly that others were involved in the crime.
We knew that Aziz and Islam had always claimed their innocence, and we knew that from the beginning, Mujahid Abdul Halim, who had confessed to the murder, had repeatedly stated that Aziz and Islam had no part in the killing.
A documentary filmmaker and investigative journalist pieced together convincing evidence of the innocence of the two men that goaded the Manhattan district attorney into a twenty-two-month investigation that verified the horrific prosecution.
I will not raise many conspiracy theories; however, I must mention two issues that have always bothered me.
The first issue is, how did other men raise a diversionary ruckus in the auditorium, shoot Malcolm X, and disappear forever? The second issue is why these other guilty men were never found by the police or the FBI and brought to justice?
I refuse to believe it happened without authorities–at a minimum–looking away and intentionally doing nothing—except frame innocent men. Old conspiracy theories said officials manipulated these men in the act and spirited them away. They may have been correct.
I will not discuss other conspiracies about Malcolm’s death, nor will I address those concerning MLK’s assassination. But I must say that there were enough holes in the case for James Earl Ray acting alone to drive a tractor and trailer through. I always thought the King family waited too long to begin to believe Ray’s story.
But back to the FBI.
I never believed the FBI was involved in JFK’s assassination. Conspiracy theories that suggested this never made sense to me.
However, we have learned in recent years how the FBI and the CIA failed in their duty to follow more closely Oswald’s comings and goings and his associates, especially those from foreign countries.
In 2013, Philip Shenon, best-selling author and former New York Times reporter, published a riveting book, A cruel and shocking act: The secret history of the Kennedy assassination, that detailed what amounts to cover-up activity by the FBI and the CIA.
After prodding by some prominent Warren Commission lawyers, Shenon conducted five years of research and hundreds of interviews and discovered “that much of the truth about the President’s assassination had still not been told, and that much evidence was covered up or destroyed by the FBI, the CIA, and others in power in Washington.”
Indeed, if the FBI could shield forever from public view its actions after JFK was killed, they certainly could hide their activities surrounding Malcolm X’s assassination. We must remember that Hoover was opposed to all civil rights activities. For example, he called MLK “the most dangerous man in America.”