Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) was shot three years before Martin Luther King Jr., yet the pattern is similar in the way that they both had shifted their gaze from their originally narrow focus on civil rights for blacks, expanding to a later broader view, seeking equal rights for all the disaffected in America. They wanted to influence the status quo as a whole. At that point they became more than a nuisance. They became a threat.
And that won't do.
The week before his murder on February 21, 1965, Malcolm X's house had been fire-bombed, with him and his family inside. At first he came out publicly blaming Black Muslims, saying that they were angry over his split with Elijah Muhammad, and the Nation of Islam.
Then in the following week leading up to his death, by some reports Malcolm X said that the harassment had gotten too big for any organization of blacks to accomplish on it's own, that it had to be somebody else, though he did not specify who.
When the first uniformed police arrived outside of the Audubon Ballroom after the shooting, two men were reportedly rescued from the crowd that had chased them from the building. The cops apparently, according to the New York Herald Tribune early morning edition (Monday, February 22, 1965) saw two men being beaten by a large crowd outside of the ballroom, and pulled them away to safety. Quickly placing them under arrest, they took the two men away. One of the men was later convicted for his part in the slaying, but the other man had disappeared from the press accounts by that evening. No more was heard about this mystery suspect at all throughout the whole subsequent trial (Breitman, Porter and Smith, 52).
Who was this man? Was he a police provocateur, as was certainly not unusual at that time? To this day the police utilize informants, and undercover officers that will assist the criminals commit crimes, to help bust bad guys and put them away.
In the early 1970s, three black activists, and a Quebecois were arrested and charged with "conspiring to blow up the Statue of Liberty, the Washington Monument, and the Liberty Bell."
Ray Wood, who provided the information needed to secure a conviction against the four Defendants, turned them in. It turned out that Wood, a black undercover officer in the New York City Bureau of Special Services, had done most of the planning for the bombing plot. While the four were convicted, Wood was decorated by the New York Police Department, as noted in The Assassination of Malcolm X by Breitman, Porter and Smith.
Man convicted of Malcolm X assassination to head Harlem mosque
Associated Press
NEW YORK - A man who spent 19 years in prison for killing Malcolm X said Monday that the Nation of Islam has appointed him to head the Harlem mosque where the civil rights leader preached in the 1950s.
At a news conference outside Mosque No. 7., Muhammad Abdul Aziz also denied that he played any role in the assassination of Malcolm X and said a new lie-detector test backs him up.
"I did not kill Malcolm X," said the 59-year-old Aziz, who has always proclaimed his innocence.
Aziz said he will head the mosque and would also be Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan's new regional security chief, assigned to reorganize the group's paramilitary Fruit of Islam guards, largely dormant since Malcolm X was killed.
Malcolm X was gunned down at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on Feb. 21, 1966. Aziz and two other men were sent to prison for the slaying of the civil rights leader.
Earl Rollins, who identified himself as a polygraph expert hired by the mosque, said he put Aziz through a lie-detector test over three days and found that he was truthful when answering "no" to questions of whether he killed Malcolm X, had any prior knowledge of the plot or had lied about it.
Aziz served 19 years in prison before being paroled in 1985.
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