Government agents aided the activist’s killers and then covered up their involvement, his daughters have claimed.
Three of Malcolm X’s daughters have filed a lawsuit against the CIA, FBI, and New York Police Department, accusing the agencies of complicity in the assassination of the militant black activist.
Filed in a Manhattan court on Friday, the suit alleges that the CIA, FBI, and NYPD were aware of a plot to kill Malcolm X, but did not act to stop it. It claims that the NYPD arrested his security detail days before the assassination, while the CIA and FBI’s undercover agents – who were present on the night of the fatal shooting – stood by while the militant leader was gunned down.
The lawsuit alleges that there was a “corrupt, unlawful, and unconstitutional” relationship between the agencies and “ruthless killers that went unchecked for many years and was actively concealed, condoned, protected, and facilitated by government agents.”
“We believe that they all conspired to assassinate Malcolm X, one of the greatest thought leaders of the 20th century,” civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing the family, said at a press conference on Friday.
The agencies covered up their involvement in the killing for decades, “blocking the Shabazz family’s access to the truth and their right to pursue justice,” Crump claimed.
Malcolm X rose to prominence as the national spokesman of the Nation of Islam (NOI), a black Muslim sect that considers white people “devils” and advocates racial segregation. He adopted the name el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz during his time with the NOI, although he broke ties with the group in the early 1960s.
Malcolm X was shot dead as he prepared to deliver a speech in a New York ballroom in 1965. His murder was initially pinned on three members of the NOI – Muhammad Abdul Aziz, Khalil Islam, and Thomas Hagan – who were all charged, tried, and convicted for the killing.
After spending over 20 years in prison, in November 2021, Aziz and Islam were exonerated and awarded $36 million for wrongful convictions. That was after the Manhattan district attorney’s offices discovered that prosecutors and the FBI had withheld key evidence that would have acquitted the two men.
Unlike Martin Luther King, who campaigned for racial integration in the US, Malcolm X advocated for the complete separation of whites and blacks. He argued that black Americans deserved reparations and their own independent state in the southern US, and called on his followers to use violence to achieve this goal if necessary, although he later toned down his rhetoric and cooperated with other civil rights organizations.
His segregationist beliefs brought him into a loose alliance with the Ku Klux Klan, which called for segregation from the other side of the US’ racial divide. Malcolm X also famously met with American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, who said that he was “fully in concert with [the NOI’s] program” of racial separation.
