In memory of Sharon
Poole
© 2017, Karl Evanzz
In the spring of
2010, Columbia University professor Manning Marable had his associates call a
number of researchers and historians versed in the history of the Nation of
Islam. He was finishing a biography of Malcolm X and hoped to corroborate a
number of sensationalistic allegations, all of them potentially libelous.
The associates mentioned
the names of people who were once friends and confidantes of Malcolm X, the visionary
activist assassinated in Harlem on February 21, 1965. One of the more spurious claims
involved an eighteen-year-old girl named Sharon Poole.
Poole was a former
member of the Nation of Islam who was renamed Sharon 6X Shabazz in the mid-1960s. When
Malcolm X left the group in March 1964, Poole quite to join his new group, Muslim
Mosque, Inc. Her basic assignment was to keep a log of news reports about
Malcolm’s activities, particularly as they related to his petition to bring the
United States before the United Nations for violating the human rights of
African Americans.
Malcolm X was a
father figure to Sharon, and he treated her like she was his own daughter,
according to former members. Contrary to claims by ignorant journalists,
Malcolm X treated women with as much respect as he did men. Women held
top offices in both Muslim Mosque Inc., and the Organization of Afro-American
Unity (OAAU).
Poole was among the
nearly 300 people who gathered on February 21 around three o’clock in the
Audubon Ballroom to hear Malcolm X speak. Sitting next to her was an old family
friend, Agurs Linward Cathcart. Cathcart was like a beloved uncle to Poole. Her
father had been the same to Cathcart, and now he was returning the blessing.
Although Cathcart
was an NOI stalwart, he and Poole had remained friends.
When Malcolm X was
gunned down minutes later, Poole rushed to the stage to assist his wife Betty (a
registered nurse) and others trying to save his life. She is the young black
woman opposite Betty and wearing eyeglasses in this photo taken by Earl Grant
as Malcolm lay dying on stage.
During the melee,
Poole saw a dark-complexioned black man shoot Malcolm X and then turn his
weapon toward the crowd and shoot over people’s heads to scare them away. She
immediately recognized the man, who wore a dark brown suit under his tweed
overcoat, as an official at Mosque Number Seven in Harlem, where she was a
member when Malcolm was still its minister.
She was in shock as
she left the Audubon alone that afternoon. A TV reporter approached her as she
exited and asked her what she had witnessed:
She also told a New York Times reporter what she saw:
The reporter foolishly mentioned her address
in the article, making her a potential target for the assassins who escaped the
Audubon. Only one of the five, Thomas Hagan, was captured at the scene by
audience members. Unlike every other Sunday rally held by Malcolm X, police
were nowhere to be found that afternoon.
Another eyewitness
to Malcolm’s assassination was Yuri Kochiyama, a nurse and the first Asian American member of
the OAAU. Fearful of being identified and marked for death, Kochiyama refused to give her name to the reporter. She too said
that one of the men shooting Malcolm wore a tweed coat:
A woman who was
wearing a green scarf and a black felt hat with little floral buds, and who
would identify herself only as a registered nurse,
said she had seen ``two men rushing toward the stage and firing from underneath
their coats.'' One, she said, wore a tweed coat.
Rushed to the Stage
``I rushed to the stage even while the firing was going
on,'' she said. ``I don't know how I got on the stage, but I threw myself down
on who I thought was Malcolm but it wasn't. I was
willing to die for the man. I would have taken the bullets myself. Then
I saw Malcolm, and the firing had stopped, and I tried to give him artificial
respiration.
Both Poole and Kochiyama later identified the shooter as
Norman 3X Butler, an official at the Harlem mosque. Although Butler denied
involvement, he was captured on film by a TV camera on the scene. These are
still images of Butler outside the Audubon and under arrest a few days later.
At the time of the assassination, Poole was romantically
involved with Benjamin Goodman, a chief assistant to Malcolm X, who was unaware
of their relationship. Unbeknownst to Malcolm, who was too busy traveling to
garner support for his UN petition, Goodman had separated from his wife and had
begun dating Poole.
Although Malcolm
was not privy to the relationship, another chief assistant, James 67X Warden,
was fully aware of it. He recognized the potential embarrassment to Malcolm’s
movement if Goodman’s relationship with the teenager became public at the very
time that Malcolm was due in a Los Angeles courtroom to testify against Elijah
Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam, for impregnating over a half-dozen of
his own teenage secretaries. Warden was overheard yelling at Malcolm X about
the issue, demanding that Goodman be expelled. But Goodman and Malcolm were
close and the latter was reluctant to expel him, so he delayed his decision
pending a discussion with Goodman after the February 21 meeting.
A major problem
arose between Poole and Goodman because when he was interviewed by detectives
about what he saw at the Audubon, Goodman insisted that Norman Butler could not
possibly have been there. Poole disagreed, and for good reason: she was
crouching on the floor bearing witness to the execution of a man she idolized.
Goodman, on the
other hand, had quickly gone backstage after introducing Malcolm X and did not
see anything.
Ironically,
Goodman signed an affidavit in 1978 insisting that Butler was not there. This
was another betrayal of Poole by him and clearly must have raised questions in
her mind about Goodman’s loyalties.
But the reason for his denial was
simple: Goodman was ashamed to admit that he failed to survey the crowd that
day for potential enemies of Malcolm X. He had failed his obligations to his
leader.
In his 1993
memoir, Goodman makes no mention of his affair with Poole, even though he had
fathered her first child, Khadija, in April 1966.
Poole was devastated by Malcolm’s murder. For many years afterwards,
she would visit his gravesite on February 21 and sit there alone except for the
company of a bottle of liquor. She stayed until she was inebriated, and then left.
She ended up
homeless. Cathcart and his wife gave her a place to stay. She was their
upstairs tenant in a building they owned when Marable’s book was published.
Although Cathcart threatened to sue Viking and Marable, the truth is that he
knew that neither he nor Sharon stood a chance of winning without spending tens
of thousands of dollars fighting in court.
Poole was depressed
about the allegations but felt that God would, in His own due time, deal with
Marable and others involved in spreading vicious lies about her. While she
waited divine retribution, Marable’s lies spread throughout the world.
One of the first
news outlets to help spread the lies was TheRoot.com, a web site then run by a pompous little black man named Henry Louis Gates Jr., or “Skip” to his
friends because one of his legs is shorter that the other, giving him the
appearance of skipping when he walks.
On June 10, 2011,
former Washington Post reporter
Natalie Hopkinson (TheRoot.com was a subsidiary of the Post at the time), wrote the following:
Malcolm, for
his part, was likely spending his final night at a hotel with his 18-year-old
secretary and alleged mistress, according to Marable. At the time, the woman,
Sharon 6X, was living with Linward X Cathcart. Both had connections to members
of the NOI mosque in Newark, N.J., who hatched the assassination plot. Both sat
in the front row at the ballroom the day he was murdered . . .
But beyond
that, many of Marable's other revelations about Malcolm's life paint a striking
picture of his marriage and attitudes toward women in general.
Like other
journalists, Hopkinson never raised any questions about the accuracy of
Marable’s book, even though I had written a long review two months earlier
raising doubts not only about his sources but about its multitude of spurious
allegations.
Moreover,
Hopkinson’s article, dealing with Malcolm’s alleged hatred of woman, did not
quote a single woman who knew Malcolm X. She jumped from one ridiculous
allegation to another, all of them by Marable. So much for unbiased reporting.
Hopkinson's boss was one of the
principle endorsers of Marable’s book.
He also mentored Zaheer Ali, a lead assistant on Marable’s
book. Interestingly enough, Ali has since removed his reference to Gates from the biography
on his web site.
The biography read this way on the day Reinvention was published:
Under the direction of Dr. Manning
Marable, he served as project manager and senior researcher of the
Malcolm X Project (MXP) at Columbia University, a multi-year research
initiative on the life and legacy of Malcolm X. As project manager, he served
as associate editor of an online annotated multimedia version of The
Autobiography of Malcolm X, developed by MXP and the Columbia University
Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL) (2004), and was a lead researcher for Dr. Marable's Malcolm X: A
Life of Reinvention (2011), a comprehensive biography on Malcolm X.
He received his Bachelor of Arts degree with a concentration
in Afro-American studies from Harvard University, where he was a Mellon Undergraduate Fellow under faculty advisors Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and
Catherine Clinton. During that time, he also served as a research fellow for
the "Pluralism Project: World Religions in America," a multi-year
research initiative under the direction of Harvard religion professor Diana
Eck, for which he researched the history and diversity of African-American
Muslim communities in New York City.
That’s the way the publishing
business operates: cronyism and nepotism rule. If you don’t play by the rules,
you get locked out. So I knew that TheRoot.com would not publish my highly
unflattering review of Marable’s book.
I knew because some people can’t handle the
truth.
Poole’s health deteriorated after the lies spread, and she
died a couple of years afterward, by which time Cathcart had abandoned his
attempt to sue for libel. Like others, she essentially died of a broken heart,
her reputation ruined by a callous author who knew that he lied about the nature of her association with Malcolm
and Cathcart.
I know Marable knew
because I was approached by him and his researchers on the very topic. In May
2010, two of them told me what Marable intended to claim about Poole. I told
him them it was libelous because Poole was never involved with Malcolm but with
Goodman. I showed them evidence that Goodman had fathered Sharon’s child.
Lance Shabazz, a
member of the Nation of Islam since birth (but no more) and a recognized
historian on the sect, recounts a nearly identical experience:
Manning Marable and his researchers contacted me about
Sister Sharon X Poole. She served as a secretary for Malcolm X and James 67X
Shabazz after Malcolm left the Nation of Islam. They first stated that her baby
died in the hospital in the early ‘60s. I told them I didn’t know anything
about that. I received another call stating she was pregnant with Malcolm’s
baby when he was murdered.
I called her and was
told the child was born in April of 1966. Malcolm was murdered in February of
1965. Benjamin 2X Goodman was the father
of her daughter. This did not stop these
bastards. They published trash portraying Malcolm and Linward and Sharon as a
threesome.
These lies are
painful not only to the family of Malcolm X but to Linward’s wife and children
as well. Sister Sharon X Poole was not
well, and the news, I believe, led to her untimely death.
There is nothing we can do now to make up for the pain Sharon
Poole endured. Her death is on the hands of those who libeled her.
However, a white-owned movie company
currently has plans to use Marable’s book of lies as the basis for a TV series
about the life and death of Malcolm X.
Since they have passed up Malcolm’s autobiography in favor of Marable’s
book, which also contains a completely fabricated relationship between Malcolm
and an old white man, we know what their intentions are.
They are about character assassination, nothing more. They
even hired a “Negro” writer who specializes in writing smutty scripts with
stereotypical “Negro” characters.
As defenders not
only of Malcolm’s legacy but the truth in general, we have an obligation to
speak out now. This has to be a grassroots effort because black journalists
have proven themselves both incompetent and indifferent to their obligation to
tell the truth.
Moreover, the pseudo-intellectuals
upon whom one would normally rely to defend Malcolm X’s legacy have already
gone on record as supporting Marable. So it’s up to the people.
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