In commemoration of the 55th Anniversary of the
Assassination of Malcolm X
If the truth will set us free, a
lie will keep us in bondage. If you know the whole truth about something but
deliberately withhold part of it, you are no better than a person who creates
events out of whole cloth. An old adage is that “a half-truth is the same as a
whole lie.”
Having watched the six-part
Netflix series, “Who Killed Malcolm X,” I can say emphatically that the makers
of this series are peddling a half-truth even though the whole truth was
available to them. As such, the series is more propaganda than inquiry, more
deception than honesty.
Why do I call it a half-truth? Because
Ark Media had access to the complete film footage of the scene outside the
Audubon Ballroom moments after three members of the Nation of Islam
assassinated Malcolm X, a charismatic revolutionary who inspired tens of
thousands before his death on February 21, 1965, and who inspires millions
across the globe today.
They had access to the complete
footage, but they only revealed half of it. They show the footage of two of the
assassins––Talmadge Hayer and William Bradley––fighting with police and
spectators, but they deliberately suppressed footage of the third assassin––Norman
3X Butler––wrestling his way through the crowd as the body of Malcolm X is
wheeled from the Audubon to the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital across the
street.
There are a host of problems with
the series, but the major offenses and omissions are these:
- They minimize the role of the intelligence agencies in orchestrating the assassination. There is, for example, only one reference to the State Department’s hostility toward Malcolm X, but they don’t show a single document to substantiate it.
- They fail to make a single reference to the CIA’s spying on Malcolm X while he was in Africa, and they make no mention of Benjamin H. Read, a White House official, telling CIA Director Richard Helms in the spring of 1964 that Malcolm was damaging America’s foreign policy in the Third World and should be “dealt with” the way the CIA dealt with other foreign leaders who cause problems for America. This information is in the declassified CIA documents on Malcolm X and is readily available.
- Instead, the entire series is aimed at convincing viewers that Malcolm X was killed by a group of five Black Muslims from the Newark mosque who were acting independently of any leaders of the sect.
- To buttress this argument, nearly all of the NOI members interviewed are from Newark. There were no interviews with members from Philadelphia, Chicago, or even Harlem, an inexcusable omission.
- While there is a brief mention of a mandatory meeting of officers in the NOI’s Fruit of Islam group called by Elijah Muhammad Jr., during which he ordered them to kill Malcolm X, there is no mention that Junior added an extra incentive of $10,000 to the person who killed Malcolm.
- The central premise of the series is that two of the three men convicted for murdering Malcolm X were innocent. While it succeeds in establishing the innocence of Johnson through eyewitness accounts and FBI documents, they fail to show any reliable evidence whatsoever to support Butler’s claim of innocence.
- They give the false impression that Abdur-Rahman Muhammad is this brave, defiant soldier hell-bent on confronting William Bradley, the shotgun assassin of Malcolm X, but Bradley died before he could do so. This is, of course, utterly ridiculous. Rahman wrote on his blog on April 22, 2010, that he had discovered Bradley’s whereabouts.
Bradley didn’t
pass until October 2018. By then, Ark Media was a full ten months into the
project. If Rahman had eight years to confront Bradley, to give the impression
that he didn’t locate Bradley until shortly before the latter’s death is
dishonest, one of many half-truths in the series.
The Bradley
confrontation hoax is one of many.
Another half-truth is Rahman’s account of how he discovered Bradley’s
whereabouts. He claims now that he was visiting a mosque and asked about
Bradley when someone gave him Bradley’s new name, Al-Mustafa Shabazz.
This is at odds
with what Rahman told me and other researchers in 2010, when he said that he
was the Howard University classmate of the nephew of a prominent NOI official
whose name has surfaced repeatedly in relation to the assassination. The nephew
was the person who led him to Bradley.
Here are some of the key problems
with the series, episode by episode. I refer to them as “acts” because the
series is more theater than documentary.
Act One
Rahman begins that he was
bothered that no one seemed interested in discovering who killed Malcolm X, and
that he spent 30 years wondering “why someone doesn’t want to get to the bottom
of this.”
Rahman knows Professor Zak Kondo
of Baltimore and apparently has read his book on the assassination. He began
emailing me in 2010 and expressed familiarity with my books, one of which
focuses on the assassination. Since Kondo’s book was published in 1993 and mine
in 1992, he knows full well that people have tried to solve the question of who
actually killed Malcolm X. Moreover, Newsweek
writer Peter Goldman wrote one of the first in-depth accounts of the
assassination in 1973, when Rahman was a nine-year-old named Kenneth Oliveira living
in Providence, Rhode Island.
David Garrow: This brings us to
the next problem. David Garrow, a white writer who has written a book in which
he called Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a “sexual athlete” (based solely on his
opinion, of course), followed by other salacious statements about Dr. King.
Garrow’s career has been in the toilet of late, especially after writing a
disreputable, overly long biography of President Barack Obama (based almost
exclusively on the views of a white girl who dated Obama a hundred years ago,
so to speak). His descent into disreputability continued last year when he
claimed that Dr. King laughed while one of his associates raped a prostitute.
“No one alive has done more” than
Rahman to solve the riddle of the assassination, Garrow claims.
Even though Rahman claims to have been
investigating the assassination for thirty years, he has not in all that time
published a single book about his findings. He hasn’t had a single magazine
article published about his findings. He has blogged for nearly a decade, yet
he has never blogged about his findings except to mention that he had located
William Bradley.
So what, Mr. Garrow, has Rahman
done to deserve your adulation? There are several university professors in the
series, yet none of them express any familiarity with Rahman. I’ll lay you
ten-to-one odds that if you had asked any of the professors “Who Is
Abdur-Rahman Muhamad?” before April 2010, they would have replied: “I have no
idea.”
This is the first time we hear
the theme of the series, namely, that Butler is innocent. Not a single shred of
evidence is shown to support this contention.
Part One ends with the proverbial
scene of “The Investigator” (played by Rahman) tacking items about Malcolm X’s
assassination to a bulletin board.
Act Two
It begins with Rahman arguing
that Talmadge Hayer, the assassin caught at the scene, told the jury the truth
during the trial but that he was not believed. This is another whopper, one
that anyone who has read the trial transcript would recognize. Hayer told so
many lies during the early part of the trial that the jury must have thought he
was insane.
Butler wasn’t much better. He was
disrespectful to the prosecutor and got caught in a number of misstatements, so
much so that he essentially convicted himself. For example, the prosecutor
asked Butler whether he ever heard any language besides English in the mosque.
Butler became indignant and replied that Muslims were not permitted to speak
anything but English in the Nation of Islam.
The prosecutor then asked him
whether “As Salaam Alaikum” was an English phrase. To which Butler replied, “Oh,
that’s different” or something to the effect.
During a break in the trial,
Thomas Johnson (whom I interviewed over a span of about five years) said that
he, Hayer, and Butler were standing outside the men’s room when he said to them
in a stern but calm voice: “Man, y’all are jamming me up. Y’all know I wasn’t
there.”
He was furious at Butler, he
said, because Butler “stole my alibi.” He had proof from his physician that he
was at home at the time of the assassination sitting in a chair with his right
leg propped up due to a circulatory problem.
When Butler took the stand, he
said the same thing. However, when Butler’s doctor was called to testify, he
said that he did not see Butler until February 25, four days after the
assassination.
Halfway through the second hour,
Garrow is cued again. Apparently, you need a white person to make an argument
truly convincing.
“Historians universally accept
that Johnson and Butler are innocent,” he tells us. None of the black
historians in the series concurs with this statement during the entire series.
The rest of the time is spent
interviewing members of the Newark mosque and showing footage of the former
Newark mosque minister, James 3X Shabazz, a former protégé of Malcolm X who
grew jealous of Malcolm’s rise to the forefront of the Nation of Islam.
Act Three
Garrow makes his third
appearance, during which he tells us that “the FBI had multiple informants
inside the Nation of Islam––almost certainly so.” Well, did it or didn’t
it? Again, apparently we are to take
this as an article of faith because Garrow has won the Pulitzer Prize or
because he is white, or both. What
becomes disturbing at this point is that Garrow, whose reason for being in the
series is never explained other than the aforementioned possibilities, is given
nearly five times as much air time as Zak Kondo and other black historians in
the series. In contrast, these African American historians have written five
times as much about Malcolm X as Garrow.
On a positive note, former New
York police officials admit repeatedly during the series that Malcolm X was a
thorn in their side and that they therefore routinely violated his privacy
rights, worked with FBI agents to surveil him, and had informants inside
Malcolm’s group, the Organization of Afro-American Unity. FBI Agent Arthur
Fulton admits that the Bureau had informants inside the group.
In yet another appearance, we see
Rahman visiting Garrow’s home, where Rahman seems a bit surprised to see an FBI
document about Elijah Muhammad’s adultery. Now, if Garrow believes that Rahman
is the most knowledgeable person in the universe about Malcolm X, why does he
need to show him a document that Rahman should know by heart?
Another glaring omission is
exposed at this point. When Garrow takes Rahman to the room where he keeps his
research, we see boxes and boxes of files, all neatly organized. Even though
the series shows Rahman at his home praying and sticking things on a board, we
never see any evidence of his alleged thirty years of research, not so much as
a single box. He has a few files on a table, but hell, those could well be
something that he received from Garrow.
Garrow also claims that the FBI
had three informants inside Elijah Muhammad’s inner circle. He has a document
on the table, but we never see it, unlike most of the other documents he
discusses. He then claims that three of the ten people in Elijah Muhammad’s
inner circle were FBI informants.
Once again, we are asked to take this as an
article of faith.
John Ali, an individual long
suspected of being an FBI informant, makes for the first time an interesting
admission. He says that he applied for a position (which one is unclear, but
presumably an agent) with the FBI but was turned down.
The balance of the hour is spent
discussing Malcolm’s mentoring of Muhammad Ali. Historian Peniel Joseph and
Jonathan Eig, an award-winning biographer, make brief appearances.
Act Four
The scene begins with a rather
disturbing and certainly questionable piece of hyperbole about Malcolm X’s
mental state during the last year of his life. “He needed a therapist,” Joseph
says. “He needed two therapists,” he adds with a grin.
This is followed by a comment
from Lance Shabazz, a diehard believer in Elijah Muhammad and someone who has
written critically about Malcolm X for many years. “Malcolm X lost his mind,”
he claims.
A layperson is liable to believe
that both men are speaking literally, and perhaps they were given the tone of
the segment. In truth, Malcolm X was in great spirits until the last month or
so of his life.
He was anxious about the numerous attempts on his life but was
functioning as well as he always had. He was holding it all together until
members of the Nation of Islam firebombed his home during the early morning
hours of Valentine’s Day, 1965.
He and his wife and daughters
would have perished in the fire but for a stroke of luck. One of the Molotov
cocktails aimed at his daughter’s room on the second floor ricocheted, giving
the family time to escape.
What the series fails to note is
that the person who threw the homemade incendiary device at the window was none
other than Alvan Farrakhan, brother of NOI leader Louis Farrakhan. Farrakhan is
seen in the background of several pieces of footage, but I don’t recall hearing
his name mentioned more than once or twice.
The reason why this is an
unforgivable omission is because Alvan lived less than half a block from Malcolm
X. The gang of Muslims who firebombed the home in all probability threw the
bombs and then ran down the street to Alvan’s apartment.
This is another example of the
half-truth nature of the series. They want viewers to believe that the entire
plot to kill Malcolm X emanated from Newark, when nothing could be further from
the truth.
Muslims, including John Ali and
Butler, claim that Elijah Muhammad ordered his followers not to lay a finger on
Malcolm X. There is no mention of the attempt to kill Malcolm X in Boston, the
attempt by Boston mosque minister Clarence 2X Gill to obtain a silencer to kill
Malcolm X, or the brazen attempt to kill Malcolm X right in front of his home.
The comedy relief in the
otherwise mundane series comes in this hour, when Rahman is visiting Garrow
once again (around the 23-minute mark). Garrow shows Rahman and FBI transcript
of a wiretapped telephone call between Elijah Muhammad and one of his
ministers. During the call, Elijah Muhammad said that it was time for the NOI
to deal with Malcolm X the same “way Moses and the other ones did” their bad
apples.
Rahman chimes in that he
understands what that meant. It was a reference to how Moses wanted to kill
certain Christians who resorted to idolatry when he had to go away for a while.
When Garrow replied, I nearly
bowled over laughing. I could just see them in a comedy.
Garrow: “Well, golly, Mr. Rahman,
I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout no Moses. You really need someone with your background
to understand all this Moses stuff!”
It was one of the worst instances
of patronizing conduct I have ever witnessed. Garrow has written numerous books
and articles about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Garrow grew up as a Christian.
Yet he sits there with this ridiculous look on his face swearing that he had no
idea what the reference to Moses meant.
Near the end of the segment,
Garrow tells us that Rahman “is a person with a cause. He’s one of deep
commitment and deep faith and deep courage. What Rahman is doing, he adds, is “dangerous.
Rahman knows that.”
Garrow was doing so much sucking
up to Rahman that I expected to find Rahman nursing him in the next episode.
Act Five
After telling us at the end of
Act Four what a brave man this Rahman fellow is, Act Five opens with Rahman
showing a video clip of the scene outside the Audubon moments after the
assassination of Malcolm X. This person,
he says, pointing to a tall black man on the screen, “looks a lot like William
Bradley.”
“If I can prove it,” he adds, “I
want to confront him face to face.” We see Rahman driving by Bradley’s gym and
a daycare center, he says, that have closed. Poor Rahman is foiled again! (the
audience laughs)
This scene was presumably shot
sometime before Bradley’s death in 2018.
As I said earlier, Rahman had eight years to confront Bradley if that
was ever his intent. Bradley was a dangerous man, and you would have to be more
crazy than brave to confront him without backup. That’s why we know this is
only theater.
The premise gets repeated, namely
that Butler and Johnson were framed. We are told that there is no physical
evidence linking them to the crime. What we are not told––and hence the
half-truth aspect––is that many of the eyewitnesses to the assassination
described one of the assassins as a man about Butler’s height and Butler’s
complexion. Oh yes, they also mention that the assassin wore a tweed coat.
Butler was the father of six
young children at the time and as poor as a mosque mouse. He had a tweed coat that was a bit too large,
and a brown suit that he wore two or three times a week. Another way to pick
him out of the crowd was the way he wore his black fedora. He wore it at a
forty-five-degree angle, always.
Benjamin Karim, one of Malcolm’s
top aides, swore in an affidavit that Johnson and Butler could not have been
inside the Audubon that day because he or one of the guards would have seen
them and put them out or barred their admittance.
This affidavit is what threw
every historian and researcher off track for decades. In 1992, I wrote in The
Judas Factor that Butler and Johnson were not there because Karim said so.
Peter Goldman wrote the same thing in 1973 and Kondo reiterated it in 1993. “If
Butler and Johnson were there,” Kondo said in “Brother Minister (1994),” I was
there.”
The fundamental problem with
Karim’s affidavit is that he did not witness the assassination, so how could he
possibly swear that neither Johnson nor Butler was present?
Ironically, the woman with whom
Karim was having an affair in 1965 was also inside the Audubon.
After the
shooting, she and a group of women were the first people who rushed to help
Malcolm. Most of the men were either hiding backstage or hiding under the
chairs. Two of the women, a nurse named Yuri Kochiyama and Sharon 6X Poole, a
former member of the Harlem mosque who quit to join Malcolm’s new group,
positively identified Butler as one of three assassins.
Sharon was Karim’s mistress. He
never mentions that she identified Butler, and he never mentions her in his
autobiography. Again, the problem of the half-truth.
Karim doesn’t mention that
Malcolm’s security was compromised by former members of the Newark mosque. Nor
does it mention that James 67X Warden, a former Harlem mosque member who left
with Malcolm, was overheard on February 19 by a member of the security detail
threatening to have Malcolm killed.
“We,” Warden said, “will kill
you.” Two days later, Malcolm was killed. Warden was a key adviser on Manning Marable’s
biography of Malcolm X.
A positive scene in this act is
the entrance of Eugene “Gene” Roberts, a member of Malcolm’s security detail
who was an undercover detective for the New York Police Department’s Bureau of
Special Services and Investigations (BOSSI).
He describes how quickly he was hired by BOSSI and how he was
essentially a paid informant.
Another note of interest is
Arthur Fulton’s admission that the FBI had at least nine informants in the
Audubon Ballroom when the assassination occurred.
Act Six
From the opening scene with
Malcolm in Africa, we finally think that the series will discuss the
revolutionary’s lasting impression on African, Asian, and Latin American
leaders. They show a photo of him with Prince Faisal of Saudi Arabia, but they
fail to show him with Fidel Castro or Kwame Nkrumah and other prominent Third
World leaders.
Instead, they return us to Garrow’s
house, where Rahman, the greatest expert on Malcolm X in the universe, is being
educated again by Garrow. Garrow has been amassing files on Malcolm X for over
a decade. Presumably, his glowing adulation of Rahman is in anticipation of a
biography crediting both of them as the authors.
In a return to the “Hunt for
William Bradley” subplot, Rahman is shown in Newark again. Just as he was about
to confront Bradley, he receives a phone call telling him that Bradley had died.
Rahman attends the funeral, or at
least stands outside. He then interviews the same groups of Muslims for the
fifth or sixth or tenth time. They assure him that Bradley was a changed man
when he died, that he made the hajj and had all of his past sins wiped away.
“I have given so many decades of
my life to unveil who killed him,” Rahman says wistfully. He sacrificed his
career (he works as a tour guide in Washington and has held other jobs) and
time with his children in his quixotic journey to find the killers.
As the scene closes, Rahman meets
again with Butler. He vows to do everything in his power to get him exonerated.
If that happens, Butler can sue
the city of New York for wrongful conviction and get millions and millions of
dollars. The lawyers representing him will take their cut, and everyone lives
happily ever after.
Except those like me who know
that Butler was guilty and deserves every day he spent in prison and more.
Below are photos from the footage
shown in the series. They show Bradley and Hagan outside the Audubon shortly
after the assassination.
These photos are from the same
footage. It shows Butler at the Audubon as he attempts to view Malcolm’s body
to make sure he’s dead.
This is the footage that Ark Media deleted. The company
purports to seek the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the
assassination.
But what it delivers is a
half-truth. A half-truth is the same as a whole lie.
The full footage begins at the
16-minute mark in this YouTube film.
