60 years on, will Malcolm X's killers ever be brought to justice? | The Excerpt
On a special episode (first released on February 13, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: This year marks 60 years since of the assassination of Malcolm X, a civil rights leader who pierced the consciousness of a racially divided nation. In 1966, three men were convicted in his shooting death, two of whom were exonerated in 2021. Revelations from the overturning of those convictions has led to a $100 million lawsuit, filed last November, by the three daughters of Malcolm X. In it, they accuse the NYPD, FBI and CIA of playing a role in the murder of their father. What really happened the day Malcolm X was murdered and how can we understand his significance to civil rights in America? Peniel Joseph, an American scholar, teacher, and public voice on race issues, joins The Excerpt to discuss the 60-year legacy of Malcolm X.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
Hello, and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Thursday, February 13th, 2025, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt. This year marks 60 years since the assassination of Malcolm X, a Civil Rights leader who pierced the consciousness of a racially divided nation. In 1966, three men were convicted in a shooting death, two of whom were exonerated in 2021. Revelations from the overturning of those convictions has led to a $100 million lawsuit filed last November by the three daughters of Malcolm X. In it, they accused the NYPD, FBI, and CIA of playing a role in the murder of their father. What really happened that day to Malcolm X, the day he was murdered? And how can we understand his significance to civil rights in America?
Here to discuss the 60-year legacy of Malcolm X is Peniel Joseph, an American scholar, teacher, and public voice on race issues, especially the history of the Black Power Movement. He's also the author of the upcoming title, Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America's Civil Rights Revolution. Thanks for joining me, Peniel.
Peniel Joseph:
Great to be here, Dana.
Dana Taylor:
I want to start by having you set the stage for our audience here. Who was Malcolm X and what was his significance to the Civil Rights Movement?
Peniel Joseph:
Well, Malcolm X is really the revolutionary leader of the struggle for black dignity in the 1950s and 1960s. So we usually think of him as the counterpart to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He's somebody who believed in a Black political self-determination, and Malcolm also feels that dignity deserves self-defense, that Black women and men need to be protected from racial terrorists.
Dana Taylor:
As a leader in the Civil Rights movement, Malcolm X had no shortage of enemies on the national stage. How did those in positions of power regard him?
Peniel Joseph:
American counterintelligence officials from the FBI to the New York Police Department's Bureau of Special Services really surveilled Malcolm X and viewed him as subversive, viewed the organization he was part of, the Nation of Islam, as subversive as anti-white and anti-American. Civil Rights leaders were of two minds about Malcolm X, including Dr. King. On the one hand, they publicly refuted what they perceived as an overly pessimistic view of American race relations. On the other, they felt that Malcolm served the role by showing white America an alternative path away from King's philosophy of nonviolence so if you don't deal with us, you have to deal with him, and he represents forces that are less willing to negotiate and have a kind of racial rapprochement. Over time, however, by the time he leaves the Nation of Islam at the end of 1963, and throughout the last year of his life, he's in the US Senate alongside of Martin Luther King Jr, that's their first and only meeting. He comes to develop a bigger political repertoire with different civil rights leaders, and he really looks upon himself as a human rights activist over time.
Dana Taylor:
On February 21st 1965, Malcolm X was murdered while giving a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan. As I mentioned, three men were initially convicted in that shooting. Two of them have since been exonerated. What happened there?
Peniel Joseph:
Well, it was later discovered that the two who were exonerated were actually not at the Audubon Ballroom when Malcolm was assassinated. So they were not connected to the assassination, they'd been rounded up later afterwards. They spent two decades in prison trying to become exonerated and prove their innocence, and subsequent investigations proved that they were not part of the five-man hit team that actually assassinated Malcolm on February 21st 1965.
Dana Taylor:
And what can you tell us about the other people who were involved in the assassination, maybe some that haven't been identified yet? Have they been held accountable? Where do you stand on that?
Peniel Joseph:
I think what we know now is that that hit team was from a mosque in Newark, New Jersey, and that, in addition to the person who was rightfully arrested in charge, there were four other members of that hit team and that they subsequently escaped, most of them have passed, and they were never brought to justice.
Dana Taylor:
I want to stick with that. In the lead-up to this speech, tensions between Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam had been escalating. Why? And was the schism strong enough to motivate his murder?
Peniel Joseph:
The biggest reason for the break publicly is that in 1963, after John F. Kennedy's assassination, Malcolm on December 1st 1963 tells reporters that the assassination is an example of chickens coming home to roost. And many people felt that Malcolm was valorizing the president's death, just happy about the President's death. What Malcolm intended that message to be was that American violence had actually boomeranged and hit the American president, so American violence in the South, American violence overseas, just the idea the practice of American violence. But that becomes a pretext for Elijah Muhammad to silence Malcolm.
And really that silencing is based on a political dispute within the Nation of Islam over whether the organization is going to be a secular organization that's thinking about social justice, voting rights, civil rights, or is it just going to be a religious organization that allows people like Elijah Muhammad, who's the founder of the sect to do as they please. Malcolm later discovers that Elijah Muhammad had fathered at least seven, eight children out of wedlock with a series of secretaries, and that's going to become public knowledge in a dispute that the Nation of Islam has with Malcolm over the ownership of his house in East Elmhurst, Queens. So really when we think about that last year, they're going to be in court with each other, Elijah Muhammad is going to be very fearful that his secret comes out. His secret does come out, and there's going to be droves of Muslims who leave the Nation of Islam.
And Malcolm intermittently talks of peace, but he also calls Elijah Muhammad a religious faker while he's overseas. He also says that the nation is corrupt, and this is not the kind of leader you should follow, and he becomes an Orthodox Muslim, he takes the Hajj pilgrimage in the spring of 1964 and becomes really this very secular figure who is meeting with Muslim and Arab and African leaders throughout the African and the Middle Eastern and the European continents. So what's so interesting about Malcolm is that last year is that he becomes this figure who was coalescing different parts of anti-colonial struggles all across the world and in so doing he becomes a threat to the Nation of Islam, and that's why they want to silence him.
Dana Taylor:
The government had informants who were in the Nation of Islam at the time. Do we know who they were? Does their existence support the allegation of a conspiracy?
Peniel Joseph:
There's definitely evidence that the Nation of Islam had FBI and NYPD informants. There's evidence that Malcolm's own organization, the Organization of Afro-American Unity, and Muslim Mosque Incorporated had law enforcement undercover agents there both as part of the organization, but also who regularly attended meetings. So I wouldn't even call it, Dana, a conspiracy. I would say that there's real evidence that Malcolm was under constant surveillance, that the FBI, that the CIA State Department, United States Information Services, Mississippi Sovereignty Committee, and the New York Police Department's Bureau of Special Services are among some of the agencies that we have clear cut evidence, surveilled Malcolm, ratcheted up warlike and violent talk against Malcolm X, and sort of stood back and watched what happened, which was that he was assassinated. So we know all of that. So I would say it's not necessarily a conspiracy so much as we have entrenched evidence that US intelligence at the domestic and global levels infiltrated Malcolm X's organizations and were intent on silencing Malcolm X, and we can see how that all played out.
Dana Taylor:
We often look at the Civil Rights Movement through the lens of the number of leaders who were lost in the 1960s, Medgar Evers in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. What did the death of Malcolm X mean to the movement?
Peniel Joseph:
Well, I think it means that the movement lost really the foremost public spokesperson for this idea of dignity for all people. I think Martin Luther King Jr. is going to take steps towards being that advocate for dignity, and King was always a wonderful advocate for citizenship. But I think that in losing Malcolm X, there's the loss of a global figure who can connect the idea of the Black freedom struggle in the United States of America to anti-colonial struggles that are happening all over the world, in Africa, in Latin America, all throughout the Caribbean and in parts of Europe as well. So there's really a massive loss of potential.
And Malcolm as somebody who's this revolutionary human rights activist, he's attempting to connect Islamic and Christian and Arab and African and white worlds together under this banner of human rights. And when we think about one of his last speeches, which is at Oxford University, December 3rd 1964, in that speech he says that he's willing to align himself with anyone who wants to transform what he calls the conditions on the face of the earth. So you see him reaching out and coalition building with people that he wouldn't have when he was part of the Nation of Islam. So he was really an immense force for the kind of global, multiracial coalition politics that were really necessary in that time as well as our own.
Dana Taylor:
And finally, looking back at the last six decades following the assassination of Malcolm X, what is his legacy?
Peniel Joseph:
Well, I think his biggest legacy is this idea of dignity and the dignity of not just Black people, but all people. So his biggest net legacy is his ability to argue that Black people fundamentally had human dignity and was a dignity that, one, they needed to recognize. So he was very critical of Black people, even as he was supportive of Black people. And by dignity, he meant certainly behaving responsibly, ethically and morally. But he also meant how Black people were going to treat other people, so they needed to treat themselves with value and dignity and treat other people that way. But then it's also a message to the wider world, and in white America as well, that Black people were worthy of dignity and needed to be treated as such. And through that message of dignity, Malcolm is talking about transforming our conscious minds and transforming institutions politically and socially and economically, but it all starts with this recognition of human dignity.
So I think the biggest legacy that Malcolm gives us is this recognition of our internal human value and the fact that once we recognize that, we're in a better position to do the right thing, because he always says that where he went wrong was that he lacked human dignity. And it becomes a radical, even revolutionary legacy because Malcolm X connects human dignity to what really Dr. King called a revolution of values that would transform the world and alleviate poverty, racism, marginalization, economic displacement, all those different things start with human dignity, and it starts with each of us recognizing that dignity in ourselves and in turn in others.
Dana Taylor:
Peniel, thank you so much for being on the excerpt.
Peniel Joseph:
Thank you for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor, Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.