Lawyers for the family of Malcolm X have filed a $100 million lawsuit against the U.S. government, Department of Justice, FBI, CIA and the NYPD for conspiring to allow the assassination of the civil rights leader in 1965.
“The government’s fingerprints are all over the assassination of Malcolm X,” civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump said Friday at a press conference in the former Audubon Ballroom, the Washington Heights building where Malcolm X was gunned down before giving a speech. “We believe we have the evidence to prove it.”
Crump stood in front of a mural featuring Malcolm X with the team of lawyers who have worked to prepare the case and one of Malcolm X’s daughters, Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz.
“It has taken us a long time to get to this point, and we fought primarily for our mother, who was here on Feb. 21, 1965,” said Shabazz. “My mother was pregnant but she came here to see her husband speak, someone who she just admired totally, and to witness this horrific assassination of her husband.”
Malcolm X was shot by three gunmen on Feb. 21, 1965, while standing onstage of the Audubon Ballroom, now known as the Malcolm X & Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center. The suspects, including Nation of Islam members Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam, were convicted of first-degree murder.
But the shooting has always been shrouded in mystery amid conspiracy theories that the real killers got away — and that government agencies covered up the truth and withheld evidence that could have cleared Aziz and Islam.
Mujahid Abdul Halim, a third gunman who was caught at the scene, later confessed and declared Aziz and Islam were innocent, but the two men spent more than 20 years in prison for the crime.
In 2021, relatives of a deceased former NYPD officer, Raymond Wood, shared what lawyers called a decade-old deathbed confession detailing a plot to falsely arrest the civil rights leader’s security guards Khaleel Sayyed and Walter Bowe to make sure Malcolm X wasn’t adequately protected during his final speech.
Sayyed and Bowe gave sworn affidavits in February, and said they were busted on trumped-up charges and kept out of the picture just days before Malcolm X was killed.
In 2021, a state judge exonerated Aziz and Islam. The city paid $26 million and the state paid $10 million to Aziz and the family of Islam to settle lawsuits related to their wrongful convictions in 2022.
Crump said that was the case’s turning point.
“Over the last three years every day, every week, every month, we have been unearthing new evidence — evidence of people never having spoken before about what they witnessed during those turbulent times in the 1960s.”
Crump cited an affidavit given by Mustafa Hassan, who was working security that night at the Audubon Ballroom, and had never before spoken out about witnessing the murder.
Hassan, who was next to Malcolm X as he died, in 2023 described his attempt to stop one of the gunmen as he fled, but being stymied by police.
“Why would it be that no one, for almost 57 years, never heard from [Hassan], never spoke to him, never took a statement from him?” asked lawyer Ray Hamlin at Friday’s press conference. “Why wouldn’t they speak to someone whose presence is so prominent?
“Why would the government prosecute two individuals knowing those individuals had no involvement in the assassination? What was it that our government, what was it that the city was trying to protect?”
Attorney Flint Taylor said after Aziz and Islam were exonerated, evidence began to surface linking the FBI’s role in the assassination to the NYPD, citing nine FBI reports that confessed killer Halim “had heavy connections to the FBI.”
“We’re looking for his file, they’re trying to say it may have been destroyed,” said Taylor.
In 2023, on the 58th anniversary of Malcolm X’s killing, Crump announced plans to file a wrongful death lawsuit against the agencies.
“We believe we are on solid ground to go forward with this lawsuit at his time. We’re not just making history, but we’re making a path to justice,” said Crump.
