On Nov. 18, Manhattan’s District Attorney exonerated two of the three men convicted of assassinating Malcolm X on Feb. 21, 1965: Muhammad Abdul Aziz and Khalil Islam. The third, Mujahid Abdul Halim (known then as Talmadge Hayer), was paroled in 2010.
A 22-month review by the D.A.’s office found that “one of the most significant weaknesses in the government’s case was Mr. Halim’s confession and his exoneration of his co-defendants.” But that confession first came in 1966, at the original trial. In other words, the primary evidence used to overturn a 55-year-old conviction is as old as the case itself.
So why now? Why not in 1966? Or in the late 1970s, when Halim signed several affidavits naming the other conspirators to clear his co-defendants’ names? Or in 2011, when historian Manning Marable pushed to reopen the case, writing in his Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Malcolm X that “extensive evidence suggests that two of those men were completely innocent of the crime.”
The answer lies in the stakes, and the crisis of legitimacy the criminal legal system faces today. William Bradley, the last of the four remaining accomplices named in Halim’s affidavits, passed away in 2018. Islam died in 2009 and Abdul Aziz is now 83 years old. Both were paroled in the 1980s after already serving a combined 42 years in prison. So the state exonerated two men to deflect from the real issue undergirding Malcolm X’s murder: itself.
Indeed, answering the decades-old question — “who killed Malcolm X?” — requires confronting a long history of state violence. Local, state and national law enforcement, in cooperation with Black informants, undercover police, scholars and journalists created the conditions that made Malcolm X’s assassination possible as well as the framework to deflect responsibility when it was carried off.
Malcolm X was a revolutionary Black internationalist who advocated self-defense and community control, a separatist who denounced the premises of racial integration and an erudite critic of liberals both Black and White. A week before his assassination, his home was firebombed. He arrived in Detroit the next day, still smelling of smoke, and spoke on African independence movements. Malcolm reminded the audience that “the power structure is international” and that people across the world were awakening to “imperialism, colonialism, racism.”
He was first politicized by his own experiences with policing and prisons. After being arrested for a series of home robberies before his 21st birthday, he was sentenced to 6-8 years in prison, where he converted to Islam in 1948. There he began to speak out against state violence, including the death penalty. He argued that the false idea “that murder by the state can repress murder by individuals, is the eternal war cry for the retention of Capital Punishment.”
His view on the death penalty reflected his broader critique about the criminal legal system: individual punishment does not address harm, it compounds it; and violence by the state does not prevent that by individuals, it naturalizes both.