The Government Assasssinated Malcolm X and MLK

How and Why  the ‘Deep State’ (The US Spy Agencies United as COINTELPRO) Assassinated Malcolm X and MLK!

 

By Roland Sheppard, An Eyewitness to Malcolm X’s Assassination

Forword 

I have led a unique life. I am one, of the few people remaining, who was at the Audubon Ballroom when Malcolm X was assassinated.    House painting was my vocation, but working for a better world has been my lifelong avocation. The Following are 4 of my essays, in chronological order, that I have written about the assassination of Malcolm X.  All my essays about the assassination can be found on My web page, Roland Sheppard’s Blog.

The Assassinations of M.L.K. Jr. and Malcolm X

Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in 1964.

It’s impossible for a chicken to produce a duck egg… The system of this country cannot produce freedom for an Afro-American. It is impossible for this system, this economic system, this political system, this social system, this system period. It is impossible for it , as it now stands, to produce freedom right now for the Black man in this country — it is impossible. And if ever a chicken did produce a duck egg, I’m certain you would say it was certainly a revolutionary chicken. — Malcolm X, Harlem ’Hate Gang’ Scare Militant Labor Forum, May 29, 1964

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends — Martin Luther King, Jr The Assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

As Coretta Scott King stated: There is abundant evidence of a major high level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband, Martin Luther King, Jr. And the civil court’s unanimous verdict has validated our belief. I wholeheartedly applaud the verdict of the jury and I feel that justice has been well served in their deliberations. “This verdict is not only a great victory for my family, but also a great victory for America. It is a great victory for truth itself. It is important to know that this was a SWIFT verdict, delivered after about an hour of jury deliberation. The jury was clearly convinced by the extensive evidence that was presented during the trial that, in addition to Mr. Jowers, the conspiracy of the Mafia, local, state and federal government agencies, were deeply involved in the assassination of my husband. The jury also affirmed overwhelming evidence that identified someone else, not James Earl Ray, as the shooter, and that Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame.. . . .

Pepper went a step beyond saying government agencies were responsible for the assassination. To whom in turn were those murderous agencies responsible? Not so much to government officials per se, Pepper asserted, as to the economic powerholders they represented who stood in the even deeper shadows behind the FBI, Army Intelligence, and their affiliates in covert action. By 1968, Pepper told the jury, ’And today it is much worse in my view’ — ’the decision-making processes in the United States were the representatives, the footsoldiers of the very economic interests that were going to suffer as a result of these times of changes [being actived by King].’ To say that U.S. government agencies killed Martin Luther King on the verge of the Poor People’s Campaign is a way into the deeper truth that the economic powers that be (which dictate the policies of those agencies) killed him. In the Memphis prelude to the Washington campaign, King posed a threat to those powers of a non-violent revolutionary force. Just how determined they were to stop him before he reached Washington was revealed in the trial by the size and complexity of the plot to kill him. — Jim Douglass, The Martin Luther King Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis

I first started to write about Malcolm X’s assassination, after I watched the 1992 CBS documentrary, The Real Malcolm X, An Intimate Portrait of the man, narrated by Dan Rather. I then saw that Spike Lee’s documentary movie, Malcolm X, had left out the most of the events in the last year of Malcolm’s life, starting with March 12, 1964 Press Statement By Malcolm X. When Denzel Washington, acting as Malcolm X, is shown addressing this press conference, right after Malcolm’s statement: “There can be no black-white unity until there is first some’ black unity”, Denzel Washington did not state what Malcolm X said next, which was “There can be no workers solidarity until there is first some racial solidarity,” The statement about ’workers solidarity’ showed some of Malcolm’s thinking and outlook at that time — he was becoming anti-capitalist in his political thinking.

I felt compelled to write this essay to show why this government, “the assassination leader of the world “ assassinated Malcolm X. But when I began to read more of what King had stood for at the end of his life, that he also was becoming anti-capitalist in his political thinking, before his life was ended, I realized the United States Government had the same motive to kill both Malcolm X Martin Luther King. When I discovered and realized the complicity, of the government, in both assassinations, I then felt compelled to write this essay, based upon what I learned and my own personal experience.

“It’s impossible for a chicken to produce a duck egg� The system of this country cannot produce freedom for an Afro-American. It is impossible for this system, this economic system, this political system, this social system, this system period. It is impossible for it , as it now stands, to produce freedom right now for the Black man in this country — it is impossible. And if ever a chicken did produce a duck egg, I’m certain you would say it was certainly a revolutionary chicken.” — Malcolm X (Harlem ’Hate Gang’ Scare Militant Labor Forum, May 29, 1964

Malcolm X speaking at the New York  Militant Labor Forum, 1964

I regularly attended Malcolm X’s meetings in Harlem and was present at the meeting when Malcolm X was assassinated. I was in charge of defense when Malcolm X spoke at the Militant Labor Forum in New York City from 1964 to 1965. I have written several articles, spoken to various groups, and been interviewed about Malcolm X. This essay is an update of a paper that was accepted by City College of New York’s (CCNY) Black Studies Program for The Third Symposium of Institution Building in Harlem: The Malcolm X Legacy: A Global Perspective, held on Friday, May 20, 2005 at CCNY. It was first written as the February, 2001 Monthly Feature for the Holt Labor Library website.

This essay is based on my presentation at a forum in Boston in 2000, on the same subject. The other speaker at the forum was Minister Don Muhammad of the Boston Nation of Islam.( I have updated this essay as more data becomes available in the internet.)

Over forty years ago, Malcolm X (1965) and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968) were assassinated. In the case of Malcolm X, several members of the Nation of Islam (NOI) were convicted of the assassination. In the case of Martin Luther King, one assassin, James Earl Ray, was convicted of the assassination and sentenced to life in prison. However, there have always been many unanswered questions about both of these murders. Despite the convictions, and the ongoing campaign by the government, police agencies, and various authors and pundits to put the assassinations to rest, there have always been many unanswered questions.

Almost 32 years after King’s murder at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, l968, a Memphis court extended the circle of responsibility for the assassination beyond the late scapegoat James Earl Ray to the United States government. According to the Memphis jury’s verdict on December 8,1999, a jury of twelve citizens of Memphis, Shelby County, TN, concluded in Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King, III, Bernice King, Dexter Scott King and Yolanda King Vs. Loyd Jowers and Other Unknown Conspirators that Loyd Jowers and governmental agencies including the City of Memphis, the State of Tennessee, and the federal government were party to the conspiracy to assassinate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the 1970’s, the public became aware of the COINTELPRO disruption operations of the government against the Civil Rights movement, the anti-war movement, radicals and socialists. Under COINTELPRO the different United States spy agencies used informers, agents, and agents provocateurs to disrupt these organizations. One of the stated purposes of this program was to neutralize Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Elijah Muhammad in order to prevent the emergence – to use the government’s term – of a Black Messiah who would have the potential of uniting and leading a mass organization of Black Americans in their struggle for freedom and economic equality.

(This policy was still being continued in 1978 and probably still going on. http://www.finalcall.com/MEMORANDUM-46.htm)

A second assassination of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. has been the attempt to distort what they really stood for in their last years of life. This is a process that Lenin described in the opening to his book The State and Revolution:

…what in the course of history, has happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the consolation of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. . . .

As one who was politically active at that time, I believe that it is important to tell the truth about Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in order to help keep their ideas alive and prevent them from being reduced to harmless icons.

The Assassination of Malcolm X

I witnessed Malcolm X’s assassination at the Audubon Ballroom, on February 21, 1965. I am writing with the benefit of first hand knowledge of what took place that day, what Malcolm X stood for at the time of his death, and the hope for the future that inspired all who heard or knew the man.

I remember the mass media, reflecting their class hatred of Malcolm X, gloating and cheering his assassination. I remember the response to his death by the tens of thousands in Harlem, who for several days went to view his casket. I remember the Malcolm X Eulogy by Ossie Davis that silenced the hyenas of the press when he said “Consigning these mortal remains to earth, the common mother of all, secure in the knowledge that what we place in the ground is no more now a man – but a seed – which, after the winter of our discontent, will come forth again to meet us. And we will know him then for what he was and is – a Prince – our own black shining Prince! – who didn’t hesitate to die, because he loved us so.” In spite of all of the attacks by the mass media, Malcolm X has grown more and more popular as a martyred leader of his people and an uncompromising advocate of human rights and freedom.

In 1991, at the time Spike Lee’s documentary movie on Malcolm X was due to be released, several books were written that attempted to camouflage Malcolm’s political evolution during his last year. Two such books were Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America, by Bruce Perry and Malcolm X: The Assassination, by Michael Friedly. In my opinion, these books are a second assassination of Malcolm X.

Both books were written in order to reaffirm the government’s position to put sole blame on the Nation of Islam (NOI) for the assassination. Both deny the evolution of his thinking, reflecting his revolutionary development in the last year of his life, and discounted any possibility of government complicity or motive in the assassination. Both were also polemics against two excellent books written by George Breitman: The Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary and The Assassination of Malcolm X.

Breitman wrote The Last Year of Malcolm X to cover the period of Malcolm’s life that is absent from the autobiography co-authored with Alex Haley. He also hoped to clear up any misconceptions that Haley, who disagreed with Malcolm’s ideas as they were developing, had put into the epilogue of the autobiography. Breitman’s book was based on Malcolm’s speeches and statements during his last year and his collaboration with the Socialist Workers Party. If one reads Malcolm X’s speeches, one will clearly understand that Breitman’s book is a very accurate statement of Malcolm X’s political development and evolution.

Unfortunately, Spike Lee’s documentary movie, Malcolm X, also downplayed Malcolm’s thinking and accomplishments during his last year and omitted this sentence from Malcolm’s first press conference after the split from the Nation of Islam: “There can be no workers solidarity until there is first some racial solidarity” 1 is a clear expression of his thinking, at that time in history.

This allows those who oppose what Malcolm had become in his last year to maintain that he had not become a threat to the capitalist establishment. This has been consciously done to make it appear that the NOI alone had a motive to kill Malcolm X and to exonerate the role of the government in the assassination.

The Government’s Motive To Neutralize Malcolm X

In his last year, Malcolm X came to the conclusion that it was impossible for African Americans to be integrated into this system because racism was profitable and an integral part of capitalism. His words on the world-wide oppression of non-whites by white Europeans were very similar to what Karl Marx wrote about how the original capitalist fortunes were obtained. In Capital, Volume One, Part VIII, Chapter 31, “Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist,” Marx wrote:

…The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production… If money… comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek, capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.

Malcolm X was the first mass leader in the United States to oppose the war in Vietnam and to identify the oppression of African Americans in this country with the struggles of the oppressed throughout the world. In all probability, Malcolm X would have spoken at the first mass demonstration against the Vietnam War in 1965. His powerful oratory alone, as well as his standing among inner-city Blacks, would have given the Vietnam Antiwar Movement a far different character and the history of that period in the United States and the world would have been greatly changed.

I had the opportunity to hear Malcolm X speak at meetings in Harlem at the Audubon Ballroom and elsewhere. His power as an orator was his ability to make complex ideas simple and clear. He was not a demagogue. His speeches were always an appeal to reason.

One example of the power of his oratory was when he spoke at anorganizing rally for Hospital Workers Local 1199 in New York City 1962. The following is a famous quote from that speech: “The hospital strikers have demonstrated that you don’t get a job done unless you show the Man you’re not afraid to go to jail. If you’re not willing to pay that price, then you don’t deserve the rewards or benefits that go along with it.”  Malcolm X at 1199 RallyThe response was the same whether he spoke in Harlem or in a debate at Oxford University in England.

One can hear the response that Malcolm got by watching the video of Malcolm X’s Oxford Union Debate (December 3, 1964), when he ended his speech quoting Shakespeare: “I read once, passingly, about a man named Shakespeare. I only read about him passingly, but I remember one thing he wrote that kind of moved me. He put it in the mouth of Hamlet, I think, it was, who said, ‘To be or not to be.’ He was in doubt about something—whether it was nobler in the mind of man to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune—moderation—or to take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. And I go for that. If you take up arms, you’ll end it, but if you sit around and wait for the one who’s in power to make up his mind that he should end it, you’ll be waiting a long time. And in my opinion, the young generation of whites, blacks, browns, whatever else there is, you’re living at a time of extremism, a time of revolution, a time when there’s got to be a change. People in power have misused it, and now there has to be a change and a better world has to be built, and the only way it’s going to be built—is with extreme methods. And I, for one, will join in with anyone—I don’t care what color you are—as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth.” —The Assassinations of M.L.K. Jr. and Malcolm X

Malcolm X addressing students at the London School of Economics, 1965

Malcolm X viewed the struggle of African Americans as an economic and social struggle for human rights and not limited to just a struggle for civil fights. He identified with the Colonial Revolution at that time in Africa and throughout the world, including the struggle of the Vietnamese people and the Cuban revolution; in direct opposition to the policies of the United States government both then and now. He had met with Che Guevara and the Cuban delegation to the United Nations in December 1964 and a firm bond was established between them. Contrary to Friedly and Perry’s assertions, Malcolm had become a very real threat to the very foundations of capitalism in the United States, The truth is that the United States government had a very good motive for the assassination.

Prior to his assassination Malcolm X told Clifton DeBerry, the presidential candidate of the Socialist Workers Party in 1964, and myself that he hoped to live long enough to build a viable organization based on his current ideas – so that he would be more dangerous to the system dead than alive. Unfortunately, he did not have time to build the new organization that he had envisioned

In his book, The Assassination of Malcolm X, George Breitman points out that the first accounts of the assassination, in the New York City newspapers, reported that two people were caught by the crowd and saved by the police. But later, the press and the police reported that only one person, Talmadge Hayer, who was shot in the leg, had been caught by the crowd. Since he had been shot, the police took him to the hospital that was across the street. No explanation has ever been given for the change in the story.

New York Herald Tribune

On the Smoking Gun website, http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/crime/malcolm-x-files-0 a 1965 police affidavit, by an eyewitness, is shown that confirms that two people had been caught by the crowd.

In a news video, made right after the assassination, Cointelpro Documentary, Part 2 of 6 (actual audio recording of Malcolm X assassination), the New York Police Department’s, Chef Inspector Taylor, confirmed that two suspects of the assassinations were caught. At the 5:20 point, of the video, he states: “We have two suspects in custody now.”

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Two Police Reports:

The ’Second Man’ Confirmed By Two Eyewitness Accounts

The question remains to this day: What happened to the second man? Why wasn’t he brought to trial? The first police report stated that five men were involved in the assassination; yet only three were accused and convicted at the trial. Both Perry and Friedly allege that the newspapers made a journalistic mistake. However, Breitman puts forward the probability that the second man was an undercover agent who was quietly released. (From The Assassination of Malcolm X (third edition) by George Breitman, Herman Porter, and Baxter Smith (Pathfinder Press, 1991)

There is no doubt that the police had plainclothes officials in the audience. As an eyewitness to the assassination, I was questioned at the Harlem police headquarters. I recognized a man there – obviously a cop, with free run of the office — whom I had seen standing, in the first row at the Audubon Ballroom, with other men, before the start of the meeting, where Hayer said his accomplices were sitting. He was fairly tall and wore a long powder blue wool trench coat and a fez hat. Perry’s book basically supports the official police version of the assassination. It ignores strong evidence that it would have been virtually impossible for only three people to have carried out the assassination.

Perry also ignores Hayer’s affidavit that the two other people convicted with him, Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson — who were both members of the NOI — were not even present at the meeting when Malcolm was killed. (When I was called before the Grand Jury on the assassination of Malcolm X, James Shabazz, Malcolm’s primary assistant, also told me that that Butler and Johnson were well known and confirmed that they were not at the meeting nor would they have been allowed to enter the meeting.)

Friedly’s book is a more sophisticated cover up. The book puts the blame solely on the NOI while, at the same time, criticizing the police investigation. It is based on Hayer’s confessions at the trial and at a later parole hearing. Friedly’s and Hayer’s version is that five members of the NOI carried out the assassination, three people doing the shooting up front and two people creating a diversion prior to the shooting, setting off a smoke bomb in the back of the room.

Hayer’s version of the logistics corresponds with my own impressions at the scene. Contrary to Friedly’s contention, however, the confession by Hayer only reinforces the probable existence of a second man caught by the crowd. Hayer explains that at the time that he was shot and caught by the crowd he could see one of his accomplices running ahead of him. I was told by Malcolm’s guards when I got outside the Audubon Ballroom, that two people were caught by the crowd at the same time and that one was taken to the hospital by the police and the other taken into police custody. Hayer was taken to the hospital and then booked. It is likely that the second man caught was the one running ahead of Hayer and was quite possibly an agent.

Upadate: I just learned, this year, 2020, that the 2^nd man was Raymond Woods, a BOSSI/CONINTELPRO informant.:

COINTELPRO often worked in conjunction with and received information from local law enforcement “red squads” such as the Bureau of Special Services (BOSS), a special division of the New York City Police department (NYPD). Also known as the Bureau of Special Services and Investigations, its job was to monitor and surveil political radicals.These divisions often relied on informants and undercover agents. Ray Wood, a.k.a. Ray Woodall, was one such informant who, as a police officer for BOSS, infiltrated the Bronx chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in the early 1960s.  Some historians like Ward Churchill and Susan Brownmiller have written about Woodbut new information providesa clearer picture of how undercover agents contributed to COINTELPRO. . . . By the 1970’s, Wood’s name had faded into obscurity. Historian Garrett Felber’s 2015 Guardian article about Wood reignited interest in him. Felber argued Wood mighthave been the mysterious second man arrested at the Audubon Ballroom when Malcolm X was assassinated. As part of the research team for Manning Marable’sbiography of Malcolm X, A Life Reinvented, Felber found notes from Yuri Kochiyama, a member of CORE and the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) who witnessed the assassination. In OAAU meeting notes, Kochiyama, wrote that “Ray Woods” was “seen running out of (the) Audubon, was one of two picked up by police”. — Incognegro: How Law Enforcement Spies on Black Radical Groups

There is one glaring error in Hayer’s statement. He stated that the five assassins cased one of Malcolm’s meetings at the Audubon Ballroom in the winter of 1964-65 and concluded that they would have a good chance to escape. This is far from probable. There were normally 30 to 50 cops, in their blue uniforms, both inside and outside the building stationed at all the exits. Escape would not have been easy.

However, at the meeting when Malcolm was assassinated, the police were nowhere to be found, even though they knew that an assassination attempt was imminent. In order to plan Malcolm X’s death, the conspirators would have needed to know and be confident that the cops were not going to be there on that day. Perry and Friedly assert that the police agreed to Malcolm’s request not to have police protection. However, when the police first spoke of their agreement, Malcolm’s wife, Betty Shabazz, stated that it was a lie that Malcolm had made the request.

Both Perry and Friedly discount any possible disruption operations by the FBI, the New York City police, or the CIA. When Clarence Jones, Martin Luther King’s lawyer, was interviewed by Dan Rather on the 1992 documentary, when questioned about the assassination of Malcolm X, he stated:

. . . . Knowing what I now know of the various agencies of the US government investigative agencies of the US government with respect to Martin King, for example, and knowing what they did to political parties, like the Black Panther Parties, I have no doubt that the assassination of Malcolm X was calculated, planned by agencies at the highest level of this government. I don’t have any question, I don’t have any doubt in my mind that is what happened…

“The Judas Factor”

In dramatic contrast to Perry’s and Friedly’s conclusions about Malcolm X’s assassination, is a book by Washington Post staff writer Karl Evanzz titled, The Judas Factor (Thunder’s Mouth Press, New York, 1992. 389 pp., $22.95).

In this book, Evanzz documents how the intelligence community, the CIA, the FBI, and the New York Police Bureau of Special Services (BOSSI) using agents provocateurs and infiltrators; set the stage for the assassination of Malcolm X. It outlines the motives for their actions. Evanzz spent 15 years researching over 300,000 pages of declassified FBI and CIA documents. From Page 214 of The Judas Factor:

(A few days after Malcolm X’s press conference announcing his split from the NOI) “William C. Sullivan (FBI) contacted the directors of BOSSI and asked them to recruit several African Americans to infiltrate Malcolm X’s new organization. Among the directors at the time were two men who later would play key roles in the scandal that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation: Anthony Ulasewicz, the infamous bagman of Watergate, and Nixon advisor John J. Caulfield.

“Ulasewicz was all too happy to comply with Sullivan’s request. Malcolm X had been a thorn in the New York Police Department’s side for more than a decade. He told Sullivan that he would have officers ready to infiltrate Malcolm X’s new organizations within thirty days.

“While Sullivan was coordinating the domestic counterintelligence program against Malcolm X with BOSSI, the CIA initiated a similar program to determine the extent of Malcolm X’s influence with Third World leaders. ’What do we have on Malcolm X?’ a CIA official wrote in an inter-office memo dated March 10. The request for information had come from the U.S. State Department. The official ordered a clerk to run a thorough check in the CIA’s database to determine which Third World countries seemed receptive to Malcolm X. . .”

In the introduction to the book, Evanzz writes: “After analyzing these resources, I am convinced that Louis E. Lomax, an industrious African-American journalist who befriended Malcolm X in the late 1950’s, had practically solved the riddle of his assassination. Lomax, who died in a mysterious automobile accident while shooting a film in Los Angeles about the assassination, believed that Malcolm X was betrayed by a former friend who reportedly had ties to the intelligence community � In 1968, Lomax called the suspect ’Judas’. This, then, is the story of The Judas Factor.” There are two major themes in the book: One is the “Judas Factor” and the other is the concern of the FBI and the CIA over Malcolm X’s success in linking the struggle of African Americans with the national liberation struggles in Africa and throughout the Third World.

Evanzz documents that Ahmed Ben Bella, the leader of the Algerian Revolution, had invited Malcolm X ; along with Che Guevara and other leaders of independence movements; to a special conference in Bandung scheduled to begin on March 3, 1965. Malcolm X had also been able to get Ethiopia and Liberia to include human rights violations against African Americans with their petition on South African human rights violations before the International Court of Justice at The Hague. The petition was scheduled to be heard on March 12, 1965.

Part of the Judas Factor was the FBI’s attempts to neutralize Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Elijah Muhammad. Evanzz provides concrete evidence that Martin Luther King was going to support Malcolm X in his project to bring the struggle of human rights before the United Nations and had begun to also identify with the struggles for human rights in Africa.

In light of the CIA’s policies to neutralize opponents of the U.S. government’s political and covert activities in Africa, Evanzz explains that it was necessary to neutralize Malcolm X prior to the Bandung conference. Malcolm X was assassinated on February, 21, 1965, a week and a half before the conference was to take place. Soon after the assassination, several African government officials who had been working with Malcolm X were also assassinated and the Ben Bella government in Algeria was overthrown in June 1965.(Also he would have spoken at the First March Againstthe Vientam Demonstration, in Aprilof 1965.)

From his research into FBI files, Evanzz was able to prove that the FBI had a high-level informant in the NOI. Thus, the FBI was clearly in a position to carry out a campaign to fan the flames of discontent among rising leaders of the Nation and to disrupt the organization’s activities. FBI memos indicate that they maneuvered within the NOI to keep their informant in the best possible leadership position to carry out their covert activities. From the very day that Malcolm X split from the NOI, the FBI worked on a day-to-day basis with BOSSI and the CIA to infiltrate and disrupt his activities. William Sullivan (subsequently of Watergate fame) was the FBI agent in overall charge of both the infiltration of the NOI and Malcolm’s organization, the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU).

It is clear from the book that a coordinated effort was carried out between all government spy agencies to widen the split between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, to increase tensions between their organizations, and to undermine their support among African Americans. It is also safe to assume that agents, informants, and provocateurs from these different agencies were sent into the NOI and Malcolm X’s organizations and that these agents were also present at the Audubon Ballroom when Malcolm X was assassinated. One of police informants, who later informed on the Black Panthers, told me as I was going to take my normal front row seat that “you are not going to sit there today,” and he had me sit in the front row on the left side of the Ballroom. (The assassins sat in the area where I normally sat to hear Malcolm X speak.) When I look over in that direction to see who was sitting in my usual seating area, that was when I saw the same man that I later saw at the Harlem police station, when I was questioned by the police.

Some of Evanzz’s research was based on books about the NOI by Louis Lomax. Evanzz found in the FBI files a script for a movie on the assassination of Malcolm X, which Lomax was working on at the time of his death. (He died in a car accident caused by brake failure.) Evanzz provides circumstantial evidence that John Ali, a former friend of Malcolm X who became a national secretary of the NOI, was more than likely an FBI agent/informer and hence the Judas Factor. In fact, Evanzz provides quotes from Malcolm X to Lomax indicating that Malcolm X blamed John Ali for his expulsion from the Nation.

On pages 327-329 of the book, Conspiracys: Unravelling the assassination of Malcolm X (Nubia Press, 1992, Washington) Baba Zak Kondo documents that John Ali was most likely an FBI agent.

On page 328 Kondo wrote:

As previously noted, Malcolm, who had a clear understanding of the internal workings of the NOI leadership, stated in early June 1964, that Ali was running the NOI to steal as much money as he could from its treasury. This could well explain why Ali was considered an informant. Most FBI informants were/are motivated by money, a point not lost on Frank Donner: Victims, with good reason, typically charge that inform and defectors are motivated primarily by greed. The bureau knows and invariably weaves financial considerations into its snitch jacket scripts. (Age of Surveillance, p. 193).

There is a tendency for researchers and historians to minimize the role and duties of the informant. This is a grave mistake. The Bureau informant frequently played the role of special agent during the 60s and 70s. Former FBI executive William Sullivan, a man in a position to know, clarified this point in the Bureau: “Sometimes an informant can become an agent provocateur who ends up participating in and perhaps instigating and even leading the activity he was being paid to report on (p. 129).

In the Dan Rather CBS documentrary, The Real Malcolm X, An Intimate Portrait of the man, Dan Rather stated that:

We have now looked over 50, 000 freedom of Informations act files from the FBI and the CIA. . . .they do show, prior to MalcolmX’s death, that the CIA and the State Department were actively monitoring his travels abroad and telling foreign leaders to be wary of him.” At the same time, the FBI agents were trying to quote ’cause disruption and deepen the dispute between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad’. By among other things forging Malcolm’s signature and and sending inflammatory letters to Elijah Muhammad and his followers. There are at least 45,000 more pages. … that have never been reveled.

Therefore, John Ali was in a perfect position to forward these letters to Elijah Muhammad.

(10/16/2019 Update):

In the 1970s, the public learned about COINTELPRO and other secret FBI programs directed towards infiltrating and disrupting civil rights organizations during the 1950s and 1960s. J Edgar Hoover, who led the government’s COINTELPRO said… ‘there must be a goal of preventing a coalition of militant black nationalist groups, prevent the rise of a black messiah that can unify and electrify the black nationalist movement, along with preventing militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability, by discrediting them to the community’. John Ali, national secretary of the Nation of Islam, was identified as an FBI undercover agent.  Malcolm X had confided in a reporter that Ali had exacerbated tensions between him and Elijah Muhammad. He considered Ali his “archenemy” within the Nation of Islam leadership. On February 20, 1965, the night before the assassination, Ali met with Talmadge Hayer, one of the men convicted of killing Malcolm X. — Gene Roberts: The Undercover NYPD Agent Who Betrayed Malcolm X

The most important aspect, however, is not whether Ali was the high-level agent, but the fact that the FBI did indeed have a high-level person in the NOI in their employ. Overall, the main value of the book is that all of the spy agencies in the United States were deeply involved as infiltrators and agent provocateurs (Judas Factors) to set the stage for Malcolm X’s assassination.

The evidence provided by the book is irrefutable proof that the government had the motive to assassinate Malcolm X and the ability, through its COINTELPRO spy operations, to orchestrate his assassination.

It is now time to open up all the files of the CIA and the FBI, as well as the thousands of pages of files of the New York City Police Department, so that the truth about the assassination of Malcolm X can be exposed.

Certain things seem agreed upon by everybody: The Organization of Afro-American Unity had scheduled a rally on Sunday afternoon, February 21, at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. This was one week after Malcolm’s home was fire-bombed and he and his family narrowly escaped injury or death. People entering the rally were not searched. On the other hand, they were all scrutinized by OAAU aides as they entered the hall.

Malcolm had just begun to speak when two men began a scuffle deliberately designed to distract the attention of Malcolm’s guards. Three men rushed toward Malcolm, opening fire and wounding him mortally; they then ran out of the ballroom, pursued by several of Malcolm’s supporters.

Police said that one of the three, identified later as Talmadge Hayer, twenty-two, of Paterson, New Jersey, had received a bullet in the leg by the time he got to the exit of the building. The police also alleged that he had been wounded by Reuben Francis, a Malcolm guard. Hayer was seized outside the building by the people pursuing him. So was another man. The people began to beat and kick Hayer and the second man. Police arrived and rescued the two being beaten, taking them away from the crowd. The third man got away. He got away because the crowd did not catch him. Hayer and the second man also would have got away if the crowd hadn’t caught and held them until the police showed up.

Now let us turn to the New York Herald Tribune dated Monday, February 22 [1965]. This is a morning paper, which means that the first edition of the paper dated Monday actually appeared Sunday evening, a few hours after the killing. The top headline in the first (city) edition reads: “Malcolm X Slain by Gunmen as 400 in Ballroom Watch.” The subhead, over the lead article by Jimmy Breslin, reads: “Police Rescue Two Suspects.”

Breslin’s story in this edition reports that Hayer was “taken to Bellevue Prison Ward and was sealed off by a dozen policemen. The other suspect was taken to the Wadsworth Avenue precinct, where the city’s top policemen immediately converged and began one of the heaviest homicide investigations this city has ever seen.”

Next we turn to a later (late city) edition of the same paper for the same day. The top headline is unchanged. But the subhead is different. This time it reads, “Police Rescue One Suspect.” The “second” suspect has dropped not only out of the headline, but out of Breslin’s story too. Nothing about his being caught and beaten by the crowd, nothing about his being rescued by the police, nothing about his being taken to the Wadsworth station, nothing about the city’s top police converging on that station. Not only does he disappear from Breslin’s story in the late city edition, but he disappears from the Herald Tribune altogether from that date to this.

Perhaps the whole thing never happened? Perhaps Breslin, in the heat of the moment, had in his first story reported a mere rumor as a fact, and, being unable to verify it, decided not to repeat it in later editions?

But there are three morning papers in New York, and in their first editions they all said it happened.

For example, let us examine the first (city) edition of the New York Times for February 22. The subhead is very clear: “Police Hold Two for Questioning.” From the Times’s city edition, we even learn the name of the cop who captured the “second” man. It is Patrolman Thomas Hoy, who is quoted as saying he had “grabbed a suspect” being chased by some people.

But when we turn to the late city edition of the same Times, printed only a few hours later, we find that its subhead, too, has changed. It now reads: “One Is Held in Killing.” But the story hasn’t yet been changed altogether. Patrolman Hoy still remains in the story , and so does the “second” man who has dropped out of the subhead. In fact, the story has more about Hoy than it had in the city edition.

This time the Times reports: “’As I brought him to the front of the ballroom, the crowd began beating me and the suspect,’ Patrolman Hoy said. He said he put this man–not otherwise identified later for newsmen–into a police car to be taken to the Wadsworth Avenue station.” Then Hoy’s captive disappears from the Times as completely and as permanently as he did from the Herald Tribune, and from all the other daily papers. But there cannot be any doubt in the mind of anyone reading the accounts I have cited that a second man was captured and taken away by the police.

Who was he?

Why did the press lose interest in him so suddenly, at a time that it was filling its pages with all kinds of material about the murder, including the silliest trivialities and wildest rumors?

[text copyright 1976, 1991 Pathfinder Press] Found at: http://www.thememoryhole.org/deaths/x-suspects.htm

Government’s Motive To Neutralize Martin Luther King

Central Park Antivietnam War Demonstration

Martin Luther King and Dr. Benjamin Spock at the head of the Anti-Vietnam War March from Central Park to the United Nations Building New York City, April 15,1967

From the time of the King assassination, the many inconsistencies in the Government’s case that James Earl Ray was the sole assassin were well publicized. When the COINTELPRO disruption operations of the government against the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and radicals and socialists were exposed; The United States House of Representatives’ Select Committee on Assassinations, under pressure from these exposures and the Civil Rights Movement, did an investigation in 1979 with the purpose to reconfirm the Government’s case. Immediately after it released the report; affirming that Ray was the lone assassin;this committee sealed all of the evidence it had in its possession for 50 years (until 2029). Thus, we were left with nothing but the integrity of the Senators to justify their ’findings’; rather than the facts. The only logical reason to keep the files secret is to protect the guilty.

Recently, new facts on this assassination have come to light. On Dec. 8, 1999, a jury awarded Coretta Scott King and her family $100 in damages resulting from a conspiracy to murder her late husband, Martin Luther King. The trial was initiated by the admission of Lloyd Jowers on national TV in 1993 that he had hired King’s assassin as a favor to an underworld figure who was a friend. At the conclusion of the trial, Dexter King, Dr. King’s son, said, After today, we don’t want questions like, ’Do you believe James Earl Ray killed your father?’ I’ve been hearing that all my life. No, I don’t, and this is the end of it. This was the most incredible cover-up of the century, and now it has been exposed. Now we can finally move on with our lives.

The King family, along with their attorney, William Pepper, plan to lobby historians and elected officials to get the official record of the assassination changed. There have always been many unanswered questions about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. From the beginning it has been clear that the FBI was involved to one degree or another.

The FBI leaked the information to the Memphis press that King was going to be staying at a white hotel a couple of days prior to his arrival in the city. This forced King to stay at the less secure Lorraine Motel. This gave time to anyone who wanted King dead to plan an assassination and made it more difficult for the FBI to be accused of the crime.

The question remains: Why would the government be part of the conspiracy against King? Why would they want him dead? A key to understanding the government’s motive is that Martin Luther King had a different political perspective at the time of his death than when he made his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. His final speeches and actions reveal that he had begun to view the struggle for equality as an economic struggle and the capitalist economic system as the problem.

In one of his last speeches, given at Stanford University in April 1967 and titled the The Other America, King addressed the problem of the rich and the poor in this country. Instead of his dream, he talked about the nightmare of the economic condition of Blacks. He talked about “work-starved men searching for jobs that did not exist”; about the Black population living on a “lonely island of poverty surrounded by an ocean of material prosperity”; and about living in a “triple ghetto of race, poverty, and human misery.” He explained that after World War II, the unemployment rate between Blacks and whites was equal and that in the years between then and 1967, Black unemployment had become double the rate for white workers. He also spoke about how Black workers made half the wages of white workers

From his experience when he started his campaign for equality in Chicago and elsewhere in the North, King concluded in this speech that to deal with this problem of the Two Americas was much more difficult than to get rid of legal segregation. He pointed out that the northern liberals, who had given moral and financial support to the struggle against Jim Crow, would not give such support to the efforts to end economic segregation. He also polemicized against the concept that people should pick themselves up by their own bootstraps. In the course of explaining the obstacles that Blacks faced coming into this country that Europeans did not have, he stated: “It is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man to pick himself up by his own bootstraps.” Black people, he said, were “impoverished aliens in their own land.”

In this speech King also opposed the war in Vietnam. He criticized the government for spending hundreds of millions of dollars for war and not for equality. He stated his goal to organize and mobilize forces to fight for economic equality. In his last letter, requesting support for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1968, he wrote:

“It was obdurate government callousness to misery that first stoked the flames of rage and frustration. With unemployment a scourge in Negro ghettos, the government still tinkers with half-hearted measures, refuses still to become an employer of last resort. It asks the business community to solve the problems as though its past failures qualified it for success.”

He also stated this outlook at the SCLC Convention of Aug. 1967:

“We’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. ’Who owns this oil? … Who owns the iron ore?… Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two-thirds water?’”

On Page 602, A testament of hope: the essential writings and speeches of Martin Luther: King states the course that he was planning to take in the fight for economic equality:

“The Emergence of social initiatives by a revitalized labor movement would be taking place as Negros are placing economic issues on the highest agenda. The coalition of an energized section of labor, Negroes, unemployed, and welfare recipients may be the source of power that reshapes economic relationships and ushers in a breakthrough to a new level of social reform.”. . .

He continues on Page 631:

“There is nothing except shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum — and livable — income for every American family.

“There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid, or day laborer.

“There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peaces will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from remolding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a true brotherhood.” . . .

These words have even more meaning in today’s world. At that time, the stock market was below 1,000 points. Today, it is above 10,000 points, and yet conditions for Blacks are still lower than after World War II.

At the time of their assassinations, both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were embarking on a course in opposition to thecapitalist system. It is clear from reading and listening to their final speeches that they had both evolved to similar conclusions of capitalism’s role in the maintenance of racism. That is why they were “neutralized”.

Unlike Malcolm X, who never got the opportunity to act upon his convictions, Martin Luther King was organizing a movement to obtain his stated goals when he was assassinated in Memphis. He was in Memphis to build “the coalition of an energized section of labor, Negroes, unemployed, and welfare recipients” in support of striking municipal garbage workers.

If such a force had been launched, the whole power of the antiwar and civil rights movement in the 1960s could have transformed the labor movement and become “the source of power that reshapes economic relationships and ushers in a breakthrough to a new level of social reform.” Such a coalition, as King envisioned it thirty-three years ago, is needed today. The best tribute to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X would be to begin anew to build a movement based on the ideas and the concepts that they had developed at the time of their untimely deaths.

At the time of their assassinations, both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were embarking on a course in opposition to the capitalist system. It is clear from reading and listening to their final speeches that they had both evolved to similar conclusions as to capitalism’s role in the maintenance of racism. That is why they were neutralized.

Civil Rights Struggle for the 21st Century

’I Am A Man’ March 29, 1968: Scene in Memphis

Unlike Malcolm X, who never got the opportunity to act upon his convictions, Martin Luther King was organizing a movement to obtain his stated goals when he was assassinated in Memphis. He was in Memphis to build “the coalition of an energized section of labor, Negroes, unemployed, and welfare recipients” in support of striking municipal garbage workers. If such a force had been launched, the whole power of the anti-war and civil rights movement in the 1960s could have transformed the labor movement and become “the source of power that reshapes economic relationships and ushers in a breakthrough to a new level of social reform.” Such a coalition, as King envisioned it thirty-three years ago, is needed today. The best tribute to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X would be to begin anew to build a movement based on the ideas and the concepts that they had developed at the time of their untimely deaths.

Unfortunately, the civil rights movement, after Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, subordinated independent mass struggle in the streets to electoral activity: to elect Democrats. Black Democratic politicians under the slogan: “vote for me and I’ll set you free,” began distributing “war on poverty” money to Black organizations. What W.E.B. DuBois called the “talented tenth” got government jobs and became comfortable. This whole process demobilized the civil rights movement of the Black masses, who were subsequently left behind.

Today, the bankruptcy of this policy has come home to roost upon all workers as pensions, wages, our standard of living, etc. are under attack and devalued by inflation. Blacks and other minorities especially have faced the brunt of these attacks. They are disproportionately among the ranks of the unemployed and the underemployed.

On the question of civil rights, conditions have reverted to the 60s for the Black masses and for Latinos. According to the Harvard Civil Rights Project www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu/ the nation’s schools have become re-segregated along Black, Latino, and economic lines. Throughout this country, the inner cities are being gentrified as Blacks and the poor are forced out and scattered throughout the land. The action in response to Hurricane Katrina and the explosion of the immigrant rights movement; a reflection of the rise of the indigenous people of all of Latin America for their rights, bring hope for a better future and are just a hint of what’s to come.

As we make a balance sheet of the Civil Right’s Movement against the backdrop of the world and domestic situation at the opening of the 21st century, it is clear that Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Dream” is not possible under the “Nightmare” of capitalism. The modern-day tyranny of the multinationals and their beholden representatives in government is based on dividing working people worldwide on the basis of race, nationality, and gender. There is no way forward for Black and Latino workers, or even for their white counterparts, under capitalism. If the system of capitalism is based on the exploitation of Labor, and one of the foremost methods of capitalist exploitation of Labor is the weapon of racism, how can any lasting solution to this problem of humanity be achieved under capitalism? As Malcolm X said: “…. Racism is profitable, if it wasn’t profitable it wouldn’t exist.

At Frogmore, S.C. November 14, 1966 King echoed Malcolm X when he said in a speech in front of his staff:

You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry…. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong… with capitalism….There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.

The only permanent solution to the exploitation and oppression of African-Americans is Socialism, based on the multi-racial working class becoming the masters of their own society, culture, and economy. Only on this basis can the age-old double exploitation of Blacks be eliminated and replaced by a society fit for all human beings to live in. Only on this basis can the African-American working class take its rightful place as masters of the country that was built by the blood and sweat of its slavery: both the chattel slavery of the plantation and the wage slavery of the city.

The lesson of this history is that if we keep our politics independent of the Republican and Democratic Parties and the government; if we rely upon our own power in the streets; if we take up the struggle where Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. left off, we will win. September, 2006

The Militant, March, 1964: March 12, 1964 Press Statement By Malcolm X Page 6

The following is the text of the statement made by Malcolm X in opening his press conference at New York’s Park Sheraton Hotel, March 12.

Because 1964 threatens to be a vary explosive year on the racial front, and because I myself intend to be very active in every phase on the American Negro struggle for Human Rights, I have called this press conference this morning to clarify my own position in the struggle — especially in regard to politics and nonviolence.

The problem facing our people here in America is bigger than all other personal or organizational differences. Therefore, as leaders, we must stop worrying about the threat that we think we pose to each other’s personal prestige, and concentrate our united efforts toward solving the unending hurt that is being done daily to our people here in America.

I am going to organize and head a new Mosque in New York City, known as the Muslim Mosque, Inc. This gives us a religious base, and the spiritual force necessary to rid our people of the vices that destroy the moral fiber of our community. .

Our political philosophy. will be Black Nationalism. Our economic and social philosophy will be Black Nationalism. Our cultural emphasis will be Black Nationalism.

Many of our people aren’t religiously inclined” so the Muslim Mosque, Inc., will be organized in such manner to provide for the active participation of all Negroes in our political, economic, and social programs, despite their religious or non-religious beliefs.

The political ’philosophy of Black Nationalism means: we must control the politics and the politicians of our community. They must no longer take orders from outside forces. We will organize and sweep out of office all Negro politicians who are puppets for the outside forces.

Our accent will be upon youth: we need new ideas, new methods, new approaches. We will call upon young students of political science’ throughout the nation to help us. We will encourage these young students to launch their own independent study, and then give us their analysis and their suggestions. We are completely disenchanted with the old, adult, established politicians. We want to see some new faces — more militant faces.

Concerning the 1964 elections: we will keep our plans on this a secret until a later date – but we don’t intend for our people to be the victims of a political sellout’ again in 1964. The Muslim Mosque, Inc.:, will remain wide-open for ideas and financial aid from all quarters.

• Whites can help us, but they can’t Join us.

•  There can be no black-white unity until there is first some’ black unity.

• There can be no workers solidarity until there is first some racial solidarity.

• We cannot think of uniting with others, until after we have first united among ourselves.

• We cannot think of being acceptable to others until we have first proven acceptable to ourselves.

• One can’t unite bananas with scattered leaves.

Concerning nonviolence: it Is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks. It is legal and lawful to own a shotgun or a rifle. We believe in obeying the law.

In areas where our people are the constant victims of brutality, and the government seems unable or unwilling to protect them, we should form rifle clubs that can ’be used to ’defend our lives and our property in times of emergency, such as happened last year in BirmIngham, Plaque mine Ia., Cambridge, Md., and Danville, Va. When our people are being bitten by dogs, they are within their rights to kill those dogs.

We should be peaceful, law abiding — but the time has Come for the American Negro to fight back in self-defense whenever and wherever he is being unjustly and unlawfully attacked. . It the government thinks I am wrong for saying this, then let the government start doing its job.

Martin Luthers King’s The Other America Speech Stanford University April 14, 1967 A Film by Allen Willis

Allen Willis has the distinction of being the dean of African American filmmakers in the San Francisco Bay Area. Those who know the rich history of the area’s independent filmmaking community acknowledge him as the founding father. He worked for the San Francisco public broadcasting station KQED-TV from 1963 to 1983 and was the first African American news and documentary cinematographers in the Bay Area. The Other America Speech is available in VHS and DVD formats at $19.95 each, and can be purchased directly online or by calling 510.843.3699.

The online video of this speech can be found here.

The transcript of this speech can be found here.

Documentaries: Who Killed Martin Luther King? by Michel Perbot

• • Part 1 Who Killed Martin Luther King? (documentary)

  • Part 2 Who Killed Martin Luther King? (documentary)

  • Part 3 Who Killed Martin Luther King? (documentary)

  • Part 4 Who Killed Martin Luther King? (documentary)

  • Part 5 Who Killed Martin Luther King? (documentary)

  • Part 6 Who Killed Martin Luther King? (documentary)

  • Part 7 Who Killed Martin Luther King? (documentary)

  • Part 8 Who Killed Martin Luther King? (documentary)

  • Part 9 Who Killed Martin luther King? (documentary)

  • Part10 Who Killed Martin Luther King?

The  is a book review of Karl Evannz book the Judas Factor, by Karl Evannz, as a background article bout the spy agencies that make up the ‘Deep State’.  The rest are my essays are about who and why he was assassinated based based upon my personal experiences and Malcom’s speeches, during the last years of his life.

 Part I

Background

Book Review: The Judas Factor by Karl Evanzz

In this book, Evanzz documents how the intelligence community, the CIA, the FBI, and the New York Police Bureau of Special Services (BOSSI) using agents provocateurs and infiltrators; set the stage for the assassination of Malcolm X.

It outlines the motives for their actions. Evanzz spent 15 years researching over 300,000 pages of declassified FBI and CIA documents. From Page 214 of The Judas Factor:      “(A few days after Malcolm X’s press conference announcing his split from the NOI) “William C. Sullivan (FBI) contacted the directors of BOSSI and asked them to recruit several African Americans to infiltrate Malcolm X’s new organization.

Among the directors at the time were two men who later would play key roles in the scandal that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation: Anthony Ulasewicz, the infamous bagman of Watergate, and Nixon advisor John J. Caulfield. 

From the book: “Ulasewicz was all too happy to comply with Sullivan’s request. Malcolm X had been a thorn in the New York Police Department’s side for more than a decade. He told Sullivan that he would have officers ready to infiltrate Malcolm X’s new organizations within thirty days.    “While Sullivan was coordinating the domestic counterintelligence program against Malcolm X with BOSSI, the CIA initiated a similar program to determine the extent of Malcolm X’s influence with Third World leaders.  ‘What do we have on Malcolm X?’ a CIA official wrote in an inter-office memo dated March 10. The request for information had come from the U.S. State Department. The official ordered a clerk to run a thorough check in the CIA’s database to determine which Third World countries seemed receptive to Malcolm X. . .’”   

 In the introduction to the book, Evanzz writes: “After analyzing these resources, I am convinced that Louis E. Lomax, an industrious African American journalist who befriended Malcolm X in the late 1950’s, had practically solved the riddle of his assassination. Lomax, who died in a mysterious automobile accident while shooting a film in Los Angeles about the assassination, believed that Malcolm X was betrayed by a former friend who reportedly had ties to the intelligence community.     

In 1968, Lomax called the suspect ’Judas’. This, then, is the story of The Judas Factor.” There are two major themes in the book: One is the “Judas Factor” and the other is the concern of the FBI and the CIA over Malcolm X’s success in linking the struggle of African Americans with the national liberation struggles in Africa and throughout the Third World.     

Evanzz documents that Ahmed Ben Bella, the leader of the Algerian Revolution, had invited Malcolm X ; along with Che Guevara and other leaders of independence movements; to a special conference in Bandung scheduled to begin on March 3, 1965. Malcolm X had also been able to get Ethiopia and Liberia to include human rights violations against African Americans with their petition on South African human rights violations before the International Court of Justice at The Hague. The petition was scheduled to be heard on March 12, 1965.

Part of the Judas Factor was the FBI’s attempts to neutralize Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Elijah Muhammad. Evanzz provides concrete evidence that Martin Luther King was going to support Malcolm X in his project to bring the struggle of human rights before the United Nations and had begun to also identify with the struggles for human rights in Africa.

In light of the CIA’s policies to neutralize opponents of the U.S. government’s political and covert activities in Africa, Evanzz explains that it was necessary to neutralize Malcolm X prior to the Bandung conference. Malcolm X was assassinated on February, 21, 1965, a week and a half before the conference was to take place. Soon after the assassination, several African government officials who had been working with Malcolm X were also assassinated and the Ben Bella government in Algeria was overthrown in June 1965.(Also he would have spoken at the First March Againstthe Vientam Demonstration, in Aprilof 1965.)

From his research into FBI files, Evanzz was able to prove that the FBI had a high-level informant in the NOI. Thus, the FBI was clearly in a position to carry out a campaign to fan the flames of discontent among rising leaders of the Nation and to disrupt the organization’s activities. FBI memos indicate that they maneuvered within the NOI to keep their informant in the best possible leadership position to carry out their covert activities. From the very day that Malcolm X split from the NOI, the FBI worked on a day-to-day basis with BOSSI and the CIA to infiltrate and disrupt his activities. William Sullivan (subsequently of Watergate fame) was the FBI agent in overall charge of both the infiltration of the NOI and Malcolm’s organization, the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU).

It is clear from the book that a coordinated effort was carried out between all government spy agencies to widen the split between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, to increase tensions between their organizations, and to undermine their support among African Americans. It is also safe to assume that agents, informants, and provocateurs from these different agencies were sent into the NOI and Malcolm X’s organizations and that these agents were also present at the Audubon Ballroom when Malcolm X was assassinated. One of police informants, who later informed on the Black Panthers, told me as I was going to take my normal front row seat that “you are not going to sit there today,” and he had me sit in the front row on the left side of the Ballroom. (The assassins sat in the area where I normally sat to hear Malcolm X speak.) When I look over in that direction to see who was sitting in my usual seating area, that was when I saw the same man that I later saw at the Harlem police station, when I was questioned by the police.

Some of Evanzz’s research was based on books about the NOI by Louis Lomax. Evanzz found in the FBI files a script for a movie on the assassination of Malcolm X, which Lomax was working on at the time of his death. (He died in a car accident caused by brake failure.) Evanzz provides circumstantial evidence that John Ali, a former friend of Malcolm X who became a national secretary of the NOI, was more than likely an FBI agent/informer and hence the Judas Factor. In fact, Evanzz provides quotes from Malcolm X to Lomax indicating that Malcolm X blamed John Ali for his expulsion from the Nation.

Investigative journalist Karl Evanzz, provides the first in-depth analysis of the role the Intelligence Community played (through its counter-intelligence arm CINTELPRO) in instigating the death of Malcolm X. Based on fifteen years of research, hundreds of interviews, the examination of 300,000 pages of declassified FBI and CIA documents, The Judas Factor, uncovers evidence of a conspiracy to silence Malcolm X and the entire black nationalist movement.

Louis E. Lomax, an African American journalist, who practically solved the riddle of the assassination, twenty five years ago, believed that Malcolm X was betrayed by a former friend [John Ali] who reportedly had ties to the intelligence community. In 1968, Lomax called the suspect “Judas.”  “This, then, is the story of “THE JUDAS FACTOR”, The PLot to Kill Malcolm X” by Karl Evanzz.

Judas Factor Timeline:

• [1928]Marcus Garvey began circulating a “Petition” that accused the United States and the nations of Europe of violating the Human Rights of Black Americans and other African peoples. Each regional leader of the UNIA was charged with getting signatures supporting Garvey’s Petition, which he planned to submit to the League of Nations. In detroit, responsibility for getting signatures fell upon Earl Little, president of a Detroit-area branch of the UNIA. [1931][September 17] Marcus Garvey set sail for London to formally file his Petition with the League of Nations.
• [1953] [Mid-January] Hoover received word from the FBI’s field office in Chicago that Malcolm X, was responsible for the rapid growth of the NOI. Something had to be done to stop him, Chicago suggested.
• [1954] [June 8th] New Temples continued to sprout wherever Malcolm traveled by mid-1954. The FBI placed him on its “COMSAB” and “DETCOM” list. “COMSAB” for “Communist Sabotage,” was a list of every American considered a treat to national security in the event of a war. “DETCOM” for “Detention of Communists,” a list of every American whose arrest was to be given high priority in the event of a war or national emergency.     Although the FBI had installed microphones in most of the Messenger’s older Temples, the NOI was growing too fast for its surveillance methods to keep up, so the FBI decided it was time to develop a high-level informant within the NOI.      It wanted someone who was close to the Messenger. The FBI wanted someone to be its “Judas Factor.”
• [1958].John Ali replaced, Ernest T. 2X McGhee, as National Secretary of the NOI in Chicago Headquarters in 1958. At the Chicago headquarters, next in power to Messenger Muhammad was John Ali, the national secretary of the NOI, and Supreme Captain of the FOI Raymond Sharrieff. John Ali, had been secretary of Temple Seven and gone to Chicago on Malcolm’s recommendation.     Overseeing all the financial interest of the NOI, with a staff of accountants, bookkeepers, assistants, secretaries, typist, and clerks, he received and disbursed all the moneys that came into Chicago from NOI businesses and investments as well as dues, fees, and donations from the membership in all Temples.      He ran the NOI bank. Official NOI letters and communications between Chicago and other Temples went through Ali’s office.    John Ali was in a highly sensitive and influential position.     Some followers of the Messenger believed that policies, Ali, had enacted since moving to Chicago to assume responsibilities as chief financial officer, were damaging the NOI. The whole nature of the NOI changed since 1958, when Ali replaced, Ernest T. 2X McGhee, as National Secretary. Ali’s financial directives were destroying the NOI. Ali’s handling of the NOI’s purse strings led to his dismissal from the position in 1970, to be reinstated two years
• [1960] In a National Security Council meeting following the revocation of the Detwiler contract, Eisenhower concluded Lumumba could not be trusted and, American control of the Congo Central Bank could evaporate as the Detwiler contract, and it would be in America’s best interest to remove Lumumba from power, “we will have to do whatever is necessary to get rid of him,” so an assassination plot against Lumumba was authorized.
• [July] Malcolm telephoned Messenger Muhammad to advise him that he wanted to invite Lumumba to a special gathering of African, Arab, and Asian leaders. The Messenger approved.     After receiving a teletype about Malcolm’s conversation with Elijah regarding Lumumba’s visit, FBI director Hoover, had forwarded a summarized copy of the “telephone transcript” to the State Department and the CIA.     CIA’s surveillance of the NOI lay dormant until it was notified by the FBI that Malcolm was making contacts with Castro’s and Lumumba’s representatives in N.Y.
• [September 21] The FBI visited Malcolm at the Harlem Temple to discuss what he and Castro talked about, but as usual, they learned nothing.     A CIA agent noted, while no action was necessary as a consequence of Malcolm’s meeting with Castro, “it is felt the above information indicating a direct connection between the NOI and Castro is of particular interest.”
• [1963]. The national secretary, John Ali, was attending the rally that day, and he reported back to Chicago immediately. Three days later on December 4th, Malcolm was suspended by Mr. Muhammad for ninety days.
• [1964].    [March 20 1964] William C. Sullivan, who was in charge of the high-level FBI informant, received a memo from the Settle field office, advising him that the following passage appeared in Lomax’s book:    “…the finances and other administrative chores of the movement are carried out in Chicago…This decision by Muhammad was made possible because John X [Ali], a former FBI agent and perhaps the best administrative mind in the movement, was shifted from New York to Chicago.”     In a second memo to Sullivan, a FBI official wrote:    It is felt that the Seattle Office should be advised concerning the true status of [John X Ali] Simmons and his alleged connection with the bureau…contact Lomax to advise him concerning the inaccurate statement contained in this book regarding Simmons…”     The memo wanted Lomax apprized of Ali’s “true status” with the FBI, clearly conveying that there was indeed a relationship. The Memo didn’t refer to the allegation as a lie or fabrication, or any other word indicating that it was totally untrue. The memo only stated that the allegation that he was a FBI agent was “inaccurate” or “incorrect,” suggesting, that it was at least partially accurate or partially correct. Was the writer trying to suggest that Ali’s status with the FBI was that of an informant instead of a full-fledged agent
• [March 24] A memo from Hoover to the New York and Settle FBI field offices is instructive on this issue:     New York should contact Lomax (unless files of that office indicate such contact should not be made) for the purpose of pointing out to him that the statement contained in his book is inaccurate.     According to Louis E. Lomax, his sources told him that Ali worked for the FBI before joining the NOI. Lomax shared a close friendship with the publisher of the “New Crusader,” Balm Leavell, one of the first individuals to discover that, high-level officials, in the NOI were FBI agents or informants.     Leavell called Muhammad at his residence in Phoenix and advised him that he had information from reliable sources that at least five ministers or assistant ministers were “working for the government” and “plotting to get” him.     Dorothy Leavell, his widow, suggests that the source of his information came directly from Jimmy Hoffa or someone working for him. “Balm and Hoffa were very close friends,” she noted. Hoffa had numerous sources in the FBI, who were also on, the Mafia’s payroll, who might have tipped him off as a favor to Leavell, who was under constant FBI harassment for publishing a column written by The Honorable Elijah Muhammad.      Lomax thought nothing of the allegations about, Ali’s, FBI background since it really wasn’t that unusual.      A number of policemen had infiltrated the NOI, only to reveal their roles, following their conversion. In that context, Ali’s past seemed of little moment.     The existence of an informant at Ali’s level would explain how the FBI obtained a list giving the location of every NOI Temple in the country, including the names of every official at each Temple. The list, came from the Philadelphia Temple, of which Ali was a member at the time.
• [May] Benjamin X Thomas, a lower-level official in the Newark Temple, a secretary or assistant secretary, began recruiting others into a plot to assassinate Malcolm. The first recruit into the cabal was Leon X Davis.      They formed the core of the group into which they recruited Talmadge Hayer. Sometime later, Hayer, Thomas and Davis got together with William X, and Wilbur Kinley. The five continued to meet and discuss, throughout the summer and fall of 1964.
• [July 2] FBI headquarters sent a memo to field offices in New York, Omaha, Philadelphia, and Chicago advising them that the Philadelphia office was requested to determine whether, John Ali, had left Philadelphia and arrived in Chicago. John Ali arrived in Chicago, where Malcolm was scheduled to appear on “Hotline,” a Chicago radio program hosted by Wesley South, on station WVON, on July 2nd.
• [1965][January 12] Several high-ranking officials from the Chicago headquarters of the NOI, including Elijah Muhammad Jr., John Ali, and Raymond Sharrieff, addressed a meeting of FOI at the Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm frequently held his own meetings.     Elijah Muhammad Jr., did not mince his words as he addressed over five hundred top NOI security officers from around the nation, “cut the n!&&#^’s tongue out and put it in an envelope and send it to me, and I’ll stamp it approved and give it to the Messenger.”
• [1965] [January 24] Jack Anderson, nationally syndicated columnist, broadcasting on WINS radio, revealed why the CIA was interested in Malcolm and the and Intelligence Community might have been motivated to see him dead before the end of February. Anderson stated:     Malcolm has been secretly contacting African governments to strengthen ties between African and American Negroes. He is expected to be a star attraction at the coming Afro-Asian conference in Algiers where he will join in propaganda attacks on his own country for its racial discrimination. Anderson revealed a secret Malcolm hadn’t shared with anyone. Two weeks before Anderson’s broadcast, Malcolm accepted an invitation from Ben Bella to attend the conference.
• [January 25] Malcolm told two of his closest aides that he was going to Los Angeles in a few days to check on the welfare of Rosary and Williams, the two Secretaries on whose behalf Attorney Gladys Root had filed paternity suits.
• [January 28] At two o’clock, Hakim Jamal, Malcolm’s cousin and close friend, and Edward Bradley arrived at the L.A. Airport to wait for Malcolm. While waiting they spotted a well dressed black man, sitting in the lounge, whom Jamal thought looked familiar, but he couldn’t quite place the face. Suddenly, Jamal realized he did know the man, it was John Ali, national secretary of the NOI, the Messenger’s top aide.     John Ali’s appearance at the terminal was ominous, since only seven people, Betty, two aides, Bradley, Jamal and the two secretaries, were supposed to know he was coming.    How, John Ali, found out was anyone’s guess. Since FBI agents, in response to a June 24th recommendation from Hoover, were monitoring Malcolm’s telephone calls, it is reasonable to suspect they might have notified him, or he found out from the FBI’s high-level informant, who infiltrated Muhammad’s inner circle, assuming they were not one and the same.
• [February 19] According to Hayer, John Ali arrived in New York City and checked into the Americana Hotel.     [February 20] John Ali was seen in the evening, in the Americana hotel’s restaurant with a young black man named Talmadge Hayer, a believer from the Paterson, New Jersey Temple, who had been recruited as an assassin in May, 1964.
• [February 20] Hayer later went to the Audubon with, four co-conspirators to rehearse the assassination of Malcolm, and spent several hours simulating an event scheduled for the next afternoon
• [February 21st] Malcolm, or somebody speaking in his name, had directed that nobody be searched coming into the meeting. Malcolm had begun worrying that talk of death and the martial aura of policemen and armed guards and body searches were frightening people away from his meetings. But the result was to lay him wide open to men who had been hunting him. It was almost as if he were delivering himself to his assassins.
• [March] The “New York Times”, under the headline “World Court Opens Africa Case Monday,” it reported in part: The International Court of Justice will open oral proceedings Monday in a case linking the segregation struggle of the American Negro and the fate of 430,000 African Bantus and bushmen….This hearing was exactly the thing the Johnson administration and the Intelligence Community were determined to prevent. Had Malcolm lived until March 12th, the story would have made front-page headlines instead of a small story buried inside the newspaper, and the embarrassment to America would have created a scandal instead of a historical footnote.  Malcolm’s presence at the World Court hearings on a petition he had helped to reshape might have led to the United States and South Africa being placed on equal footing. This seems to have been the Intelligence Community’s MOTIVATION in seeking his silence.

In the 1970s, the public learned about COINTELPRO and other secret FBI programs directed towards infiltrating and disrupting civil rights organizations during the 1950s and 1960s. J Edgar Hoover, who led the government’s COINTELPRO said… “there must be a goal of preventing a coalition of militant black nationalist groups, prevent the rise of a black messiah that can unify and electrify the black nationalist movement, along with preventing militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability, by discrediting them to the community”. John Ali, national secretary of the Nation of Islam, was identified as an FBI undercover agent. Malcolm X had confided in a reporter that Ali had exacerbated tensions between him and Elijah Muhammad. He considered Ali his “archenemy” within the Nation of Islam leadership. On February 20, 1965, the night before the assassination, Ali met with Talmadge Hayer, one of the men convicted of killing Malcolm X. — Gene Roberts: The Undercover NYPD Agent Who Betrayed Malcolm X —R.S. 2010 Update)

Part II

The Day the Music Died: Malcolm X’s Assassination, Feb. 21, 1965 by Roland Sheppard (First Published by the San Francisco Bayview 2011)

In the afternoon of Feb. 21, 1965, I went to the Audubon Ballroom to hear Malcolm X speak. I also went to sell the newspaper, The Militant, a radical newspaper that printed the truth about Malcolm X, published his speeches and publicly defended him.

When I got to the ballroom, things were radically different – there were no cops. Normally, Malcolm’s meetings in Harlem were crawling with cops. As I was selling papers, Malcolm X approached the Audubon Ballroom. I offered to sell him the latest issue, but he told me, “Not today, Roland. I am alone and in a hurry.”

(2/22/21 Update: I always wondered Why Malcolm X had no guards with him when he was approaching the Audubon Ballroom, Now I know!  “Without any training, Wood’s job was to infiltrate civil rights organizations and encourage leaders and members to commit felonious acts. He was also tasked with ensuring that Malcolm X’s security detail was arrested days prior to the assassination, guaranteeing Malcolm X didn’t have door security while at the Audubon Ballroom, where he was killed on Feb. 21, 1965.” — US: Ex-Policeman Implicates NYPD, FBI in Malcolm X Murder)

A while later as I entered the meeting room, again I did not see any cops. I went in to sit down where I normally sat along with the rest of the press in the front and the left side of the room. On the way to my seat, Gene Roberts, who later surfaced as a police agent member of the Black Panther Party, told me that I could not sit at my regular place but that on that day I had to sit in the front row on the right side of the hall, facing the stage.

As I sat down, I glanced over to where I normally sat and saw a large Black man with a navy blue-gray trench coat. When the meeting started, all was quiet as the crowd listened to Benjamin X introducing Malcolm X.

When Malcolm approached the podium, he gave the normal Muslim greeting for peace. At that point a disturbance occurred in the room. Two men were standing about halfway back in the room and to the right of Malcolm on stage. One was shouting, “Get your hand out of my pocket!”

Malcolm was trying to calm things down, when the men — one later identified as Talmadge Hayer — started running down the right aisle shouting and firing a pistol at Malcolm and ran out the exit doors by the stage, to the right of Malcolm X

Suddenly I heard gunshots fired from all over the place, and I instinctively hit the floor. When I looked up, I saw Malcolm X standing up and glaring down at one of his assassins. At that point, from the corner of my eye, nearby to my left, I saw a flash from a gun as I watched Malcolm X fall down and back about 10 feet.

In that instant, as Malcolm died before my eyes, I suddenly realized how big he was and I also realized that he was a giant in stature and in the world. This vision of Malcolm X, being assassinated, has haunted me ‘til this day.

The fatal blast, which I later found out to be from a shotgun, came from the area where I had seen the large Black man with a navy blue-gray trench coat! When I left the hall, Malcolm’s bodyguards told me that they had caught two of the assassins, one who was shot – Talmadge Hayer – and one whom the police took away.

A few weeks later, when I was questioned in the Harlem police station, I was shown a series of photos of people whom I recognized as members of the Nation of Islam or Malcolm’s organization. I also saw a picture of the large Black man with a navy blue-gray trench coat that I had seen at the Audubon Ballroom.

I was thinking of how to respond to the cops and how to say that I did not recognize the photos of Malcolm’s friends and supporters and the members of the Nation of Islam. I then told the cops that I had to go to the restroom.

When I got to the men’s room door, I saw the same large Black man coming out of the men’s room that I had seen in the Audubon Ballroom and in the photos that had just been shown to me. He walked by me, past the desks of the secretarial pool, and went to his office inside the police station!

At that point I knew that he and the government either killed Malcolm X or were part of the assassination plot. I became very nervous thinking about what I was going to say to the cops when I got back and how I was going to get out of the station alive.

I then came up with, “I cannot recognize anyone, for all Black people look the same.” The cops nodded in agreement and we were allowed to leave the police station.

Malcolm X was one of my heroes. He was the most honest mass leader that I have ever known or seen. He was a great orator and his speeches seemed like a conversation between himself and the audience.

His speeches were like music to my ears and have inspired me for the rest of my life in the fight for social justice. He was so human in his orations. I still remember him when he made the “Harlem Hate Gang Scare” speech at the Militant Labor Forum on May 29, 1964, and other speeches in which he chuckled a “heh heh” when he was about to make a special comment.

At that forum, he said: “It’s impossible for a chicken to produce a duck egg … The system of this country cannot produce freedom for an Afro-American. It is impossible for this system, this economic system, this political system, this social system, this system period. It is impossible for it, as it now stands, to produce freedom right now for the Black man in this country — it is impossible. And if ever a chicken did produce a duck egg (heh heh), I’m certain you would say it was a revolutionary chicken (heh heh).”

Both he and Martin Luther King had come to similar positions about capitalism and the Vietnam War at the time of their death. That is why this government assassinated them. No one has followed in their footsteps.

From the point of view of this government, the world leader in political assassinations, the two assassinations worked. To this day, no mass leader has had the courage to pick up where they left off. They were able to silence the art, science and truth of these two great orators. To me, Feb. 21 is “the day the music died.” It was the saddest day of my life.

For an in depth explanation of the government’s assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, read my article, “The Assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.”

Update: The assassin with the shotgun

On April 30, 2010, I received an email from John Judge, director of the Coalition on Political Assassinations, referring to an April 22, 2010, article titled For the First Time in History, The Face of William Bradley, Shotgun Assassin of Malcolm X-El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, in a Public Safety Campaign Commercial for Mayor Cory Booker! by Abdur-Rahman Muhammad.

In that article is the picture shown here of William Bradley, who is the man that I had seen in the Audubon Ballroom and in the photos that the Harlem police showed me while I was being interrogated. Bradley was the man I saw coming out of the men’s room, walking by me, past the desks of the secretarial pool, and into his office inside the police station, as I was going to the men’s room!

As I wrote in my original 2009 essay: “At that point I knew that he and the government either killed Malcolm X or were part of the assassination plot.” And now I know his name. William Bradley is the man that Talmadge Hayer identified as the one who shot the shotgun. Zak Kondo also identified William Bradley as the assassin with the shotgun.

In his article, Abdur-Rahman Muhammad states: “Although his name has been in the public domain now for well over three decades, ever since 1977 when Hayer filed his affidavit with famed lawyer William Kuntsler naming his accomplishes, nevertheless a face has never been attached to the name. Historian and member of the committee researching this story Zak Kondo published a marvelous book two decades ago on the assassination of Malcolm X, wherein he explored quite a bit of biographical material on the five assassins. Spike Lee even named the five killers in the credits of his movie. But in all of these years none of them, including ‘Willie’ Bradley, has ever filed a libel suit. And for good reason – they would lose.”

This video, “MALCOLM X The Assassination of Malcolm X,” shows the police catching a second man after Malcolm’s assassination.
MALCOLM X The Assassination of Malcolm X
Uploaded by polobylimsa. – Watch the latest news videos.

A new improved video, “The Hunt for William Bradley,” by Karl Evanzz in the association of Shabazz Productions, identifies the man rescued from the crowd by the police as William Bradley. The video is contained in a collection of clips titled “Naked Lies: The Continuous War Against Malcolm X.” Shabazz Productions had previously produced: Omar Shabazz “Inside Job: Betrayal of the Black Messiah.”

2024 Update:

2016 Video of me speaking, at Howard University, meeting at I on at the 1:24:00 mark) watch: The “Black Messiah” The Life and Assassination Of Malcolm X Who Killed Him And Why?

The film, Fusion TV’s: A First Look: Who Killed Malcolm X? — A More Subtle Assassination of Malcolm X  and The Man He Had Become When He Was Assassinated.,  shows FBI papers that William Bradely was the shotguns assassin. The fact that he was never arrested confirms what I suspected — that William Bradely was an agent of the government!

Roland Sheppard is a writer and activist and former BA of the Painters Union in San Francisco. Email him at [email protected]  and visit his website, https://rolandsheppard.com/

Part II

 

Why the U.S. Government Assassinated Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. By Roland Sheppard (2024 Updated)      Preface

Malcolm X was assassinated fifty years ago, on February 21, 1965. Three years later, Martin Luther King, Jr. was also assassinated (April 4, 1968). These murders marked an escalation in the U.S. Government’s war against the Civil Rights Movement.      In the 1960s, Roland Sheppard regularly attended Malcolm XIS meetings in Harlem. Between 1964 and 1965, he was in charge of security when Malcolm X spoke at the Militant Labor Forum in New York City. He is one of the few remaining people who personally witnessed the assassination of Malcolm X in the Audubon Ballroom.    A life-long socialist, Sheppard was active in the Civil Rights Movement, the movement against the U.S. war in Vietnam, the Black Liberation Movement, the struggle for women’s liberation, for union rights, for workers democracy, and for socialism. He worked for 31 years as a union painter until his 1994 election as an official for Painters Local 4 in San Francisco.   Sheppard is often invited to speak about his experiences. One time, when he was addressing an inner-city history class, he was astonished to find that the class textbook contained only two pages on the Civil Rights Movement.      The students had a lot of questions after Sheppard’s presentation, and many stayed after school to continue the discussion. They were hungry for knowledge about their history. Sheppard wrote this pamphlet to feed that hunger and to inspire the next generation of Freedom Fighters. — Susan Rosenthal for ReMarx Publishing

It has been half a century since Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., were assassinated. In the case of Malcolm X, several members of the Nation of Islam were convicted. In the case of Martin Luther King, Jr., one assassin, James Earl Ray, was convicted. Despite these convictions and ongoing efforts by government and police agencies, and various writers and pundits to put the assassinations to rest, many questions remain unanswered.

In the 1970s, the public was made aware of the U.S. Government’s secret COINTELPRO program to employ informers, agents, and provocateurs to disrupt the Civil Rights Movement, the antiVietnam-War Movement, and radical and socialist organizations. One of the goals of this program was to ‘neutralize’ Black leaders like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Elijah Muhammad in order to prevent the emergence, to use the government’s term, of a Black Messiah who would unite and lead Black Americans in their struggle for equality and freedom. In other words, the United States Government had the same motive to assassinate Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.

 On December 8, 1999, almost 32 years after King’s murder, a Memphis court extended the responsibility for the assassination beyond James Earl Ray to the United States Government. In “The Martin Luther King Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis,” Jim Douglass writes,

 “To say that U.S. government agencies killed Martin Luther King on the verge of the Poor People’s Campaign is a way into the deeper truth that the economic powers that be (which dictate the policies of those agencies) killed him. In the Memphis prelude to the Washington campaign, King posed a threat to those powers of a nonviolent revolutionary force. Just how determined they were to stop him before he reached Washington was revealed in the trial by the size and complexity of the plot to kill him.”

 Murdering Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. was not sufficient for the U.S. Government. It was also necessary to distort what they stood for. Lenin describes this process in State and Revolution:

 “During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, 50 to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the consolation of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.”

 It is important to tell the truth about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., to keep their ideas alive, and to prevent them from being turned into harmless icons. That is why I wrote this pamphlet, based on upon what I have learned and on my own personal experience. —  Roland Sheppard

This pamphlet has its origin in a paper that was first published as the February, 2001 Monthly Feature for the Holt Labor Library and later included in the City College of New York’s (CCNY) Black Studies Program for The Third Symposium of Institution Building in Harlem: The Malcolm X Legacy: A Global Perspective (May 20,2005).

All of Roland Sheppard’s essays are posted on his website. Roland Sheppard’s Blog  (https://rolandsh  eppard.com/?page_id=5_

 The Assassination of Malcolm X

 I personally witnessed Malcolm X’s assassination.

 The afternoon of February 21, 1965, I went to the Audubon Ballroom to hear Malcolm X speak. When I arrived, I was surprised, to see no cops. Malcolm X’s meetings in Harlem were usually crawling with cops.

 I began to sell my socialist newspaper, The Militant, and as Malcolm X approached the Ballroom, I offered him the latest issue. He replied, “Not today, Roland. I am alone and in a hurry.”

 When I entered the hall, I did not see any cops. I normally sat in the front-left side of the hall, along with the rest of the press, but that day, Gene Roberts told me that I had to sit in the front-right side of the hall. Roberts was later exposed as a police-agent member of the Black Panther Party.

 I glanced over to where I normally sat, and I saw a large Black man in a navy blue-gray trench coat. Then the meeting started. All was quiet as the crowd listened to Benjamin X introduce Malcolm X.

 When Malcolm X approached the podium, he gave the normal Muslim greeting for peace. At that point, there was a disturbance in the back of the room to the right of the stage. I saw two men, and one was shouting, “Get your hand out of my pocket!”

 As Malcolm X tried to calm things down, the two men – one later identified as Talmadge Hayer – started running down the aisle shouting and firing a pistol at Malcolm X. Then they ran out the exit doors by the stage, to the right of Malcolm X.

 Then I heard gunshots coming from everywhere, and I instinctively hit the floor. When I looked up, I saw Malcolm X standing on the stage and glaring down at one of his assassins. From the corner of  my eye, I saw a bright flash, and I watched Malcolm X fall back about 10 feet.

 In that instant, Malcolm X died before my eyes. This vision of Malcolm X, being assassinated, has haunted me ever since. It was the saddest day of my life.

 As I left the hall, Malcolm’s bodyguards told me that they had caught two of the assassins, one who was shot – Talmadge Hayer – and one whom the police took away.

 A few weeks later, when I was questioned in the Harlem police station, I was shown photographs of people whom I recognized as members of the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X’s organization. I was also shown a photograph of the large Black man in the navy blue-gray trench coat.

 I did not know how to tell the cops that I did not recognize the photos of Malcolm’s friends and supporters. To buy some time, I told them that I had to go to the rest room.

 As I approached the men’s room, I saw the same large Black man coming out of the men’s room that I had seen in the Audubon Ballroom and in the photos that the cops had shown me, the same man who had sat in the area from where the shotgun blast had originated. He walked past me, past the desks of the secretarial pool, and entered what looked like his office inside the police station! (Years later, I learned that this man was William Bradley and that he had been the assassin with the shotgun.)

 That was when I realized that the police and other government agencies had killed Malcolm X or were part of the assassination plot. I became very nervous thinking about what I was going to say to the cops when I got back and how I was going to get out of the police station alive.

 So I said, “I cannot recognize anyone. All Black people look the  same.” The cops nodded in agreement, and I was allowed to leave.

 After the assassination, I remember the mass media spewing their class hatred of Malcolm X, gloating and cheering his assassination. I also remember the outpouring of grief from tens of thousands in Harlem, who stood in line for days to view his casket. Ossie Davis countered the hyenas of the press with his stirring eulogy to Malcolm X,  “what we place in the ground is no more now a man but a seed which, after the winter of our discontent, will come forth again to meet us. And we will know him then for what he was and is – a Prince. Our own Black shining Prince who didn’t hesitate to die, because he loved us so.”

 It was not enough to assassinate Malcolm X. His influence was so powerful that his enemies also had to assassinate him politically.

 In the 1990s, several books were published with the aim of camouflaging Malcolm X’s political evolution. Two examples are Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America, (1995), by Bruce Perry and Malcolm X: The Assassination (1995), by Michael Friedly.

 Perry and Friedly support the U.S. Government’s position that the Nation of Islam was solely responsible for the assassination and that the Government was not involved. To support their case, both authors deny Malcolm X’s growing radicalization and the political threat he represented which are documented in George Breitman’s books: The Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary (1970) and The Assassination of Malcolm X (1991).

The Last Year of Malcolm X covers material that is missing from Malcolm X’s autobiography, which was co-authored with Alex Haley. Haley disagreed with Malcolm X’s developing radicalism and, as Breitman shows, inserted misconceptions into the book’s epilogue. Breitman provides a more accurate picture, using the evidence of Malcolm X’s later speeches and statements and his collaboration with the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.)

 Despite the many media attacks and distortions, Malcolm X continues to live in our hearts – a martyred leader of his people and an uncompromising advocate of human rights and freedom.

 The Government’s Motive

 Many liberals and conservative Black Nationalists wrongly paint Malcolm X as a hater of White people. They refuse to acknowledge that he had become a political threat to the capitalist establishment. Denying this threat supports the lie that the U.S. Government played no part in his assassination. In fact, Malcolm X was becoming a huge threat.

 During his last year, Malcolm X came to the conclusion that as long as racism was profitable, African Americans would never achieve social equality. On March 29, 1964, he stated,  “The system of this country cannot produce freedom for an Afro-American. It is impossible for this system, this economic system, this political system, this social system, this system period. It is impossible for it, as it now stands, to produce freedom right now for the Black man in this country.”

 Malcolm X was the first mass leader in the United States to oppose the U.S. war against Vietnam and to connect the oppression of African Americans with the struggles of oppressed peoples throughout the world. Had he lived, Malcolm X would likely have spoken at the first mass demonstration against the Vietnam War in 1965. His powerful oratory, combined with his standing among inner-city Blacks, would have pushed the Anti-War Movement in a more radical direction.

 Malcolm X was a giant of a man. I personally heard him speak at all but two of his meetings in Harlem, at the Audubon Ballroom and elsewhere. He was the most honest mass leader that I have ever known. He was a great orator, and his speeches seemed like a conversation between himself and the audience. His power lay in his ability to make complex ideas clear and understandable. He was not a demagogue. He appealed to the honor and courage of his audience. A good example was his address to the 1962 rally in New York City to support striking Hospital Workers Local 1199. .”The hospital strikers have demonstrated that you don’t get a job done unless you show the Man you’re not afraid to go to jail. If you’re not willing to pay that price, then you don’t deserve the rewards or benefits that go along with it.”

His was the most moving speech at the rally and when he finished, all the workers – Black, White, and Puerto Rican – cheered wildly. This was the typical response to Malcolm X, whether he spoke in Harlem or at Oxford University in England.

At the Oxford Union Debate (December 3, 1964) Malcolm X ended his speech by quoting Shakespeare:

“I remember one thing [Shakespeare] wrote that kind of moved me. [Hamlet] was in doubt about something. Whether it was nobler in the mind of man to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take up arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them. And I go for that. If you take up arms, you’ll end it, but if you sit around and wait for the one who’s in power to make up his mind that he should end it, you’ll be waiting a long time. And in my opinion, the young generation of Whites, Blacks, Browns … you’re living at a time of extremism, a time of  revolution, a time when there’s got to be a change. People in power have misused it, and now there has to be a change, and a better world has to be built, and the only way it’s going to be built is with extreme methods. And I, for one, will join in with anyone, I don’t care what color you are, as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth. Thank you.”

Malcolm X approached the struggle of African Americans as a fight for full human rights, not just legal rights. He supported anticolonial revolutions in Africa, Vietnam, and Cuba – in direct opposition to the policies of the United States government. In December 1964, Malcolm X met with Che Guevara and the Cuban delegation to the United Nations with the aim of mutual support. Malcolm X was becoming a real threat to U.S. capitalism. That is why the United States Government assassinated him.

Just before his assassination, Malcolm X knew that he had become a target. He told me and Clifton DeBerry, the presidential candidate of the Socialist Workers Party, that he hoped to live long enough to build a viable organization based on his current ideas, so that he would be more dangerous to the system dead than alive.

 The Cover-Up

The initial reports of the assassination stated that two people had been caught by the crowd. Later on, the press and the police reported that the crowd had caught only one person, Talmadge Hayer, who was shot in the leg and taken by police to the hospital across the street. No explanation has ever been given for that change in the story.

 On “The Smoking Gun” web site, a 1965 police affidavit of an eyewitness statement confirms that the crowd had caught two people. And in a news video released immediately after the assassination, the New York Police Department’s Chef Inspector Taylor confirmed that two suspects had been caught.

 Talmadge Hayer’s version of events corresponds with my own impressions at the scene. Hayer states that when he was shot and caught by the crowd he could see one of his accomplices running ahead of him. When I got outside the Ballroom, Malcolm X’s guards told me that two people had been caught by the crowd at the same time and that one was taken to the hospital by the police and the other taken into police custody. Hayer was taken to the hospital and then booked.

 What happened to the second man? Why wasn’t he brought to trial? I believe that the second man, the one running ahead of Hayer, was William Bradley, a police or government agent. And he was not the only one present.

 The first police report stated that five men were involved in the assassination; yet only three were accused and later convicted.

 Perry’s book supports the official police version of the assassination and ignores Hayer’s affidavit that the two other men convicted, Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson (both members of the Nation of Islam), were not at the meeting where Malcolm X was killed.

 When I was called before the Grand Jury on the assassination, Malcolm’s primary assistant, James Shabazz, confirmed that Butler and Johnson were well known and would not have been allowed to enter the Ballroom.

 Friedly’s book offers a more sophisticated cover-up. The book puts the blame solely on the Nation of Islam while also criticizing the police investigation.

Both Friedly and Hayer state that five members of the Nation of Islam carried out the assassination, three people doing the shooting up front, and two people creating a diversion by setting off a smoke bomb at the back of the room.

 Hayer stated that the five assassins cased one of Malcolm X’s meetings at the Audubon Ballroom in the winter of 1964-65 and concluded that they would have a good chance of escape. This is unbelievable. There were normally 30 to 50 uniformed cops at Malcolm X’s meetings, stationed at all the exits inside and outside the building. Under these conditions, escape would not have been easy.

At the meeting where Malcolm X was assassinated, the police were nowhere to be found, despite being warned that an assassination attempt was imminent, To succeed, the assassins would have had to know that the cops would be absent.

Authors Perry and Friedly, and the police, all claim that Malcolm X requested no police protection that day. This is a lie. Malcolm X’s wife, Betty Shabazz, denies that any such request was made.

Both Perry and Friedly discount any possible involvement by FBI operatives, the New York City police, or the CIA. However, when Martin Luther King, Jr.’s lawyer was interviewed in the 1992 CBS documentary, The Real Malcolm X, An Intimate Portrait of the Man, he stated:

“Knowing what I now know of the various investigative agencies of the U.S. Government with respect to Martin King, for example, and knowing what they did to political parties, like the Black Panther Party, I have no doubt that the assassination of Malcolm X was calculated, planned by agencies at the highest level of this government. I don’t have any question, I don’t have any doubt in my mind that is what happened … “

 COINTELPRO

Since its formation in 1908, the FBI has worked to sabotage domestic political organizations: by forging documents to discredit individuals and groups; by planting false reports in the media; and through harassment, violence, wrongful imprisonment, and assassination. The FBI’s stated motive for these tactics is  “protecting national security, preventing violence, and maintaining the existing social and political order,

The FBI’s secret Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) was launched in August 1956 to “increase factionalism, cause disruption, and win defections” inside the Communist Party U.S.A.

 In 1957, when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was founded, the FBI targeted the group. After the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Martin Luther King, Jr. was identified as a major threat. According to William C. Sullivan, the FBI agent in charge of COINTELPRO,

“In the light of King’s powerful demagogic speech … We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security.”

 Soon after, the FBI was systematically bugging King’s home and his hotel rooms.

 During the urban Black rebellions in 1967, the FBI launched

 “COINTELPRO-BLACK HATE,” which focused on King and the SCLC as well as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and its leader Stokely Carmichael.

 BLACK HATE established the Ghetto Informant Program that instructed 23 FBI offices to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist hate-type organizations”. A particular target was the Poor People’s Campaign, a national effort organized by King and the SCLC to occupy Washington, D.C.

 In 1971, the existence of COINTELPRO was exposed when activists entered an FBI field office in Pennsylvania and stole secret files proving that the U.S. Government was conducting a massive spying campaign against dissident Americans.

 Eighty-five percent of COINTELPRO resources targeted the left: communist and socialist organizations; organizations and individuals associated with the Civil Rights Movement; Black Nationalist groups; the American Indian Movement; a broad range of “New Left” organizations; groups protesting the U.S. war against Vietnam; individual student demonstrators; the National Lawyers Guild; organizations and individuals associated with the women’s movement; dissident U.S. politicians, journalists, athletes, etc.

 On reviewing the FBI files, reporter Betty Medsger discovered that, “Every FBI agent was required to hire at least one informer to report to him regularly on the activities of black people. In the District, every agent was required to hire six informers for that purpose. On one campus in the Philadelphia area, Swarthmore College, every black student was under surveillance.”

 FBI informers reported on every meeting, every word, and every action of members of the Black Panther Party, SNCC and other groups. FBI agents used informers to create dissension among activists and succeeded in weakening and destroying many organizations. And they are still doing it.

 Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning remind us that nothing has changed except that in the 21st century, government agencies possess even more powerful tools to spy on and disrupt the lawful activities of dissidents.

 The Threat to U.S. Capitalism

  Malcolm X was considered such a threat that he was placed on the FBI’s COMSAB and DETCOM lists. COMSAB – Communist Sabotage, was a list of every American considered to be a treat to national security in the event of war. DETCOM – Detention of Communists was a list of every American whose arrest was to be given high priority in the event of a war or national emergency. They had good reason to fear Malcolm X.

 Ahmed Ben Bella, the leader of the Algerian Revolution, had invited Malcolm X along with Che Guevara and other leaders of independence movements to a conference in Bandung beginning March 3, 1965.

 Malcolm X had also convinced Ethiopia and Liberia to include human rights violations against African Americans in their petition on South African human rights violations to the International Court of Justice at The Hague. The petition was to be presented on March 12, 1965.

 Had Malcolm X lived to attend the conference and the petition hearing, the stories would have made front-page headlines around the world and discredited the United States Government. To prevent this, Malcolm X had to be silenced.

 Malcolm X was assassinated ten days before the Bandung conference began. Several African government officials who had been working with Malcolm X were also assassinated, and the Ben Bella government was overthrown a few months later (June, 1965).

 The FBI-CIA

 The FBI was concerned about Malcolm X’s growing influence in America, and the CIA was concerned about his efforts to link the struggle of African Americans with national liberation struggles in Africa and Latin America.

 After spending fifteen years researching more than 300,000 pages of declassified FBI and CIA documents, Washington Post staff writer Karl Evanzz summarized his findings in The Judas Factor (1992).

 Evanzz documents how the intelligence community, the CIA, the FBI, and the New York Police Bureau of Special Services and Investigation (BOSSI) used provocateurs and infiltrators to set the stage for the assassination of Malcolm X.

 “(A few days after Malcolm X’s press conference announcing his split from the Nation of Islam) William C. Sullivan (the FBI agent in charge of COINTELPRO) contacted the directors of BOSSI and asked them to recruit several African Americans to infiltrate Malcolm X’s new organization. [One of the directors], Anthony Ulasewicz … told Sullivan that he would have officers ready to infiltrate Malcolm X’s new organization within thirty days. While Sullivan was coordinating the domestic counter-intelligence program against Malcolm X with BOSSI, the CIA initiated a similar program to determine the extent of Malcolm X’s influence with Third World leaders.” (p.214)

 In the FBI files, Evanzz found a script for a movie on the assassination of Malcolm X that Louis Lomax was working on at the time of his death. In his introduction to the book, Evanzz writes,

 “I am convinced that Louis E. Lomax, an industrious African American journalist who befriended Malcolm X in the late 1950s, had practically solved the riddle of his assassination. Lomax, who died in a mysterious automobile accident while shooting a film in Los Angeles about the assassination, believed that Malcolm X was betrayed by a former friend who reportedly had ties to the intelligence community … In 1968, Lomax called the suspect ‘Judas.’ This, then, is the story of The Judas Factor.”

 The Judas Factor

 The Judas Factor refers to the FBI’s attempts to neutralize Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Elijah Muhammad from the inside.

 Evanzz was able to prove that the FBI had a high-level informant in the Nation of Islam, which enabled the agency to sow discontent among rising leaders of the Nation and to disrupt the organization’s activities.

 From the day that Malcolm X split from the Nation of Islam, the FBI worked on a daily basis with BOSSI and the CIA to infiltrate his new organization, the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), and disrupt its activities. William Sullivan (director of COINTELPRO) was in charge of the infiltration of the Nation of Islam and the OAAU.

Evanzz documents a coordinated effort among government spy agencies to widen the split between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam, to increase tensions between their two organizations, and to undermine their support among African Americans. I am convinced that some of the agents, informants, and provocateurs that infiltrated the Nation of Islam and the OAAU were present at the Audubon Ballroom when Malcolm X was assassinated.

 Evanzz provides circumstantial evidence that John Ali, a former friend of Malcolm X who became a national secretary of the Nation of Islam, was likely an FBI agent or informer – the Judas Factor.

 Evanzz provides a series of statements, from Malcolm X to Lomax, indicating that Malcolm X blamed John Ali for his expulsion from the Nation of Islam.

 In Cover-Up: Unravelling the Assassination of Malcolm X (1992), Baba Zak Kondo indicts John Ali as an FBI agent and informant.

 ” … As previously noted, Malcolm, who had a clear understanding of the internal workings of the NOI leadership, stated in early June 1964, that Ali was running the NOI to steal as much money as he could from its treasury.” (p.328)

 According to Frank Donner, author of The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of the American Political Intelligence System (1980), most FBI informants are motivated by money.

 “Victims, with good reason, typically charge that informants and defectors are motivated primarily by greed. The bureau knows and invariably weaves financial considerations into its snitch jacket scripts.” (p. 193)

 The Judas Factor shows that all the spy agencies in the United States were deeply involved, as infiltrators and agent provocateurs, to set the stage for Malcolm X’s assassination.

 In the 1992 CBS documentary, The Real Malcolm X, An Intimate Portrait of the Man, Dan Rather states,

 “We have now looked over 50,000 Freedom of Information Act files from the FBI and the CIA. … they do show, prior to Malcolm X’s death, that the CIA and the State Department were actively monitoring his travels abroad and telling foreign leaders to be wary of him. At the same time, FBI agents were trying to ’cause disruption and deepen the dispute between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad’ by,  among other things, forging Malcolm X’s signature and  sending inflammatory letters to Elijah Muhammad and his followers.”

 John Ali was in a perfect position to deliver forged letters to Elijah Muhammad. It should also be noted that John Ali met with Talmadge Hayer on February 20, 1965, the evening before the assassination.

See my essay, The Day The Music Died, for an update of the Malcolm X’s assassination and the identification ogf  the assassin with the shotgun!

 The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated to subvert the Poor People’s Campaign. King was building a mass movement against poverty, and those who profit from poverty were determined to stop him.

Since King’s assassination, the inconsistencies in the Government’s version of the crime have been well publicized. After COINTELPRO was exposed, the U.S. House of Representatives was pressured to launch an investigation into the Government’s role in the assassination. The Church committee released a report rubberstamping the official view that James Earl Ray was the lone assassin, and then it sealed the evidence for 50 years (until 2029). The only reason to keep these files secret is to protect the guilty.

In the 1999 legal claim filed by the King family, “Coretta Scott King, et al. VS. Loyd Jowers, et al.,” the only named defendant, Loyd Jowers (the former owner of a Memphis bar and grill) was not their main concern. The primary defendants were the anonymous coconspirators who stood in the shadows behind Jowers.

The Kings and William Pepper (James Earl Ray’s attorney) jointly charged U.S. intelligence agencies, particularly the FBI and Army intelligence, with organizing, subcontracting, and covering up the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Pepper accused these government agencies of serving as “the representatives, the foot soldiers, of the very economic interests that were going to suffer as a result of these times of change [being activated by King].”

After considering all the evidence, a Memphis jury ruled that someone other than James Earl Ray had been the shooter. The jury also concluded that Loyd Jowers, the City of Memphis, the State of Tennessee, and federal government agencies were all involved in the assassination. King’s widow, Coretta Scott King concluded,

“There is abundant evidence of a major high level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil court’s unanimous verdict has validated our belief … It is important to know that this was a SWIFT verdict, delivered after about an hour of jury deliberation. The jury was clearly convinced by the extensive evidence that was presented during the trial that, along with Mr. Jowers, the conspiracy of the Mafia, local, state, and federal government agencies, were deeply involved in the assassination of my husband.”

King’s son, Dexter King, added,   “After today, we don’t want questions like, ‘Do you believe James Earl Ray killed your father?’ I’ve been hearing that all my life. No, I don’t, and this is the end of it. This was the most incredible cover-up of the century, and now it has been exposed. Now we can finally move on with our lives.”

Since the trial, the King family and their attorney have lobbied ‘historians and elected officials to change the official record of the assassination, with little success.

While many questions remain about the assassination of Martin  Luther King, Jr., one thing is certain; the FBI was involved.

A few days before King arrived in Memphis, the FBI leaked information to the local press that he was going to be staying at a White hotel. This forced King to stay at the less secure Lorraine Motel.

 The Government’s Motive

Why would the U.S. Government want to assassinate the man who gave the famous “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963? The answer lies in the fact that King had developed his political perspective since then. He had begun to view the struggle for racial equality as an economic struggle and the capitalist system as the problem.

In one of his last speeches, titled the “The Other America,” delivered at Stanford University in April 1967, King addressed the problem of inequality. Instead of his dream, he talked about the nightmare of the economic condition of Blacks. He talked about: “work-starved men searching for jobs that did not exist.” He described the Black population as living on a “lonely island of poverty surrounded by an ocean of material prosperity” and living in a “triple ghetto of race, poverty, and human misery.” He explained that after World War II, the unemployment rate was equal for Blacks and Whites, but by 1967 Black unemployment was double the rate for White workers, and Black workers made half the wages of White workers.

King launched his campaign for equality in Chicago and elsewhere in the North because he understood that solving the problem of ‘Two Americas’ was more difficult than eliminating legal segregation. He pointed out that the Northern liberals, who had given moral and financial support to end Jim Crow laws in the South, would not support the effort to end economic segregation.

King attacked the concept that poor people should pick themselves up by their bootstraps. Pointing out that Blacks had come to America as slaves, he stated, “It is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man to pick himself up by his own bootstraps.” He added that Black People were “impoverished aliens in their own land.”

King opposed the war in Vietnam. He criticized the government for spending hundreds of millions of dollars for war and not for equality, and he pledged to mobilize people to fight for economic equality.

In his letter to rally support for the 1968 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, he wrote:

“It was obdurate government callousness to misery that first stoked the flames of rage and frustration. With unemployment a scourge in Negro ghettos, the government still tinkers with half-hearted measures, refuses still to become an employer of last resort. It asks the business community to solve the problems as though its past failures qualified it for success.”

At the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Convention in August 1967, he said,

The movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy … We’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice that produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. “Who owns the oil? Who owns the iron ore?” Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that’s two-thirds water?”

In, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1968) King describes the need for a “revitalized labor movement” to place “economic issues on the highest agenda.”

“The coalition of an energized section of labor, Negroes, unemployed, and welfare recipients may be the source of power that reshapes economic relationships and ushers in a breakthrough to a new level of social reform …

“There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid, or day laborer.

“There is nothing to prevent us from paying adequate wages to schoolteachers, social workers and other servants of the public to insure that we have the best available personnel in these positions which are charged with the responsibility of guiding our future generations.

“There is nothing except shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum – and livable – income for every American family.

“There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from remolding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a true brotherhood.”

At the time of their assassinations, both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. were moving into opposition against the capitalist system. They were beginning to see that the capitalist system!

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ‘Dream’ is not possible under the ‘Nightmare’ of capitalism. The system of capitalism is based on the exploitation of Labor, and racism is required to divide and weaken the working class. As Malcolm X said: “Racism is profitable. If it was not profitable, it would not exist.”

The capitalist class and its servants in government are a tiny elite who rule by dividing the much larger working class by race, religion, nationality, gender, etc. Unless we challenge those divisions, none of us can hope for a better life.

At Frogmore, S.C. on November 14, 1966, King echoed Malcolm X when he said,  “You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry …. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong … with capitalism …. There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”

The only lasting solution to the exploitation of workers and the oppression of African Americans is for the multi-racial working class to unite and take control of society. That would be socialism. In such a society, there would be no need for any group of people to be oppressed. In such a society, Black workers would become the masters of the country that their ancestors built with their needs racism because it is profitable. And that is why they were assassinated.

 The Struggle for Freedom Today

After Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated, the more conservative leaders of the Civil Rights Movement abandoned independent mass struggle in favor of trying to elect Democrats and other politicians who promise, “Vote for me; and I will set you free.” The Government supported such activities by distributing ‘War on Poverty’ money to Black organizations. What W.E. B. DuBois called the “talented tenth” got comfortable government jobs.

The decline in mass struggle combined with the co-optation of many Black leaders meant that the concerns of Black workers were abandoned.

Today, the strategy of seeking improvements through elections has proved to be bankrupt, as the pensions, wages, benefits, and the standard of living of all workers continue to be attacked. However, Black workers form a disproportionate share of the unemployed, the poor, and the imprisoned.

Social conditions have reverted to the pre-Civil Rights era for most Blacks. According to the Harvard Civil Rights Project, the nation’s schools have become re-segregated along Black, Latino, and economic lines. As the inner cities become gentrified, Black and poor people are being forced out of their homes. A disproportionate number of Black families lost their homes to foreclosure during the mortgage crisis.

Despite these discouraging losses, a new Civil Rights Movement will rise. The protests in support of the abandoned victims of Hurricane Katrina, the explosion of the immigrant rights movement, and the mass protests that consistently follow the police shooting an  unarmed Black men prove that as long as there is no justice, there will be no peace.

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ‘Dream’ is not possible under the ‘Nightmare’ of capitalism. The system of capitalism is based on the exploitation of Labor, and racism is required to divide and weaken the working class. As Malcolm X said: “Racism is profitable. If it was not profitable, it would not exist.”

The capitalist class and its servants in government are a tiny elite who rule by dividing the much larger working class by race, religion, nationality, gender, etc. Unless we challenge those divisions, none of us can hope for a better life.

At Frogmore, S.C. on November 14, 1966, King echoed Malcolm X when he said,  “You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry …. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong … with capitalism …. There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”

The only lasting solution to the exploitation of workers and the oppression of African-Americans is for the multi-racial working class to unite and take control of society. That would be socialism. In such a society, there would be no need for any group of people to be oppressed. In such a society, Black workers would become the masters of the country that their ancestors built with their blood and sweat under slavery: the chattel slavery of the plantations and the wage slavery of the cities.

The previous Civil Rights Movement offers valuable lessons for today: if we don’t let them divide us; if we keep our politics independent of the Republican and Democratic Parties and the Government; if we rely only upon our own power in the streets, in the schools, and at work; if we take up the struggles of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the many other heroes of the movement – we can win.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated as he began to build a  “coalition of labor, Negroes, unemployed, and welfare recipients” in support of striking municipal garbage workers. Such a coalition would have had the potential to unite the Civil Rights Movement, the Labor Movement, and the Anti-War Movement to become “The source of power that reshapes economic relationships and ushers in a breakthrough to a new level of social reform.”

The coalition that King envisioned almost 50 years ago is needed today.

The best tribute to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. would be to learn from their struggles and carry their vision forward, to conclude what they so bravely began.

Don’t Let Them Devide Us!

Conclusion:

The Conlusion from my essay, The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights Movement

Unlike Malcolm X, whose assassination cut short his organizing plans, King was organizing a movement to obtain his stated goals when he was assassinated. In fact, he was in Memphis to build that “coalition of an energized section of labor, Negroes, unemployed, and welfare recipients” in support of striking municipal sanitation workers.    If such a force had been launched, the whole power of the antiwar and civil rights movement in the 1960s could have transformed the labor movement and become “the source of power that reshapes economic relationships and ushers in a breakthrough to a new level of social reform.”     To combat the rise of the Civil Right Movement, the “war on poverty” was first launched in 1964 along with the concept of “Black Politicians”. Malcolm X described this process in his Jan. 7, 1965 speech The Prospects for Freedom, at the Militant Labor Forum, in New York City (For complete an audio of the speech go here.):

“They have a new gimmick every year. They’re going to take one of their boys, black boys, and put him in the cabinet so he can walk around Washington with a cigar. Fire on one end and fool on the other end. And because his immediate personal problem will have been solved he will be the one to tell our people: ‘Look how much progress we’re making. I’m in Washington, D.C., I can have tea in the White House. I’m your spokesman, I’m your leader.’ While our people are still living in Harlem in the slums. Still receiving the worst form of education. But how many sitting here right now feel that they could [laughs] truly identify with a struggle that was designed to eliminate the basic causes that create the conditions that exist? Not very many. They can jive, but when it comes to identifying yourself with a struggle that is not endorsed by the power structure, that is not acceptable, that the ground rules are not laid down by the society in which you live, in which you are struggling against, you can’t identify with that, you step back. It’s easy to become a satellite today without even realizing it. This country can seduce God. Yes, it has that seductive power of economic dollarism. You can cut out colonialism, imperialism and all other kind of ism, but it’s hard for you to cut that dollarism. When they drop those dollars on you, you’ll fold though.” 

After the assassination of Martin Luther King and the subsequent rebellions in the inner cities protesting his assassination, the Democratic Party’s “war on poverty” started laying dollars on any potential Black leaders and grooming Black Candidates.     John Lewis, formally of SNCC, became enlightened, he ignored the Black Panthers and saw the Democratic Party, symbolized by a jackass, as his party. Most of what W.E. B. Dubois described as the “talented tenth” were bought off by this process. The more radical concepts that Martin Luther King and Malcolm X had developed at the time of their deaths disappeared from the scene. No one took up where they left off. The governmental policy, directed towards the ‘leaders’ of the civil rights movement, of the carrot (dollarism) and the stick (assassinations) had proven to be successful.

Part IV

Conclusion

From The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights Movement:

Unlike Malcolm X, whose assassination cut short his organizing plans, King was organizing a movement to obtain his stated goals when he was assassinated. In fact, he was in Memphis to build that “coalition of an energized section of labor, Negroes, unemployed, and welfare recipients” in support of striking municipal sanitation workers.    If such a force had been launched, the whole power of the antiwar and civil rights movement in the 1960s could have transformed the labor movement and become “the source of power that reshapes economic relationships and ushers in a breakthrough to a new level of social reform.”   To combat the rise of the Civil Right Movement, the “war on poverty” was first launched in 1964 along with the concept of “Black Politicians”. Malcolm X described this process in his Jan. 7, 1965 speech The Prospects for Freedom, at the Militant Labor Forum, in New York City (For complete an audio of the speech go here.):     “They have a new gimmick every year. They’re going to take one of their boys, black boys, and put him in the cabinet so he can walk around Washington with a cigar. Fire on one end and fool on the other end. And because his immediate personal problem will have been solved he will be the one to tell our people: ‘Look how much progress we’re making. I’m in Washington, D.C., I can have tea in the White House. I’m your spokesman, I’m your leader.’ While our people are still living in Harlem in the slums. Still receiving the worst form of education. But how many sitting here right now feel that they could [laughs] truly identify with a struggle that was designed to eliminate the basic causes that create the conditions that exist? Not very many. They can jive, but when it comes to identifying yourself with a struggle that is not endorsed by the power structure, that is not acceptable, that the ground rules are not laid down by the society in which you live, in which you are struggling against, you can’t identify with that, you step back. It’s easy to become a satellite today without even realizing it. This country can seduce God. Yes, it has that seductive power of economic dollarism. You can cut out colonialism, imperialism and all other kind of ism, but it’s hard for you to cut that dollarism. When they drop those dollars on you, you’ll fold though.”

After the assassination of Martin Luther King and the subsequent rebellions in the inner cities protesting his assassination, the Democratic Party’s “war on poverty” started laying dollars on any potential Black leaders and grooming Black Candidates.     John Lewis, formally of SNCC, became enlightened, he ignored the Black Panthers and saw the Democratic Party, symbolized by a jackass, as his party. Most of what W.E. B. Dubois described as the “talented tenth” were bought off by this process. The more radical concepts that Martin Luther King and Malcolm X had developed at the time of their deaths disappeared from the scene. No one took up where they left off. The governmental policy, directed towards the ‘leaders’ of the civil rights movement, of the carrot (dollarism) and the stick (assassinations) had proven to be successful.