The Undiscovered Malcolm X: Stunning
New Info on the Assassination, His Plans to Unite the
Civil Rights and Black Nationalist Movements & the 3
'Missing' Chapters from His Autobiography
Amy Goodman interviews Manning Marable
Democracy Now
February 21, 2005
http://www.democracynow.org/2005/2/21/the_undiscovered_malcolm_x_stunning_new

[moderator: Manning Marable died Friday April 1, 2011
just days before his new book "Malcolm X: A Life of
Reinvention" was due to be released.  This 2005
interview offers a tantalizing preview of the book to
come.

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
Release date: April 4, 2011
Hardcover, 608 pages
Viking Adult
ISBN-10: 0670022209
ISBN-13: 978-0670022205]

On this the 40th anniversary of the assassination of
Malcolm X, we spend the hour with historian Manning
Marable who has spent a decade working on a new
biography of Malcolm X. He is one of the few historians
to see the three missing chapters from "The
Autobiography of Malcolm X" that he says paint a very
different picture than the book with Alex Haley and
Spike Lee's film. Marable has also had unprecedented
access to Malcolm's family and documents that shed new
light on the involvement of the New York Police, the FBI
and possibly the CIA in Malcolm X's assassination.
Manning today called on the federal government to
release all remaining classified documents on Malcolm X.
[includes rush transcript]

40 years ago today on February 21, 1965 Malcolm X was
shot dead as he spoke at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem.
He had just taken the stage when shots rang out riddling
his body with bullets. Malcolm X was 39 years old.

At his funeral, the actor and civil rights activist
Ossie Davis hailed Malcolm as "our Black shining
prince."

Today commemorations are scheduled across the country.

In New York, the Center for Contemporary Black History
and the Institute for Research in African-American
Studies at Columbia University are sponsoring "Malcolm
X: Life After Death-the Legacy Endures" an educational
forum and radio broadcast. The program will be chaired
by historian Manning Marable, founding director of the
Institute for Research in African-American Studies.

The historic Abyssinian Baptist Church is also hosting a
national commemoration of Malcolm X with Percy Sutton,
Sonia Sanchez, Haki Madhubuti, Dr. James Turner, Gil
Noble, Rev. Herbert Daughtry and M-1 of Dead Prez.

Later this year, the Audubon Ballroom is scheduled to
reopen as the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial
and Education Center on May 19 on what would have been
Malcolm's 80th birthday.

Meanwhile Columbia University professor Manning Marable
is working on a major new biography on Malcolm X.
Marable has already spent 10 years researching the book
which is tentatively titled "Malcolm X: A Life of
Reinvention."

Today Professor Marable joins us in our Firehouse
Studios to discuss the legacy of Malcolm X as well as
some of his new findings.

Marable has said "Malcolm X was potentially a new type
of world leader, personally drawn up from the 'wretched
of the earth into a political stratosphere of
international power. And telling that remarkable, true
story is the purpose of my biography."

Marable's research has raised new questions about The
Autobiography of Malcolm X which was written with Alex
Haley. Marable has also examined un-redacted FBI files
which provides new insight into the role of FBI and the
New York Police Department in the assassination of
Malcolm X

AMY GOODMAN: We will be joined by Professor Marable in
just a moment, but first we begin with Malcolm X himself
in words recorded just a months before he was
assassinated. It was January 1965, he gave this speech
entitled "Prospects for Freedom."

    MALCOLM X: When this country here was first being
    founded, there were 13 colonies. The whites were
    colonized. They were fed up with this taxation
    without representation. So some of them stood up and
    said, liberty or death. I went to a white school
    over here in Mason, Michigan. The white man made the
    mistake of letting me read his history books. He
    made the mistake of teaching me that Patrick Henry
    was a patriot and George Washington-wasn't nothing
    non-violent about old Pat or George Washington.
    Liberty or death was what brought about the freedom
    of whites in this country from the English. They
    didn't care about the odds. Why, they faced the
    wrath of the entire British Empire. And in those
    days, they used to say that the British Empire was
    so vast and so powerful, the sun would never set on
    it. This is how big it was, yet these 13 little
    scrawny states, tired of taxation without
    representation, tired of being exploited and
    oppressed and degraded, told that big British
    Empire, liberty or death. And here you have 22
    million Afro-Americans, black people today, catching
    more hell than Patrick Henry ever saw. And I'm here
    to tell you, in case you don't know it, that you got
    a new-you got a new generation of black people in
    this country, who don't care anything whatsoever
    about odds. They don't want to hear you old Uncle
    Tom handkerchief heads talking about the odds. No.
    This is a new generation. If they're going to draft
    these young black men and send them over to Korea or
    South Vietnam, to face 800 million Chinese. If you
    are not afraid of those odds, you shouldn't be
    afraid of these odds.

AMY GOODMAN: Malcolm X, a month before he was
assassinated. It was January 1965 at a speech he gave in
New York, sponsored by the Militant Labor Forum. This is
Democracy Now! We're joined by Professor Manning
Marable, one of America's most influential and widely
read scholars, professor of history and African American
Studies at Columbia University, founding director of the
Institute for Research in African American studies,
again working on a new biography of Malcolm X. Welcome
to Democracy Now!

MANNING MARABLE: Thank you. It's always great to be
here.

AMY GOODMAN: It is great to be with you. Why don't you
summarize for us-I mean, you have been studying Malcolm
X for more than a decade now-what you think are the most
explosive findings and then throughout the hour, we will
tease them out and talk about them.

MANNING MARABLE: I think that Malcolm X was the most
remarkable historical figure produced by Black America
in the 20th century. That's a heavy statement, but I
think that in his 39 short years of life, Malcolm came
to symbolize Black urban America, its culture, its
politics, its militancy, its outrage against structural
racism and at the end of his life, a broad
internationalist vision of emancipatory power far better
than any other single individual that he shared with
DuBois and Paul Robeson, a pan-Africanist
internationalist perspective. He shared with Marcus
Garvey a commitment to building strong black
institutions. He shared with Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr., a commitment to peace and the freedom of racialized
minorities. He was the first prominent American to
attack and to criticize the U.S. role in Southeast Asia,
and he came out four-square against the Vietnam War in
1964, long before the vast majority of Americans did. So
that Malcolm X represents the cutting edge of a kind of
critique of globalization in the 21st century. In fact,
Malcolm, if anything, was far ahead of the curve in so
many ways.

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to break and then when we come
back, we are a going to talk about The Autobiography of
Malcolm X, the missing chapters, and where they are,
which you have got a chance to see excerpts of.

MANNING MARABLE: That's right.

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to talk about how the
autobiography was written, and the F.B.I., their
relationship with Alex Haley. We will talk about these
things and more in just a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We spend the hour today on Malcolm X, today
the 40th anniversary of his assassination. Our guest is
Columbia University Professor Manning Marable, writing a
biography of Malcolm X, and also the editor of the
magazine Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics,
Culture and Society. The winter 2005 issue, photograph
of Malcolm X on the cover, and that's what the whole
issue is devoted to, with a major article by Professor
Marable. Let's talk about The Autobiography of Malcolm
X.

MANNING MARABLE: Okay. The-most people who read the
autobiography perceive the narrative as a story that now
millions of people know, and it was-it's a story of
human transformation, the powerful epiphany, Malcolm's
journey to Mecca, his renunciation of the Nation of
Islam's racial separatism, his embrace of universal
humanity, of humanism that was articulated through Sunni
Islam. Well, that's the story everybody knows. But
there's a hidden history. You see, Malcolm and Haley
collaborated to produce a magnificent narrative about
the life of Malcolm X, but the two men had very
different motives in coming together. Malcolm did-what
Malcolm did not know is that back in 1962, a
collaborator of Alex Haley, fellow named-a journalist
named Alfred Balk had approached the F.B.I. regarding an
article that he and Haley were writing together for The
Saturday Evening Post, and the F.B.I. had an interest in
castigating the Nation of Islam, and isolating it from
the mainstream of Negro civil rights activity. So
consequently, a deal was struck between Balk, Haley and
the F.B.I. that the F.B.I. provided information to Balk
and Haley in the construction of their article, and Balk
was-Balk was really the interlocutor between the F.B.I.
and the two writers in putting a spin on the article.
The F.B.I. was very happy with the article they
produced, which was entitled, "The Black Merchants of
Hate," that came out in early 1963. What's significant
about that piece is that that became the template for
what evolved into the basic narrative structure of The
Autobiography of Malcolm X.

AMY GOODMAN: Did Alex Haley know about this
relationship?

MANNING MARABLE: There is no direct evidence that Haley
sat down with the F.B.I. Nevertheless, since Balk was
the co-author of the piece and it was Balk who talked
directly with the F.B.I.-

AMY GOODMAN: Did Haley know-

MANNING MARABLE: One can assume that Haley was involved
in it.

AMY GOODMAN: Did Haley at least talk to Balk about-did
he know about Balk's relationship with the F.B.I.?

MANNING MARABLE: One can assume that Haley did because
Haley and Balk co-authored the piece, traveled
throughout the United States together and collected
material together to form an article that they co-
authored. It would be highly unlikely that Haley did not
know.

AMY GOODMAN: Then the writing of the autobiography, Alex
Haley and Malcolm X's relationship. How did they do it?

MANNING MARABLE: Over a period of-

AMY GOODMAN: And why did Malcolm X choose him?

MANNING MARABLE: Over a period of about year-and-a-half,
Malcolm and Haley agreed to work with each other. They
met usually after a long business day that Malcolm put
in very tired. He would get there at about-either at
Haley's apartment or they would meet at then Idyllwild
Airport at a hotel, and Malcolm would be debriefed by
Haley. He would talk, Haley would take notes. Malcolm
had a habit of scribbling notes in small pieces of paper
that Haley would surreptitiously pick up at the end of
their discussions. Malcolm's objective was actually to
reingratiate himself within the Nation of Islam, that
because he had emerged by the early 1960s as a very
prominent figure outside of the N.O.I., there were
critics within the organization that were saying to the
patriarch of the N.O.I., the Honorable Elijah Mohammad,
that Malcolm planned to take over the organization,
which was not true. But nevertheless, Malcolm felt that
if he could make a public-a prominent public statement
to show his fidelity to the Honorable Elijah Mohammad
that that might win him back in the good graces of the
organization. But there were internal critics, sharp
critics, who were very opposed to him, and who were
very-some of them were members of Elijah Mohammad's
family, such as Herbert Mohammad, Raymond Shareef, who
was the head of the Fruit of Islam, the brother-in-law
of-the son-in-law of Elijah Mohammad. They isolated
Malcolm X and kept him out of the newspaper of the
organization Mohammad Speaks for over a year, which is
kind of curious. He was the national spokesperson of the
N.O.I., and he wasn't represented in their own newspaper
for over a year. Haley's objective was quite different.
Haley was a republican. He was an integrationist. He was
very opposed to black nationalism. His objective was to
illustrate that the racial separatism of the N.O.I. was
a kind of pathological or a kind of-it was the logical
culmination of separatism and racial isolationism and
exclusion. He wanted to show the negative aspects of the
N.O.I.'s ideology, Yacub's history, and all of the
ramifications of racial separatism that he felt were
negative, and that Malcolm, being as charismatic as he
was, a very attractive figure, nevertheless, he embodied
these kind of negative traits. Haley felt he could make
a solid case in favor of racial integration by showing
what was-to white America-what was the consequence of
their support for racial separatism that would end up
producing a kind of hate, the hate that hate produced,
to use the phrase that Mike Wallace used in his 1959
documentary on the Nation of Islam. So, the two men for
very different reasons came together. What is striking
is that from almost from the very beginning of certainly
by September and October of 1963, as the book was being
constructed, that Haley was vetting-asking questions to
the publisher and to the publisher's attorney regarding
many of the things that Malcolm was saying. He was
worried that he would not have a book that would have
the kind of sting that he wanted. He was also concerned,
to use Haley's phrase, about the purported anti-Semitism
of Malcolm X, and so he began to rewrite words or
passages in the book without Malcolm's knowledge. And
Haley, in his own-this is prior to emails-Haley had a
tendency to write even more frequently and voluminously
to his agents and his editors than he did putting pen to
paper in his own books. So that one finds in Haley's
archives, or the archives of Anne Romaine, who was going
to be his biographer until her tragic death in 1995, one
finds a copious series of notes from Haley to his
editors and attorneys regarding the construction of the
autobiography itself. He wanted to steer the book to
accomplish his political goals, as well as Malcolm's
goals.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, Professor Marable, you went to the
Haley collection.

MANNING MARABLE: That's right.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about that experience and how
difficult it is, really, to get original information
about Malcolm X, and the Haley example is just one.

MANNING MARABLE: That's right. One of the striking
things about doing research on Malcolm X, and I believe
that most Malcolm X researchers could tell you their own
stories, is that there's this paradox of the absence of
critical information. Malcolm X is a person who has
inspired-he has been the muse of several generations of
black cultural workers, artists, poets, playwrights.
There are literally a thousand works with the title
Malcolm X in them. There are over 350 films and over 320
web-based educational resources with the title Malcolm
X, yet the vast majority of them are based on secondary
literatures, that is, not on primary source material. In
the case of Alex Haley, Haley's material is located at
the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, primarily. But
there are a whole series of elaborate steps that one has
to-has to encounter in order to even begin to do
research. There's an attorney. If you want to photocopy
material from that archive, you have to get permission
from the attorney beforehand. You have to name the exact
pages you want to photocopy before you can photocopy
them. So that there are a whole series of steps. You can
only use a pencil rather than a pen to copy down
material, etc. It's a laborious process, and it takes a
long time just to do a small amount of research.
Fortunately, Anne Romaine, who was appointed by Haley
just before his death to be his own biographer-

AMY GOODMAN: She was a folk singer?

MANNING MARABLE: That's right. A folk singer and a
skillful historian, even though she was not formally
trained in the field. She collected her own parallel
archive to Haley, and without Anne Romaine's archive,
which is also at the University of Tennessee-well, I
should-let me put it in a positive light, with that
archive, we have gained extensive knowledge about how
Haley and Malcolm actually worked and how the book, the
autobiography, was constructed. The raw material for
chapter 16, a lot of that material, is actually in
Romaine's archives, not in Haley's, which is
interesting.

AMY GOODMAN: Hmm.

MANNING MARABLE: That's right. But what is most
interesting about the book is that as I have read it
over the years, something-something was odd to me. It's
like-you know, Malcolm broke with the N.O.I. in March
1964, and in that last 11 chaotic months, he spent most
of the time outside of the United States. Nevertheless,
he built two organizations in the spring of 1964. First,
Muslim Mosque Incorporated, which was a religious
organization that was largely based on members of the
N.O.I. who left with him. It was spearheaded by James
67X or James Shabazz, who was his chief of staff. Then
secondly was the Organization of Afro-American Unity.
This was an organization that was a secular group. It
largely consisted of people that we would later call
several years later Black Powerites, Black nationalists,
progressives coming out of the Black freedom struggle,
the northern students' movement, people-students, young
people, professionals, workers, who were dedicated to
Black activism and militancy, but outside of the context
of Islam. There were tensions between these two
organizations, and Malcolm had to negotiate between them
and since he was out of the country a great deal of the
time, it was rather difficult for him to do so. It
seemed rather odd that there's only a fleeting reference
to the OAAU inside of the book that's supposed to be his
political testament. I wondered about this. It seemed
like something was missing. Well, as a matter of fact,
there is. Three chapters. Those three chapters really
represent a kind of political testament that are
outlined by Malcolm X, and to make a long story short,
they're in a safe of a Detroit attorney by the name of
Greg Reed. He purchased these chapters in a sale of the
Haley Estate in late 1992 for the sum of $100,000. Since
that time, no historian, or at least I suppose I'm the
exception, very few people have actually had a chance to
see the raw material that was going to comprise these
three chapters. The missing political testament that
should have been in the autobiography, but isn't.

AMY GOODMAN: And what is he doing with them?

MANNING MARABLE: Well, they're sitting in his safe. And,
I guess the conundrum-I'm not an attorney or a person
who does intellectual property-but my understanding of
the situation is that he owns the property, but he
doesn't own-he owns the physical texts of these
chapters, but Mr. Reed does not own the intellectual
property, the content of these chapters, so he cannot
publish them.

AMY GOODMAN: Is this the same attorney Reed who is
involved with, perhaps, a lawsuit to do with Rosa Parks?

MANNING MARABLE: That's right. It's the same one, with
the trial with the hip-hop group that's based in
Atlanta, and Gregory Reed-.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Outkast?

MANNING MARABLE: That's right, with Outkast. In fact, I
was even-I think even Reed sent something to me asking
me to be a-to give testimony in this trial, which I
promptly said, thanks, but no thanks.

AMY GOODMAN: It's because Outkast used in their music,
they use Rosa Parks's words, her own voice?

MANNING MARABLE: That's right.

AMY GOODMAN: How does the family of Rosa Parks feel
about this?

MANNING MARABLE: I cannot really say. I just know what I
have seep on the media. I know that they weren't very
happy about this.

AMY GOODMAN: Happy about-

MANNING MARABLE: About Greg Reed's representation, but-

AMY GOODMAN: So, he's not representing them.

MANNING MARABLE: Well, again, I cannot really
characterize what is going on with that lawsuit, because
I'm not really a party to it.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, you are the only historian who has
seen excerpts of the attorney Reed, the three chapters
that he has in his safe?

MANNING MARABLE: I cannot say that for certain.

AMY GOODMAN: One of the few.

MANNING MARABLE: One of-I could say that very few people
have seen it. Reed, after a series of conversations-Reed
said he would allow me to see this. This was about two
years ago. I flew out to Detroit. I asked when could I
come over to the office, and he said, no, let's meet at
a restaurant, which struck me as rather odd. We met at a
restaurant. He came with a briefcase, and he opened the
briefcase and he showed me the manuscripts. He said,
I'll let you take a look at this for about 15 minutes.
Well, that wasn't very much time. I was deeply
disappointed, nevertheless, in that 15 minute time,
looking at the content, because I'm so familiar with
what Malcolm wrote at certain stages of his own life and
development, it became very clear that there's a high
probability he wrote this material sometime between
August or September 1963 to about January 1964. Now,
this is a critical moment in his development. In
November 1963, he gives his famous message to the
grassroots address in Detroit, which really kind of
marks off the real turning point in his own development.
But I would argue that equally important is a brilliant
address he gives in Harlem in mid-August of 1963, which
actually is one of my favorite addresses by Malcolm,
which actually is superior in my judgment to the message
to the grassroots address, where he lays into a critique
of what then is being mobilized, the march on
Washington, D.C., the pinnacle of the civil rights
movement. Malcolm envisions a broad-based pluralistic
united front, which is spearheaded by the Nation of
Islam, but mobilizing integrationist organizations, non-
political organizations, civic groups, all under the
banner of building black empowerment, human dignity,
economic development, political mobilization. He's
already envisioning the N.O.I. playing a role
cooperatively with integrationist organizations. I
believe that if we could see the chapters that are
missing from the book, we would gain an understanding as
to why perhaps-perhaps-the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the New
York Police Department and others in law enforcement
greatly feared what Malcolm X was about, because he was
trying to build a broad-an unprecedented black coalition
across the lines of black nationalism and integration.
And in way, it presages 30 years ahead of time, the
Million Man March.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Marable, we have to break. When
we come back, I want to ask more about the chapters and
also about the assassination of Malcolm X, 40 years ago
today.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Professor Manning Marable of
Columbia University, and long time now writing the
biography of Malcolm X, which I see has just been bought
by a publisher, and is going to be coming out in few
years.

MANNING MARABLE: That's right, with Viking Penguin.
That's right.

AMY GOODMAN: More on these three chapters, what you saw
in the restaurant, and then let's talk about the
assassination of Malcolm X.

MANNING MARABLE: Alright. I think that Malcolm was
envisioning, even while he was in the Nation of Islam, a
black nationalist progressive strategy toward uniting
black people across ideological, class lines,
denominational religious lines, Christians, as well as
Muslims, to build a strong movement for justice and for
empowerment. And I think that that is what frightened
the FBI, and that is what frightened the CIA. That is
what they had to stop, and if one thinks about it, those
listeners and our viewers who know the history of
COINTELPRO, the counter intelligence program of the FBI
that occurred in the 1960s and 70s, that in 1965 or 6,
that J. Edgar Hoover wrote an infamous memo called the
Black Messiah Memo. He said, "We must stop the rise of a
black messiah." That was the concern that the FBI had
more than anything else. Either Malcolm or Martin could
have played the role of a unifier, but it was-Malcolm as
long as he remained within the Nation of Islam, talking
to the converted, he did not represent a fundamental
threat to the American government. But when he began to
talk about uniting the very fractious civil rights
movement, when he talked-when he began to negotiate with
people like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin and
Martin and others, keep in mind that several weeks
before Malcolm's assassination, he went to Selma,
Alabama. Dr. King was imprisoned during the
mobilization. He went to Mrs. King, and he told Coretta
that, you know, that even though we're very different
people, that we're really about the business of the same
struggle. We just use different tactics. And I want you
to understand, and I want you to convey to your husband
that I deeply respect what he is doing. So, Malcolm had
a clear vision and an understanding that we were-that he
was a part of a broad freedom struggle. As his vision
became more internationalist and pan-African, as he
began, especially in 1964, after seeing the example of
anti-colonial revolutions abroad and began to articulate
and incorporate a socialist analysis economically into
his program, he clearly became a threat to the US state.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain how events led to this day, 40
years ago, the assassination of Malcolm X.

MANNING MARABLE: I believe that the evidence will show
that there was not so much a conspiracy, but a
convergence of interests with three different groups
that had an interest in eliminating his voice and his
vision. The first group, obviously, is the NYPD, the New
York Police Department. They had their own red squad,
which was called BOSS, the Bureau of Special Services.
They had managed to infiltrate Malcolm's organization
and the nation of Islam. And, of course, the FBI. There
were over 40,000 pages of FBI documents of which only
about half are currently available to scholars and
researchers. I think that this 40th anniversary of the
assassination is a good opportunity for us to say that
now is the time to declassify all FBI material on
Malcolm X. There really is a need for us to challenge
the US government for its refusal to open up its own
archives 40 years after the death of Malcolm. All of
that material should be made available to all
researchers and all scholars and to the family of
Malcolm X. So that-I believe that the FBI clearly was
concerned, wanted to monitor and disrupt Malcolm
wherever possible. Gene Roberts, one of Malcolm's chiefs
of security, was an NYPD undercover cop. He later went
on to bigger things by being a disruptive force inside
of the Black Panther Party. So, that's one element. A
second element was the Nation of Islam. Lynwood X, who
was one of the leaders of the New Jersey mosques of the
Nation of Islam, was at the Audubon Ballroom sitting on
the first row. He came in early to observe the events on
the 21st of February. He was taken aside by Benjamin 2X,
close associate of Malcolm and also Reuben X, Reuben X
Francis, who was the chief of security. Lynwood said he
just wanted to check out what Malcolm had to say. But my
sense is that perhaps his role was more complicated than
simply that of a bystander. We know from Talmadge Hayer,
one of the men who carried out the assassination, who
was shot by Reuben X as he tried to flee the Audubon
after shooting Malcolm X, we know that Hayer confessed
years later to his Imam in prison that there had been a
walk-through a week prior to February 21st at the
Audubon Ballroom. So, there was deep knowledge on the
part of members of the Nation of Islam regarding the
planning, in sight of the OAAU and the Muslim Mosque
Incorporated regarding the events at the Audubon. They
knew when they were going to be there, they knew what
the schedules were. How did they know this? Well, in
part because they had informants inside of the
organization, and in part because, obviously, they had
information that hardly anybody else had. They also knew
something else clearly, that on the day of the
assassination, and here we get to the third group-I
think the third group are elements within Malcolm's own
entourage. Elements within Malcolm's own entourage, some
of them were very angry with some of the changes that
had occurred with Malcolm. One source of anger,
curiously enough, was that-was the tension between MMI
and OAAU, that the MMI, the Muslim Mosque Incorporated,
these were women and men who had left the Nation of
Islam out of loyalty to Malcolm, but then Malcolm
continued to evolve rapidly. He never renounced and
never stepped away from a strong commitment to black
nationalism and black self-determination. That's
absolutely clear if you do any analysis of his speeches.
But what is clear is that he incorporated within the
framework of black nationalism a pan-Africanist and
internationalist perspective. In doing so, he began to
reassess radically earlier positions sexism and
patriarchy. He began to break with notions of sexism
that he had long held as a member of the Nation of
Islam, and began to advance and push forward women
leadership in the OAAU. MMI brothers were very resistant
to women such as Lynn Shiflet and others who emerged as
leaders within the OAAU, so one of the tensions that
occurred was around gender equality and gender
leadership inside of Malcolm's entourage.

AMY GOODMAN: Then, that day, there was the presence, or
lack of presence, of the NYPD.

MANNING MARABLE: That's right. The NYPD was ubiquitous.
They were always around Malcolm. Whenever Malcolm spoke,
there would be one or two dozen cops all over the place.
On this day, the cops were nowhere to be seen. The cops
later explained that they had been pulled off the
Audubon in order to go across the street. Normally, they
were in a command center on the second floor adjacent to
the large ballroom in the building. On this day, there
were only two cops at moment of the shooting inside of
the building, but they were as far away as possible from
the site of the ballroom. The man who actually
apprehended Talmadge Hayer, the only shooter who was
shot at the site, Thomas Hoy, was actually driving by by
accident. So, clearly, they had been pulled off the
case.

AMY GOODMAN: He was an off duty cop.

MANNING MARABLE: That's right. Why did the cops
disappear quite literally? Then there were other kind of
curious things. There was a complete failure of
protection of the principal. The MMI brothers, who
provided security for Malcolm had been trained by
Malcolm himself that inside of the Nation of Islam,
whenever there is a diversion, you protect the
principal. The principal, in this case Malcolm, clearly
was not protected on February 21st. First off, nobody
was checked for weapons as they came in. Now, of course,
people know that over the last several months prior to
February 21st, 1965, the OAAU and MMI tried to get away
from the old practices of checking people at the door
for weapons. They wanted people to feel more
comfortable. But the guards themselves did not carry
weapons. Now, Malcolm's home had just been firebombed a
week before. The guards didn't carry weapons. Malcolm
had insisted that the guards not carry firearms that
day. I have asked James Shabazz, I've asked other people
who are members of the OAAU, Herman Ferguson and others,
what led to that disastrous decision? James Shabazz said
to me with a shrug, you just didn't know Malcolm.
Malcolm was adamant, and that whatever Malcolm wanted,
that's what we just did. But I said, this is highly
irresponsible considering that there were death threats
that were constant, that there was FBI surveillance and
disruption, and that none of you carried weapons? Well,
that's not quite true, because we later learned from
unredacted FBI files, that we have discovered and that
we have archived in the municipal archives here in the
city of New York, that there were at least, according to
the district attorney, at least three undercover cops
who were at the ballroom that day. We know one of their
names. We know that-

AMY GOODMAN: What's his name?

MANNING MARABLE: Well, we know that Gene Roberts, who
was depicted giving mouth to mouth resuscitation to
Malcolm-

AMY GOODMAN: We only have a minute.

MANNING MARABLE: Was an undercover cop, but who were the
others? Two of the three men, who were imprisoned,
Norman Butler and Robert 15x Johnson, convicted and
given life sentences, I'm absolutely convinced were
innocent. The real murderers of Malcolm X have not been
caught or punished. I think that now is the moment for
us to rededicate ourselves to learning the truth about
what happened on February 21st. The place to begin is to
make all evidence public, and we have to begin with the
federal government, and the FBI.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Manning Marable, I want to thank you
very much for being with us.

MANNING MARABLE: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Marable is writing a biography of
Malcolm X that will come out in a few years, has a major
piece in his magazine, Souls, a critical journal of
black politics, culture and society. Tonight, we'll be
at Columbia University talking more about his
investigation. Thank you very much.

MANNING MARABLE: Thank you, Amy.

___________________________________________

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