Malcolm X (80 page)

As Benjamin 2X continued his address, the Audubon’s main entrance and second-floor lobby became packed with late arrivals. At about 2:50 p.m., Betty arrived at the Audubon. For some of Malcolm’s followers, Sister Betty’s attendance was a pleasant surprise, as she had made few if any public appearances since his return from Africa. MMI member Jessie 8X Ryan left his seat beside his wife and escorted Betty and her children to a booth close to the stage. Betty’s prominent appearance undoubtedly told the audience that Malcolm would soon emerge onstage. There were now approximately four hundred people seated in the ballroom.

At 2:55 p.m., the MMI’s security detail made its third and final change of assignments. A few minutes before three p.m., without advance warning Malcolm walked briskly out onto the stage with a portfolio in his hand and sat down next to Benjamin 2X. “Without further ado, I bring before you Minister Malcolm,” Benjamin hastily announced. As the applause began, Benjamin dutifully turned from the speaker’s platform and moved to sit down on the stage, but Malcolm stopped him from sitting down and, leaning over slightly, asked him to look out for Galamison’s arrival. Since Galamison had canceled his appearance, the order made no sense, but Benjamin obediently left the stage and Malcolm walked up to the podium.

The enthusiastic applause lasted almost a full minute as Malcolm surveyed his admiring audience. To his immediate left, bodyguard Gene X Roberts quietly left box two and walked swiftly to the rear of the ballroom, only a few feet from Reuben X Francis. By doing so, whether by coincidence or design, he would escape being near the primary line of fire that ensued seconds later.
“As—salaam alaikum
,” Malcolm declared in Arabic, extending the traditional Muslim words of greeting.
“Walaikum salaam
,” hundreds in the audience responded. Before he could utter another sentence, a disruption broke out in the front center of the ballroom, approximately six or seven rows from the stage. “Get your hands out of my pockets!” Wilbur McKinley exclaimed to another conspirator seated next to him. As both pretended to tussle, the pushing and shoving distracted the entire audience, including the MMI security team. From the rostrum, Malcolm shouted repeatedly: “Hold it! Hold it! Hold it! Hold it!”

The principal rostrum guards that afternoon were Charles X Blackwell and Robert 35X Smith, unusual choices as they did not usually serve in this role and had little experience guarding Malcolm. William 64X George had guarded Malcolm at the rostrum many times, yet on this day he had been stationed outside. When the commotion broke out, Blackwell and Smith made a tactical blunder: they moved from their posts and began walking toward the two bickering men. Gene Roberts, George Whitney, and several other security personnel approached the men from the rear. Malcolm was now completely alone and unguarded onstage. At that precise moment, an incendiary smoke bomb ignited at the extreme rear of the ballroom, instantly creating panic, screams, and confusion. It was only then that Willie Bradley, sitting in the front row, got to his feet and walked briskly toward the rostrum. When he was fifteen feet away, he elevated his sawed-off shotgun from under his coat, took careful aim, and fired. The shotgun pellets ripped squarely into Malcolm’s left side, cutting a seven-inch-wide circle around his heart and left chest. This was the kill shot, the blow that executed Malcolm X; the other bullets caused terrible damage but were not decisive.

This single shotgun blast oddly failed to topple Malcolm. As Herman Ferguson recalled, “There was a loud blast, a boom that filled the auditorium with the sound of a weapon going off.” On cue, two men—Hayer in the first row, with a .45 next to his stomach, and Leon X Davis sitting next to him, also holding a handgun—stood up, ran to the stage, and emptied their guns into Malcolm. Ferguson, still sitting only feet from the stage, took in everything that happened next:

Ferguson was perhaps the only eyewitness who had not fallen to the floor to escape the line of fire. He continued his account:

Most of the MMI security force had also scrambled for cover at the first shot, making no effort to protect Malcolm or to apprehend his murderers. Rostrum guards Charles X Blackwell and Robert 35X Smith both had pulled out of position and had rolled to the floor seeking their own safety. John X Davis, nominally the chief of MMI’s rostrum detail, subsequently admitted to police that when the shooting started, he, too, “fell to the ground.” Charles 37X Kenyatta had also flopped to the floor and later claimed that he “did not see anything.”

Several eyewitness accounts suggest that Bradley then pivoted to his left and may have fired a second blast above the heads of the audience, narrowly missing Ferguson. He then ran down the right corridor of the ballroom and quickly ducked into the women’s lavatory, located barely sixty feet from the stage. Discarding his shotgun, he and perhaps a second conspirator descended a narrow, seldom-used flight of stairs leading down to the street, making an easy escape. The other two gunmen, Hayer and Leon X Davis, inexplicably chose to run a virtual gauntlet, leaping over chairs and people, attempting to escape through the ballroom’s main entrance on West 166th Street, 180 feet away. Adding to the confusion, the homemade incendiary device, composed of a bundle of matches and film stuffed in a sock, was still smoking up the ballroom.

The two shooters, trying to escape through the main entrance, hoped to conceal themselves within the large, panicking audience, but even before they were halfway across the ballroom, Gene Roberts intercepted them. One assailant, probably Hayer, fired at him at point-blank range. The bullet tore through Roberts’s coat but did not hit him. Roberts grabbed a folding chair and hurled it into Hayer’s legs, causing him to stumble and fall, after which Hayer tried to scramble up toward the now packed exit. As he did so, Reuben X Francis took aim and fired at him from eight feet away, pulling off three shots. Hayer was struck just once, in the left thigh; in pain, he stumbled and continued running down the stairwell, where he was immediately surrounded by Malcolm’s enraged followers and viciously beaten. In the confusion, Leon X and the other conspirators managed to escape.

From his lone security outpost at the front door, William 64X George had heard the gunfire and immediately ran down the street to tell police, who within a minute were outside the Audubon. Turning back to the main entrance and front stairwell, William saw Hayer being grabbed by two MMI and OAAU brothers, Alvin Johnson and George 44X, who dragged the wounded shooter to the ground. “The crowd started to beat him,” William would later recount. At that moment, police patrolman Thomas Hoy arrived at the scene and attempted to pull Hayer into the rear of his squad car. Seconds later Sergeant Alvin Aronoff and patrolman Louis Angelos drove up in a squad car and assisted Hoy in dispersing the angry crowd. Aronoff fired his revolver into the air and the officers were finally able to secure Hayer into a squad car.

The most detailed eyewitness account by a journalist was that of freelance writer Welton Smith, whose story appeared in the
New York Herald Tribune
. Smith first observed a man wearing “a black overcoat in the middle of the hall” rise to his feet and “[yell] at the man next to him, ‘Get your hand out of my pockets!’ ” Gunshots then erupted from the front stage as Smith found himself violently pushed to the ballroom floor by others. All the shots took place “within fifteen seconds.” By the time Smith rose to his feet, he saw two men chase the man in the black overcoat, who turned and fired at his pursuers as he ran toward the main entrance. Smith located the smoke bomb at the back of the ballroom, smothered the fuse, and looked for water to douse it. Several minutes later, he could see that about eight people were bending over Malcolm. As several MMI security personnel attempted to keep others from crowding onto the stage, Smith saw Yuri Kochiyama, an OAAU member, bend over Malcolm and heard her shout, “He’s still alive! His heart’s still beating!”

Mercifully, Betty had witnessed only the first terrible seconds of her husband’s murder. When she first heard the boom of the shotgun blast, she instinctively turned her body toward the stage. “There was no one else in there they’d be shooting at,” she recalled later. Two more killers with handguns stepped forward, firing into Malcolm. Betty would later claim that she had seen her husband collapse onstage under this withering fire. Observers, however, saw her quickly gathering her terrified children, pushing them to the floor, shielded partially by a wooden bench and her own body. As the shooting continued, Betty screamed out, “They’re killing my husband!” While the assassins fled the scene, the Shabazz children began to cry and to speak up. “Are they going to kill everyone?” one daughter asked. Betty could see people running up to the stage, overwhelmed by the terrible damage that Malcolm had sustained. Finally rising to her feet, she began to run toward the body, sobbing and screaming; friends tried to hold her back because she was clearly hysterical. After Gene Roberts checked on the safety of his wife, Joan, who had been seated in the front near several reporters, he rushed to the stage. Immediately he sensed that Malcolm was dead, yet he desperately attempted to revive him with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Joan Roberts was deeply traumatized by Malcolm’s assassination and her husband’s near death. She wept uncontrollably in the taxi as she went home with her husband. Forty years later, Gene Roberts observed that “the horror of the incident stayed with her for years.”

As the smoke still wafted overhead, MMI and OAAU members stumbled around the ballroom aimlessly, in stunned disbelief at what they had just witnessed. The journalist and OAAU member Earl Grant had been using the pay telephone near the front entrance, making a follow-up call to solicit funds at Malcolm’s request, when the first shot rang out. He tried to reenter the ballroom but was pushed aside by the stampede of people fleeing the building. When he finally reached the stage, Malcolm’s shirt had been opened and blood covered his torso. Grant retrieved his reporter’s camera and began taking photographs. His photos would become the main images of the death of Malcolm X.

When Herman Ferguson finally managed to reach the Audubon’s main entrance, he saw to his immediate right “a big commotion going on in the street. . . . A crowd of people had a man up in the air and they were pulling and tugging on him.” Wandering in shock, Ferguson found himself on the corner of Broadway and West 166th Street brooding over “what I had just seen—Malcolm’s death.” A few minutes later he recognized several MMI and OAAU brothers rushing by with a hospital gurney, which they wheeled into the building. Soon a group of policemen and the brothers returned with the gurney bearing a familiar figure: “I looked down at Malcolm. I could already see the pallor, the grayish pallor of his face. . . . His shirt was opened and his collar and tie were pulled down. You could see his chest . . . [and] a pattern of about seven bullet holes, holes large enough to fit your little finger. And I [thought] to myself that he was gone.”

Ferguson stood disoriented at the corner for several minutes, trying to decide what to do next. Just then a police car, traveling north up Broadway, turned sharply and stopped only a few feet from him. The squad car held two policemen, one of whom he judged to be “police brass,” due to “the scrambled eggs on his hat.” The officer left the car and entered the Audubon, returning moments later with a man with an olive complexion who was “obviously in great pain.” As the man was assisted into the backseat, Ferguson walked to the car. “He was slumped over, holding his midsection, and I had to bend down and look into his face.” Ferguson figured the man had been shot; thinking that the wounded man was “one of our guys,” he asked what was happening. The squad car sped away—only instead of making a right turn across Broadway toward Columbia Presbyterian, the nearest hospital, “they kept going down towards the [Hudson] river, across the street, down that incline, and disappeared out of sight.”

When the frantic MMI and OAAU members and police carrying Malcolm’s body reached Columbia Presbyterian’s emergency room, one physician immediately performed a stab tracheotomy in an effort to revive him. Malcolm was then taken to the hospital’s third floor, where other physicians set to work. The doctors knew Malcolm was almost certainly dead by the time he was brought into the emergency room, but they continued to try to revive him for fifteen minutes before giving up. At three thirty p.m., in a small office overflowing with Malcolm’s supporters and a growing cluster of journalists, a doctor announced in an oddly detached manner: “The gentleman you knew as Malcolm X is dead.”

Malcolm’s principal lieutenants did not personally witness the shooting. Mitchell, Benjamin 2X, and James 67X were all together backstage. “I heard a sound like firecrackers,” Benjamin recalled. “I heard blasts of gunfire. . . . The perspiration broke out of every pore of my body. I knew that he was gone.” He had tried to get up but physically couldn’t. “I just sat there, stunned, staring through the open doorway at the body on the stage. . . . Then, all at once, it left me, the weight on my shoulders, and I felt a great relief come over me, Malcolm’s relief from all his suffering. Death ends a thing on time. Whatever may be the instruments to bring it about, when it comes, it comes on time.”