Malcolm X (82 page)

The news of Malcolm’s murder was broadcast by the media within minutes, nationally and internationally. At the Nation of Islam Chicago headquarters, Elijah Muhammad was stunned, according to an account provided by a grandson. “Oh my God! . . . Um, um, um!” Muhammad reportedly murmured. The emotional split with his “lost-found” disciple had finally come to a tragic end. “You know, I really want to go home now,” Muhammad told his grandson and other NOI subordinates. It was a wise decision. Undoubtedly, Muhammad’s dedicated security force, the Fruit of Islam, realized that Malcolm’s murder would almost certainly trigger an act of retaliatory violence against their leader. The Chicago office, while protected by a corps of highly trained men, could still be difficult to defend from a frontal assault, but Muhammad’s Hyde Park mansion had been carefully constructed to be virtually impregnable. Several family members and other devoted followers owned residences adjacent to Muhammad’s mansion, and NOI security men routinely prowled the sidewalks surrounding the property. Muhammad and his advisers retreated to his fortress and waited.

The terrible news of Malcolm’s murder quickly reached Alex Haley at his home in upstate New York. Less than two hours later, his grief was pushed aside by practical concerns. Haley typed a letter to Paul Reynolds, fearing their lucrative deal might now be in jeopardy. “None of us would have had it be this way,” Haley wrote, “but since this book represent’s [
sic
] Malcolm’s sole financial legacy to his widow and four little daughters . . . I’m just glad that it’s ready for the press now at a peak of interest for what will be international large sales, and paperback, and all.” He also advised Reynolds that Doubleday should be alerted to a potential financial problem:

A few days later, Haley had another thought. Again writing to Reynolds, he suggested, “Maybe some magazine might wish to pay well enough for a probing interview of Elijah Muhammad. I could accomplish this.” Haley proposed something along the lines of his earlier personal interviews with Malcolm and Martin Luther King, Jr., featured in
Playboy
. Haley assured Reynolds that he would not be at any personal risk from such an assignment. “I know there would be no danger from the Muhammad faction side of the fence; they would want me to do it. They associate me with major publicity done with dignity, which they desperately want.” Some of Malcolm’s friends might “feel nettled that I was in Chicago with Muhammad,” but they could be handled. Get the contract first, Haley advised; he would then “contact Sister Betty and also a couple of Malcolm’s close lieutenants and tell them that I had the order, which is a professional job.” Another benefit for Haley would be to maintain his line of communications with the Nation’s leadership. “It would give me a chance to say to Muhammad some things I’d like to regarding the book—that he isn’t attacked as he might think, that he actually is praised by Malcolm.” Haley insisted that “some other writers might presently have bigger ‘names’ (Baldwin, Lomax, Lincoln) . . . [but] actually I have the very best inside track to the Muslims’ confidence.” Nothing came of these overtures, and Haley and Reynolds’s fears were fully justified. Within two weeks, in a terribly shortsighted move, Doubleday’s owner, Nelson Doubleday, abruptly canceled the contract.

On the day of the assassination, NOI enforcer Norman Butler was still out on bail for the Benjamin Brown killing. That morning he’d visited a doctor to obtain treatment for leg injuries, which had come from his violent beating by the police during his recent arrest. Butler had spent most of Sunday watching television at home. When he saw the news reports about Malcolm’s murder, he phoned Mosque No. 7 and finally reached Captain Joseph, who strongly advised him to get himself seen by others as soon as possible—to walk to the corner store and “buy a quart of milk,” to speak to several neighbors in his building, and so on. Butler decided not to follow Joseph’s advice; after all, he had not attended the event at the Audubon. He slumped back in his chair and continued watching television. That decision would cost him two decades of his life.

Thomas 15X Johnson, like Butler, had not known that Malcolm “was going to get hit that Sunday.” At the time, he lived in a top-floor apartment across from the Bronx Zoo. A neighbor called up to Johnson and yelled, “Turn your TV on . . . Big Red just got hit!” Since the Benjamin Brown shooting and Johnson’s arrest, Captain Joseph had forbidden Johnson from attending Mosque No. 7 functions. For weeks Joseph had met with him privately, giving him orders. Johnson was not at all surprised by Malcolm’s murder: “I already knew—John Ali made it known.” He found himself pleased that Malcolm was finally dead.

In Detroit, at Nation of Islam Mosque No. 1, Malcolm’s oldest brother, Wilfred X Little, was conducting a service that Sunday afternoon when he received word of the murder. The news shook him terribly, but he went on with the service. At its conclusion, he solemnly announced to the congregation that Malcolm had been assassinated. Some in the audience had known his brother many years earlier, when he was their energetic assistant minister. “No sense in getting emotional,” Minister Wilfred cautioned his flock. “This is the kind of times we are living in. Once you are dead your troubles are over. It’s those living that’re in trouble.”

And in northern California that Sunday afternoon, Maya Angelou was chatting on the telephone with her girlfriend Ivonne. Angelou recalled that there “was no cheer in [Ivonne’s] voice” when she said, “These Negroes are crazy here. I mean, really crazy. Otherwise why would they have just killed that man in New York?” In disbelief, Angelou managed to place the phone receiver down on a table. She walked into a bedroom and locked the door behind her. “I didn’t have to ask,” she remembered. “I knew ‘that man in New York’ was Malcolm X and that someone had just killed him.” The next morning in bed, her first thought was that she “had returned from Africa to give my energies and wit to the OAAU, and Malcolm was dead.”

CHAPTER 16

Life After Death

T
he shattered remains of Malcolm Little were in the hands of Dr. Milton Helpern on the morning of Monday, February 22, 1965. A veteran medical examiner, Helpern had previously directed more than twelve thousand autopsies and had participated in fifty thousand others. As stenographer Frank Smith transcribed Helpern’s forensic remarks, the autopsy examination proceeded: “The body is that of an adult colored male, six foot three inches tall, scale weight 178 lbs. There is slight frontal baldness. There is a wide mustache brown in color, also a goatee of brown hair with a few gray hairs.” Physically, Malcolm had been in good condition: slender, but muscular. “The hands are well developed. The fingernails are neatly trimmed.” Examining the head, Helpern determined that there were no hemorrhages to the scalp. Malcolm’s brain was “heavy, weighs 1700 grams.” A brain section was taken, which revealed “no abnormalities.”

Helpern surveyed the evidence provided from the multiple gunshot wounds. Much of the damage had been caused by the initial shotgun blast, including two wounds on the right forearm, two more in the right hand. The full force of the blast perforated the chest, cutting into “the thoracic cavity, the left lung, pericardium, heart, aorta, right lung.” Handgun bullet wounds pockmarked the rest of the body: several in the left leg, a slug shattering the left index and middle fingers, a slug fragment embedded into the right side of his chin, a “bullet wound of [the] left thigh” that extended “through the innominate bone into the peritoneal cavity, penetrating the intestines and the mesentery and aorta.” Helpern methodically counted twenty-one separate wounds, ten of which had been from the initial blast. The forensic evidence indicated that three different guns had been used—a sawed-off shotgun, a 9mm automatic, and a .45 caliber handgun, probably a Luger. Helpern set aside a number of slugs and bullets for further testing by the NYPD’s ballistics bureau.

The NYPD’s narrative about Malcolm’s murder was simple. The slaying was the culmination of an almost yearlong feud between two black hate groups. The NYPD had two priorities in conducting its investigation: first, to protect the identities of its undercover police officers and informants, like Gene Roberts; and second, to make successful cases against NOI members with histories of violence. Its hasty and haphazard treatment of forensic evidence at the crime scene suggested that it had little interest in solving the actual homicide.

From the outset, the NYPD focused its attention on Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson, the two NOI lieutenants they believed had participated in the shooting of Benjamin Brown in the Bronx. The department’s hypothesis in the Malcolm killing was that Butler was the second gunman along with Hayer. Johnson was supposedly the shotgun shooter, despite that he was about four inches taller and fairer complexioned than the very dark, stocky Willie Bradley. Still, the police’s suspicions were not entirely without merit. Several OAAU and MMI members placed either Butler or Johnson in the Audubon on the day of the shooting. George Matthews, a member of both groups, informed an NYPD detective that “Butler looks like one of the men who had been engaged in the argument but that he would not swear to this.” An “unspecified number” of other eyewitnesses viewed Butler in lineups, and two claimed that he had been inside the Grand Ballroom on the day of the shooting.

Yet the most intriguing piece of evidence against Butler came from Sharon 6X Poole, the eighteen-year-old OAAU secretary with whom Malcolm had been secretly involved in the previous weeks. Only minutes after the shooting, she told a news interviewer that one of the assassins was definitely a member of Harlem Mosque No. 7. Sharon had been sitting in the first row when the shooting began, and had fallen to the floor like nearly everyone else. She was still able to identify one of the assassins, she claimed, as a man wearing a brown suit who was an NOI member from Harlem.

On February 26 police arrested Butler at his home and drove him to a station house to be questioned, prompting the
Times
and newspapers across the country to assert that the NYPD was solving the case. The next day, without being contacted by the police first, Sharon 6X phoned the NYPD and presented what appeared to be a convincing story. Again, she explained that she had been seated in the front row when the shooting started. She “observed Malcolm get shot, place his hands across his chest, and then fall backwards.” One of the shooters who sprinted past her with a gun in his hand looked like “the pictures of Norman Butler” she had seen in newspapers. She described Butler as “thirty-five years, five foot eleven inches, or six foot, medium build, 170 pounds, brown skin. . . . [The] subject was firing his gun in all directions in an attempt to get out of the premises.” Sharon 6X also told the police that MMI “guards were all ordered not to have any guns, that is all except Reuben Francis.”

Her statements focused attention on Harlem Mosque No. 7, yet police never examined Sharon’s possible connections with Newark mosque members. After entering the Grand Ballroom on the afternoon of the assassination, Sharon 6X had sat in the front row next to Linwood X Cathcart, an NOI member from New Jersey whose presence perturbed the MMI members who recognized him. The seating arrangement may have been a coincidence, but subsequent evidence concerning Sharon and Cathcart makes this hard to believe. More than forty years after the assassination, Cathcart and Sharon 6X Poole Shabazz live together in the same New Jersey residence, and Shabazz has maintained absolute silence about her relationships with both Malcolm X and Cathcart.

A grand jury was impaneled on March 1, and the New York district attorney’s office vigorously presented its theory that only three men—Hayer, Johnson, and Butler—had committed the murder. Johnson was arrested on March 3. He, too, was placed in the Audubon by eyewitnesses. Photojournalist Earl Grant divulged important details to the NYPD about the murder that had been confided in him by a fellow MMI member, Charles X Blackwell, one of the rostrum guards during the assassination. On March 8, Grant told police that Blackwell observed one assassin “fleeing from the chair area to the ladies room located on the east side of the ballroom.” Blackwell “feels that this person [Thomas Johnson] was arrested for this crime—he knows Johnson from previous meetings.” Blackwell also identified “another person who he knows as Benjamin from Paterson or Newark seated about the third row on the left side.” Although the police were pleased that Johnson was placed at the crime scene, the fact that Blackwell had identified Ben X Thomas of the Newark mosque, one of the actual assassins, was not further investigated. On March 10 the grand jury ruled that Hayer, Butler, and Johnson had “willfully, feloniously and of malice aforethought” killed Malcolm X.