The Assassination of Malcolm X

Malcolm X was shot and killed on February 21, 1965, while beginning a speech to a gathering of the Organization of Afro-American Unity at the Audubon Ballroom in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. As his wife, Betty Shabazz, and their four young daughters watched from the front rows, a man rushed the stage with a sawed-off shotgun and fired, and two more gunmen followed with a pistol and a semi-automatic weapon. He was pronounced dead at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital shortly afterward, at age 39.

The killing came roughly three months after Malcolm returned from the second and longer of his two 1964 trips through Africa and the Middle East, a five-and-a-half-month journey that had ended on November 24, 1964. During that trip he had addressed the Organisation of African Unity’s summit in Cairo, met numerous African heads of state, and deepened his break from the Nation of Islam, the organization he had left the previous March amid an increasingly bitter and public rupture with its leader, Elijah Muhammad.

Three Nation of Islam members were charged with the murder: Talmadge Hayer (also known as Mujahid Abdul Halim), Muhammad A. Aziz, and Khalil Islam. At the 1966 trial, Hayer confessed to firing on Malcolm but insisted that Aziz and Islam were not involved and had not been present. All three were nonetheless convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Aziz and Islam maintained their innocence for decades. In November 2021, following a joint reinvestigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the Innocence Project that turned up FBI and NYPD records withheld from the original defense, both men’s convictions were vacated. Islam had died in 2009; Aziz, then 83, lived to see his name cleared.

Suspicion has long circled the Nation of Islam’s current leader, Louis Farrakhan, over his rhetoric in the weeks before the killing. Writing in the Nation’s newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, in December 1964, Farrakhan, then a rising minister named Louis X, denounced Malcolm as a traitor and warned that “such a man is worthy of death.” Farrakhan has repeatedly and publicly denied any direct role in planning or carrying out the assassination itself. In a 1993 interview and again in later statements, he acknowledged that his words may have helped create the climate that led to the killing, saying he regretted that “any word that I have said” contributed to Malcolm’s death, while continuing to reject claims that he ordered or participated in the murder. No court has ever found Farrakhan legally responsible for the assassination, and the extent of any organizational role by Nation of Islam leadership beyond the three men convicted, and later two of them exonerated, remains a matter of historical dispute rather than settled fact.