2 Men Convicted of Killing Malcolm X Will Be Exonerated After 55 Years

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: New York Times


Norman 3X Butler, left, and Thomas 15X Johnson, right, maintained their innocence, but were convicted in Malcolm X’s killing on the testimony of several eyewitnesses, who told conflicting stories. There was no physical evidence against them.Credit...Photographs by Associated Press


Two of the men found guilty of the assassination of Malcolm X are expected to have their convictions thrown out on Thursday, the Manhattan district attorney and lawyers for the two men said, rewriting the official history of one of the most notorious murders of the civil rights era. The exoneration of the two men, Muhammad A. Aziz and Khalil Islam, represents a remarkable acknowledgment of grave errors made in a case of towering importance: the 1965 murder of one of America’s most influential Black leaders in the fight against racism.

A 22-month investigation conducted jointly by the Manhattan district attorney’s office and lawyers for the two men found that prosecutors and two of the nation’s premier law enforcement agencies — the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the New York Police Department — had withheld key evidence that, had it been turned over, would likely have led to the men’s acquittal. The two men, known at the time of the killing as Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson, spent decades in prison for the murder on Feb. 21, 1965, in which three men opened fire inside a crowded ballroom at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan as Malcolm X was starting to speak.

But the case against them was questionable from the outset, and in the decades since, historians and hobbyists have raised doubts about the official story. The review, launched as an explosive documentary about the assassination and a new biography renewed interest in the case, did not identify who prosecutors now believe really killed Malcolm X, and those who were previously implicated but never arrested are dead. Nor did it uncover a police or government conspiracy to murder him. It also leaves unanswered questions about how and why the police and the federal government failed to prevent the assassination.

But the acknowledgment by Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney who is among the nation’s most prominent local prosecutors, rewrites one of the most painful moments in modern American history. And at a time when racism and discrimination in the criminal justice system are once again the focus of a national protest movement, it reveals a bitter truth: that two of the people convicted of killing Malcolm X — Black Muslim men hastily arrested and tried on shaky evidence — were themselves victims of the very discrimination and injustice that he denounced in language that has echoed across the decades.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/17/nyregion/malcolm-x-killing-exonerated.html

[Hugh_Lebowski]

1. Well that's trippy ... are they still alive? nt

[Tomconroy]

2. Huh. I'll have to reread 'At Canaan's Edge' which covered this.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X was a pretty compelling book.
Somebody killed him. I'll just keep my thoughts to myself for now.

[Tomconroy]

3. The whole article was pretty interesting. I guess Mr. Aziz apparently

Is still alive. There was a third man arrested who confessed on the witness stand and exhonerated these two. The article does identify another man as a likely suspect. He was connected to the Newark mosque while these two were connected to the Harlem one. That sort of fits with what I remember reading.