Biography Revives Push to Reopen Malcolm X Case

Now a best-selling biography has helped to renew calls for a full investigation. But this time they may well gain traction because the legal environment has changed: prosecutors in the South have demonstrated that it is possible to pursue and win cases that are decades old and, as a byproduct, they have made the failures of the police in the civil rights era abundantly clear.

At the same time, news has emerged that the man long suspected of having fired the shot that killed Malcolm X but who was never arrested is living in Newark under a different name.

“Time is running out; these guys are very old,” said Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, a graduate student at Howard University who first published the identity of the Newark man on his blog and was a source for the biography’s author, Manning Marable. “I wanted justice to be done, and I knew that Dr. Marable wanted justice to be done.”

Dr. Marable, a historian at Columbia University, died days before the publication of the book, “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.”

The effort to reopen the case has attracted the attention of the nation’s most persistent advocate of civil rights-era justice, Alvin Sykes of Kansas City, Mo. Mr. Sykes was instrumental in the reopening of the investigation into the killing of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955 and in persuading Congress to allocate millions of dollars to the investigation of civil rights cold cases. Mr. Sykes has asked both the Justice Department and, this week, the New York State attorney general “to conduct the most comprehensive and credible search by the government for the truth concerning Malcolm X’s assassination.”

The cause has made for strange bedfellows: Ilyasah Shabazz, one of Malcolm X’s six daughters, is supporting the call to reopen the case despite her objections to the biography, which paints a bleak picture of her parents’ marriage. Leith Mullings, the author’s widow, is also asking for a new investigation.

But it will be an uphill battle, partly because three men were convicted at the time, meaning the case is potentially a hybrid of two separate areas of criminal law: a civil rights cold case and a wrongful conviction.

Malcolm X, who became a patron saint of the black power movement and, long after his death, an American icon, knew his life was in danger when he took the stage at the Audubon Ballroom on Feb. 21, 1965. He had broken with the Nation of Islam, which had branded him an enemy and a traitor. A week earlier, his house had been firebombed. As he began to speak, a disturbance broke out in the audience, a smoke bomb went off, and gunmen opened fire.

Thomas Hagan, a member of the Nation of Islam from New Jersey who was then 22, was arrested at the ballroom that day. The police investigated the crime scene for four hours before the blood was mopped up and a planned dance began.

The police later picked up two more Nation of Islam members: Muhammad Abdul Aziz, then known as Norman 3X Butler; and Kahlil Islam, then Thomas 15X Johnson. Both of them had attended a mosque in Harlem. In his book, Dr. Marable says that the Nation of Islam would not have used men from Malcolm X’s own mosque to carry out the killing and that the assassins were from New Jersey.

Mr. Hagan confessed, but always maintained that the other two men were not involved. At the trial, he testified there were other conspirators, but refused to name them. All three men were convicted, but the question of how high the conspiracy went in the Nation of Islam hierarchy — who, in fact, ordered the killing — was never answered.

David Garrow, a historian and a King biographer, obtained and reviewed the Federal Bureau of Investigation files on Malcolm X in the 1990s. He said it was probable that reams of wiretaps of the Nation of Islam had never been combed for clues. In 1980, the bureau said it had never investigated the assassination.

In the late 1970s, Mr. Hagan, also known as Talmadge X Hayer, finally identified his accomplices in an affidavit as part of an unsuccessful effort to free Mr. Butler and Mr. Johnson (all three men have since been paroled).