Murdered 60 years ago: the radical freedom fighter

In the US civil rights movement, Malcom X represented the militant counterpart to Martin Luther King (1929-1968), who preached violent resistance. While King formulated his dream from a peaceful path to a nation without a racial discrimination, Malcolm X saw violence as a very tried and tested means of ending the “American nightmare” and defending himself against the oppression of the African American population. His murder at a public appearance on February 21, 1965 in New York is still the subject of numerous speculations and conspiracy theories.

The fact that the political activist became the most angry man in the United States at the time has a lot to do with the experience he had to have at a young age. Malcolm X was born on May 19, 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska as Malcolm Little. His father, Earl Little (1890-1931), was a Baptist lay preacher who was also active in the “Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL)”, an organization that was the global support of people with African Ledge on the flags and, among other things, an emigration of all African Americans to Africa.

In 1929 the family moved to Lansing near Detroit, where the father bought a house in a white preferred area. When the sale was to be reversed a few weeks later due to the skin color of his family, he went to court. After the house went into flames in a mysterious way, Earl Little accused white of arson – which probably also corresponded to the facts. However, the police, characterized by racism, did not follow these allegations, but preferred to arrest and harass the desperate father.

In 1931 Earl Little was run over by a tram and was killed. However, it was clear to his surviving family that it was not an accident. It seemed much more obvious that the father, known as a political activist, was beaten up by white racists and then placed on the rails. An insurance company in which Earl Little had taken out life insurance classified his death brazenly as a suicide and refused to pay.

In the years, too, Malcolm Little’s youth was not a good star and was characterized by traumatic experiences with institutional racism. After the death of her husband, his mother Louise increasingly got into a psychological imbalance and suffered a total nervous breakdown in 1938 when a new relationship failed. After she was instructed to a state nerve clinic by court order, her seven children first came to Heimen and were later accommodated for foster families.

In school, Malcolm convinced with outstanding intelligence and good grades, but had to be frustrated frustrated after completing the high school that he would be denied a degree due to his skin color. In 1941 he moved to his sister to Boston, where he initially kept afloat with occasional jobs, but soon slipped into crime. In 1944 he came to court for the first time after stolen and sold a fur coat. After a few burglaries, he was arrested in 1946 and sentenced to ten years in prison, of which he was six.

Malcolm Little used this prison period intensively to continue developing autodidactically. In his studies, he was primarily concerned with the areas of philosophy and history, and he also trained his rhetorical skills in debating groups. According to legend, he wrote down entire foreign words in his cell to raise his language level. During his imprisonment, he also got to know his brother Philbert’s letters with the religious-political organization “Nation of Islam”, to whose highly spokesman he was supposed to rise after his early discharge in 1952.

The organization led by civil rights activist Elijah Muhammad (1897-1975) pursued a liberation program that was fundamentally different from Martin Luther King’s approach. Instead of striving for peaceful integration of African Americans into the white majority population, Muhammad propagated a separatism based on race.

Among other things, the demands of the association, which is also known as “Black Muslims”, included a separate state for African Americans on US territory. While Martin Luther King was aiming for a departure from prevailing racism, the “Nation of Islam”, in turn, developed a separate racist program under the keyword “Black Supemacy” (“Black Degend”) that the superiority of the black breed propagated over the white. After his prison, Malcolm Little found a new home in this organization and a kind of replacement father in her leader Elijah Muhammad.

Since the “Nation of Islam” only regarded the last name of every African American as the name that was once imposed on his ancestors by slave owners, their members demonstratively remove them and replace them with a simple X that stood for their actual surname has been stolen in the past. Malcolm Little did the same and now called himself Malcolm X. Under this new name, he soon rose in the organization and became the most prominent spokesman.

In this position, the angry young man put no reconciliation with the white majority population, but rather the retaliation for injustice suffered. In addition, he summons the right of oppressed blacks on self -defense against the prevailing racial discrimination and did not rule out violence as a legitimate means in his struggle for freedom. His militant perspective made numerous speeches and writings clear. Among other things, it said: “I think it is a crime if someone who is exposed to brutal violence will put up with this violence without doing anything for his own defense Gandhi’s philosophy that teaches us, then I call this philosophy criminal. “

Another handed down quote from the early 1960s, “if you are not ready to die, then pranks the word ‘freedom’ from the vocabulary”, Malcolm X would soon catch up with dramatic way – but differently than he imagines this had. At the end of 1963 there was a break with the head of organization Elijah Muhammad, which was accused of corruption and enrichment. Further conflicts arose from Muhammad’s numerous extramarital relationships that Malcolm X publicly addressed. After commenting on the murder of John F. Kennedys (1917-1963) with malicious words, he also received a temporary ban on speaking that finally prompted him to exit the “Nation of Islam” in March 1964.

Malcolm X decided to continue his freedom struggle with his own organization, which he called the name “Muslim Mosque Inc.” gave and for which he provided for an orientation towards orthodox Islamic principles. Before he started with this new organization, Malcolm X went on a pilgrimage to Mecca, which left him a lasting impression and let him move away from his idea of ​​the “Black Supremacy”. After a four -month journey through Africa, in which he was looking for contact with anti -olonial fighter, he returned to the USA.

Due to anonymous death threats, Malcolm X, who had now renamed El Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, was under police protection, which could not prevent, however, the unknown person in February 1965 carried out an arson attack on his house, which he with his wife Betty Shabazz (1936 -1997) and his six daughters barely escaped. In interviews, he expressed his conviction that the “Nation of Islam” would have been targeting him in order to avenge his break with her guide. Just a week after the devastating arson attack, this fear should become sad reality.

On February 21, he gave a speech in the Audubon Ballroom in New York when two listeners suddenly started a loud argument. When his boyguards took care of the troublemakers, another man stepped in front of the stage and fired with a sawn -off shotgun directly on Malcolm X. Two other assassins also fired on the civil rights activists lying on the ground, in which the forensic doctor later found a total of 21 gunshot wounds. The explosion of a smoke bomb caused additional chaos and enabled two assassins. Only one of the attackers, the “Nation of Islam” member Thomas Hagan (now 83), could be recorded until the police arrived.

After his arrest, the then 23-year-old confessed the attack, but described two other men who were identified by the police as accomplices. Muhammad A. Aziz and Khalil Islam, who also asserted their innocence in court, were sentenced to long -term prison terms despite thin evidence and were only released again in the mid -1980s. After the turn of the millennium, however, new documents came to light that suggested that the FBI and the New York police were actively involved in the assassination attempt. In addition, the participation of the two alleged accomplices seemed increasingly unlikely.

In 2021, the New York public prosecutor had the guilt against the two of them after an approximately two -year investigation and admitted “serious judicial crowns”. In November 2022, the families of Aziz and Islam were finally awarded a compensation of $ 36 million. The exact circumstances of the assassination remain in the dark to this day – and continue to offer fabric for dark conspiracy theories.