Remembrances of the Assassination of Brother Malcolm X By A. Peter Bailey

Feb. 15, 2015

Remembrances of the Assassination of Brother Malcolm X
By A. Peter Bailey

SPECIAL COMMENTARY

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A. Peter Bailey, shown here in conversation with Malcolm X, was a charter member of his Organization of Afro-American Unity and editor of the organization's newsletter.

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Malcolm X

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - I was in the Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965, the day Brother Malcolm X was assassinated, a murder that I believed then and still believe today resulted from a collaboration of elements in the leadership of the Nation of Islam, the New York City Police Department and the FBI. Below are excerpts exactly as written in a 1965 essay that I wrote during the three days following the assassination:

Brother Malcolm X has been assassinated. Once again, as has happened many times in U.S. history, a black man who was considered a threat to the white racist system has been murdered by other black men. Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Marcus Garvey and countless other black leaders were all destroyed by blacks working in alliance with the white power structure. We have to assume that it was an alliance because the FBI and local police forces and the press have constantly bragged that they have infiltrated the Black Muslim movement, thus they know every move the Black Muslims make. If this be true, and they are the ones who made the claims, then they were either lying about the infiltration or they knew that Bro. Malcolm’s life was in danger and made no attempt to stop the plotters…

The FBI and the police force have almost completely immobilized the Communist Party with successful infiltration; only recently they and the NYC police force were able to infiltrate a small group of black men and accuse them of plotting the bombing of certain monuments. Yet now they and the press want us to believe that an organization, which both claimed had been infiltrated by agents, plotted a crime of gigantic magnitude without the infiltrator finding out about it? It is no doubt that if the Black Muslims had planned to bomb or assassinate Wagner or some other comparable figures, they would have been halted before any such plan could succeed.

There are many of us who believe that there are others who desired the death of Bro. Malcolm. For instance, those people who had him banned from France, those same people who worried about the effects of his trips abroad, those same people who dreaded the consequences of his trips south. He had spoken in Alabama and was due to speak in Mississippi. These people also would benefit from the removal of Malcolm X. He didn’t fit their pattern. He didn’t waste time criticizing Wallace, Barnett, Clark, Bull Conner and other individual villains speaking for white supremacy.

He recognized that these men were products of an evil system, a system which has, for over 350 years, treated non-white people as sub-humans. He recognized that the above individuals were able to operate so freely because the system allowed them to do so. …

Bro. Malcolm saw those things occurring and recognizing that the federal government was either unable or unwilling to protect the lives and property of black people, he called for a new approach. Domestically, he told black people to unite and adopt a program of self-defense; internationally, he called for black people to look elsewhere for allies in the struggle for human rights. He said that our struggle is only a part of the worldwide struggle where formerly oppressed people are throwing off oppression and asserting themselves. He told us to make use of the U.N., especially the Commission on Human Rights, as other minority groups have done, most notably the Russian Jews.

He traveled throughout Africa, the Middle East and Europe telling any group who would listen that black people in the U.S. needed their help in their struggle for human rights. He felt that Afro-Americans have a psychological complex about being a minority and that if they tied their struggle to the struggles of oppressed people throughout the world, it would help them, psychologically, in their own struggle.

These two approaches by Bro. Malcolm, the call for self-defense and the internationalizing of the racial struggle, profoundly disturbed the power structure and their allies. …

The press gleefully took his words out of context and tried to paint him as a monster when reporting his death. They claimed credit for there even being a Malcolm X. They scoffed at him by saying that he had a handful of followers, and, as one said, he had built up a myth. They were practically dancing over his body. The New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune, those pious, hypocritical prostitutes of the daily press, gave Zeus-like editorial about what a terrible man he was, the Herald Tribune saying that he was no loss to the Civil Rights Movement.

It must be said that the press devoted a fantastic amount of space and time to the death of such an “insignificant” man. Their very press coverage of his death and the reaction of the people and other leaders showed that the Human Rights Movement suffered a considerable loss with the assassination of this articulate, forceful black man.

He presented an image that white America is not used to seeing in black men. They resented and feared not only what he was doing, but even more so the potential of what he could do in the future. Bro. Malcolm pointed this out very clearly when he told an antagonist on a radio program that if people like him would spend more time helping and protecting the Rev. Martin Luther King and his followers and less time searching for material with which to attack him and other nationalists, the U.S. would be a better place to live.

Fifty years later, I stand by those words written by a then angry, grief-stricken 26-year- old supporter of Brother Malcolm. Efforts have been made by various sources to ignore, demean or downgrade his brilliant and memorable legacy. They have been unsuccessful.

In fact, if we, as Black folks would follow the Master Teacher’s wise, thought-provoking, concrete guidelines on how to most effectively promote and protect our cultural, economic and political interests in what is basically still a White supremacist society, we would be much further along in the drive for equal rights, equal justice and equal opportunity.

A. Peter Bailey, whose most recent book is Witnessing Brother Malcolm X, the Master Teacher, was a charter member of the Organization of Afro-American Unity founded by Malcolm X. He was the editor of its newsletter.

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