This article was on Gab this morning. The guy who posted it had a good summary:
“2 Men Convicted Of Murdering Malcolm X In 1965 To Be Exonerated. 9 of the “witnesses” were FBI agents. Big surprise, right? FBI and NYPD withheld key evidence in this case that would likely have led to an acquittal for these 2 men.”
There are black people so skeptical of government you sometimes think it borders on the irrational. Yeah? Not when you look at it from their point of view. Take for example MLK. Its come out in recent years that the FBI performed unwarranted surveillance on Dr King. They waged a psychological war on him through his wife. And who knows how many other things?
The black community knew about it from the git go. Its for white people that it took over 50 years to “come out”. In this case with Malcolm X, when a mainstream outlet like CBS News goes on record and claims the FBI and NYPD withheld information critical to the case, you can pretty well believe that’s what happened.
Just from a crime scene point of view, its fascinating that the venue, a theater/ballroom went ahead and was used for a dance that night. The podium that Malcolm was standing at, riddled by buckshot (the movie has the assassins using shotguns) was tossed in the basement and sat for 20 years.
The FBI and NYPD had no intention of performing a thorough investigation. Its hard to explain now but the government feared the civil rights movement. They looked at it (swear to God) as something that could destabilize and overthrow them. I shit you not. I did not grasp the extent of their paranoia, until I heard with my own ears an Iowan who was a soldier stationed in the DC area on August 28, 1963.
This Iowa soldier said he and something like 50,000 other soldiers were stationed in full battle gear blocks away from the National Mall when MLK gave his ‘I Have A Dream Speech’ (“19,000 troops put on standby in the D.C. suburbs”). They had so little understanding of King’s non-violent approach, that they literally feared an uprising that day.
After the event, FBI official William Sullivan wrote that King’s “powerful, demagogic speech” meant that “we must mark him now…as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation.” – History dot com
As an interesting side note showing the power of words, I ran across this fascinating tidbit. The speech by King so impressed Kennedy that it helped pass the civil rights legislation that was struggling in Congress.
[“At the FBI’s urging, Attorney General Robert Kennedy authorized the installation of wiretaps on King’s phone and those at the offices of his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), ostensibly to look into potential communist ties. The FBI later stepped up its surveillance of King, which lasted until his assassination in 1968.” – now tell the black community that they’re just being paranoid. The government could not grasp that people would take a dim view of not being able to vote, ride in the front of a bus, drink from the same fountain, swim in the same pool, go to the same school, as white people.]
Politics and Religion 