For decades, [U.S. government agencies and the NYPD] viewed Black activism as a threat to national security, resulting in the unchecked targeting of prominent leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Marcus Garvey. This lawsuit seeks accountability for the systemic negligence and intentional actions that deprived Malcolm X’s family and the world of his life and legacy.” — Civil rights attorney Ben Crump

Six days before Malcolm X was gunned down at the Audubon Ballroom in New York, an undercover NYPD detective told the department he’d seen “a dry run” of Malcolm X’s assassination, which he believed would happen on the upcoming Sunday.

The next day, two members of Malcolm X’s security team were arrested and detained in connection with a bogus plot to bomb the Statue of Liberty. Malcolm X’s daughters charged in a lawsuit filed tNov. 15 that the arrests were coordinated by the NYPD and federal law enforcement agencies “to weaken Malcolm X’s security, which knowingly facilitated his assassination.”

In a letter written in 2011 and unveiled after his death in 2020, the undercover officer who drew the men into the plot wrote, “It was my assignment to draw the two men into a felonious federal crime, so that they could be arrested by the FBI and kept away from managing Malcolm X’s Audubon Ballroom door security on Feb. 21, 1965.”

The lawsuit pulls together years of systemic and institutional corruption within the NYPD, the FBI, and the CIA.

A swift settlement would allow these agencies to draw the curtain on an ugly period of rank injustice and usher in a new era of integrity and decency.

Accusations of conspiracy and corruption have surrounded Malcolm X’s assassination from the moment the bullets were fired. Earl Grant, a close associate, wrote of the immediate aftermath, “Here were New York City policemen, entering a room from which at least a dozen shots had been heard, and yet not one of them had his gun out! As a matter of absolute fact, some of them even had their hands in their pockets.”

Two of the men who were convicted of the murder, Muhammad A. Aziz and KhalilIslam, were exonerated last year after an investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office determined that the NYPD and FBI withheld key evidence that likely would have led to their acquittal.

Mujahid Abdul Halim, who confessed to the murder at trial, has always insisted Aziz and Islam were innocent. He initially declined to name his co-conspirators but later identified them as Leon Davis, Benjamin Thomas, and two men whose full names he did not know, “William X” and “Wilbur or Kinly.”

The Manhattan D.A.’s investigation did not confirm the guilt of those men or outline a conspiracy among local and federal agencies. But the lawsuit claims the reason Malcolm X was denied entry into France 12 days before his assassination was that French authorities had learned of a CIA plot to murder him and feared he would be “liquidated” on French soil.

The CIA’s unofficial motto is the Biblical verse, “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” Until these agencies acknowledge the truth surrounding Malcolm X’s assassination, we cannot truly claim to be free.

The writer is the president and CEO of the National Urban League.