Biography Revives Push to Reopen Malcolm X Case

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Source: The New York Times

The death of Malcolm X, shot dead at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem in 1965, never inflamed the public imagination in the same way the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did. But scholars have long believed that a bungled investigation resulted in the imprisonment of the innocent and allowed some of those responsible to go free. Over the decades, efforts to reopen the case have failed.

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.”

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/23/nyregion/biography-helps-renew-calls-to-investigate-malcolm-x-assassination.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all