Malcolm’s murder, almost certainly at the hands of the Black Muslims from whom he had defected, came on a bright Sunday afternoon in full view of 400 Negroes in the Audubon Ballroom, a seedy two-story building on Manhattan’s upper Broadway. In fact, Malcolm X -in life and in death-was a disaster to the civil rights movement. Negro leaders called him “brilliant,” said he had recently “moderated” his views, blamed his assassination on “the white power structure” or, in the case of Martin Luther King, on a “society sick enough to express dissent with murder.” Malcolm’s death, they agreed, was a setback to the civil rights movement.Īlias John Doe. Yet even before his bullet-ripped body went to its grave, Malcolm X was being sanctified.
