Malcolm X’s Alleged Killer Has Been Walking Around Free For Years… Will Biography Finally Help Bring Justice??? - Page 3

This is a damn shame. This man has been dead for almost 50 years and all that potential evidence has just been ignored.

“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.”

Dr. Marable, a historian at Columbia University, died days before the publication of the book, “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.”

The effort to reopen the case has attracted the attention of the nation’s most persistent advocate of civil rights-era justice, Alvin Sykes of Kansas City, Mo. Mr. Sykes was instrumental in the reopening of the investigation into the killing of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955 and in persuading Congress to allocate millions of dollars to the investigation of civil rights cold cases. Mr. Sykes has asked both the Justice Department and, this week, the New York State attorney general “to conduct the most comprehensive and credible search by the government for the truth concerning Malcolm X’s assassination.”

Ilyasah Shabazz, one of Malcolm X’s six daughters, is supporting the call to reopen the case despite her objections to the biography, which paints a bleak picture of her parents’ marriage. Leith Mullings, the author’s widow, is also asking for a new investigation.

And now there is all this confusion over which law enforcement agency should be responsible for a new investigation if the case is reopened. Most civil rights advocates seem in favor of someone other than the NYPD handling the case, since they bungled it the first time, but federal agencies are skittish about the prospect because it’s not a clear cut hate crime scenario.

But there are limitations on other agencies’ ability to investigate. For one, it is not clear if the killing could be considered a civil rights crime because both the perpetrators and the victims are black.

Mr. Garrow said the definition of a civil rights crime should not be too narrow. “When a major civil rights leader is assassinated, I’d like the civil rights division to be interested, regardless of the color of the gunman,” he said, referring to the federal unit.

Some experts say the Justice Department’s participation is crucial because the F.B.I. and the New York Police Department had Malcolm X under surveillance at the time of his death, raising questions about whether law enforcement officials had knowledge beforehand of the assassination plot.

Still, the Justice Department may not have any jurisdiction, and the department has only occasionally investigated without it — in 1998, for example, then-Attorney General Janet Reno ordered a limited review of the King assassination after pressure from the family and the public.

The New York attorney general may investigate only if asked by the Manhattan district attorney or the governor. But cases that are decades old are not easy to solve, said Doug Jones, a former United States attorney in Birmingham, Ala., who helped prosecute the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in which four girls died. “A lot of people think witnesses come forward after so many years have passed,” he said, “but they don’t.”

JUSTICE FOR MALCOLM!!! We need to expose the shortcomings of all these shady law enforcement agencies and find out the truth.

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