For decades, the killing of Malcolm X has captivated the attention of scholars with a critical question: Were the wrong men convicted of the crime?
One of three men, Mujahid Abdul Halim, confessed at the 1966 murder trial. But he also testified that his co-defendants — Muhammad A. Aziz and Khalil Islam — were innocent and that he knew but would not name the actual assassins.
A decade later, Halim gave two sworn affidavits as part of an unsuccessful appeal by Aziz and Islam. In the documents, he named four other men who he said took part in the assassination, all members of a Nation of Islam mosque in Newark, New Jersey. He gave only partial names.
The review by the Manhattan district attorney’s office did not pin the crime on any other suspects. But scholars have formed their own conclusions about the identities and roles of the four men identified by Halim, who previously went by the name Talmadge Hayer.
It is widely believed among experts on the assassination that William Bradley, a member of the Newark mosque who once served time in prison on charges that included threatening to kill three people, fired the first shotgun blast. Halim identified the man with the shotgun as William X. Bradley denied any involvement and died in 2018.
Historian Manning Marable, who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Malcolm X in 2011, suspected that Bradley was probably pulled into the assassination plot by two other members of the Newark mosque whom Halim identified: Leon Davis and Benjamin Thomas.
Marable theorized that Davis and Thomas were most likely directed by a minister at the mosque to plan the assassination after Malcolm X returned to the United States from a trip abroad in 1964 and eventually enlisted the other men.
Most historians have concluded that Davis was seated with Halim in the first row of the ballroom, and they began firing handguns at the leader after the shotgun blast hit him.
At the time, Davis was about 20; lived in Paterson, New Jersey; and worked at an electronics plant. His name appears in a previously undisclosed 1965 FBI report that says a New York police lieutenant was looking for him, the district attorney’s investigators said. It is unclear what that search yielded.
Thomas, who died in 1986, was 29 and an assistant secretary at the Newark mosque at the time of the assassination. It was at his home on the day before the killing, Marable wrote, that the team members ironed out details of the plot, including that Bradley would fire the first round.
Historians like Baba Zak Kondo believe that the fifth man involved was Wilbur McKinley, a 30-year-old construction worker at the time who is probably now dead. In an affidavit, Halim said a man named “Wilbur” or “Kinly” had created a diversion at the back of the ballroom before the shooting, igniting a furled sock as a makeshift smoke bomb.
Still, historians emphasize that other details of the plot are as significant as the men who they believe were directly responsible for carrying it out. It remains a matter of debate who ordered and planned the killing.
“The question is not simply the other four men who did kill Malcolm,” David Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights historian, says in the second part of a Netflix documentary series about the assassination. “The more historically crucial questions are, who else in Newark, in New York and most essentially, in Chicago, were active participants in arranging Malcolm’s murder?”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .