To the 3940 Broadway, the silhouette of the Audobon Ballroom hides, in the traffic of November, all the stories of the suo past. Commissioned in 1912 as a 2500-seat theater by producer William Fox, the Audobon housed up to two hundred dancers on the second floor, twirling in two-steps and fox trots. It was then variety, cinema, venue for fiery union congresses. Today it is incorporated, between 165th Street and Harlem, in the biotechnology center of Columbia University, and the nerdy researchers just look up towards the door, home of the Shabazz Center, museum in memory of Malcolm X, leader of African American civil rights, later called el- Hajj Malik el-Shabazz.
At the Audobon, on February 21, 1965, during a rally, Malcolm X was riddled with revolvers, aged 39, in front of the crowd, his wife and young children terrified, by three killers, immediately vanished. Three militants of the Nation of Islam, an Islamic sect to which Malcolm X had joined in prison, were sentenced for the murder, only to break up with the founder Elijah Muhammad, disillusioned by his bleak nationalism.
Today two of the defendants of the time, Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson, were exonerated by Manhattan’s chief prosecutor, Cyrus Vance jr, for failing to commit the crime. Butler, who later adopted the name of Muhammad Aziz, is 83 years old, of which 20 spent in maximum security prisons at the time of the racist repression against the Black Panthers which culminated in the Attica massacre in 1971, 43 dead. Johnson, who had chosen Khalil Islam as his name, remained, without blame, in jail until 1987, for 22 years, dying in 2009. The two were, belatedly recognizes the judiciary, victims of a conspiracy between the FBI, the police and the nation of Islam, jealous that Malcolm X had risen to international fame, convinced by the pilgrimage to Mecca to abandon the idea that whites were “devils” and willing to dialogue with the moderate leader of human rights, Reverend King.
The third convicted, confessed guilty who tried, in vain, to exonerate the innocent Butler and Johnson, was Talmadge Hayer, later called Mujahid Abdul Halim, a member of the Newark, New Jersey community who hated Malcolm X as a “traitor.” The judiciary now believes that Hayer-Halim, in league with another Newark nationalist, William Bradley, a former Marine, thug and weapons expert, killed Malcolm X, while the Audobon Room was propounding agents provocateurs from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Police Department. “With deep sorrow” – the two innocents respectively had six and three children grown up without a father – the prosecutor Vance acknowledges that the testimonies were rigged, an Audobon switchboard operator was with Butler on the phone, at home, well away from the crime scene, others defense witnesses were not summoned, Bradley, who in Newark on the street was listed as the real killer of Malcolm X, was never questioned.
Edgar Hoover, almighty chief of the Fbthe from 1935 until his death in 1972, he wanted to suppress the black movement at any cost, for years he intercepted and harassed ML King, killed the Black Panthers and considered the charisma of Malcolm X pernicious, while the United States was suspended between the war in Vietnam and reforms by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. That Malcolm X fell at the hands of his associates, blacks and militants like him, not a white racist like King in 1968, was for Hoover a perfect plot, whites would have said “their stuff …”, blacks would not have a wave of protest has been raised.
To reopen the investigation of VancAnd a magnificent documentary, aired on Netflix by Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, which in stringent sequences exposes the FBI plot, the complicity of prosecutors, the silence of the Islam Nation, costing the death of Malcolm X and the destruction of life of the defendants and their families. For a long time activists, reporters and documentary makers had tried to exonerate the accused, finally they succeeded, too late for the crushed destinies, in time for at least history to take note. When one thinks about the racism inherent in the past of the United States, at school and its media, therefore one does not fall at all – as some wig, in Europe and in the USA, subsumes – in the “politically correct” corrivo, the truth is expounded, which today , in the comings and goings at 3940 Broadway, Audobon Ballroom, reappears inescapable, as in that February of fire and lies in 1965. Instagram @gianniriotta
Unlimited access to all site content
€ 1 / month for 3 months, then € 3.99 / month for 3 months
Unlock unlimited access to all content on the site
#Malcolm #mystery #falls