The family of Malcolm X, the militant civil rights leader who was assassinated almost 60 years ago, filed a $100m federal lawsuit on Friday that accuses the FBI, the CIA and the New York police department (NYPD) of allowing his murder.
The lawsuit, brought by Malcolm X’s daughter Ilyasah Shabazz and other family members, alleges the law enforcement agencies concealed evidence they knew of the plot to kill him but did not act to stop it.
“We believe that they all conspired to assassinate Malcolm X, one of the greatest thought leaders of the 20th century,” Ben Crump, a civil rights attorney who is representing the family, said at a press conference.
The wrongful death lawsuit was announced at a memorial center on the site in New York City where Malcolm X was killed in 1965. It seeks to answer questions surrounding the assassination, and paint an accurate history of the events, Crump said.
It is also intended to bring reparations to the family. There was no comment from the FBI, the CIA or the NYPD by Friday afternoon.
“This cover up spanned decades, blocking the Shabazz family’s access to the truth and their right to pursue justice,” said Crump in a statement. “We are making history by standing here to confront those wrongs and seeking accountability in the courts.”
Malcolm X became prominent as the national spokesperson of the Nation of Islam, an African American Muslim group that espoused Black separatism.
After more than a decade with the group, he publicly broke with it in 1964. He moderated some of his earlier views on racial separation, angering some Nation of Islam members and drawing death threats.
Talmadge Hayer, then a member of the Nation of Islam, confessed in court to being one of the three assassins. But speculation that the government may have been aware of the assassination plan and allowed it to happen has persisted for decades.
Shabazz was two on 21 February 1965, when she, her mother and her siblings witnessed her father being shot and killed while preparing to speak at New York’s Audubon Ballroom in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.
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