NEW YORK (1010 WINS) — Family members of Malcolm X, the Black civil rights leader who was assassinated in 1956, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the NYPD and FBI for his death, his daughters Qubilah and Ilyasah Shabazz announced at a Manhattan press conference Tuesday.
The press conference announcing the lawsuit was held on the 58th anniversary of Malcolm X’s death at the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Education Center in Washington Heights. The lawsuit seeks $100 million for concealing evidence of who committed the murder.
"If the government compensated the two gentlemen that were wrongfully convicted for the assassination of Malcolm X with tens of millions of dollars, then what is to be the compensation for the daughters who suffered the most from the assassination of Malcolm X?," said Civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump at the conference.
In 2021, a New York judge exonerated two of the three men convicted of killing Malcolm X after a Manhattan District Attorney’s Office investigation showed the NYPD and FBI withheld key evidence that could have led to acquittal.
Crump implied the family would not settle out of court, instead opting to use the lawsuit as a tool to investigate law enforcement’s role in the killing.
"We intend to have vigorous litigation of this matter, to have discovery, to be able to take depositions of the individuals who are still alive, 58 years later, to make sure that some measure of justice can be given to Malcolm X's daughters," Crump said. "The truth of what happened and who was involved has always been critical."
Crump and Malcolm X’s family have accused the NYPD and FBI of playing a role in the assassination in the past.
Two years ago, the family shared a 2011 deathbed letter written by former NYPD Detective Raymond Wood that claimed NYPD and FBI involvement in the murder.
Wood confessed his supervisors instructed him to entice members of Malcolm X’s security detail to commit crimes, resulting in their arrest just days before the assassination.
"It was my assignment to draw the two men into a felonious federal crime so that they could be arrested by the FBI and kept away from managing Malcolm X's door security on February 21, 1965," he wrote. "At that time, I was not aware that Malcolm X was the target."
The FBI has a history of silencing Black leaders through assassination and subterfuge.
The agency was involved in the assassination of Deputy Chairman of the Black Panther Party Fred Hampton. Agents pressured Martin Luther King Jr. to kill himself by leveraging evidence that he was having an affair attained through FBI surveillance. The FBI opened a file on Malcolm X in 1953 under COINTELPRO, the program to "expose, disrupt, and neutralize'' subversive groups in the U.S.
"The connection between his death and federal and New York government agencies, including the NYPD, FBI and CIA has long been contested," Crump said in a statement ahead of the press conference.
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