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By Root 1911 0

shotgun “wrapped in a man’s suit jacket,” had been found lying on a table in the left rear of the stage. Together with other officers they proceeded to comb the vacant ballrooms for additional physical evidence related to the crime. Locations of bullet holes and other ballistics debris were duly marked off, and the NYPD’s photo unit was called up. Investigators also learned that several others had been wounded during the assassination, all of whom were relocated to the hospital, and proceeded to interrogate them. The fifty-one-year-old OAAU member Willie Harris had been sitting three rows from the back of the ballroom when the trouble started. After the barrage of gunshots, he had tried to flee through the ballroom’s main entrance. As he explained to detective James Rushin, “I was hit by a bullet. I then left the hall and went to a patrolman . . . and told him I had been hit.”

NYPD detective James O’Connell took the statement of another man receiving medical attention, thirty-six-year-old William Parker, a building superintendent in Astoria, Queens. Parker had taken his six-year-old son Nathaniel to the rally just “to see what the meeting was all about.” Sitting three rows back from the stage near the middle aisle, he had grabbed his son and dropped to the floor when the first shot was fired. As the fusillade continued, Parker felt a sharp pain in his left foot. It was only after he and the boy walked down the crowded stairwell that he realized that he had been shot. Given the number of bullets fired in an enclosed space, it was remarkable that, apart from minor wounds such as this, Malcolm’s was the sole fatality.

As the remaining MMI and OAAU members still inside the Audubon surveyed the initial stages of the NYPD’s investigation, most officers at the crime scene appeared apathetic about the shooting. Earl Grant recalled that the first police officers who entered the Audubon were “strolling at about the pace one would expect of them if they were patrolling a quiet park. . . . Not one of them had his gun out!” A few cops “even had their hands in their pockets.” As many as 150 members of the audience who had initially fled into the street by now had returned to the Grand Ballroom. One frustrated black man cried out, “There ain’t no goddamn hope for our people in this lousy country. You got to fight them lousy whites and fight the stupid niggahs too.” An elderly West Indian woman confronted reporter Welton Smith: “Don’t you menfolk let them get away with it. They done hurt Malcolm and don’t you let them get away with it. They can’t stop us. And the white man can’t stop us. We know the white man put them up to it.” Another man angrily declared to Smith, “I know the cops had a hand in it. . . . [L]ook how long it took the cops to get up to the hall after this happened. It must have been ten minutes, and it took the ambulance almost half an hour to come from the hospital right across the street. Now you tell me that this wasn’t nothing but coincidence.”

The deep skepticism about the NYPD’s unprofessional behavior was not without merit. Most street cops were contemptuous of Malcolm, whom they considered a dangerous racist demagogue. Many believed that Malcolm had firebombed his own house in some kind of publicity stunt. Besides, they thought, given Malcolm’s incendiary rhetoric, it was inevitable that the black leader would be struck down by the very violence he had promoted. Most police officers generally treated his murder case not as a significant political assassination, but as a neighborhood shooting in the dark ghetto, a casualty from two rival black gangs feuding against each other.

Shortly before four p.m., James 67X returned to the Audubon, where police officers demanded to know where he had been. He replied, “I was going up . . .” Then James asked himself, “How do they know that I left? . . . They must have photographed this whole thing.” Days later the police showed him “a seating plan . . . where everybody was seated in the Audubon Ballroom.” The police demanded that both James and Reuben X accompany them to the