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By Root 1927 0

witnesses, including the capture of one assailant who may have been a BOSS operative. The NYPD and mainstream journalists such as Peter Goldman ridiculed such speculations. Goldman attributed the confusion to the fact that reporters debriefed Officer Thomas Hoy “at the scene and Aronoff at the station house,” not realizing they “were talking about the same man. . . . [T]he confusion lasted long enough to create a whole folklore around the ‘arrest’ of a mysterious second suspect—a mythology that endures to this day.” However, Herman Ferguson’s 2004 account of a second man who had been shot being taken away by the police lends some credence to the “second suspect” theory. If an informant or undercover operative of the FBI or BOSS had been shot, or was part of the assassination team, the police almost certainly never would have permitted his role to become public. Another possibility was the presence of more than one assassination team in the Grand Ballroom that Sunday. Although Ferguson and many eyewitnesses saw three shooters, some observers, including FBI informants, claimed that there were four or even five.

Within twenty-four hours of the assassination, nearly every national civil rights organization had distanced itself from both Malcolm and the bloody events at the Audubon. To Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, Malcolm’s assassination “revealed that our society is still sick enough to express dissent through murder. We have not learned to disagree without being violently disagreeable.” The NAACP leader Roy Wilkins deplored Malcolm’s “gunning down” as a “shocking and ghastly demonstration of the futility of resorting to violence as a means of settling differences.” Speaking on behalf of SNCC, the young desegregation activist Julian Bond informed the New York Times, “I don’t think Malcolm’s death or any man’s death could influence our deep-seated belief in nonviolence.”

From London, James Baldwin responded by linking the crime to the involvement of the U.S. government. “Whoever did it,” he speculated, “was formed in the crucible of the Western world, of the American Republic.” Much more explicit was CORE’s James Farmer, who was well aware of Malcolm’s metamorphosis and had expressed doubts that the leader’s murder was the product of a feud with the Nation of Islam. “I believe that his killing was a political killing,” he declared. It was hardly “accidental that his death came at a time when his views were changing [toward] the mainstream of the civil rights movement.” Farmer’s demand for a “federal inquiry into the murder,” however, found virtually no support. To the public, the Nation of Islam was evidently responsible for the shooting.

Malcolm’s death set off a chain reaction of violence and intimidation that kept his supporters in fear and left his organizations crumbling. On the night of the murder, a fire ignited in Muhammad Ali’s Chicago apartment, but the fire was later determined to have been accidental. Ali informed the press that Malcolm had been his friend “as long as he was a member of [the Nation of] Islam. Now I don’t want to talk about him.” Perhaps still suspicious about his apartment fire, Ali protested, “All of us were shocked at the way [Malcolm] was killed.” Ali denied that Elijah Muhammad, or others in the NOI, had any involvement in the murder.

Two days later, early in the morning on February 23, unknown parties ascended to the roof of a building next door to Mosque No. 7 and tossed Molotov cocktails into the mosque’s fourth floor, igniting a fire that soon raged out of control, with flames soaring as high as thirty feet. The fire quickly spread next door to the Gethsemane Church of God in Christ, and soon seventy-five firemen were working frantically to put it out. As a section of the mosque’s wall collapsed, five firefighters and a civilian were injured. Within an hour the entire building was gutted. The Fruit of Islam was mustered, and soon about three hundred people were watching the fire blaze away. As the crowd grew and emotions surged, the police became worried and called in