Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [297]
In his original testimony to the grand jury, Thomas was one of the few OAAU members who claimed to have seen all three men—Hayer, Butler, and Johnson—at the murder. He explained that Butler and Johnson were the two who had tussled with each other while Hayer attacked Malcolm with the sawed-off shotgun. Since Hayer bore absolutely no physical resemblance to the shooter, the prosecutors and police persuaded Thomas to revise his testimony. At the 1966 trial, he was better prepared, insisting that Johnson, not Hayer, had wielded the shotgun; Hayer and Butler were the two handgun attackers. But he continued to make minor mistakes that undermined his testimony, for example, identifying Hayer as a member of Mosque No. 7; he also admitted to the jury that he had not actually seen guns in the hands of Butler or Hayer.
Butler struggled to understand how the assassination had actually occurred, and why he ended up being tried for the murder. He didn’t know Hayer, indeed had never met him. After his arrest, Butler sadly discovered that the Nation’s promises to him were empty. “Nobody took care of my children, nobody looked after my wife,” he complained. “I think that the people—the city, the state, the feds, whoever—they wanted this case closed, and they got somebody to say I was there and that I did it.” Butler, now out of prison, having served his sentence, insists “everybody know[s] there was four or five people involved. They didn’t go look for nobody else.”
As Johnson and Butler listened to the prosecution’s weak case being presented, they were brimming with confidence. There was no way, they believed, that the jury would convict them. Indeed, as the trial progressed, Hayer informed the court that Johnson and Butler were not involved in the assassination; he and three other men had committed the crime. Hayer even provided some accurate details. But Johnson correctly feared that these last-minute confessions would be used against him and Butler. Dermody effectively argued that Hayer was merely under orders by NOI bosses to sacrifice himself, in order to free his coassassins. Johnson’s attorneys also made things worse by putting up Charles Kenyatta as a defense witness. Johnson had extreme misgivings: “When they wanted to put Kenyatta on the stand to testify for me, I was against it. I never trusted Kenyatta—never.” Kenyatta had agreed to tell the jury that it would have been impossible for Butler and Johnson to enter the Grand Ballroom that afternoon, because both were well known as militant NOI members. Kenyatta also wanted to get into the public record his belief that an “internal left plot” was possibly responsible for Malcolm’s murder. However, under Dermody’s cross-examination, he also identified both Johnson and Butler as members of an NOI “hundred-man enforcing squad.”
Any chance for Johnson and Butler to be acquitted disintegrated with the appearance of Betty Shabazz. Betty had only briefly witnessed the actual shooting, so her testimony added only limited information. She described the chaos: “Everyone had fallen to the floor, chairs were on the floor, people were crawling around . . .” She’d pushed all her children under a bench and covered it with her body until things appeared to have settled down. A few minutes later she found Malcolm on his back on the stage. Dermody asked only a few questions, and the defense attorneys passed on cross-examining her. But as she walked slowly away from