Who killed President John F. Kennedy? Who killed civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr.? These questions have inspired some profoundly captivating conspiracies.
However, Who Killed Malcolm X?—an overly long docuseries on Netflix released on February 7, 2020—has little new to offer about the “open secret” of who killed Malcolm X, the Black Muslim revolutionary who morphed into El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz just before his death.
Numerous Malcolm X scholars have known who killed Malcolm 55 years ago on February 21, 1965, for over two decades. Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, a historian, identified the main trigger man as William Bradley, who changed his name to Al-Mustafa Shabazz, according to Richard Prince of “Journal-isms,” in an article entitled “Some Call Film’s Assertion Bogus or Old News.” What’s more, Zak A. Kondo, who teaches at Baltimore City Community College, wrote some time ago that there were numerous “intertwined conspiracies.” Kondo, who is treated as a mere footnote in the series, told Prince: “It seems that all they were interested in was the Nation of Islam. They were not interested in looking at the broader picture. . . . I was kind of shocked on seeing the final product.” He said he plans to update his 1993 book and have it republished in April.
What’s more, other important scholars were not just marginalized in the docuseries but also go unmentioned, according to Prince. One example would be Karl Evanzz, who authored “The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X.” Prince goes on to point out what I and far too many other black scholars write are ignored by white-owned and operated press. Prince’s article comes as the series is met with a chorus of boos by the likes of Jared Ball, Jerry Bembry, Todd Steven Burroughs, Andrew Stewart and Jeanne Theoharis, Keisha N. Blain and Ashley D. Farmer.
Most of the many mentioned above and beyond who have studied Malcolm know that his life was complicated as he stopped using much of his black nationalistic rhetoric to become more of a global citizen. This Netflix series is overly complex—by not being honest about what we already know. Time would have been better spent on telling the viewer about those who are believed to be responsible. No need for tangents like “Who firebombed Malcolm’s house?” Maybe Malcolm actually firebombed his own house, but I don’t think he killed himself. The problem Netflix has is that it often needs an editor. The platform wants to turn everything into a series. However, the information in this story can be told in a good 80 or 90 minutes. If it is to be longer, then time should have been allocated to the people who have uncovered the assassins who should be properly profiled.
The series follows Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, who talks about how all of this has consumed his life, but all I could think about is how the overlying broad story that even meanders into how can we exonerate the wrongly accused just feels like they were trying to meet the Netflix series quota.
If space is what they were looking to fill about Malcolm they could have gone further into the late Columbia University historian Manning Marable’s controversial book, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. Marable, who died just before the book was published, has some sections of the gay community claiming Malcolm as a gay icon. Mostly straight people say that any male who lived by the credo “By any means necessary” could never do anything sexually with other men—especially a white one. This vehement denial is much like those who only embrace the urgent and vigorous self-defense that Malcolm promoted until he left the nation. This type of homophobia or “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach is what I discuss about Malcolm and other prominent black leaders’ sexual relationships with white men in my latest book The Professor: Witnessing White Power.
It is clear we have a long way to go from cleansing our society from this type of homophobia largely visited upon us from our European counterparts. Simply put, there is nothing straight about Malcolm. He was an enigma to many in his time despite his stature and ability to promote his bold and sometimes caustic rhetoric. He was ferociously fearless for his time like many other militant blacks. All of these black voices were fearless but still labeled by many whites as inappropriate and odd for giving narrative to the community. The very definition of queer is to be “strange” or “odd.” To the point, the series points out how strange it was that Malcolm did not fear whites. The show points out how he was political when the nation didn’t want him to be. And how it was strange he grew up in all- or mostly white classes in the schools he attended. All of those observations feed the point of Malcolm’s queerness.
There are a lot of people who want to know who killed important people like Malcolm. The series has one thing right and that is the answer is the same people who morph him into who they want him to be and not accepting his evolution and his queerness.
Robert Redding, Jr.
Robert “Rob” Redding, Jr. MA, MFA is a professor at Seton Hall and has taught at Pace and colleges of the City University of New York. He is the editor of ReddingNewsReview.com and host of Redding News Review Unrestricted. He has authored a book with discussions of Black queerness as it relates to Black political life: The Professor: Witnessing White Power.
