Inside the ballroom, Malcolm lay on the stage, his heartbeat still pulsing. The screaming had subsided, but people were still crying and moaning. “The whole room was a wailing woman,” one writer recalled. A half dozen people bent over him while Malcolm’s men paced furiously, regretting that they had not done enough to protect their brother. One fumed, “There ain’t no goddam hope for our people in this lousy country. You got to fight them lousy whites and fight the stupid niggahs too. There ain’t no goddam hope!”52
Frantic, Betty kneeled beside her husband, his white shirt ripped open and soaked with blood. Gene Roberts had tried to revive him, but by then it was too late. Betty attempted to resuscitate him too, frantically pumping his chest. Suddenly, she began digging through his pockets, searching for a paper that included the names of five men Malcolm believed would be responsible for his murder, a list that Betty never revealed. Clinging to the bloodstained paper, friends pulled her away while a stretcher rolled into the dance hall. “Oh, Muriel,” she sobbed to a friend, “he’s gone! And I’m pregnant!”53
Police investigators knew very little except that Malcolm was dead and that a wounded suspect was already being interrogated. Beyond those facts, they had more questions than answers. Why hadn’t Malcolm’s guards been armed? Why weren’t the spectators searched? Why wasn’t there tighter security near the stage? Was this an inside job? “He was definitely set up for it,” an investigator later told Newsweek writer Peter Goldman. “To us, it was all so—perfect. Nobody would have walked in there to shoot him unless you know nobody has a gun and unless you know you’ve got one key man in your pocket.”
Malcolm’s men had questions of their own. The police knew that his life was in danger, and yet on the day of the murder, they deployed only two officers inside the Audubon and one outside the entrance. Why did the police hide twenty officers inside the hospital across the street? Did the police look the other way? Was the FBI involved? Malcolm had told his most trusted assistants that the FBI had agents working inside the Nation—agents who deliberately exacerbated the feud between him and Elijah, knowing that it would lead to a bloody war. Malcolm’s men did not doubt that Talmadge X and his accomplices belonged to the Nation of Islam. The real question, the one that has lingered for decades, was much simpler: who sent them?
MALCOLM’S MURDER ENRAGED his followers, setting in motion a vendetta against Elijah Muhammad and the Nation’s most prominent members. After the FBI warned the Chicago police that Malcolm’s avengers were headed to their city, the department placed heavy details at bus stations, train stations, and airports. Police cruisers and unmarked cars parked outside Muhammad’s mansion, Mosque No. 2, and the offices of Muhammad Speaks. Under police protection, Elijah seemed safe, but around ten p.m., a call went out over police scanners: a fire had broken out at a South Side apartment on Cregier Avenue. While the fire burned for more than an hour, the police interviewed a resident who lived on the second floor. At first they suspected arson because Muhammad Ali had an apartment on the third floor. Perhaps, the police surmised, Malcolm’s men had planned to immolate the boxer while he slept. But after interviewing Ali’s drunk neighbor, the man admitted that he had started the fire when he fell asleep on a sofa with a cigarette in his hand.54
There was little hope that Malcolm would survive the massive gunshot wounds that ripped open his chest. Emergency room doctors tried to revive him at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, but it was too late. Shortly before three thirty p.m., a surgeon delivered the tragic news to the fallen minister’s friends and loved ones: “The gentleman you knew as Malcolm X is dead.” Associated Press
Fortunately for Ali, when the fire occurred, he and Sonji were out dining after attending religious services. Earlier that evening at the mosque, one of the ministers announced that Malcolm had been murdered. Immediately, Sonji feared that her husband might be next. No one knew that they were eating dinner at the Arabian Sands Motel, but somehow John Ali, who had already returned from New York, called to tell the champ that his apartment had caught fire. Arriving at his apartment with the national secretary, the boxer told writers that he was “shocked and surprised” that someone had killed Malcolm. The Nation, he insisted, had nothing to do with the murder. It was just a coincidence that the fire occurred on the same day that Malcolm was killed, he said. Privately, though, Ali told Sonji that “somebody started it on purpose.”55