That black-and-white shot of Malcolm X staring straight into the lens, that fire in his eyes you can still feel 60 years later, right next to a color portrait of his daughter Ilyasah. Damn. Hits different every time.
Almost six decades after they gunned him down, his daughters finally said enough.
On November 15, 2024, Ilyasah Shabazz, Gamilah Lamumba Shabazz, Malaak Shabazz, and the Malcolm X estate walked into Manhattan federal court and dropped a $100 million wrongful-death lawsuit against the CIA, the FBI, the NYPD, the Department of Justice, and a long list of individual agents and their estates. They’re not asking for a handout. They’re saying the government helped get their father killed, then spent decades burying the proof.
A tweet from X.
You know the story: February 21, 1965, Audubon Ballroom. Malcolm’s up there speaking, Betty and the little girls in the front row. Three gunmen rush the stage. Twenty-one bullets. He’s dead at 39.
Cut to 2021: two of the guys who took the rap, Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam, get exonerated when it comes to light that the prosecution had been suppressing evidence for decades. The city and state of New York end up paying them $36 million to make it go away.
Now the family’s 85-page complaint lays it out cold. They say the feds and the NYPD knew threats were coming and did nothing. Pulled their own undercover guys out of the ballroom right before the shooting started. Arrested Malcolm’s personal security detail days earlier on some bogus “Statue of Liberty bomb plot” that conveniently left him wide open. Had informants sitting in the crowd some of them actual agents who watched it happen and stayed silent. Then they spent the next half-century redacting files, hiding informant identities, and letting two innocent men rot in prison just to keep the real story buried.
Ben Crump didn’t mince words at the press conference:
“They all conspired to assassinate one of the greatest thought leaders of the 20th century.”
Ilyasah put it simpler:
“It took us a long time to get here.”
The complaint itself is raw:
“The damage caused to the Shabazz family is unimaginable, immense, and irreparable.”
They’ve carried the pain of not knowing for three generations.
(Quick side note: you still see viral tweets saying the family “just announced plans” to sue. That was the 2023 notice-of-claim stuff. The actual lawsuit landed last November. Always check the docket.)
This whole thing sits right in the middle of COINTELPRO the FBI’s own admitted program to “neutralize” Black leaders. Malcolm’s file is thick with surveillance, disruption, and straight-up character assassination. The lawsuit could finally force those files open.
Crump said he hopes the people running things today read it, see what their predecessors did, and try to make it right.
Money isn’t really the point here. They want the truth. They want the records. They want the record set straight.
Whether this case will make it past the inevitable motion to dismiss on grounds of sovereign immunity and statute of limitations is anyone’s guess at this point. But for the simple act of filing this suit, the family has kept the spotlight burning on one of the darkest eras in American history.
The courtroom fight is just getting started. And after 60 years, that feels like something.
