New York Times Article on Malcolm X Investigation

Alvin Sykes, the man leading the effort to get William Bradley indicted and convicted for the murder of Malcolm X

The drumbeat to bring William Bradley to justice has only just begun. Although we face an uphill battle, as this NY Times article makes clear, nevertheless I feel confident that we as a nation will put this man in jail.

The death of Malcolm X, shot dead at the Audubon Ballroom in Upper Manhattan in 1965, never inflamed
the public imagination in the same way the assassinations of John F. Kennedy
and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did. But scholars have long believed
that a bungled investigation resulted in the imprisonment of the innocent and
allowed some of those responsible to go free. Over the decades, efforts to
reopen the case have failed.

Now a best-selling biography has helped to renew calls for a full investigation. But
this time they may well gain traction because the legal environment has
changed: prosecutors in the South have demonstrated that it is possible to
pursue and win cases that are decades old and, as a byproduct, they have made
the failures of the police in the civil rights era abundantly clear.

At the same time, news has emerged that the man long suspected of having fired the
shot that killed Malcolm X but who was never arrested is living in Newark under
a different name.

“Time is running out; these guys are very old,” said Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, a graduate student at Howard University who first published the identity of
the Newark man on his blog and was a source for the biography’s
author, Manning Marable. “I wanted justice to be done, and I knew that Dr.
Marable wanted justice to be done.”

Dr. Marable, a historian at Columbia University, died days before the
publication of the book, “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.”

The effort to reopen the case has attracted the attention of the
nation’s most persistent advocate of civil rights-era justice, Alvin Sykes of
Kansas City, Mo. Mr. Sykes was instrumental in the reopening of the
investigation into the killing of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955 and in
persuading Congress to allocate millions of dollars to the investigation of
civil rights cold cases. Mr. Sykes has asked both the Justice Department and, this
week, the New York State attorney general “to conduct the most comprehensive
and credible search by the government for the truth concerning Malcolm X’s
assassination.”