The original draft of the email below was sent to Washington Post enterprise reporter Sydney Trent and some Post colleagues after her several thousand-word story in Sunday’s print edition reported a recent effort by an indebted nephew of a deceased former NYPD detective to peddle as authentic a supposedly confessional letter that vaguely suggests police and the FBI were aware of but did nothing to stop the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X. Not surprisingly, the once respected civil rights attorney turned opportunistic charlatan Ben Crump has thrown his high-profile support to the ne‘er-do-well nephew’s publicity campaign. And though Ms. Trent was gracious enough to reply to this email, pointing out that her story quotes many sources skeptical of the dubious letter, she didn’t try to explain why the lengthy story was even written, much less published, nor why it fails altogether to mention Louis Farrakhan – the man who has benefitted the most from Malcolm’s murder.
Dear Sydney,
In today’s woke milieu it comes as no surprise that the likes of The Post, Ben Crump and others are trying desperately, nearly six decades after the fact, to obfuscate with thousands of words the circumstances surrounding Malcolm X’s assassination and to somehow apportion blame to the Blue-Eyed Devil [“Did a Black undercover NYPD detective unwittingly aid Malcolm X’s assassination?” A6, May 2].
But those now arguing that “the FBI and NYPD owe it to the nation to release all records related to Malcolm X, including electronic surveillance and informant files,” should be careful what they wish for. Because many who’ve carefully studied this sad chapter of our history with objectivity are fairly certain that an aging, juvenile-impregnating Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad effectively ordered a jealous hit on the more righteous Malcolm by making clear to ambitious younger men in the Nation that he wanted his disloyal antagonist dead. And arguably the most ambitious among these younger men was Louis Farrakhan, Malcolm’s one-time protégé
Farrakhan believed at the time that his talents and potential were being wasted at Boston’s lower-profile temple, and he wanted very much to be promoted to lead the high-profile Harlem temple where he could better position himself as Muhammad’s successor. And just as Judas got his silver, Farrakhan got his promotion after Malcolm’s murder.
Even if one wishes to defend Farrakhan, it cannot be denied that, perhaps like a general overseeing a battlefield from the safety of an adjacent hilltop, he just happened to be in nearby Newark when Malcolm was killed. Nor can anyone deny that no one has gained more from Malcolm’s death in the intervening decades than has Farrakhan. Coincidences? Maybe. But good investigators never put much stock in coincidences.
So, to the extent they’ve not already been long destroyed, classified FBI wiretap recordings may well prove a Muhammad-Farrakhan conspiracy. And unless the woke Biden administration’s Attorney General Merrick Garland wants to be forced by such evidence to turn from putting local police departments under the federal yoke of consent decrees and instead bring a no-statute-of-limitations murder prosecution against the crazy, 87-year-old anti-Semite still leading the Nation of Islam, maybe folks should just let this particular murder lie — unless they want to invite another summer of BLM lootings and arsons.
For the record, I’d personally love to hear early- to mid-1960s phone conversations between Muhammad and Farrakhan and Farrakhan and his Newark henchmen. But today’s woketivists aren’t likely to share my appreciation for history.
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.