Waiting within the holding space of a New York City courthouse in 1966, Talmadge Hayer turned to the 2 males who had been standing trial with him. He advised them that he meant to admit to his function within the assassination of Malcolm X and make it clear that they had been harmless.
“I just want to tell the truth, that’s all,” he mentioned when he took the stand.
But the jury was not satisfied. Hayer had advised a unique story earlier within the trial, and he nonetheless refused to call his co-conspirators or say who they had been working for. Eleven days later, the jury convicted all three males of first-degree homicide.
The different two males, identified then as Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson, went down in historical past with Hayer because the assassins of an icon of the Civil Rights period. It would take 55 years to clear their names, and Johnson wouldn’t reside to see his exoneration.
The convictions of Butler and Johnson, who, whereas in jail modified their names to Muhammad A. Aziz and Khalil Islam, had been thrown out in that very same Manhattan courthouse final week after a 22-month overview of the case.
But lengthy earlier than the brand new investigation that led to the exonerations, Mujahid Abdul Halim — the title that Hayer later selected — had insisted on the lads’s innocence in an effort to set the report straight and to atone ultimately for his function in a vastly consequential act of violence.
Halim was launched on parole in 2010. Now 80, he lives quietly within the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, about 5 miles away from the courthouse that linked him inextricably to the 2 harmless males.
He seems to maintain a low profile. His title and a years-old photograph of him weren’t recognised at a close-by Muslim group heart and mosques within the space. At a barbershop, pharmacy and deli on Halim’s block, staff mentioned they didn’t know him. And his spouse mentioned at their residence that Halim was reluctant to be interviewed.
“I don’t know why he wouldn’t want to,” she mentioned. “But I think there’s a lot of people that really still feel differently about some things and maybe even about him.”
Two days earlier, a person answering to Halim’s title had responded solely briefly to the information that Aziz and Islam would have their convictions thrown out.
“God bless you, they’re exonerated,” he mentioned by way of a closed door.
File photograph of Muhammad Aziz being escorted by detectives at police headquarters, after his arrest in New York, on Feb. 26, 1965. (AP)
Halim was 23, a follower of the Black nationalist group the Nation of Islam and a member of its Newark, New Jersey, mosque in 1964, when, he mentioned in an affidavit years later, two males introduced him into their automotive on a avenue in downtown Paterson, New Jersey, to debate killing Malcolm X.
Malcolm X had spent 12 years within the Nation of Islam, rising quickly to its prime ranks because it expanded. But in 1964, fissures between him and the sect’s chief, Elijah Muhammad, widened right into a messy cut up. Muhammad privately appeared to indicate that he ought to be executed, in response to FBI recordsdata. And two months earlier than the killing, Minister Louis Farrakhan wrote within the Nation’s official newspaper that Malcolm, his former mentor, was worthy of loss of life.
So when Halim was approached in Paterson, his deep spiritual zeal led him to consider he was being examined, he advised Peter Goldman, a journalist who interviewed him in jail for a biography of Malcolm X.
“I just believed, man. And I was the type of person that if I had to stand up for what I believe, I would do it,” Halim advised Goldman.
In an affidavit, Halim recalled the planning of the assassination.
“We met a few times to discuss how to carry out this killing,” he wrote. “Sometimes we talked while driving around.”
In the affidavit, he additionally recognized the opposite males he mentioned had been concerned within the plot: Leon Davis, Benjamin Thomas and two males whose full names he didn’t know, “William X” and a person who glided by “Wilbur or Kinly.”
They determined towards concentrating on the civil rights chief’s dwelling, which was closely guarded, and settled as an alternative on the Audubon Ballroom in uptown Manhattan, casing it the night time earlier than the assassination.
On February 21, 1965, as Malcolm X was about to ship a speech on the ballroom outlining a brand new anti-racist motion centered on Black empowerment, Halim was certainly one of three males who rose after a short distraction and opened hearth. In the chaos that adopted, Halim was shot within the leg and apprehended.
The different shooters, together with the person who fired the deadly shotgun blast, escaped; inside 10 days, Aziz and Islam, Nation of Islam enforcers who had been out on bail on costs that that they had crushed up a defector from the group, had been arrested. (None of the co-conspirators whom Halim recognized later had been ever charged with the crime, and all are believed to be lifeless.)
Even because the trial approached, Halim didn’t count on his co-defendants to be discovered responsible.
“I actually felt that the brothers would be cut loose,” he mentioned years later in a jail interview with journalist Tony Brown. “I didn’t think they were going to be convicted until this trial started going on, and it became obvious what was being done. And at that point I had to say something.”
It didn’t matter.
File photograph of the Audubon Ballroom, following the assassination of Malcolm X on February 21,1965. (AP)
Despite Halim’s assertion, the testimony of alibi witnesses, and a whole lack of bodily proof tying Aziz and Islam to the capturing, the ballroom or one another, they had been convicted together with him.
Halim continued to name for the exoneration of his co-defendants within the years that adopted. In 1977, he wrote the affidavit by which he once more mentioned the lads had been harmless and recognized the opposite assassins.
In one other affidavit, the subsequent yr, he offered extra element about his recruitment into the assassination plot and the plan itself, saying he hoped the extra statements “will clear up any doubt as to what took place in the killing of Malcolm X and the innocence of Norman Butler and Thomas Johnson.”
But simply as his testimony had been ignored, the affidavits failed to perform their function. Aziz and Islam’s movement to wipe out their convictions was denied by a decide, Harold Rothwax, who was identified for his hard-line method to defendants.
In jail, the burden of what he had performed appeared to crash down on Halim, in response to the unbiased historian Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, who has studied Malcolm X’s life and loss of life for greater than 30 years and hosted a Netflix documentary sequence on the assassination.
New York cops stand outdoors the Audubon Ballroom on 166th Street at Broadway within the Harlem part of Manhattan, the place Malcolm X was assassinated as he addressed a rally on February 21, 1965. (AP)
After Elijah Muhammad, the Nation of Islam chief, died in 1975, his son, Warith Deen Mohammed, started instructing his followers in a brand new set of beliefs, together with concepts in regards to the afterlife, whereas concurrently restoring Malcolm X’s good title. At that time, the historian mentioned, Halim turned involved in regards to the state of his soul.
“He had a complete breakdown in prison because he had been holding it down on a pack of lies,” Abdur-Rahman Muhammad mentioned. “He took a man’s life over a lie.”
Goldman mentioned in an interview final week that he had been struck by what he felt was Halim’s honest penitence.
“It’s hard for me to say I liked a murderer, particularly the murderer of a man I so respected,” Goldman mentioned. “But that’s where I ended up.”
Goldman, who’s pals with Aziz, mentioned that Aziz, too, had forgiven Halim for his function within the homicide that led to the wrongful conviction, partly due to the affidavits and partly for spiritual causes. Aziz had referred to his former co-defendant, Goldman mentioned, as having “an innocent heart.” (Aziz is just not granting interviews.)
Halim spent greater than 40 years in jail. He acquired a bachelor’s and a grasp’s diploma in sociology and took part in a work-release program that allowed him to spend a lot of the week outdoors jail.
For a time, Halim labored on the Manhattan Psychiatric Center on Wards Island and at a Steak’N’Take quick meals restaurant. He was launched in 2010 and has lived in Brooklyn since, on the alternative aspect of the town from the Audubon Ballroom the place he participated within the assassination that modified his life — and the lives of the harmless males convicted with him.
“He doesn’t want to ever appear to be benefiting from what he did,” mentioned the historian, Muhammad. “That’s why he doesn’t do interviews. He is genuinely trying to save his soul from the hellfire, and he doesn’t want to benefit at all from what he did. He’s ashamed of what he did.”
This article initially appeared in The New York Times.
