Letter detailing how FBI, NYPD connived to kill Malcolm X goes public

Members of Malcolm X’s family have made public a letter alleging a conspiracy between the New York Police Department and FBI in the 1965 killing of the famed Black activist and civil rights advocate.

Checkout Magazine learnt that the letter was written by a former undercover NYPD officer named Raymond Wood.

Malcolm X was a powerful orator who rose to prominence as the national spokesman of the Nation of Islam, an African-American Muslim group that espoused Black separatism. He spent more than a decade with the group before becoming disillusioned and publicly breaking with it in 1964. He moderated some of his earlier views on the benefits of racial separation.

He was killed at New York’s Audubon Ballroom while preparing to deliver a speech. Three members of the Nation of Islam were convicted in the shooting.

The letter was released at a news conference on Saturday that had in attendance Wood’s cousin, Reggie Wood and some of Malcolm X’s daughters at the news conference at the site where the Audubon Ballroom once stood to make the letter public.

Raymond Wood’s letter stated that he had been pressured by his NYPD supervisors to lure two members of Malcolm X’s security detail into committing crimes that resulted in their arrest just days before the fatal shooting. Those arrests kept the two men from managing door security at the ballroom and was part of a conspiracy between the NYPD and FBI to have Malcolm killed, according to the letter.

“Under the direction of my handlers, I was told to encourage leaders and members of the civil rights groups to commit felonious acts,” Wood’s letter stated.

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