Did a Black undercover NYPD cop unwittingly aid Malcolm X s assassination?
By The Washington Post
By Sydney Trent
On Feb. 20, Reginald Wood Jr., a bespectacled, balding man in a dark suit and striped tie, walked across the wooden stage to the podium at the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center in Manhattan.
The place and timing were weighty with symbolism. The centre had been built on the former site of the Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm X was assassinated 56 years ago that very weekend. Wood was also speaking on the eve of the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in the killing of George Floyd last May. A heightened suspicion of law enforcement swirled in the air, just as it did after Malcolm was murdered.
(RNS) More than five decades after he was gunned down at age 39 in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom in an apparent effort to silence him, Malcolm X has retained his voice in American culture. In an era of “Muslim bans” and the killing of George Floyd by a police officer, El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, as he was called at his death in February of 1965, remains an influential figure in pop culture, political activism and among American Muslims.
The Muslim minister and activist’s most recent flare into public consciousness comes with the film “One Night in Miami,” in which Muhammad Ali, R&B singer Sam Cooke, NFL star Jim Brown and Malcolm X (played by Kingsley Ben-Adir) engage in an imagined all-night hang. A biography released last year, “The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X,” presents 30 years of deep research by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Les Payne and his daughter Tamara Payne, who finished the book after her father died in 2018.
Origin
In February 2021, Snopes became aware of news reports and social media posts claiming a former New York Police Department (NYPD) officer authored a letter on his deathbed that served as evidence that the NYPD and FBI conspired in the 1965 murder of civil rights activist and Nation of Islam figurehead Malcolm X.
The posts’ underlying claims were these: that a Black man named Raymond Wood wrote a letter shortly before his death that authentically outlined his experience working as an undercover NYPD officer in the mid-1960’s, when, he supposedly claimed, his supervisors ordered him to carry out a secret plan that led to the killing of the famed Black leader.
New revelations of FBI and New York police conspiracy in the assassination of Malcolm X
The family of Malcolm X held a news conference on Saturday, February 20, to reveal the deathbed confession of an undercover police officer about his involvement in a New York Police Department (NYPD) and FBI conspiracy to assassinate the famous black nationalist leader.
Raymond Wood was an undercover cop with the NYPD for seven years in the 1960s and early 1970s. In 2011, after a cancer diagnosis and when he believed he was near death, he composed a letter explaining his role at the time of the assassination. He asked his cousin, Reginald Wood, to reveal the contents of the letter only after his death, which did not take place until nearly ten years later.
The 2011 letter by now-deceased New York police officer Raymond A. Wood stated that Wood had been compelled by his NYPD supervisors to coax two members of Malcolm X’s security team into committing crimes, leading to their arrests just a few days before the 1965 assassination and leaving Malcolm X more vulnerable to attack.