The Judas Factor: The Mystery of Malcolm X’s Assassination
Has Karl Evanzz Solved the Mystery of Malcolm X’s Assassination?
by L. R.
A student essay from Dr. Elliot Neaman's History 210 class (historical methods - spring 2004)
© Elliot Neaman / PHDNReproduction interdite par quelque moyen que ce soit / no reproduction allowed
Any discussion of the assassination of Malcolm X must be seen against the backdrop of the 1960s; it must be viewed in context. The 1960s in the United States was an era of assassinations; John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King to name the most famous, although one might also include Medgar Evers, another slain civil rights leader, in this tragic list. All these men were associated with the civil rights movement. All these men were to some degree opposed to what has been termed the ‘Military Industrial Complex.’ All these men were left of center in the political spectrum. I would propose that these broad characterizations are reasonable beyond any need for argumentative proof and are certainly understatements in some cases. It is also important to begin the inquiry into Malcolm X’s assassination by noting that one of the foremost architects of America’s rise to global military dominance expressly warned of a new danger to our civil life at the outset of this decade. The following quote is from Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell speech to the nation in 1961.
…this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for a disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.[i]
This remarkable speech is relevant because it, and the violent decade it ushered in, serve as a veritable starters pistol for an outpouring of the most fervent and wide reaching conspiracy theories imaginable. The Kennedy assassinations alone are responsible for an unending parade of books and films, with theories as to the identities of the ‘real killers’ ranging from plausible to outlandish. The general thrust of most theories on 1960’s assassinations is predictable; elements within the US government killed these leaders, someway, somehow, either by proxy or directly.
The maddening thing about many of these books, films and articles is that there are legitimate questions about these killings and some solid evidence of government misconduct in this era with several of these subjects. When looking at these works in the context of the 1960s, it is as if one had to refute a holocaust denier when the ‘book’ on the holocaust really was open, and the thought that a great-untold story about it was plausible. The question that must be answered is whether one-sided and conspiracy driven works serve the larger inquiry? Does amassing a trove of circumstantial evidence prove a case? Do agenda driven accounts of historical events create a milieu in which all theories and sources come to appear equal in the public eye? It is in the midst of these important and frustrating questions that we encounter The Judas Factor.
The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X, by Karl Evanzz is the kind of book that is a familiar part of the literary landscape. It is billed on the cover of the paperback edition as “a shocking expose of the intelligence community’s secret activities.”[ii] It is essentially a rapid-fire history of the Black Muslim movement, its involvement with Malcolm X, and the tangled relationship of both entities with the forces of the U.S government. The book culminates in the assassination of Malcolm X and the entire narrative is focused toward building a case for direct government complicity in the murder. The Judas Factor is the epitome of an agenda driven book. Evanzz sets out his goals in the introduction and presents a mountain of source material; no less than two hundred and twenty four full-length books are listed in the bibliography for this three hundred and twenty three page work. This is in addition to a considerable number of newspaper articles that are listed in the notes section and actually form the overall majority of the citations. But there is more; the source material that the author highlights as the basis for much of the books legitimacy are “hundreds of thousands of pages of declassified government documents”[iii] from the FBI reading room. These include CIA data described as “key names and organizations cited in files released on Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr”[iv] and consisting of presumably the files for nine listed individuals and the Nation of Islam. The FBI files listed number twenty-eight listed numerically and twenty-eight more described as “FBI public source materials (file data gathered from media).”[v] The Judas Factor was published in 1992 and interestingly the book has an unofficial companion of sorts in another work published in 1992 using the same sources. This is Malcolm X: The Assassination, by Michael Friedly. Friedly’s book provides a useful point of comparison for The Judas Factor given that he was a researcher for the Martin Luther King Jr. Paper’s Project at Stanford University at the time of his writing. Malcolm X: The Assassination was Friedly’s honor’s thesis at Stanford, and as such is a book that one can assume adheres to rigorous academic standards as a work of history by virtue of its very inception. Direct comparisons will duly be made between the methods and conclusions found in these books.
One of the first things that I wanted to know upon entering into this study of Evanzz’s book was: Who is Karl Evanzz? This proved to be a more difficult task than I first thought. There is no biography supplied in my edition of his book. I could not find any significant biographical information on the Internet, and the brief back-jacket bio on the book describes him only as “a Freelance writer whose articles have appeared in the Washington Post, Southern Exposure, Black Film in Review, and numerous other publications.”[vi] The blurb went on to say that he is currently on the staff of the Washington Post. An examination of The Washington Post’s website and a search turned up no mention of Evanzz or articles by him in the last ten years. It is by carefully examining the acknowledgements and the notes section of The Judas Factor that one can gain an interesting and possibly quite relevant view of Evanzz’s background. In the acknowledgements, Evanzz thanks a series of St. Louis activists and publishers as well as the families of prominent African American leaders, writing, “Despite their flaws they were my heroes. They provided me with the courage to quit a notorious street gang, and the inspiration to try and make a contribution to African-American culture.”[vii] In the notes section there are two personal references of interest. The first is an endnote to support the observation that “The Holy Temple of Islam was the only place in America where a black man or woman entered feeling anger and pity for black people, and exited two hours later feeling anger and pity for “racially inferior” whites.”[viii] The endnote reads
The reverse psychology employed by the Nation of Islam was so effective, at least in my experience, that I believed whites were “racially inferior” until I attended a predominantly white college in Fulton, Missouri. College represented my first actual encounters with whites in a non-hostile environment.[ix]
The second endnote is used to support a quote from Minister Abraham X, Nation of Islam, St. Louis Mosque that prefaces a chapter about exposing the Nation of Islam founder Wallace D. Fard as a fraud and reads, “The problem with telling a lie is that you’ve got to tell another lie to conceal the first one, and another to hide the last.” The endnote reads,
During the period between 1968-1971 when I frequented Muhammad’s Mosque No.28 in St. Louis, Ministers Abraham X and Yusef Shah used this analogy to explain the history of Western Civilization.[x]
The rough view of Evanzz that emerges from these brief glimpses is of an ex-gang member who was indoctrinated into the most extreme teachings of the Nation of Islam, moved on to get a college degree and experience a somewhat more balanced view of other races, and has devoted himself to a writing career in the hopes of making a contribution to African American culture. I find this to be quite a compelling resume’ for someone writing about the Nation of Islam and its collusion with the racist white power structure in assassinating Malcolm X. Evanzz’s background as far as I can glimpse it is a great potential asset for someone writing a balanced account of this subject. It is a selling point and an important and personal perspective that I would think would be front and center in the all material concerning this book and featured prominently within its pages. In reviews of both books on Amazon.com from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal there is no mention of this information about Evanzz. Publishers
Weekly describes him as “freelance writer Evanzz.”[xi] Library Journal merely compares “Evanzz…a journalist who spent 15 years researching the case” and Friedly as “a researcher at the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University.”[xii] Perhaps in a perfect academic world the personal backgrounds of authors are irrelevant; in this case I think Evanzz’s background is of note. The question raised is how does Evanzz want this book to be perceived by the general public, and does he actually intend to write a balanced account at all? For this we turn to the book itself.
There is a tone and approach in The Judas Factor that I would describe as overheated. In leading up to the titular assassination, Evanzz touches upon every conspiracy and instance of government dirty tricks relating to this era that I have ever heard of. He shies away from no characterization of the CIA and the FBI as malefactors and makes no effort to balance this view. In Evanzz’s depiction we have government agencies at work whose transgressions have no limits. This is a crucial construct of the book, and perhaps its central weakness. It is an opportune way to muddy the waters to his advantage given the widely acknowledged fact that these agencies did behave inappropriately with regards to Malcolm X. In common with the methods of many agenda driven writers, Evanzz is eager to take a piece of the puzzle and expand it to cover half the board. In this instance it boils down to a leap from showing that the FBI and the CIA improperly surveyed, limited and sabotaged the progress of Malcolm X as a leader, to the ‘logical’ conclusion that they also desired and affected his assassination. Evanzz forces this logic by structuring his book from the standpoint of an attorney proving a legal case. In his introduction he very briefly lays out the three competing theories about the assassination: the Nation of Islam did it, the intelligence community did it or the mafia/international drug cartel was responsible. The conclusion at which the legal system arrived, that the “the Black Muslims did it”[xiii], Evanzz does not deny. This is a central feature of his book. Evanzz never denies or minimizes the involvement of the Nation of Islam in Malcolm Xs’ murder. While consistently critiquing the leadership of the Nation of Islam, Evanzz paints a picture of the intelligence community as even greater villains. In this sense the tactic is comparable to Daniel Goldhagen in his work Hitler’s Willing Executioners.[xiv] Each work takes as its starting point the guilt of the accepted perpetrators; they then move on to paint a damning picture of the other group responsible, even to the point of shifting the bulk of the blame onto them. Without belaboring the comparison, the point is that as Goldhagen cannot ultimately prove that the German people wanted, with knowledge aforethought, to do exactly what Hitler and the Nazi party did in terms of the holocaust. Evanzz sets himself a similarly manipulative task in establishing the express desire of the intelligence community to kill Malcolm X, as members of the Nation of Islam actually did. In laying out his legal model Evanzz seeks to apply the “three pronged test of motive, means, and opportunity.”[xv] A total of three pages of this book are devoted to exploring the merits of the three assassination theories, as compared with a chapter of twenty-eight pages for Friedly in Malcolm X: The Assassination. Similarly, Friedly has a chapter each for motive and means. The rest of Evanzz’s book is devoted to the motives that he feels impelled the intelligence community to seek Malcolm’s’ death and to establishing a “modus operandai”[xvi] that shows us how likely a scenario their active complicity actually was.
There are some concrete methodological problems with Evanzz’s use of his research that one can point out. One is that he cites newspaper articles frequently as informational sources without actually qualifying this practice in the text (see Evanzz, especially chapters18, 19 and 20 covering the assassination and aftermath). Newspaper articles certainly have their value as primary sources to be examined, but as Friedly points out in his chapter critiquing the theories about Malcolm’s death,
...Newspapers are not usually the most accurate sources of information, especially in the heat of a major assassination. The New York Times, for example, had a number of inaccuracies in its various articles the next day.[xvii]
Evanzz cites the New York Times copiously in the service of his narrative, indeed in passages dealing with events leading up to and following the assassination, without any mention of this well-known pitfall. This type of omission is a general problem in this text. The Judas factor is a book for believers, Evanzz rarely comments on any of his sources in the text, but cites at a rate of twenty three notes on the low end, to ninety eight citations in chapter nineteen on ‘the final days.’[xviii] This creates an impressive stack of footnotes and an impression of scholarly rigor, but leaves the serious reader with the burden of finding out for himself if the sources are credible or properly used. Since Evanzz does not go on record with his opinion of these sources, he creates the impression that they are all to be credited equally as reliable. This applies to government files as well, as Peter Goldman notes in his book The Death and Life of Malcolm X.
As experienced students of FBI documents know, Hoover’s functionaries were in the habit of bragging on paper, seeking his favor by overstating their own heroics in his private political vendettas.[xix]
This is a commonsense observation of shortcomings associated with in-house reports from any organization. It is particularly true in lower-level intelligence missives and is a frequently noted factor by most authors using these sources. Evanzz makes no mention of these tendencies. Again, a willful impression is created of sources that speak for themselves, and are accurate simply by virtue of being cited. In terms of the quality or reliability of the many books cited in Evanzz’ notes, both sheer volume and his lack of commentary again cloud the issue. In some cases other avenues of commentary can be found for these books. For example, Evanzz cites an author identified as “Norden” in an article entitled The Assassination of Malcolm X with the publisher apparently Hustler.[xx] As is typical, no mention is made of the particular point of view of this person. A search for Norden in Michael Friedly’s book finds an Eric Norden, author of an article entitled The Murder of Malcolm X in a magazine The Realist (1967). Friedly describes Norden in company with other conspiracy theorists and refers to his article as “the classic statement of the white radical left of the 1960s.”[xxi] He also states that Norden and another author George Breitman, who Evanzz also cites, are representative of
A marxist perspective, arguing that it was Malcolms shift from capitalist to socialist, as well as his attempts to bring the United States before the united nations, that drew the anger of the CIA and provoked its subsequent attempts to kill him.[xxii]
In Peter Goldman’s book we find a section entitled Notes on Sources that also refers to Norden and Breitman. Here they are described as authors of “the principal conspirialist treatments.”[xxiii] Eric Norden’s articles are also more clearly listed, and it is found that he did write one called The Assassination of Malcolm X (Merit 1969). Norden’s articles are described as “the more fanciful” of the two. There are other examples of criticism of sources that Evanzz presents as reliable. The most striking, albeit catty, is the observation that Goldman makes about Louis Lomax, the journalist that Evanzz cites as having solved the assassination, with his identification of John Ali as the Judas who betrayed Malcolm X from his vantage point of Nation of Islam leader and FBI infiltrator.[xxiv] Goldman refers to Lomaxs’ book To Kill A Black Man, as having “passages of interesting gossip…but … essentially a paperback quickie, with all the normal vices of that form.”[xxv] Evanzz cites this book frequently throughout the text. These are, of course, not the final word on these sources. It does seem however that Evanzz has exposed himself to an accusation of having cited incestuously from books that have little claim to balance themselves.
One of the frustrating aspects of examining Karl Evanzz’s book in relation to others in the field is that there is very little disagreement on the fundamental issues raised by Malcolm X’s assassination. All the authors I have read describe a climate of violence and racism surrounding the assassination on all sides. None of these authors find the final verdict of the court satisfactory and all acknowledge that the FBI, CIA and the NYPD all have explaining to do regarding their conduct with Malcolm X. The difference may be one of intention. Authors who want to present a balanced account that serves to give the best explanation available for this event do not force a resolution where one is not yet possible. Those who have an axe to grind are willing to find smoking guns wherever they can. As has been mentioned before, Evanzz creates an atmosphere of conspiracy and intrigue wherever he can. The book is such a dense litany of these anecdotes that it is impossible to address them all here. A characteristic example is this mention of the assassination of JFK,
President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, four months after the march on Washington. On November 17, 1963, five days before the assassination, the FBI had received a warning from one of its high level informants in a right wing group that the President was going to be killed in Dallas. Again, the FBI did nothing to prevent the crime. Coincidentally, perhaps, Hoover was in Dallas on the day of the assassination.[xxvi]
The citation for this passage is High Treason: The Assassination of President Kennedy and the New Evidence of Conspiracy.[xxvii] The source is not described or critiqued in any way. In this manner, Evanzz visits all manner of lurid government plots in passing, building his modus operandai for Malcolm X’s assaination through indirect and circumstantial reasoning.
The Judas Factor is ultimately not much of a contribution to the study of Malcolm X’s murder. The problem is akin to the fable of the boy who cried wolf. There is a cavalier approach to the sources and relentless drive toward Evanzz’s contention of government complicity. The sheer amount of these kinds of faults serves to detract from a sober consideration of the likelihood, and what is more, the implications of an intelligence community plot to kill a civilian civil rights leader in cold blood. Evanzz cannot be termed a simple anti-government demagogue. His criticism of the Nation of Islam is relentless and in fact is the subject of an ongoing Internet feud on the online edition of The Messenger, the Nation of Islam’s magazine. Karl Evanzz may never have intended to write a balanced historical account. An important lesson here is that a ‘paperback quickie’ can take the form of a large and exhaustive work in terms of value, and when it does it is a waste of research time. Evanzz could have written a straightforward and opinionated account of this era, framed around the assassination of Malcolm X, and drawing from his own personal experiences and life lessons. A book of that type would be a unique contribution to understanding this era of assassinations. In its stead he has attempted a definitive account while skirting the accepted methods for producing one resulting in an incomplete contribution, and that is not unique.
Notes
[i] Safire, William. Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997, p. 409.
[ii] Evanzz, Karl. The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992, Cover.
[iii] Ibid. p. IX.
[iv] Ibid. p. 372.
[v] Ibid. pp. 373-374.
[vi] Ibid. back-jacket bio.
[vii] Ibid. p. XI.
[viii] Ibid. p. 47-48.
[ix] Ibid. Notes, p. 331.
[x] Ibid.Notes, p. 341.
[xi] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1560250496//p11-20/002-7167458-8863250
[xii] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1560250496//p11-20/002-7167458-8863250
[xiii] Evanzz, Karl. The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992, Notes, p. XVII.
[xiv] Exerpt from Hitler’s Willing Executioners. By Daniel J. Goldhagen. Copyright 1996. Published in The Holocaust. Donald L. Niewyk. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003.
[xv] Evanzz, Karl. The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992, Notes, p. XVII.
[xvi] Ibid.
[xvii] Friedly, Michael. Malcolm X: The Assassination. New York: First Carroll & Graf, 1992. p 61.
[xviii] Evanzz, Karl. The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992, Chapters 4 & 19.
[xix] Goldman, Peter. The Death and Life of Malcolm X. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1979, p. 430.
[xx] Evanzz, Karl. The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992, Notes 68-71, chap.19 and numerous other occasions
[xxi]Friedly, Michael. Malcolm X: The Assassination. New York: First Carroll & Graf, 1992. p. 57.
[xxii] Ibid. p. 60.
[xxiii] Goldman, Peter. The Death and Life of Malcolm X. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1979, p. 441.
[xxiv] Evanzz, Karl. The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992, p. XXIV.
[xxv] Goldman, Peter. The Death and Life of Malcolm X. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1979, p. 437.
[xxvi] Evanzz, Karl. The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992, p. 161.
[xxvii] Ibid. p. 365.
[ Holocaust denial (french) | Gravediggers of Memory | Tout PHDN ]