The guards didn't carry weapons. Malcolm X had insisted that the guards not carry firearms that day [February 21, 1965].
Manning MarableWhen this country here was first being founded, there were 13 colonies. The whites were colonized. They were fed up with this taxation without representation. So some of them stood up and said, liberty or death.
Manning MarableMalcolm's X objective was actually to reingratiate himself within the Nation of Islam, that because he had emerged by the early 1960s as a very prominent figure outside of the N.O.I., there were critics within the organization that were saying to the patriarch of the N.O.I., the Honorable Elijah Mohammad, that Malcolm planned to take over the organization, which was not true.
Manning Marable[Alex Haley] objective was to illustrate that the racial separatism of the N.O.I. was a kind of pathological or a kind of - it was the logical culmination of separatism and racial isolationism and exclusion.
Manning MarableThere were over 40,000 pages of FBI documents of which only about half are currently available to scholars and researchers. I think that this 40th anniversary of the assassination is a good opportunity for us to say that now is the time to declassify all FBI material on Malcolm X. There really is a need for us to challenge the US government for its refusal to open up its own archives 40 years after the death of Malcolm.
Manning Marable