A major lawsuit has been filed by leading civil rights attorneys on behalf of the daughters of Malcolm X in an effort to litigate claims of state complicity in the 1963 murder of the Black revolutionary leader.

The suit comes in the wake of a reinvestigation that led to critical exonerations of two of the alleged killers in 2021. The outcome will turn on proving the U.S. government’s role in allowing the assassination to happen — to the extent, new evidence suggests, of actively facilitating it.

The Shabazzes’ lawsuit is being pursued by a vaunted and highly regarded legal team, at the head of which are attorneys Benjamin Crump and G. Flint Taylor. In the $100 million suit, known as Malcolm X Shabazz et al. v. USA, the defendants are listed as the United States of America, the City of New York and none other than J. Edgar Hoover, among many more named NYPD, FBI and CIA agents or their estates. These organizations are accused of obscuring and influencing, by various means, the circumstances around Malcolm X’s death.

As such an imposing set of defendants would suggest, the lawsuit is a legal gesture of historic proportions. Winning this complaint will require challenging an edifice of complicity, corruption and secrecy, and ascertaining truth in the face of both intentional concealment by state agents and the blurring of objectivity that accompanies such long reaches of time. Nevertheless, the legal teams are pursuing the case with vigor — for Malcolm X’s living family and for posterity, accountability and historical justice.

When Malcolm X was assassinated by volleys of gunfire 59 years ago, on February 21, 1965, he was standing onstage to speak before a crowd in New York City’s Audubon Ballroom. His wife, Betty Shabazz, and his daughters, including then-2-year-old Ilyasah Shabazz, were both present at that horrific scene.

Yet also among the audience that day, recent investigations have indicated, were a number of government informants, federal agents and police officers. Their failure to stop the killing, as well as glaring signs of state influence over the circumstances, has long cast official narratives in considerable doubt.

Despite falsely reassuring claims to the contrary, coordinated state surveillance and subversion, particularly of leaders on civil rights and racial justice, is far from a thing of the past.

Whatever the ultimate outcome — if state complicity can be proven in open court, if these renewed hopes of justice can outlast the impositions of time and unaccountable power — the consequences of this lawsuit will not be confined to posterity alone; its concerns remain resonant with contemporary politics. After all, despite falsely reassuring claims to the contrary, coordinated state surveillance and subversion, particularly of leaders on civil rights and racial justice, is far from a thing of the past.

Benjamin Crump, a lead attorney on the Shabazz case, is one of the nation’s most prominent and accomplished civil rights lawyers. Crump has previously taken on the cases of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, residents of Flint, Michigan, harmed by the water crisis, and many more.

“Anytime you fight for justice for people of color, it’s an obstacle,” Crump commented to Truthout by phone. “And if you think about the fact that we’re bringing a case 59 years later, then you add in all kinds of hurdles and impediments to justice. But we’re up for the job.”

Crump’s team is working in collaboration with veteran advocate G. Flint Taylor of the People’s Law Office, along with members of the Innocence Project and other collaborators at the firm Beldock Levine & Hoffman. Taylor is known for successfully winning litigation against Chicago police and the FBI on behalf of assassinated Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, as well as reparations for victims of the Chicago police torture cases.

In the weeks before his death, Malcolm X had known — and had been claiming to the media and all those around him — that attempts on his life were imminent. Indeed, initial attacks were both threatened and attempted over that timespan — until on February 21, when the worst outcome, as so many had feared and Malcolm X had predicted, was ultimately realized.

The longstanding narrative, based on the findings of the original........

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