Their code names within the Nation of Islam were Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson.
They have spent most of their lives trying in vain to prove their innocence, screaming to the world that they had nothing to do with the murder of Malcolm X.
Now, 55 years after their sentence, they will be definitively exonerated from what is one of the most sensational and painful criminal episodes in American history.
The decision was made by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance who, after a 22-month investigation, admitted "serious mistakes" then made by FBI and New York Police Department investigators and investigators who, during the trial suspected killers, they would have covered part of the evidence. Evidence that would have led to the acquittal of two of the accused. For this Vance apologized to the families of those who unjustly spent about 20 years of his life in a cell for a murder he never committed. And for a judicial system then more than ever permeated by a systematic racism.
Thus opens the way for a review of the events that took place that cursed February 21, 1965, when three men, all African Americans, opened fire on Malcolm X who had just spoken in the Adubon Ballroom in Harlem. The leader of that anti-racist movement within which feuds had opened expired in front of his pregnant wife and three of his daughters. He was 39 years old.
The facts as reconstructed in the process have never convinced, and over the years have been disputed by several historians.
A thousand doubts and perplexities that have always enveloped the story. The only one to plead guilty was Thomas Hagan, the African American who fired the fatal shots and was released from prison in 2010.
Hagan himself, not believed, at the trial argued that Norman 3X and Thomas 15X, who already had good alibis, were not part of the death expedition. Among the findings of the investigation by the Manhattan prosecutor that of the presence in the room where Malcolm X was murdered of some undercover agents. Documents have emerged that show that investigators were aware that day of the concrete risks faced by the civil rights leader, with a phone call that reached a newspaper hours earlier in which it was said that the civil rights leader would be assassinated that day.
So, the mystery remains as to how things really went and why Malcolm X was not adequately protected.
Meanwhile, of the two exonerated people, only one can finally celebrate: Norman 3X, released from prison in 1985, is now 83 years old.
While Thomas 15X, after being released in 1987, passed away in 2009.
