Last month, the Manhattan district attorney’s office exonerated two men who were convicted, along with a third, in the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X.

Mujahid Abdul Halim, a member of the Nation of Islam’s Newark, N.J., mosque who was captured at the scene, confessed to the murder during his 1966 trial. While doing so, Halim named two accomplices while insisting that his co-defendants, Muhammad Abdul Aziz and Khalil Islam, were not those two men.

Abdul Aziz and Khalil Islam also asserted their innocence at their trial and provided alibis to authorities that would’ve confirmed their stories, but that exculpatory evidence was withheld from the jury by authorities. Both men were convicted along with one of the actual killers.

The men served a combined 42 years in prison until they were paroled in the mid-80s. Bitter, but not broken, they continued to strenuously insist on their innocence after they were free and refused to allow history — or the law — to paint them as the killers of Malcolm X.

As Malcolm X came into vogue in the late ’80s and early ’90s thanks to hip-hop and Spike Lee’s movie about the former Nation of Islam leader, their names once again bounced around in the public discourse, further defaming them as killers of a cultural icon.

Mr. Islam died in 2009, but Mr. Abdul Aziz is still very much alive. At 83, he has now lived long enough to see a crime he and his family have carried as a burden for 55 years removed from his back.

The evidence that they were innocent had always been available to law enforcement, but there was little interest in solving the murder. That’s why historians and Malcolm X biographers joined the two men in pushing for a reexamination of the case and the righting of wrongs, if possible. It took a popular Netflix series that laid out the facts for the general public to prompt the Manhattan DA’s office to move to clear up the matter.

After a 22-month investigation, the office finally exonerated both men. It now believes that the men whom Halim named as his accomplices, now dead, were the tip of the spear in the conspiracy to kill Malcolm X. Halim himself, now 80, was paroled 11 years ago from prison and finally wears the mantle as the killer of Malcolm X alone.

During his final years, Malcolm X was under intense FBI surveillance because he was considered one of the most charismatic and influential Black leaders in the country. As a spokesman for the Nation of Islam, he was a fearless critic of white supremacy, racial injustice, and America’s foreign and domestic policies.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover loathed Malcolm X. When Hoover and the FBI became aware that Malcolm X had cultivated powerful enemies within the Nation of Islam, Hoover didn’t lift a finger to protect the firebrand or warn him of the swirling plots around him.

Hoover’s lack of interest in bringing Malcolm X’s killers to justice trickled down the ranks to law enforcement, and the investigation into the murder of such a towering figure in the Black liberation struggle was shockingly superficial.

Halim’s co-defendants were implicated by informants and scoundrels peddling contradictory information. Now, more than half a century later, the truth has surfaced.

Muhammad Abdul Aziz will get to see history books updated to exonerate him as a killer of Malcolm X. A more significant revision of the story would put part of the blame where it belongs — with those in law enforcement who ignored the truth and allowed several of the shooters to escape their monstrous crime unpunished.

First Published: December 4, 2021, 5:00 a.m.