Malcolm X Is Assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom

Malcolm X was about to address roughly 400 people at a meeting of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, the group he had founded after breaking with the Nation of Islam, when a disturbance broke out near the front of the Audubon Ballroom on Broadway at 165th Street. As his bodyguards moved to handle it, a man rushed the stage and shot him in the chest with a sawed-off shotgun, and two more gunmen followed with handguns. He was 39. He was pronounced dead at 3:30 p.m. at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, with 21 gunshot wounds across his chest, shoulder, arms, and legs. Three men were convicted of the murder in 1966, but a reinvestigation decades later found that the FBI and NYPD had withheld evidence that could have cleared two of them, and in 2021 Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam were formally exonerated.