“For the last three years, we’ve been unearthing new evidence every day, every week, every month,” Crump said. “Proof that people have never spoken before about what they saw during those turbulent times in the 1960s.”

Of the three men initially convicted of the murder, two were acquitted in 2021: Muhammad Aziz and the late Khalil Islam, who spent more than two decades in prison and both maintained their innocence. Investigations revealed that the FBI and New York Police withheld potentially exculpatory evidence during the trial. The city and state of New York later settled lawsuits on behalf of both men for a total of $36 million.

Also that year, relatives of former New York police officer Raymond Wood, who had since died, revealed a letter he wrote in 2011 alleging that the New York Police Department and the FBI had hidden details of the murder. Wood wrote that he was forced to trick members of Malcolm X’s security team into committing crimes so they could be arrested days before the assassination.