Sometimes even conspiracy theorists have a point

The exoneration of two men wrongly convicted of helping to murder Malcolm X is good news for the cause of justice. But it raises the question of why, until Netflix aired the series "Who Killed Malcolm X?" earlier this year, hardly anybody but a handful of scholars and biographers paid attention to the considerable body of evidence that Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam had been railroaded.

Even at the time of the assassination, there were those who insisted that the events that unfolded in the Audubon Ballroom in February 1965 had not been properly investigated. Even when it was revealed two decades later that an undercover police detective had witnessed the murder — a fact never disclosed to the defence — the nation shrugged and went on to the next story.

Why the public disinterest?

One reason might be that the familiar lack of fury when Black people are killed by Black people was alive even then, no matter who the victim might have been. After Malcolm X's murder, authorities braced for an outbreak of urban violence that never materialised. As the Associated Press deadpanned at the time: "The slaying created excitement in Harlem, but there was no disorder."

So, yes. Race surely played a role. But a larger reason, I suspect, is that we are surrounded by believers in 'wrong-man' conspiracies, who have been shouting so loud and so long that it is hard to take their pleas seriously, never mind paying attention to their evidence.

A wrong-man conspiracy theory is exactly what the name suggests: the belief that history is wrong about the identity of the person who killed ... well, pretty much any great figure.

Wrong-man theories bombard us at every turn: To this day, millions of people are certain that Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill John Kennedy; or, if he did, that he did not act alone. The notion that James Earl Ray did not shoot Martin Luther King Jr. has been accepted by some members of the family of the civil rights giant. 

And I remember from my undergraduate years a certain set for whom it was an article of faith that, if you read the evidence closely, you would see that Sirhan Sirhan had been a fall guy for the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

The killing does not even have to have been recent. To this day there are those who do not believe that John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln. (To say nothing of an internet rumour a couple of years ago that Booth himself escaped, and someone else was shot to death in that Virginia farmhouse.) 

Probably there would be conspiracy theories swirling around the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley, if anybody cared about McKinley, or could remember who shot him. (Leon Czolgosz, who was executed a few weeks later, and whose name I might not remember myself were I not a fan of E. L. Doctorow's novels.) 

And had Giuseppe Zangara managed to hit Franklin Roosevelt in Miami in 1933, rather than missing the president-elect and slaying the mayor of Chicago instead, there would surely be an entire movement devoted to the proposition that Zangara was framed.

But a larger reason, I suspect, is that we are surrounded by believers in 'wrong-man' conspiracies, who have been shouting so loud and so long that it is hard to take their pleas seriously, never mind paying attention to their evidence

Thus our distaste: When everyone around you is yelling that history has the whole thing wrong, it is easy to tune out the noise.

But sometimes the conspiracy theorists are right. In the case of the Malcolm X assassination, they were right even at the time that all but one of the real killers escaped justice. 

More important, they were also right that two innocent men, convicted after a farcical trial, went to prison — a wrong that is being righted only 55 years later. And if it could happen to those accused of so infamous a crime, surely it happens in more than a trivial number of the cases that draw less attention.

It also bears mentioning that those pushing 'wrong-man' theories about the assassination of Malcolm X were probably right as well right that the crime stemmed from a larger conspiracy. It is highly unlikely that a group of four or five young men from the Newark mosque acted on their own when they decided to arm themselves and cross into Manhattan to commit the murder. 

The orders must have come from on high. True, nowadays scholars believe that 'on high' means the circle around Elijah Muhammad in Chicago rather than — as many of us once believed and, if I am honest, in some perverse way hoped — the circle around a bitter old man then living at 4936 30th Place in the nation's capital.

The message of the long-overdue exonerations of Aziz and Islam is not that 'wrong-man' theorists are always or even usually right. It is that they sometimes have a point. And we will not know when unless, now and then, we choose to listen.

TBS Sketch of Stephen Carter

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of law at Yale University and was a clerk to the US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Bloomberg, and is published by special syndication arrangement.