By KATIE MEYER

ASSISTANT NEWS EDITOR

(Photo by Daniel Murray/The Ram)
One of Carroll’s most memorable NYPD experiences was carrying Malcolm X to the hospital after he was shot in 1965.

“It was a Sunday afternoon,” John Carroll, associate vice president of security at Fordham, recalled. “I was a young foot patrolman in the 34th Precinct, and I was working a day tour…A number of us received what you call a post change from our foot post to the Audubon Ballroom. Two of us were assigned inside.”

That Sunday afternoon, Feb. 21, 1965, was nothing more than an average workday for Carroll, who promptly reported to the ballroom with his fellow officers. Their detail, as it turned out, was providing added security for a speaking event held by Malcolm X, who would be addressing the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU).

“Malcolm X, he was a very progressive young civil rights leader in that time,” Carroll said. “He had run afoul of other groups…there [had been] a couple of attempts at firebombing his house in Queens, so the police department had some concerns, you know. They didn’t want anything bad to happen to any of our citizens, including Malcolm X.”

But on that Sunday, that is exactly what happened.

Malcolm X’s security personnel vetted every person who entered the room to hear the lecture, but as many people know today, a group of armed conspirators was let in with the crowd of some 400 people. The civil rights leader had barely gotten out a greeting to his audience when a commotion broke out in the back of the room.

This was later suspected of being a planned diversion, because while the room’s attention was averted, a man in the front row rushed the stage where Malcolm X was standing and shot him in the chest with a sawed-off shotgun. After the first blast, two other men darted forward with pistols and shot him repeatedly.

White people were barred from the event, so Carroll and the other officer stationed at the ballroom door had not been allowed to enter the room, and they could not see the events unfolding inside. They were, however, able to hear the gunfire.

“I heard them [the gunshots] going off, and I counted; there were 47 shots that I counted,” Carroll said.

Hysteria erupted in the ballroom, and the shooters tried to flee the scene. Some men apparently went out a window and down a fire escape, and another, according to Carroll, ran through the building and ended up near Carroll himself.

“One individual[…]ran out that door; Malcolm X’s people were firing at him,” Carroll said. “I was behind the wall back there, but the bullets were coming into the wall. Thank God it wasn’t a sheetrock wall like they make today, it was all heavy plaster…by the grace of almighty God I didn’t get killed.”

As soon as they were able, Carroll and his fellow officer pushed their way into the ballroom and ran to Malcolm X, who was lying on the stage surrounded by people. Carroll remembers the scene vividly, recounting that “the chairs were crashed all over the place, it was total chaos.”

Many of the people present were less than thrilled to accept the assistance of the policemen.

“I ran up to the stage where Malcolm X’s bodyguard was giving him CPR and mouth to mouth,” Carroll said. “I had an exchange with one guy, one of his bodyguards, who tried to stop me but that didn’t work.”

With the police backups outside cut off from the building by the mass exodus from within, Carroll and the others were left unaided in what was clearly an extremely serious situation. CPR and mouth to mouth quickly proved ineffective, so a stretcher was readied for Malcolm X. Carroll and the other police officer carried it outside, where they were joined by two other officers. Together, the four of them brought the stretcher across the street to the emergency room of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.

“We ran there with his body. I [was] running on the front of the stretcher,” Carroll said. “At that point it wasn’t a matter of…[leaving] him there and wait[ing] for somebody to pronounce him dead. We did everything we could to get him to medical help.”

Even the policemen’s best efforts, however, were not enough to save Malcolm X.

“We got him in the emergency room and up to the third floor where doctors worked on him, but to no avail,” Carroll said. He sighed, and shook his head slowly. “It was just a bad day.”

Carroll struggled to explain the effects of the assassination in a way that would make sense in the context of 21st century society.

“In those years, as you went on into the ’60s, there was an awful lot of civil rights strife in New York,” he said. “There were a number of riots, you know, in Harlem and in other places like Bed-Stuy, and I was at all of them too. It was a very, very difficult time in America…It’s hard to put those kinds of days in 1965 into today, in the context of today, because we don’t treat people like that today; we don’t do things like that today.”

The violence of the time became a defining part of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

“Malcolm X knew that the climate of violence in America was so great that he would [likely] not even live to see his own autobiography published,” Mark Chapman, Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Fordham, said. “The greatest legacy of his assassination was the birth of the black power movement… [It also] had a tremendous impact on radicalizing Martin Luther King Jr., which is something that is not always well-known…After Malcolm X’s death King became  much more militant.”

“Things were very different [in those years], but I think that the one constant was that the police did everything they could to make sure that people were safe, and to keep law and order,” Carroll said. “But notwithstanding all of that…” he paused for a moment, seemingly lost in thought. “Yeah. Bad things happened.”

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