This project is an inventory and index of 4,000 pages of surveillance reports on Malcolm X. These pages are available in their entirety at the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) website. This online inventory provides an index to the selected portions of the surveillance records, for which no index exists. At the FBI website, users have to download and peruse PDF files that are hundreds of pages in length for relevant information. Other works on FBI surveillance of Malcolm X only scratch the surface -- Clayborne Carson's Malcolm X: The FBI file or Ward Churchill's The Cointelpro Papers, for example -- offering only selected excerpts from the material. It is my hope that the inventory of the Malcolm X FBI files will provide a more rounded research tool for students and scholars interested not only in Malcolm X, but the methodology and means of the federal surveillance apparatus.

The FBI files provide insight into the activities of Malcolm X, especially before his break with the Nation of Islam and Elijah Muhammad; activities that are glossed over or omitted by Malcolm and Alex Haley in The Autobiography of Malcolm X. In addition, the FBI files reveal much about what the agency itself deemed to be subversive acts: Malcolm's affiliation with Communist Party figures, his polemics against whites, his advocacy of armed self-defense for African-Americans, among other points

The files enclosed herein have been organized by date into discrete individual reports. Click on a year in the navigation above to see files on Malcolm from that year. Each report is available in Acrobat PDF format. I've taken the liberty of providing a brief summary of each report. Simply select a year in the navigation bar above to view FBI files from that time period.

In the future, I plan to add selected material from 7,000 pages of additional surveillance files on Malcolm X from various FBI field offices, which are currently unavailable online. A search engine is also forthcoming.

This project was completed under the supervision of Dr. Marilyn H. Pettit, Director of Columbiana Archives at Columbia University, with the guidance and support of Dr. Manning Marable, Director of the Center for Contemporary Black History at Columbia.

Wayne Taylor
April 2004