Sixty-one years after the assassination of Malcom X at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on February 21, 1965, his murder continues to cast a long, clarifying shadow over American power. At 39, while addressing the Organization of Afro-American Unity, Malcolm was gunned down in a hail of bullets orchestrated amid internal Nation of Islam tensions but enabled by a broader climate of state surveillance and provocation. His death was neither isolated nor accidental; it formed the centrepiece of a five-year cataclysm (1963–1968) that eliminated America’s most progressive white liberal leaders – John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy – and its most radical Black voices—Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.This sequence, extended by the FBI’s COINTELPRO programme that systematically dismantled the Black Panther Party and waged a parallel war on the white New Left, profoundly altered US political trajectories. History has since vindicated Malcolm X’s most powerful insights: the United States is a racialised settler-colonial empire whose domestic hierarchies of race and class are inseparable from its global project of domination. Liberal promises of inclusion serve as ideological cover, while the system deploys raw force against those who refuse co-optation.Gramsci’s concept of hegemony provides a precise lens through which to understand this dual strategy. Hegemony, for Gramsci, is never achieved through coercion alone; it is a dynamic combination of consent and force. The ruling class secures consent by shaping cultural norms, institutions and ‘common sense’, so that its dominance appears natural and inevitable, while reserving force – legal, extra-legal, or lethal – for those who challenge the consensus too directly. The American elite executed precisely this strategy in the 1960s and beyond: force was unleashed against uncompromising radicals like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King in his final radical phase, and the Black Panthers, while consent was manufactured by co-opting more moderate voices and integrating select Black and progressive figures into the system without dismantling its foundations.JFK represented the high-water mark of postwar liberal internationalism within the white elite. His 1963 American University speech called for peace and mutual understanding with the Soviet Union; he resisted full escalation in Vietnam and signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty. RFK, initially a Cold Warrior, transformed into an advocate for the poor and opponent of war, touring devastated communities and forging alliances with civil rights activists. Both men embodied a reformist impulse that sought to humanise empire without fundamentally questioning its racial and imperial logic.On the radical flank, Malcolm X – especially after his 1964 pilgrimage to Mecca and break with the Nation of Islam – offered an uncompromising internationalist critique. He reframed Black oppression in America as part of a global colonial pattern, urging solidarity with anti-imperial struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Martin Luther King Jr., radicalised by the Vietnam War, delivered his searing “Beyond Vietnam” address at Riverside Church in 1967, declaring the US “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” and linking domestic poverty programmes to imperial expenditures. King’s planned Poor People’s Campaign aimed to unite races and classes against economic injustice, converging toward the kind of multiracial, anti-imperial front Malcolm had begun to envision.The assassinations removed these threats in rapid succession. JFK’s murder in Dallas (November 22, 1963) cleared the path for Lyndon Johnson’s massive Vietnam escalation, and the drowning of Indonesia’s influential communist party in blood. Malcolm’s killing (February 21, 1965) silenced a voice that was internationalising Black nationalism, at the very time that the spirit of Bandung and the Non-Aligned Movement was building towards radical Third World demands for a New International Economic Order. King’s assassination in Memphis (April 4, 1968), while supporting striking sanitation workers, sparked nationwide rebellions but also fractured the broader movement. RFK’s murder in Los Angeles (June 5, 1968), moments after winning the California primary on a platform of peace and justice, extinguished the possibility of a radicalised Democratic candidacy in 1968.The system did not stop at high-profile killings. COINTELPRO (1956–1971), the FBI’s covert counterintelligence programme, institutionalised the combination of force and consent management. From 1967, when J. Edgar Hoover expanded operations against “Black nationalist hate groups,” the Black Panther Party became the primary target. Founded in 1966, the Panthers directly extended Malcolm’s legacy: armed community self-defence, survival programmes (free breakfasts, health clinics, schools), and explicit anti-imperialism. They built coalitions, including with white radicals. Hoover declared them “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country,” fearing a “Black Messiah” capable of unifying dissent. Of 295 documented actions against Black nationalist organisations, 233 focused on the Panthers—ranging from infiltration and disinformation to false arrests, raids, and assassinations.The December 4, 1969, murder of Fred Hampton in Chicago stands as the programme’s most infamous execution. An FBI informant inside the Panthers supplied a floor plan and drugged Hampton; Chicago police then stormed his apartment, shooting the 21-year-old deputy chairman and Mark Clark while they slept. Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition – uniting Black, Puerto Rican, Appalachian white, and Mexican-American communities – mirrored Malcolm’s post-Mecca universalism and King’s cross-racial poverty organising. By eliminating such figures, the state severed potential bridges between Black radicalism and broader dissent.COINTELPRO simultaneously targeted the white New Left – Students for a Democratic Society, the Weather Underground, and anti-war groups – through illegal surveillance, agent provocateurs, mail opening and engineered factionalism. The goal was clear: disrupt solidarity between Black and white radicals, push segments of the left toward self-destructive violence that discredited the movement, and contain anti-imperial energies within manageable bounds. The Panthers’ community programmes were smeared as fronts for criminality; the white Left splintered, many activists driven underground or into political retreat.This dual strategy – lethal force against the uncompromising, co-optation and containment of the rest – secured hegemony. Moderate civil rights organisations received foundation funding; integrationist leaders were celebrated; electoral paths (symbolised later by Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 Rainbow Coalition campaigns) were opened within the Democratic Party. Yet structural racism, mass incarceration, and imperial wars persisted. The assassinations and COINTELPRO cleared the terrain for Nixon’s law-and-order backlash, the carceral state, and the neoliberal turn that deepened inequality under the guise of colour-blind meritocracy.Malcolm X’s diagnosis was prophetic precisely because it named this dynamic. He rejected the mythology of American exceptionalism, insisting the US was an empire built on racial violence at home and abroad. Liberal elites offered partial concessions to manufacture consent; when radicals demanded rupture, force followed. His controversial remark after JFK’s assassination – “the chickens coming home to roost” – captured the inevitability of blowback from imperial policies and domestic repression. COINTELPRO’s playbook confirmed his view: the system neutralises threats “by any means necessary.”Sixty one years later, in 2026, the fractures remain visible. Persistent police killings, widening wealth gaps, militarised borders and endless overseas interventions testify to the limits of post-1960s reforms. Barack Obama’s presidency represented symbolic inclusion but presided over record deportations and drone warfare; Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 internationalised the struggle in ways Malcolm anticipated. Yet elite networks – philanthropic foundations, corporate DEI initiatives, centrist Democratic machinery – continue the work of co-optation, channelling radical energy into non-threatening channels while marginalising structural critiques.The Gramscian insight is crucial: hegemony is never static. Consent must be constantly renewed, force held in reserve. The American Imperium has excelled at both – integrating enough voices to sustain legitimacy, while crushing those who expose the racial and imperial core. Malcolm, King, the Panthers, and even the progressive Kennedys threatened that balance. Their elimination, followed by COINTELPRO’s long shadow, entrenched a more militarised, unequal order.As we mark 61 years since Malcolm’s assassination, his legacy endures as urgent diagnosis. The empire persists, its contradictions mounting amid multipolar challenges from the Global South, climate collapse and domestic disillusionment. True reckoning requires confronting the history of force and co-optation that silenced the era’s most transformative voices. Malcolm X openly named the truths the system feared enough to kill for; sixty-one years on, in the Trump era, those truths remain as sharp – and as necessary – as ever.Inderjeet Parmar is professor of international politics and associate dean of research in the School of Policy and Global Affairs at City St George’s, University of London. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and writes the American Imperium column for The Wire. His Twitter handle is @USEmpire. He is the author of several books, including Foundations of the American Century, and is currently writing on the history of the US foreign policy establishment, and Trump and the Crisis of American Empire.