February 21, 1965
February 21, 1965
The Audubon Ballroom, in the middle of the afternoon
Killed that day
1They were at work, or on their way, or had gone in after somebody.
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He had been told for months that he would be killed and had stopped pretending otherwise. His house in Queens had been firebombed a week before, in the middle of the night, with his wife and their four daughters inside it.
The Audubon Ballroom on the corner of Broadway and 166th Street held about four hundred people that Sunday afternoon. His wife Betty was in the audience with the girls; she was pregnant with twins. He came out and said as-salaam alaikum, and the room answered.
A scuffle started at the back - a man shouting about somebody in his pocket - and as the ushers moved toward it three men came forward from the front rows. The first fired a sawn-off shotgun into his chest and the other two emptied pistols into him as he fell. He was hit sixteen times. Betty got the children under a table and then went to him.
He was pronounced dead at Columbia Presbyterian shortly afterwards. He was thirty-nine.
Fifteen hundred people came to the funeral in Harlem. Ossie Davis read the eulogy and called him our shining black prince. His daughters buried him themselves, taking the gravediggers' shovels.
Two of the three men convicted of it were exonerated in 2021, fifty-six years later.