Michael X  

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"I can't live in this system. I don't like it. I don't want it. I want to destroy everything, down to the ground, the lot, ashes. That's what I want."--Michael X cited in Can't Get You Out of My Head (2021) by Adam Curtis

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Michael X (1933 – 16 May 1975), born Michael de Freitas in Trinidad and Tobago, was a self-styled black revolutionary and civil rights activist in 1960s London. He was also known as Michael Abdul Malik and Abdul Malik. Convicted of murder in 1972, Michael X was executed by hanging in 1975 in Port of Spain's Royal Jail.

Murder trial

Police who had come to the commune to investigate the fire discovered the bodies of Joseph Skerritt and Gale Benson, members of the commune. They had been hacked to death and separately buried in shallow graves. Benson, who had been going under the name Hale Kimga, was the daughter of Conservative MP Leonard F. Plugge. She had met Michael X through her relationship with Malcolm X's cousin Hakim Jamal.

Michael X fled to Guyana a few days later and was captured there. He was charged with the murder of Skerritt and Benson, but was never tried for the latter crime. A witness at his trial claimed that Skerritt was a member of Malik's "Black Liberation Army" and had been killed by him because he refused to obey orders to attack a local police station. Malik was found guilty and sentenced to death. The Save Malik Committee, whose members included Angela Davis, Dick Gregory, Kate Millet and others, including the well known "radical lawyer" William Kunstler, who was paid by John Lennon, pleaded for clemency, but Malik was hanged in 1975.

Other members of the group were tried for Benson's murder. It was asserted that Benson had been shown an open grave and was then pushed in it and hacked at by Michael X with a machete on her neck.

Cultural references

Michael X is the subject of the essay "Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad" by V. S. Naipaul, collected in The Return of Eva PerĂ³n and the Killings in Trinidad (1980), and is also believed to be the model for the fictional character Jimmy Ahmed in Naipaul's 1975 novel Guerrillas.

Michael X is a character in The Bank Job (2008), a dramatisation of a real-life bank robbery in 1971. The film claims that Michael X was in possession of indecent photographs of Princess Margaret and used them to avoid criminal prosecution by threatening to publish them. He was played by Peter de Jersey.

Michael X and his trial are the subject of a chapter in Geoffrey Robertson's legal memoir The Justice Game (1998).

Michael X plays a part in Make Believe: A True Story (1993), a memoir by Diana Athill.

Michael X is the eponymous title of a play, by the writer Vanessa Walters, that takes the form of a 1960s Black Power rally and was performed at The Tabernacle Theatre, Powis Square, London W11 (Notting Hill), in November 2008.

Michael X (played by Adrian Lester) is portrayed in a scene opposite Jimi Hendrix in the film All Is By My Side based on Jimi's early years in the music industry.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Michael X" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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