February 21, 1965 is a date College Professor Dr. Robert Allen isn't ever likely to forget.

It is the date of Malcolm X's assassination and the then 22-year-old college student was in the audience as the Civil Rights activist was about to address a crowd of between 300 and 400 at the Audobon Ballroom in Harlem, New York. Within minutes Malcolm X lay dying on the stage floor and Robert Allen's life was about to change forever.

"When I look back on it, that was the thing that set the tone for my own life," said Dr. Allen.

Dr. Allen was in Bermuda this week with his wife Janet to celebrate his 60th birthday after being urged to visit the Island by a former student, Bermudian Lisa Johnston, whom he taught at Mills College in Oakland, California in the 1980s.

Speaking at his hotel, Dr. Allen recalled how listening to a dynamic young speaker in the 1960s had an impact on his life.

"I was actually a Math and Science major in college and I wanted to go on and become an engineer," he recalled.

"But Malcolm X coming to speak at Morehouse (College), that began to get me thinking about the struggle, because I hadn't made any real connection to it. But hearing Malcolm speak, on the few times I heard him in New York before his death and witnessing his assassination, it just totally turned me around."

He admits the witnessing the assassination from just several feet away is something he will never forget.

"At first I was just traumatised by the whole thing, I didn't know what to do and in fact ended up dropping out of school at that point," he said. "I was in despair and thought 'what was the point'.

"I remember hearing him speak for the first time when I was a student at Morehouse and he galvanised me. Hearing him speak he was such an incredible orator and incredible teacher and he spoke directly to you and had a wonderful sense of humour. He was always cracking jokes but the jokes always had a point to them."

Even today, almost 40 years after Malcolm X met his violent death, questions still surrounds the assassination. Two Muslims were convicted of the crime but Dr. Allen believes, from what he saw that night, many questions have been left unanswered.

"I think it was the FBI," he says without reservation.

"We know now the FBI had not only been spying on Black activists but doing things to harm black leaders, going all the way back to Marcus Garvey. We now have the documents to prove it.

"J. Edgar Hoover, who was in the FBI from the beginning, hated black people. But aside from his personal hatred, the organisation itself saw one of its roles as destabilising and disrupting black militants who they saw as a threat to national security... the white nations."

Dr. Allen has no doubts the Nation of Islam carried out the shooting, but he always felt the case isn't as open and shut as that.

"Those guys said that they were paid to do it and that was never pursued," said Dr. Allen, who is a Visiting Professor in Ethnic Studies and African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

"It is true they were the triggermen, but who was behind them? The way the FBI work is they don't put their own agents out front, they get others to do the dirty work. They do it in various ways, money, blackmail...all kinds of way you can get people, even unwillingly, to do things like that."

Dr. Allen remembers how, just as Malcolm X entered the stage to speak, an incident broke out in the back of the room seconds before the shooting started.

"I'm convinced there were move involved because there were two shooters, but there was somebody in the back of the room who started the initial ruckus to take everybody's attention away from the front," said Dr. Allen who was sitting midway back, in the middle of one of the rows.

"He (Malcolm X) had just started speaking when there was a ruckus in the back of the room. A man jumped up and shouted at somebody else in the room and that drew everybody's attention, meantime two other men came right down the centre isle firing weapons. So there were several of them involved."

"The two shooters were caught and convicted. Although they claimed they were hired to do it, the courts and the media dismissed it by saying 'oh, they're just trying to get out of it'.

They eventually were released (from prison) and have disappeared."

Dr. Allen recalls there were people from various nationalities in the audience but, strangely, there were no Police around.

"After the threats were made on his life there was a Police presence at the meetings after that," he remembered. There were Policemen outside the ballroom and the week before there were Police stationed inside the ballroom. "But at that meeting there were no Policemen around. It was noticeable that the so-called Police protection had been withdrawn."

Dr. Allen remembers one of the first persons who reached Malcolm X and offered assistance was a Japanese American woman named Mary Cokochiyama who, ironically, now lives near him in San Francisco.

"She was a nurse and the first person on the stage to try to do something," he recalled. "One of the newspapers in New York had a photo of her bending over and trying to revive him.

"She was a very strong Civil Rights activist because of her own experiences. Japanese Americans were locked up in the United States during the war for being suspected spies, many of them American citizens.

"She had been locked up in camps and she devoted her life not only to Japanese Americans but all people. She is still active and is now in her 80s."

Dr. Allen also found his way to California after obtaining a Master's degree in Sociology from the New School for Social Research in New York in 1967.

He obtained a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco in 1983 and has taught classes on Racial Inequality in America, Introduction to African American Life and Culture, Black Nationalism, Black Politics in the United States and the Social Movements of the Sixties.

From 1981 to 1984 Dr. Allen was head of the Ethnic Studies Department at Mills College in Oakland and also taught courses as an Assistant Professor in Ethnic Heritage in America, Racism and Capitalism, Social Movements of the Sixties, Race and Social Reform Movements in US History and Black History.

Dr. Allen is the senior editor of The Black Scholar, an independent journal of black studies research which started in 1969. It is published four times a year by the Black World Foundation, a non-profit educational organisation in California.

Dr. Allen has also written several books, including "Black Awakening in Capitalist America", "Reluctant Reformers: Racism and Social Reform Movements in the US", the award winning "The Port Chicago Mutiny: The Story of the Largest Mutiny Trial in US Naval History" and "Brotherman" which he coedited with Herb Boyd. "Brotherman" was the winner of an American Book Award and a non-fiction award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.

He has served as a consultant on "Port Chicago: The Real Story", a one-hour documentary on the Learning Channel on his book "Port Chicago" and a consultant on "Port Chicago: a National Tragedy", a one-hour documentary produced in San Francisco based on his book.

During the Second World War black sailors refused to continue to carry live artillery shells after an explosion killed dozens of their unit at Port Chicago, a San Francisco area naval station. Whites in similar positions at other ports were given cranes and other safety equipment. The men also complained of racist treatment by their officers but they were courtmartialed and imprisoned.

All his books are still in print, and he took last semester off to work on his latest book, "Honor Without Honor: The Untold Story of How America Betrayed Sgt. Edward Carter, One of the Most Decorated Black Soldiers of World War II".

The book, published by HarperCollins, is scheduled to be out next February. It talks about how Sgt. Carter, despite being seriously wounded, single-handedly wiped out several German gun emplacements that had halted advancing US troopers. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, but he was then denied re-enlistment as a suspected Communist.

Half a century later, in 1997, Sgt. Carter was awarded the Medal of Honor, the US's highest military award for valour. Through the efforts of his daughter-in-law Allene Carter (with whom Dr. Allen says he worked on the book), his name was cleared of Communist suspicions and a formal apology was issued by President Clinton and the Army. The story received national attention in the Washington Post, US News and World Report, New York Times and other publications.

"The first book I did was 'Black Awakening' which was published by Doubleday in 1969 and then picked up by a small independent publisher in Trenton, New Jersey, Africa World Press, and they kept it in print. It sells regularly.

"Brotherman' sold the best, but 'Port of Chicago' is the best known, mainly because of all the TV coverage. Several documentaries were made, a movie for television was made with Morgan Freeman and it resulted in President Clinton issuing a pardon to one of the men accused of mutiny. We are still pushing for all of them to be pardoned because if one of them is pardoned the whole group of 50 should be."