CHAPTER 9
Malcolm arrived at Muhammad’s residence on or around April 1. The two men embraced, and Elijah led the way to the rear of his home, where they strolled around the compound’s swimming pool. Malcolm recounted what was being said about Muhammad’s extramarital affairs and, without waiting for a reply, suggested a way forward. “Loyal Muslims could be taught that a man’s accomplishments in his life outweigh his personal, human weaknesses . . . Wallace Muhammad helped me to review the Quran and the Bible for documentation. David’s adultery with Bathsheba weighed less on history’s scales, for instance, than the positive fact of David’s killing Goliath.”
Muhammad immediately focused on Malcolm’s solution. “Son, I’m not surprised. You always have had such a good understanding of prophecy, and of spiritual things.” He did not focus on his sexual relationships with specific women, but chose instead to look to the biblical past to justify his behavior. “When you read about how David took another man’s wife, I’m that David,” he told Malcolm. Although the two men parted in friendship, in retrospect it is clear they already held two strikingly different agendas. Muhammad wanted to have the rumors suppressed. If Malcolm, in his sermons, employed Qurʹanic and biblical teachings to justify his conduct, that was acceptable. Malcolm, however, left the meeting feeling more troubled than when he had arrived. As he tried to cope with the Messenger having confirmed his worst suspicions, he also knew that it would require careful work on his own part to protect the Nation going forward. He saw the rumors as a virus that could lead to an epidemic, and his goal was to “inoculate” the Nation’s rank and file.
Almost immediately he set to work, speaking first in Philadelphia and then several times over the course of four days at Mosque No. 7, at each event unfolding the new language that he hoped would ease the news of Muhammad’s transgressions. James 67X quickly noticed the shift in the ministerʹs argument. “Malcolm had always taught that every two thousand years or so, the scriptures change. Anew messenger is needed, because that which has preceded has become corrupt.” He assumed that this was Malcolm’s way of establishing the superiority of Islam over Christianity, and also of affirming Fard’s divine status. “Then, one day, Malcolm . . . said something that shocked me. He said, ‘A prophet is in a scale. If he does more good than he did bad, then he’s considered good . . . A prophet, like everybody else, is weighed in the balance.’ I said to myself, ‘Well, what happened to this business about them always doing the right thing?’ ” James realized that Malcolm must be discussing Elijah Muhammad, but was reluctant to bring it up with him.
Malcolm’s increasing interest in discussing practical concerns now offered him an attractive alternative to speaking at length about the Messenger and his theology. Throughout 1963, he wrote in his Autobiography, “I spoke less and less of religion. I taught social doctrine to Muslims, and current events, and politics.” He significantly reduced his references to Muhammad while continuing to affirm his public loyalty. Muhammad acknowledged this at the end of April by greatly expanding Malcolm’s responsibilities. On April 25 he sent a letter addressed to “Malcolm Shabazz,” confirming his appointment as interim minister of Washington, D.C.ʹs Mosque No. 4. The former minister, Lucius X Brown, had been “dismissed from the ministry.” What was needed, he wrote Malcolm, was a minister “who has not only the love of Allah and Islam in his heart, but has enough intelligence and educational training to demand the respect of the Believers there in No. 4, and also the devils in that city.” This was not a maneuver to take Malcolm away from New York: he was expected to maintain his ministerial role at Mosque No. 7 while providing supervision in D.C. The appointment actually confirmed Muhammad’s continued trust in him, despite their recent confrontation. Malcolm told Mosque No. 7’s FOI that he would shuttle between Washington and New York each week. He also admitted that former minister Brown had been fired due to his “negative attitude” toward Muhammad Speaks. It is unclear whether Lucius’s complaints were about the paper’s contents or the aggressive sales policies forced upon members.
But if Muhammad still believed Malcolm to be trustworthy and dependable, the Chicago headquarters saw an opportunity in Malcolm’s frequent absences from New York, and John Ali began contacting Joseph directly on mosque matters. On April 25, Chicago had also widely circulated a letter bearing Elijah Muhammad’s signature and calling upon “all Ministers, Secretaries, and Captains . . . to get our paper, Muhammad Speaks, into the hands of our poor, blind, deaf, and dumb brothers and sisters . . . .” The paper, the letter stated, “will get to people who will not speak to us in the public; it will convert behind the door a hundred of our people to our one from the Speakerʹs Stand!” It was an unmistakable attack on Malcolm. Meanwhile, the information blackout of Malcolm in the paper itself became virtually complete.
The Washington Post reported Malcolm’s new appointment to the D.C. mosque, describing him as “the No. 2 man of the Black Muslim sect.” For Malcolm, the expanded responsibilities opened new doors; here was a chance to transplant much of the community building he had been pushing in New York to another city. Already the Nation had found great success in Harlem with several of their black improvement projects, most notably in combating juvenile delinquency. Washington’s desolate ghettos, in no better shape than Malcolm had found them during his Detroit Red years, offered an attractive new proving ground. He would also now be operating in the nation’s capital, close to the power center. At a press conference in Washington’s National airport, Malcolm insisted that he was not second in command, that the Nation did not “preach hatred of white people,” and that he intended to hold a series of blacks-only meetings over a four-week period to examine the causes and cures for black street crime in the nation’s capital.
On the same day that Malcolm had returned from Phoenix to begin dealing with the rumors surrounding Elijah Muhammad, the landscape of the Black Freedom Movement entered a tumultuous phase, sending tremors throughout the country. On April 3, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the SCLC began the long and devastating sit-in campaign to break segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. More than any previous protest, Birmingham focused the eyes of the nation on the civil rights struggle, as over the course of five weeks more than seven hundred nonviolent protesters, many of them children, faced arrest and jail time. Black newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier and the Los Angeles Herald-Dispatch reacted with cautious optimism; the public outcry over the protesters’ brutal treatment at the hands of Birmingham police chief Bull Connor and his men had set the gears of Washington turning, and talk of new civil rights legislation percolated beyond the capital. More than ever, the time seemed ripe for action, yet Malcolm knew that with tensions between himself and Chicago still unresolved, his options remained limited. Several reporters had heard rumors that Malcolm was planning to go to Birmingham, although he himself announced that he would travel there only on the direct orders of Muhammad, or at the invitation of NOI regional leader, minister Jeremiah X. Asked about the protests, Malcolm chose to address King’s tactics rather than his goals: “I’ll say this, if anybody sets a dog on a black man, the black man should kill that dog—whether he is a four-legged dog or a two-legged dog.”
Despite his extensive travels, Malcolm kept a close eye on the legal struggles of the Los Angeles mosque. The trial of fourteen Muslims stemming from the mosque raid began on April 8, 1963. Thirteen were tried on felony assault and resisting arrest with force. The Los Angeles Times reported that “members of the cult, the men dressed in neat dark suits, and the women in ankle-length, flowing dresses and white or pastel-colored scarves, quickly filled . . . 200 seats. Four additional bailiffs were assigned to the courtroom to maintain order and numerous policemen and deputy sheriffs, in plain clothes and uniforms, circulated in a dense crowd outside.” The prospective jurors sitting in the courtroom audience were given flyers by NOI members, detailing examples of police brutality. Judge David Coleman instructed prospective jurors that they should disregard the content of the flyers, explaining, “I am not too critical of the distribution of the leaflets . . . because I realize there is a great deal of interest in this trial and there is a great deal of emotion involved.ʺ On April 25, 1963, an all-white jury of eleven women and one man was sworn in.
As the trial began, the Muslim women asked the bailiffs to arrange a separate seating area for them, segregated from white spectators. The bailiffs consented, and a separate section was created for the women. The judge, however, put a halt to the racially designated seating, ordering that all seating would be allotted on a first-come, first-served basis. Malcolm arrived back in Los Angeles and attended the trial on May 3, insisting that “the defendants are not getting a fair trial.” The district attorney had “scientifically eliminated” blacks from the jury, Malcolm declared. During a recess, Malcolm sought out Donald L. Weese, the police officer who had killed Stokes, and provocatively took several photos of him. The unstated implication was that they might be used by Fruit members to identify him on the street, to launch their retaliation. One day, among the hundreds attending the proceedings was George Lincoln Rockwell, who informed the press that most blacks “are in complete agreement with the Muslims and their ideals, just as most of the white people of the country are in agreement with the Nazis.”
As the trial progressed, the prosecution made a vigorous case against the Muslims. Defense attorney Earl Broady was so frustrated by Judge Coleman’s constant overruling of his motions of objection that at one point he simply sat with his head in his hands for five minutes. When queried by reporters, Broady replied, “No, I’m not ill. I just thought I might lose my temper.” Malcolm made the local news again by claiming that he and another Muslim had been held at gunpoint upon his arrival: “They [the police] tried in every way to provoke us into an offensive act . . . so they would have a reason to shoot us.” On May 4, Malcolm addressed an audience of about two hundred at the Elks Lodge in South Central Los Angeles. Outside, two black men, one of whom was the actor Caleb Peterson, the head of the Hollywood Race Relations Bureau, began picketing against the Muslims. A tense confrontation took place in which the other integrationist picketer, Phil Waddell, was punched in the face by a Muslim. The police were called, but on their appearance Malcolm warned them, “If you don’t get these pickets away from here, I will not be responsible for anything that happens to them.” The pickets decided they had made their point, and beat a hasty retreat.
Final arguments were made on Friday, May 25, with the jury beginning its deliberations the next Monday. After setting a new Los Angeles court record for longest deliberations, on Friday, June 14, the jury found that nine of the defendants were guilty of assault charges; two men were acquitted, and the jury failed to reach unanimous verdicts on two others. On July 31 four of the convicted Muslims received prison terms of one to five years. The other convicted Muslims received probation, with one being sentenced to serve time in the county jail. The day after the sentences were handed down, three female jurors and three alternates told the media they did not believe “justice was done.” The women had met secretly with the judge on July 6 to lobby for leniency for the convicted Muslims. One juror announced that she planned to testify at the prisoners’ probation hearing on their behalf. Despite their convictions, the Muslims had made an effective and convincing case that the LAPD had employed excessive force in the mosque incident, generating sympathy even among whites.
Long before the resolution of the Los Angeles trial, Malcolm was back on the East Coast. He returned to Washington, D.C., to make what was to have been his maiden appearance before a congressional committee. Several newspaper reports on the success of the Nation’s juvenile delinquency programs had found their way to the desk of Congresswoman Edith Green of Oregon, and she had subsequently invited Malcolm to explain these initiatives to the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Education and Labor, which she chaired, on the morning of May 16. For reasons that remain unclear, his appearance was canceled. Instead, he met privately with Green for two hours. When the Capitol Hill media learned about his presence, a press conference was hastily arranged outside Green’s office shortly after midday. Malcolm attributed the hearing’s cancellation to “some segment of the power structure,” but he also used the opportunity to criticize Kennedy’s handling of the Birmingham crisis. “President Kennedy did not send troops to Alabama when dogs were biting black babies,” he observed. “He waited three weeks until the situation exploded. He then sent troops after the Negroes had demonstrated their ability to defend themselves.”
During the previous few years, Malcolm’s criticism of Kennedy had grown sharper and more frequent, despite Elijah Muhammad’s requests that he avoid targeting the president. Malcolm frequently attacked Kennedy by mentioning his religion, much as his opponents had during the election. For the Nation, Kennedy’s Catholicism served as easy shorthand for the antagonist, racist Christianity of whites that was soon to be supplanted by Islam. Malcolm also saw Kennedy as a liberal, and attributed to him all the disingenuousness he perceived in that ilk. During the fifties, Malcolm had not shied from denouncing the conservative Eisenhower, but never with quite the same intensity or general tone of ill regard. Kennedy was also popular among blacks, though the Nation saw this sentiment as misguided, and Malcolm believed he could bolster the Nation’s separatist position by working to increase doubts about Kennedy’s sincerity. On May 12 he attended an NOI meeting of four hundred people held at WUST Radio Music Hall, using the occasion to pillory both Kennedy and Alabama’s segregationist governor, George Wallace, as “the fox versus the wolf.” “Neither one loves you,” he warned. “The only difference is that the fox will eat you with a smile instead of a scowl.”
From his new position in Washington, Malcolm pushed for expanding the NOIʹs access to America’s prisons. The issue was not altogether new for him. After all, his very first political actions had come during his own prison tenure; this experience, and the understanding that poor blacks in prison were prime conversion targets for the NOI, led him to focus more on his efforts in this area. A year before, he had become involved with the case of five African Americans at the Attica state prison in upstate New York. Converting to the NOI while behind bars, the men demanded the right to hold religious services. The state commissioner of corrections rejected their request, calling the NOI a hate group. The prisoners filed a civil suit in federal court, and throughout their hearing were chained inside the courtroom—an example of excessive coercion that caused Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., to question the practice against felons. Malcolm testified as an expert witness for the Nation. “Muhammad never taught us to hate anybody,” he informed the court. When the judge inquired whether he could attend an NOI religious service, Malcolm responded, “Whites never come to our religious services. Many whites have a guilt complex about the race issue and think that when Negroes come together hate is discussed. The Muslim who has proper religious training and guidance gets along better with whites than Negroes who are Christians.” His testimony rarely mentioned Elijah Muhammad by name, placing emphasis instead on the obligations of his faith: “The only way that we can be recognized as a righteous people, we must abstain from alcohol, nicotine, tobacco, narcotics, profanity, gambling, lying, cheating, stealing . . . all forms of vice.”
That same year, a federal judge had ruled that NOI member William T. X Fulwood had the constitutional right to attend religious services at the Lorton Reformatory, located in Virginia. Black prisoners all over the country were eagerly joining the NOI and demanding their right to religious services. Malcolm and Quinton X Roosevelt Edwards of Mosque No. 4 had conducted a service at Lorton back in May. In June, however, corrections officials turned down Malcolm’s request to continue services there, saying that he was a convicted felon and an “incendiary” who disrupted prison life. The D.C. branch of the American Civil Liberties Union at once took up the issue.
The oppressive reality of prison had a clear effect on Malcolm’s rhetoric, to the point where he began using it as a metaphor for the condition of being black in America. During an interview with psychologist Kenneth Clark on June 4, he asserted that the NOI was not a Black Muslim religion, saying, “We are black people who are Muslims because we have accepted the religion of Islam.” Malcolm then asserted that all black Americans, regardless of their religious views, were in effect prisoners under a racist system. Increasingly, a growing majority of blacks saw themselves as “inmates”; the American president, Malcolm added, was “just another [prison] warden.”
As the summer began, black Americans experienced twin polarities of joy and devastation. First, President Kennedy, ignoring his advisers, went on television and announced to the country the broad outlines of his new civil rights legislation. Then, a few hours later, a sniper assassinated NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi. With each new piece of news, the stakes grew higher, fueling black hopes and, in many places, white animosity.
Malcolm’s extensive engagement with the civil rights movement, and the well-publicized public protests by Mosque No. 7, had inspired Muslims in other cities to become involved in protests, but Chicago headquarters was anxious to quell the new mood. On June 21, Raymond Sharrieff warned a crowd in Chicago: “The whites are watching the Muslims to see what kind of stand they will take on demonstrations. . . . The NOI stands on total separation.” Therefore, “peaceful demonstrations” could accomplish nothing. Sharrieff informed Mosque No. 2 that he had been “shocked and surprised that some of the FOI want to take part in the so-called peaceful demonstrations by the so-called Negroes,” predicting that after his fellow blacks suffered mistreatment by the police and were “lied to” by King, “the so-called Negroes will be easy to get for Islam.” He then threatened, “If this is not plain enough for you, let me put it more clearly to you. Do not participate in any way in these demonstrations. If you are caught, you will wish you were dead.”
By the early sixties, some brothers inside the Nation were almost impossible to control. To a man, they were enthusiastic, loyal, and devoted, yet their propensity for violence and lockstep obedience to the Nation’s rigid chain of command made them useful tools only so long as they could be tethered. Gladly willing to sacrifice their lives for the NOIʹs cause, these men had become familiar faces to passersby in Harlem, Detroit, Miami, and Chicago, aggressively hawking Muhammad Speaks on street corners, in driving rain and freezing snow. Veteran captains like Joseph closely studied them and channeled their energies into the martial arts. The most aggressive were selected for the task of disciplining NOI members who had committed an infraction that required penitence. Louis Xʹs brother, based in New York, was soon recruited into the secret “pipe squad” inside Mosque No. 7, although to Louis its disciplinary actions seemed excessive. “If a brother committed adultery, he would get time out, but the brothers would go by and visit him and beat him down. And this was sanctioned,” he recalled. Over the years, a “thuggish kind of behavior” was institutionalized under the leadership of NOIʹs most influential captains, such as Joseph in New York, Clarence in Boston, and Jeremiah in Philadelphia. Matters frequently got out of hand. “Carelessness in what you say to somebody,” explained Farrakhan, “could lead to harm and hurt to people who disliked Elijah Muhammad, whatever their reason.” As a lieutenant, Thomas 15X Johnson was expected to perform disciplinary duties. “Say a brother got caught smoking a cigarette. [The lieutenants] would throw him down a flight of stairs,” he explained. If someone “disrespected the captain [Joseph] on their way out [of the mosque], he would have anʹaccident’ and he would just fall down the stairs.” Joseph almost always gave his disciplinary orders to a first lieutenant, who communicated what was to be done to the group of fellow lieutenants, or other FOI “enforcers.” NOI members who became victims of assaults “didn’t deserve to be beat up,” Farrakhan confessed. “They didn’t deserve to be blinded. They didn’t deserve even to be killed.”
The ministers occupied a difficult position when it came to discipline. As the de facto head of a mosque, a minister needed to know what was happening with his members, yet the unpleasant, often criminal nature of the punitive violence made it sensible to maintain a degree of deniability. In the vast majority of cases, ministers like Malcolm were deliberately kept ignorant of the actions of enforcers. “Whatever took place, we had a policy : don’t let the minister know,” said Thomas 15X. “Don’t involve him in this . . . because that puts him in a bad position.” Years later, Farrakhan implied that Malcolm had carefully insulated himself from direct involvement but was fully aware of the crimes being committed. He recalled saying to Malcolm, “Look, do you realize that when a man who is taught that this black man is his brother, and we’re giving a law to put him out the society, and then he’s visited, with every blow that you hit that man in the head, you’re killing the love that was in you for your brother?” Malcolm listened, then chided him, saying, “Brother, you’re just spiritual.” Louis took this to mean that the Nation needed men who were religiously oriented, but also men who would resort to violence without remorse to maintain discipline. If murder became necessary to set an example, so be it.
Most members of the Fruit would never question authority. “Nobody would even think about making a move if there wasn’t a direct order from a lieutenant which comes down from the top,” explained Thomas 15X Johnson. By the early 1960s, Joseph was well aware that his mosque had been infiltrated by FBI informants, so when he gave an order to discipline an individual, he carefully limited his contact with the men carrying it out. “Captain Joseph never talked to us directly,” Johnson said. “He would talk to the first lieutenant,” who in turn would communicate that order to one or more second lieutenants, who could select his own group of Fruit for that particular assignment.
Punishment ran from simple beatings for routine transgressions to far, far worse. Elijah Muhammad, Jr.’s stern reminder to the Fruit that “in the old days” brothers who stepped out of line had been killed was inaccurate only its suggestion that such punishment remained in the past. Johnson was involved in a number of extreme disciplinary actions, at least one of which exacted the ultimate price. “A brother got killed in the Bronx, okay?” he recounted in a calm, matter-of-fact voice. “He was a man worthy of death. I mean, there was no question about that, but he got killed.” In another incident, an NOI minister was discovered both with marijuana in his apartment and engaging in “fornication.” “They went up there and they damned near kicked his spleen out,” Johnson recalled. Still, like many who embraced the strictness of the Nation’s rules, he thought the beating was justified: “They kicked him out because, like I say, that’s unheard of, man, violating like that.”
One incident involved a member who reportedly made threats against Muhammad’s life. “Because Elijah was coming [to speak at] the 369th Armory . . . [this man] put out the word that he was going to kill Elijah. So me and my crew were posted in the lobby there, because we knew who this guy was.” Finally, the man was spotted in the crowd, at the top of a staircase. According to Johnson, he and his men
picked him up and we handed him down the ranks, because there was all soldiers on the staircase. . . . We got him down to the bottom, and we put [him in] a circle. We stomped him pretty bad. Making a threat like that on Elijah Muhammad—hey, as far as we were concerned, man, he should have gotten murdered right there. Police just stood around and waited. . . . They said, “Okay, well, y’all proved your point here.” I said, “Well, we’ll decide whether we’ve proved our point or not.” And after we were satisfied, we dispersed, and they called the ambulance and they took him away. But they wouldn’t intervene. . . . They [knew] that if they touched one of us they would have to touch all of us. Everybody knew it. This was a law. It was untouchable.
The disciplining of an NOI minister was especially serious. Johnson explained, “A lieutenant cannot discipline a minister. The only one can do that is the captain, and that had to be done through the supreme captain [Raymond Sharrieff] in Chicago.”
The mosque also continued to attract young people both who were dedicated to Elijah Muhammad and who did not challenge the chain of command. One outstanding example was Lawrence (Larry) Prescott, Jr. Born in the early 1940s in Hampton, Virginia, he moved to New York City when a child. As a teenager still in high school, Larry first went to hear Malcolm speak on February 13, 1960, but found that he had been replaced that evening by Wallace Muhammad. Sitting eagerly in the front row, Larry vividly remembered Wallace’s provocative statement that “Negroes are afraid of everything” at the same time that he dramatically threw a Bible to the floor. “Everybody, especially those first few rows where we were . . . jumped back,” Larry recalled. Wallace then shamed his audience, saying, “Look at you. You think a lightning bolt is going to come through and strike me?”
Larry began attending Mosque No. 7 meetings, and by age eighteen was on the verge of dedicating himself to the NOI. Two enthusiasms stood in the way: his passion for jazz and a fondness for marijuana. But one Friday night, after listening to a fiery speech by Malcolm on the radio, he collected his entire marijuana stash—about one pound—went to a friend’s home, and after announcing his determination to become a Muslim, handed it over. Larry laughed, explaining, “So he put the word out in South Jamaica [Queens]. He said, ‘Larry has lost his mind. He’s messing with them Muslims!’ ”
By 1962, Larry 4X was an assistant minister at Mosque No. 7, a proud junior member of Malcolm’s entourage. Unlike many at the mosque, he sensed the tensions developing between his mentor and Chicago. “Malcolm had more visibility than any minister in the Nation,” he recalled in 2006. “And his charisma added to that—people just hung on to Malcolm’s word.” After the police invasion of the Los Angeles mosque in 1962, “Malcolm handled it in his very strident way . . . saying that these devils that killed one of our brothers and Elijah will make them pay. And when that plane went down with all of them white folks from Georgia on it, he said, ‘Elijah answered our prayers.’ ”
Larry developed a close friendship with Maceo X after learning that the mosque’s secretary had been a jazz piano player, and he also nurtured a deep respect for the strict disciplinarian Captain Joseph, but as far as he was concerned, Malcolm was the “boss of the bosses.” What he appreciated most was Malcolm’s approach in tutorials with the junior ministers. “It was a one-way street. He did the talking; we did the listening.” Malcolm always insisted that his students be thoroughly prepared before giving a lecture. Never shoot from the hip, he cautioned; always state the subject of a talk clearly at the beginning. “He would always talk about how you have to remember and do the loop in your subject and bring the people back.” By 1963 Larry was sometimes given the responsibility of introducing his mentor at events. “There [was] a joke in the ministry class that when Malcolm walked onto the rostrum—say, if I was opening up for him—he would say, ‘Make it plain.’ He would sit down, you know, and he would sit there for a minute and let you make your point; he’d smile and maybe applaud. Then he’d say, ‘Make it plain.’ That was the signal: close out and bring him on.”
In May, Alex Haley’s Playboy interview with Malcolm hit the newsstands, further bolstering his national profile. On the one hand, the interview benefited from having been mostly conducted before Malcolm’s confrontation with Muhammad, yet the timing of its appearance hardly endeared him further to the Chicago headquarters. In the introduction, Haley presented Malcolm as standing “on the right hand of God’s Messenger” in the NOI, wielding “all but absolute authority over the movement and its membership as Muhammad’s business manager, trouble-shooter, prime minister and heir apparent.” Throughout the interview, however, Malcolm tried to express total devotion to Muhammad, explaining, “[T]o faithfully serve and follow the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is the guiding goal of every Muslim. Mr. Muhammad teaches us the knowledge of our own selves and of our own people.” One innovative argument Malcolm did advance was that the NOI had “the sympathy of ninety percent of the black people” in the United States. “A Muslim to us is somebody who is for the black man; I don’t care if he goes to the Baptist Church seven days a week.” This merger of religious, political, and ethnic identities empowered Malcolm to speak on behalf of millions of non-Islamic African Americans.
Malcolm used the interview to make a number of arguments guaranteed to offend white middle America. When asked about his plane crash comments, he replied, “Sir, as I see the law of justice, it says as you sow, so shall you reap . . . We Muslims believe that the white race, which is guilty of having oppressed and exploited and enslaved our people here in America, should and will be the victims of God’s divine wrath.” The interview also contained several anti-Semitic slurs. “The Jew cries louder than anybody else if anybody criticizes him,” Malcolm complained. “The Jew is always anxious to advise the black man. But they never advise him how to solve his problem the way the Jews solved their problem.” Through their economic clout, he observed, Jews owned Atlantic City and Miami Beach, and not only these. “Who owns Hollywood? Who runs the garment industry, the largest industry in New York City? . . . When there’s something worth owning, the Jew’s got it.” He went on to argue that Jewish money controlled civil rights groups like the NAACP, pushing Negroes into adopting a strategy of integration that was doomed to failure. His comments would be deemed so controversial, he said, that Playboy would never print them in their entirety. Haley felt vindicated, however, when the magazine indeed printed the interview exactly as transcribed: “[Malcolm] was very much taken aback when Playboy kept its word.”
That same month, following the publication of the interview, Haley contacted Malcolm with a new proposition—to tell his life story in a book. “It was one of the few times I have ever seen him uncertain,” Haley recalled. Malcolm asked for some time to consider the idea, but just two days later telephoned to say he would do the autobiography, on two conditions. All royalties to which he was entitled would go to the NOI. And second, Haley must personally request permission from Elijah Muhammad. Haley flew to see Muhammad at his home in Phoenix, but without knowing that only weeks before Malcolm and Elijah had discussed the charges of adultery. Muhammad felt that the scandal placed him at a disadvantage in considering Haley’s request. He interpreted the book project as evidence of Malcolm’s vanity, but believed it was probably in his own best interest, at least temporarily, to cater to this. “Allah approves,” Muhammad managed to say to Haley between bouts of coughing. “Malcolm is one of my most outstanding ministers.” Whether he meant it or not, he had almost completely misread Malcolm’s intentions for the project, which were nearly the opposite of what Muhammad thought. Concerned about his increasingly strained relations with his mentor, Malcolm hoped to use the book as a reconciliation tactic, presenting his life as a tribute to the genius and good works of the Messenger.
Shortly after Haley had returned to New York City and secured a book contract with Doubleday for twenty thousand dollars, Malcolm presented him with a piece of paper containing a statement written in longhand. He told Haley, “This is the book’s dedication.” It read: “This book I dedicate to The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, who found me here in the muck and mire of the filthiest civilization and society on this earth, and pulled me out, cleaned me up, and stood me on my feet, and made me the man that I am today.” None of this language, of course, appeared in the final text of the Autobiography, a casualty to Malcolm’s spiritual and political transformation in the remaining years of his life.
On May 27, 1963, a “Memorandum of Agreement” was signed between Malcolm X—also described as “sometimes called Malik Shabazz”—Alex Haley, and a representative of Doubleday. The work was described as “an untitled non-fiction book,” with a length of eighty thousand to one hundred thousand words. The royalty advance of twenty thousand dollars was to be split equally between Haley and Malcolm. Upon signing the contract, the two men each received twenty-five hundred dollars. In a second document sent to Malcolm from Haley, the key terms of the contract were restated, calling for a book manuscript of 224 pages. Haley acknowledged Malcolm’s request that his royalty share be granted directly to NOI Mosque No. 2 in Chicago. A deadline of October 1963 was set for the completion of the book. With the contracts secure, the Doubleday staff began calculating how much it stood to gain financially from publishing Malcolm’s autobiography. On June 6, 1963, Doubleday estimated that the Autobiography, priced at $3.95 in paperback and $4.95 in cloth cover, should sell fifteen thousand copies in its initial year of publication, with projected total sales of twenty thousand.
Haley drafted clear ground rules for their collaboration. “It is understood,” he declared, “that nothing can be in the manuscript, whether a sentence, a paragraph, or a chapter, or more that you do not completely approve of. It is further understood that anything must be in the manuscript that you want in the manuscript.” Despite this reassurance, it took Malcolm at least a month to relax sufficiently to talk frankly about his personal life. The two men made an uneasy pair: the integrationist former coast guard man and the separatist preacher; each was skeptical of the other’s ideas, yet both could see what they stood to gain from their collaboration. From June until early October, they would usually meet at Haley’s Greenwich Village studio apartment, Malcolm arriving around nine p.m. and staying until midnight. Haley took detailed notes, but Malcolm would also scribble his own notes on scrap paper as he talked. After he had left, Haley would attempt to decipher the scrawls. By midsummer, the project was making progress, despite the reservations both men retained. “I had heard him bitterly attack other Negro writers as ‘Uncle Toms,’ ” Haley complained in the Autobiography’s epilogue. And Malcolm continually made it plain that Haley personified the do-nothing Negro petty bourgeoisie that he enjoyed ridiculing.
As work on the Autobiography progressed, Haley peppered his agent, Paul Reynolds, and his editors at Doubleday with requests of all sorts. On August 5, Haley informed Reynolds’s assistant that he should replace the designation “Co-authored by Alex Haley” with “As told to Alex Haley.” He explained in a letter that he was “sometimes awed by [Malcolm’s] skill as a demagogue,” but wanted to assert a clear separation between Malcolm’s political perspectives and his own. “‘Co-authoring with Malcolm Xʹ would, to me, imply sharing his views—when mine are almost a complete antithesis of his.” One month later, after an “18-hour” session with Malcolm, Haley asked Reynolds for a five-hundred-dollar advance to fly to Chicago for an interview with Elijah Muhammad. Despite his many requests, work progressed slowly, and on September 22 Haley forwarded to Reynolds the book’s first two chapters. He was optimistic that he could complete the entire work by the end of October 1963. Still, he was having trouble working through the early phases of Malcolm’s life, and near the end of September he pressed Malcolm, trying to break through the ministerʹs reserve and lingering mistrust. Haley urged him “to make more gripping your catharsis of decision involving Reginald. I must build up your regard and respect for [him] when the two of you were earlier in Harlem.” He pleaded with Malcolm to give him three consecutive days that week to collaborate on the book, arguing that “night sessions here, such as we had, will be the most productive.”
Malcolm also sought to present Elijah Muhammad’s views about black women in a positive light. This may explain the New York Herald Tribune’s feature story about Betty Shabazz, published on June 30, 1963. For her first press interview, Betty presented an impressive figure:
She acknowledged us impressively, as a queen might greet a subject. She was wearing white gloves and a white veil over her hair, brushed smooth across her forehead. Her grey tweed two-piece cotton dress, buttoned to the neck, reached to the floor. Her manner was as formal as her dress, as neat and attractive as that of her husband.
The reporter was informed that Muslim women avoided publicity. The primary tasks of NOI women were caring for their families and “obeying the moral tenets dictated to them by Elijah Muhammad.” Betty stated that MGT leader Ethel Sharrieff represented the standard by which Muslim women judged themselves. “All of us try in some ways to copy her,” Betty explained to the reporter. Betty was reticent to reveal basic facts about her own life, such as at which New York hospital she had been employed as a nurse. She admitted that she did not “know the Koran very well,” but said that she read “the history of black people” to her children. Both Betty and Malcolm presented themselves as loyal followers of Muhammad. But Malcolm added, “Elijah teaches us that no two people should stay together who can’t get along.”
The idea of organizing a march on Washington, D.C., was born in the Harlem office of A. Philip Randolph sometime in December 1962, when Bayard Rustin visited Randolph there. The two old friends began talking about the Negro March on Washington Movement of 1941 that had pressured the Roosevelt administration into an executive order that outlawed hiring discrimination by defense plants. That mass mobilization never culminated in an actual event, but now Rustin conceived of a new march on a more ambitious scale, climaxing with two days of public activities. His draft proposal emphasized the acceleration of “integration in the fields of education, housing, transportation and public accommodations” and “broad national government action . . . to meet the problem of unemployment, especially as it related to minority groups.” At the outset, COREʹs Norman Hill was appointed director of field staff, traveling the country to build support at local levels, while SNCC would send John Lewis, its national chair, to represent the organization.
In the wake of his desegregation victory in Birmingham, Martin Luther King, Jr., also favored placing greater pressure on the Kennedy administration. For more than a year, he and the SCLC had pushed for a presidential order outlawing segregation. At first, King supported the tactics of simultaneous demonstrations to take place all over the country, but in the end was persuaded to support the Washington march. The more conservative wing of the black freedom struggle, the NAACP and National Urban League, was at best cool. Roy Wilkins demanded that Rustin be fired as coordinator because of his homosexuality and record of arrests. A compromise was reached, with Randolph accepting the public role of march chairman and Rustin, as vice chair, functioning essentially as executive director. The Kennedy administration was also deeply unhappy, fearing that the presence of several hundred thousand demonstrators on the National Mall might invite widespread violence. But Rustin recruited hundreds of out-of-uniform African-American police, who would be deployed as a barrier between the marchers and the mostly white D.C. police and National Park Service officers. As the project gathered momentum, some of the mobilization’s more radical demands were jettisoned to accommodate the support of organized labor and white liberal religious groups. The expanded presence of whites was just enough to convince a reluctant Kennedy administration to offer its endorsement.
Although the Nation of Islam was firmly opposed to the march’s integrationist goals, it would have been impossible for Malcolm not to have been affected by such an unprecedented mobilization. For one thing, Rustin’s headquarters was in Harlem—on West 130th Street. Throughout the summer, the black press speculated on whether the march would be successful, both in terms of turnout and in its ability to change Washington priorities. Despite the NOIʹs ban on participation in such demonstrations, Mosque No. 7 continued to be involved in similar activities. On June 29 it sponsored another major street rally, at the corner of Lenox Avenue and West 115th Street. The NOIʹs press release targeted “the Uncle-Tom Negro leaders” for doing little to halt “the dope traffic, alcoholism, gambling, prostitution, and other forms of organized crime . . . destroying the very moral fiber of the Black Community.” Despite such strident attacks, Malcolm extended speaking invitations to NAACP head Roy Wilkins, National Urban League director Whitney Young, COREʹs James Farmer, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Only Powell seems to have responded, indicating that business commitments made it impossible for him to address the rally. The program brought out about two thousand people. The attitude of the NYPD was that of mild harassment, and FOI members were dispatched to the rooftops to observe both crowd and cops.
On July 13, Mosque No. 7 threw a large banquet to celebrate a formal visit from the youngest son of Elijah Muhammad, Akbar Muhammad, and his wife, Harriet. The couple was in the process of returning home after a two-year stay in Cairo, where the twenty-five-year-old Akbar had been a student of Islamic jurisprudence. His arrival pleased Malcolm. After Wallace, Akbar had come to be counted first among Malcolm’s allies in Muhammad’s family. The youngest of the Messengerʹs children, he found that his time in the Middle East had accomplished for him what prison had done for Wallace: basically, completely disabuse him of any belief in his fatherʹs peculiar brand of Islam. Two days after his arrival in New York, the NOI held another public rally, drawing a crowd of four thousand, and Akbar was invited to speak. His talk had been advertised as a “Special Report on Africa for the People of Harlem, but once on his feet he called for a comprehensive united front of African Americans.” “We must have unity among Negroes,” he told the crowd. “It is time for all of us—CORE, the NAACP, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Black Muslims—to sit down together. . . . We must stop calling Dr. King names, and he must stop talking about us before the enemy.” For Akbar, the distinction between black separatism, symbolized by his father, and racial integration was secondary to the need to force coalitions. If such unity could be achieved, leaders of independent African states were “ready to help us win our freedom.”
Akbar then made an extraordinary comment, sending murmurs through the crowd and certainly drawing Malcolm’s complete attention. “I don’t hate any man because of the color of his skin,” he declared. “I look at a man’s heart, I watch his actions, and I make my conclusions on the basis of what he does, rather than how he looks.” Listening to the speech, Louis Lomax recalled that Malcolm had preached a similar approach several years earlier, but he had also continued to denigrate King and other civil rights leaders. Akbar Muhammad’s address marked a potential schism. Here was a son of the Messenger, the one who had most thoroughly immersed himself in the world of orthodox Islam, offering a clear refutation of the very foundation of the Nation’s theology. Akbar’s position, said Lomax, “reflects the Arabs’ involvement with black unity throughout the world. . . . Malcolm X is closer to Elijah Muhammad, in terms of just what the American Negro should do, than is Elijah’s own son.” Akbarʹs emergence meant that “the Black Muslims will become more ʹIslamicʹ and more ‘political’ in the days just ahead.”
Though Akbarʹs speech challenged Nation of Islam orthodoxy far more directly than Malcolm had ever dared, Malcolm was well aware that the NOIʹs pace of Islamization had to be accelerated. He had been forced to continue his public defense of the Nation’s religious legitimacy, as more and more orthodox Muslims came forward to challenge the sect’s racial exclusivity. On July 15, the Chicago Defender published a story on Egypt’s powerful Muslim League, which “flatly disagrees with the anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-Jew, and anti-integration preachments of America’s Black Muslims.” The story also cited complaints from the Jami’at al-Islam Humanitarian Foundation of the United States, whose director, Ahmad Kamal, characterized Elijah Muhammad’s views as “anti-Muslim.” To this, Elijah Muhammad responded personally and forcefully: “Neither Jeddah nor Mecca have sent me! I am sent from Allah and not from the Secretary General of the Muslim League. There is no Muslim in Arabia that has authority to stop me from delivering this message that I have been assigned to.”
As the summer progressed, Malcolm stepped up his involvement with on-the-ground demonstrations in support of civil rights. On July 22 he attended the picketing of a Brooklyn hospital construction site by more than a thousand workers who charged racial discrimination in the building industry. Hundreds of picketers began blocking huge construction trucks beginning at seven a.m. and the demonstration continued for nine hours; although the protesters observed nonviolent tactics, three hundred of them were dragged away by police. Malcolm carefully stood across the street, but he shook hands and expressed his support with participants. When asked by journalists why he wasn’t directly involved, he evaded the issue: “It would not be fair. You would see a different situation here. We would never let these policemen put us into those paddy wagons.” Joining him at a second demonstration was playwright/actor Ossie Davis, who briefly blocked the access of one construction truck. Malcolm brought along a 35-millimeter camera and busied himself taking photographs. “If there were no captions for these pictures, you’d think this was Mississippi or Nazi Germany,” he informed one New York Times reporter. “Only difference between the Gestapo and the New York police is that this is 1963.” Five days later, he turned up at a civil rights rally in Brooklyn that brought out more than three hundred people. Addressing the crowd, Malcolm emphasized the need for “unity” and said that there were “no real differences” between the various civil rights groups.
The March on Washington was scheduled for August 28, and as it approached, Malcolm’s increased involvement in the business of pickets and protests began to expose yet another weakness in the Nation’s ideology. For years, mainstream civil rights leaders like Rustin and Farmer had criticized the NOI for having no real political plan. Now, as black activists increasingly found themselves facing the business end of billy clubs and fire hoses, the Nation risked further revealing itself as unable to live up to its militant rhetoric. For years, Malcolm had warned listeners not to underestimate the Muslims; he consistently told anyone who would listen that while his people were to be cooperative with police, if a Muslim was physically assaulted or attacked, it would bring down a rain of retributive violence. At an FOI meeting at the end of July that summer, he talked about the problem of police brutality. “When the NOI demonstrates, it demonstrates all the way.” He told the Fruit that while he did not publicly say so, he believed in violence to defend his rights, even claiming that he was prepared to “use his teeth” if he had to protect himself. Yet for all his talk of willingness to use violence, the only real damage the Nation had inflicted in the past half decade had targeted its own misbehaving members. It was a contradiction that increasingly troubled Malcolm.
Still, he could point to some progress, certainly in terms of his increased recognition. His many media appearances and his public activities in the D.C. area even caught the attention of President Kennedy, who, referring to a controversy over the TFX fighter plane in early June, quipped, “We have had an interesting six months . . . with TFX and now we are going to have his brother Malcolm for the next six.” Muhammad continued to monitor these public addresses by his star lieutenant. It was now difficult for him to restrain Malcolm from tackling political issues, given Akbarʹs speech, which had been widely covered. But he continued to be troubled by Malcolm’s frequent criticisms of Kennedy, who despite his administration’s sluggish record on civil rights remained popular among blacks. In a letter to Malcolm dated August 1, Muhammad advised, “Be careful about mentioning Kennedy in your talks and printed matters by name; use U.S.A. or the American Government.”
As excitement about the March on Washington grew, Malcolm decided to increase the Harlem mosque’s outreach efforts. On August 10, Malcolm told a crowd of about eight hundred that the Nation would not participate in the march, but Elijah Muhammad was planning to be in Washington during that week to ensure that “there would be no skullduggery, no flimflam, no sell-out.” Malcolm also tried out, for the first time, his counterargument against the march, implying that it had been taken over by the Kennedy administration. This strategy characterized the main thrust of Malcolm’s attacks against both Kennedy and King. By taking aim at the top of the power structure and assuming a populist tone, he hoped to drive a wedge between average blacks and their leadership, to better bring them to the Nation’s position. Now he set about portraying the march as another example of the grassroots being co-opted by the establishment, which of course had its own selfish agenda. “When the white man found out he couldn’t stop [the march], he joined it,” Malcolm told the crowd. Four days later, Raymond Sharrieff gave a talk at Mosque No. 7, and he too discouraged participation by NOI members. “Some so-called Negroes believe in Martin King, and this is well and good,” he declared diplomatically. Elijah Muhammad and King “should be tried as leaders,” but ultimately Muhammad would be “on top because his works are greater.” He then warned, “In Islam today a test of the Muslim belief is being waged. You should be wise in your decision when choosing.”
On August 18, Malcolm was in Washington, speaking at a local NOI meeting. In the speech, he described the current situation as the “gravest crisis since the civil war.” The vast majority of blacks had “lost all confidence in the false promises of hypocritical white politicians.” His chief animus, however, was aimed at the “white liberals, who have been making a great fuss over the South, only to blind us to what is happening here in the North.” The root causes of American racism were to be found in the nation’s history. “The Revolutionary War and the Civil War were two wars fought on American soil, supposedly for freedom and democracy—but if these two wars were really for freedom and human dignity of all men, why are 20 million of our people still confined and enslaved?” Amajority of the “founding fathers,” men who signed the Declaration of Independence, owned slaves.
In the typed manuscript of this address, Malcolm made a handwritten correction that directly attacked the Kennedy administration, despite Muhammad’s advice. Crossing out the words “the American government,” he inscribed, “this present Catholic administration.” He correctly anticipated the white backlash against the affirmative action and equal opportunity policies that within a few years would drive millions of Southern Democrats and white workers into the Republican Party, but he still could not imagine the passage of landmark civil rights legislation, least of all led by a Southern Democrat and taking place within one year
On August 23, Malcolm answered listeners’ questions on WNOR radio, in Norfolk, Virginia, saying that Wallace D. Fard’s coming in the 1930s represented the realization of Jewish prophecies, as well as the fulfillment of Islamic expectations. He described Fard as “the son of Man,” making him divine—a status that Fard never claimed, at least not publicly. The day before, he had explained to a crowd the basics of the Nation’s strange cosmology, complete with the story of Yacub and the white devils. It seemed incongruous with the rest of his rhetoric, but either he still firmly accepted the key tenets of Elijah Muhammad’s world or he found it expedient to make it seem as though he did publicly. Politically, he was clearer: “The Muslims who follow the Honorable Elijah Muhammad won’t have anything to do whatsoever with the March,” he insisted. It would not benefit blacks to “go down to a dead man’s statue—a dead President’s monument—who was supposed to have issued an Emancipation Proclamation a hundred years ago.”
It took only a few days before his negative comments about the forthcoming march began circulating in the national press. Meanwhile, thousands began to descend on Washington: the supposedly “Uncle Tom” leaders like Rustin, Randolph, and King had mobilized a quarter of a million people, well beyond the NOIʹs outreach. Across the country, tens of thousands of working-class blacks were also engaged in smaller protests. As Malcolm took in the march’s tremendous drawing power, he must have been of two minds. The turnout let him take the temperature of the nation’s black community; the massive mobilization showed that the gains made by King and other civil rights leaders in Birmingham and Montgomery had had a galvanizing effect. He could hardly deny their effectiveness in mobilizing blacks on a large scale. Yet he also believed that the NOI needed to delegitimize the march, to push back on the idea that this dramatic display of numbers could have any real effect on black Americans’ lives. According to Larry 4X Prescott, several days before the march Malcolm met with Mosque No. 7 members, instructing them again that Elijah Muhammad had forbidden them to participate, though he also informed Larry and others that he himself would be attending, having received permission from the Messenger. On the night before the march, hundreds of buses were stationed at departure points throughout New York City. NOI laborers went to virtually every bus to distribute copies of Muhammad Speaks. Malcolm was letting it be known, Larry explained, that this was “a part of history that we should be a part of.”
And yet publicly he was communicating the opposite. At an NOI rally just before the march, Malcolm pilloried the gathering as “the Farce on Washington,” decrying its effectiveness and challenging the idea that the march as planned represented the will of the majority of blacks. He argued that the mobilization “actually began as a spontaneous and angry action of protest from the dissatisfied black masses.” This had occurred, he admitted, because black people were overwhelmingly opposed to racial segregation. Malcolm claimed that the original intention was for black groups to tie up the Capitol through sit-ins and other civic disruptions. Inevitably, though, powerful whites began to influence events. Wilkins, Randolph, King, and other civil rights leaders supposedly had been ordered to call off the march. They informed the Kennedy administration that they were not in charge of the mobilization—that the black masses had taken control. Malcolm argued that the Kennedy administration decided to “co-opt” the demonstration. The president not only publicly endorsed the march’s goals, but encouraged Negroes to participate in it. Malcolm’s thesis was that the civil rights leaders were so craven and bankrupt that they were duped by whites in power.
This version of events was a gross distortion of the facts—yet it contained enough truth to capture an audience of unhappy black militants who had wanted the march to spearhead strikes and widespread civil disobedience. For all of Malcolm’s calls for unity, and for whatever the march represented in its mass outpouring of support, the Black Freedom Movement continued to be pulled in different directions. Many on the left, including much of SNCC, were inclined to agree with Malcolm’s position on the march’s ineffectiveness. They saw the event as representative of the overly cautious strategies of middle-class Negro leaders, and believed more forceful action would be necessary to make real gains. These disagreements played themselves out in backroom deals leading up to the march, most notably when SNCCʹs John Lewis found himself embroiled in controversy over his planned speech, which said essentially that the march was too little, too late; at the last minute, more conservative leaders pressured him to cut its most inflammatory passages. Malcolm’s rhetoric, unburdened by factors of diplomacy, did not shy away from making such points.
On the night before the march, Peter Goldman ran into Louis Lomax in a Washington hotel lobby. Goldman recalled that Lomax led him to a large suite crowded with about fifty middle-class African Americans:
And there [in the center] was Malcolm. And until I saw him, I had no clue that was what Lomax was leading me to. His attitude, his public attitude toward the march, was that this is a picnic, it’s a circus, it’s meaningless. . . . He was doing a very much muted version of that. He wasn’t addressing them. It was more kind of a cocktail party setting. Indeed, there were a lot of bourbons splashing, including into my glass. . . . There’s always one power center at a cocktail party, and he was it. . . . He knew that that was the capital . . . the epicenter of black America on that day.
Malcolm was indeed the center of attention wherever he went, usually followed by a gaggle of newsmen. Attorney Floyd McKissick, who in 1965 would become head of CORE, ran into him at the Washington Hilton. The two men hugged each other and began conversing before panicked CORE staffers hustled McKissick away, worried that any association with Malcolm would damage their image. Rustin encountered Malcolm on at least three occasions that night and the following day. The first time, he was leaving a strategy session with the march’s major speakers when he saw Malcolm holding court with some reporters. Instead of getting angry, he knew his old debating partner well enough by now to use humor to deflate him. “Now, Malcolm, be careful,” he warned. “There are going to be a half-million people here tomorrow, and you don’t want to tell them this is nothing but a picnic.” Malcolm replied, “What I tell them is one thing. What I tell the press is something else.” Sometime later, Malcolm was with a group of marchers. Walking by, Rustin shouted out, “Why don’t you tell them this is just a picnic?” This time Malcolm just smiled. The next day, with the demonstration concluded, Rustin saw him one more time. Malcolm said seriously, “You know, this dream of King’s is going to be a nightmare before it’s over.” “You’re probably right,” Rustin replied.
The March on Washington is today largely remembered for King’s “I Have a Dream” address, which drew heavily upon public speeches he had given in Birmingham that April and in Detroit two months earlier. The democratic vision he evoked—“that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveholders will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood”—spoke to the possibility of transforming the nation’s political culture and making it fully inclusive for the first time in history. King’s speech was much more than a rhetorical achievement: it was a challenge to white America to break with its racist past, and to embrace a multiracial future. Not widely known is that King’s most memorable remarks that day were completely extemporaneous. However, as central as King’s role was, what Rustin did following the “I Have a Dream” address was nearly as important. Going to the podium, he reviewed the march’s objectives, which included passage of Kennedy’s civil rights bill, a federal initiative to address unemployment, the desegregation of schools, and an increase in the federal minimum hourly wage to two dollars. The vast audience gave its consent for every demand.
From a distance, Malcolm witnessed it all. Roy Wilkins’s nephew Roger Wilkins, then a young attorney working in the Justice Department, spotted Malcolm’s unmistakable profile under a shady tree, looking out over the crowd. It is probable that several hundred NOI members participated in the march, defying Muhammad and the national leadership. Among their numbers was included Herbert Muhammad, who used his connections with Muhammad Speaks to be admitted as an “official photographer” to the grandstand at the speakerʹs platform. As Malcolm returned to New York, he must have realized that he had to present an action-oriented program of demands that would place the Nation of Islam on the side of black protest.
The NOIʹs national leaders finally felt confident enough that the rumors of Muhammad’s sexual infidelities were sufficiently under control to schedule a major address by the Messenger in Philadelphia on September 29. At this rally, Muhammad voiced his direct opposition to the spirit of the March, which continued to dominate discussions a month later. In his judgment, it was “a waste of time for Negro leaders to go to Washington for justice.” American whites were “snakelike in nature” and “were created for the purpose of murdering black people.” Negroes had to choose complete racial separation, and if not, “they will die.” The 1963 Philadelphia rally was also significant because it was the final time that both Muhammad and Malcolm appeared on a public stage together. Throughout 1961-63, Malcolm had presented himself to the media as Muhammad’s national representative. But at the Philadelphia rally, Muhammad announced that Malcolm had been named national minister. The new appointment, which surely generated opposition from Muhammad’s inner circle and family members, elevated Malcolm above all other NOI ministers. “This is my most faithful, hard-working minister,” Muhammad told his audience. “He will follow me until he dies.”
During these autumn weeks, Malcolm continued his sessions with Alex Haley, which he may have come to consider as a kind of therapy. In the writerʹs studio, telling his story, Malcolm discovered that he could relax a bit, and a looser, more casual side of his personality emerged. On one occasion, Haley recalled Malcolm’s playfulness as he discussed his Harlem exploits: “Incredibly, the fearsome black demagogue was scat-singing and popping his fingers, ‘re-bop-de-bop-blap-blam—’ and then grabbing a vertical pipe with one hand (as the girl partner) he went jubilantly lindy-hopping around . . .” In late September, Haley contacted Malcolm by letter, with words of praise: “I’ve never heard, when its full sweep is reflected upon, a more dramatic life account.” He promised Malcolm that “whatever professional techniques” he possessed, they would “be brought into the effort to do the material that you have given me full justice.” He asked assistance in “filling holes,” and once again gave as an example Malcolm’s complex relationship with Reginald. To make the break with his brother “gripping,” Haley explained, “I must build up your regard and respect for Reginald when the two of you were earlier in Harlem—and, as of now, I have nothing about him there.” Finally, Haley urged for as many hours as Malcolm could spare. “I badly need it. Justice to what the book can do for the Muslims needs it.”
As the calendar turned to October, Reynolds and Doubleday became worried about the slow pace of Haley’s productivity on the autobiography. On the first of the month, Wolcott (Tony) Gibbs, Jr., an assistant editor at Doubleday, suggested that Haley come up with a more “realistic manuscript delivery date,” reminding him that it was crucial for the Autobiography to “have a publication date before the 1964 election is in full swing.” Inspired by his editors and assisted by Malcolm’s availability, Haley rapidly produced a series of draft chapters. On October 11, Haley forwarded Chapter 9, “The Negro,” and promised additional chapters to come. This new material, he told Gibbs, “will present the style of Malcolm, the demagogue, sometimes ragged at the edges, sometimes quasi-dulcet, sometimes pounding . . . without obvious intrusion by the ʹas told to’ writer.”
When compared to the final published version of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which appeared in late 1965, the October 1963 version of the book had similarities, but also striking differences. Both the 1963 manuscript and the 1965 published book included these chapters: “Nightmare,” “Mascot,” “Homeboy,” “Detroit Red,” “Caught,” “Satan,” “Saved,” “Savior,” and “Minister Malcolm X.ʺ The 1965 version additionally contains “Laura,” “Harlemite,” “Hustler,” “Trapped,” and “Black Muslims.” These chapters formed the core of the autobiographical narrative, and the majority of the book as a whole. Malcolm’s objective was to present to the general reader the transformative power of the apostle Elijah Muhammad, who had taken him from a life of criminality and drugs to one of sobriety and commitment. In his lengthy conversations with Haley, Malcolm deliberately exaggerated his gangster exploits—the number of his burglaries, the amount of marijuana he sold to musicians, and the like—to illustrate how depraved he had become. Malcolm told Haley stories about himself that were largely true, but frequently presented himself as being more illiterate and backward than he really was. Malcolm’s overriding mission was to show himself in the worst possible light, which would illustrate the power of Muhammad’s message in changing people’s lives. He also hoped that the narrative would stand as a testament to his continued devotion to and adoration of the Messenger. It might even quiet his growing chorus of critics in Muhammad’s family.
In the 1963 version, Haley had planned a chapter, “The Messenger’s Advocate,” which he described as “the man today . . . speaking at Harvard Law School.” This was to be followed by three essays outlining Malcolm’s religious views and social philosophy. To an extent these three essays contained Malcolm’s response to the striking success of the March on Washington. With a civil rights bill then being debated in the U.S. Senate, Malcolm not only had to make a case for black separation; he also had to outline an affirmative strategy for African-American resistance that was as dynamic as the Freedom Rides and sit-in protests. Drawing upon his experiences working with Randolph in Harlem, Malcolm called for a black united front embracing virtually all Negroes around a program of self-respect, economic development, and group empowerment. He believed that the NOI could play a vanguard role in building such a coalition, working with black elected officials, businesspeople, labor leaders, intellectuals, and others. Malcolm was taking the experiences he’d had in Harlem with Mosque No. 7 organizing mass rallies in the streets, and advocating an alternative to the peaceful, nonviolent demonstrations of King.
By the end of October, the Autobiography appeared to be taking shape. On October 27, Haley informed Gibbs that the book would be somewhat larger than originally planned, at roughly 120,000 words. The text would include ten chapters, three essays, and an afterword. The initial ten chapters were designed to tell “the unfolding, snowballing drama of this man’s life.” The final essays—“The Negro,” “The End of Christianity,” and “Twenty Million Black Muslims”—were designed to be a summation of Malcolm’s religious and political point of view. In his afterword, Haley intended to write “as a Christian Negro,” describing “the demagogue as I see him.” Haley wanted to explain “what I critically feel about his life, and what he signifies, and represents, to Negroes, to white people, to America.” He also mentioned to Gibbs that Malcolm had given him thirty to forty photographs to use for the book, including one of a young Malcolm alongside singer Billie Holiday. Nearly three weeks later, Haley wrote to his agent, editors, and Malcolm. Contacting executive editor Kenneth McCormick, Gibbs, and Reynolds, Haley revealed he was at the point at which the process of writing the Autobiography was changing him: “when the material begins to direct you and command you into what must be done with it.” Writing separately to Malcolm the same day, Haley explained: “[I] am being careful, careful in developing the nuances as it unfolds, each stage, because viewed overall, your whole life is so incredible that no stage, especially in the early developing stages, may the reader be left with gaps, for if so it would strain the plausibility, believability of the truly fantastic ‘Detroit Red’—and, then, the galvanic, absolute conversion.”
As Haley worked to finish the manuscript, Malcolm made what would be his last tour of the West Coast as an NOI leader. He opened by holding a press conference in San Francisco on October 10, followed the next day by a panel discussion at the University of California at Berkeley. His speech took less than thirty minutes, but contained nearly twenty specific references to “the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.” Yet in other respects its tone was profoundly secular and political. “It’s not my intention to discuss the Muslim religious group today nor the Muslim religion,” he explained. The nature of the crisis confronting America was “the increase of racial hostility, and the increase of outright racial hatred. We see masses of Black people who have lost all confidence in the false promises of the hypocritical white politicians.” The discrimination that blacks confronted in the liberal North “is even more cruel and more vicious” than Southern racism.
Even more sharply than before, Malcolm pitted the Negro elite against the interests of the struggling black masses. “The wealthy, educated black bourgeoisie, those uppity Negroes who do escape, never reach back and pull the rest of our people out with them. The blacks remain trapped in the slum.” The solution was not “token integration.” When blacks tried to desegregate housing, whites fled these residential areas. “After the 1954 Supreme Court decision,” Malcolm explained, “the same thing happened when our people tried to integrate the schools. All the white students disappeared into the suburbs.” Now black leaders “are demanding a certain quota, a percentage, of white people’s jobs.” Such a demand would cause “violence and bloodshed.” This was another instance in which Malcolm’s imagined future led him to the wrong conclusion: only six years later a Republican president, Richard M. Nixon, with millions of whites sharply opposed, would implement affirmative action and programs such as minority economic set-asides. Such reforms were enacted without the “violence and bloodshed” Malcolm had predicted.
During the question and answer period following his short lecture, Malcolm was asked about discrimination in Cuba. He observed that “Castro has made a great accomplishment and contribution” toward the achievement of greater equality for blacks. But the Cubans generally “don’t refer to themselves either as white people or Black,” just as people. The same thing held true for Muslims: “When you become a Muslim, you don’t look at a man as being black, brown, red, or white. You look upon him as being a man.” This interpretation directly contradicted NOI theology. On another issue, Malcolm was asked, “Why can’t a Negro infiltrate the political machine and use power politics to his own end?” His reply was again at odds with the NOIʹs position: “If he studies the science of politics, he probably would.” There were some African-American elected officials who effectively represented “the Black masses. . . . Adam Powell is one of the best examples.”
For a week, he traveled throughout California. In Los Angeles, at the Embassy Auditorium, an audience of two thousand heard him deliver his blistering “Farce on Washington” speech. Malcolm accused the demonstration of being “instigated by the white liberals to stem the real revolution, the black revolution.” On October 18, Malcolm returned to New York, where he delivered a talk at Mosque No. 7 on “the condition of Negroes on the West Coast.” In mid-October, Lonnie X Cross, who had been an undergraduate classmate of James 67X while at Lincoln University, was appointed the new minister of Mosque No. 4 in Washington, D.C., allowing Malcolm to relinquish his responsibilities there. Lonnie had joined the Nation only eighteen months earlier, and in September had resigned his faculty position as chairman of the mathematics department at Atlanta University to give “full time to the truth of Mr. Elijah Muhammad.”
On October 29, Malcolm traveled to Hartford, Connecticut, where student groups at the University of Hartford had invited him to speak. Interest expressed in the visit was so strong that his talk, which had originally been set for the two-hundred-seat Auerbach Auditorium, was moved to an open-air arena accommodating seven hundred people. Buffeted by cold winds, Malcolm addressed his audience, saying, “Maybe some of what I have to say will make you hot.” Much of what he said repeated his lecture at Berkeley. On November 5 he traveled to Philadelphia to address the local NOI mosque. Four days later, Malcolm engaged in a public dialogue with James Baldwin. Hardly a week went by without Malcolm making at least three public appearances, often more.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the success of the March on Washington generated great dissension inside the Black Freedom Movement. The suppression of John Lewis’s controversial speech highlighted the deeper issues that divided black activists, and as 1963 wore on, the split between the conservative old guard and the militants bubbled to the surface. Those increasingly influenced by Malcolm’s black nationalism included sections of CORE, progressives in several Christian denominations, and secular activists from colleges, labor unions, and in Northern inner-city communities. When Detroit’s Council for Human Rights began planning a Northern Negro Leadership Conference, many representatives of these independent, radical, and black nationalist groups were excluded from the program. In response, the charismatic minister the Reverend Albert B. Cleage, Jr., withdrew from the Northern Negro Leadership Conference and announced the holding of a second, more militant meeting that same weekend in Detroit. This insurgent gathering was largely put together by a Detroit network, the Group on Advanced Leadership (GOAL), which included two independent Marxists, James and Grace Lee Boggs. A former Trotskyist, Grace Lee Boggs had for years been an associate of the celebrated Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James, and was an astute Marxist theorist in her own right. Her husband, James Boggs, had extensive experience in labor organizing, and soon would become one of Black Powerʹs most influential writers and social theorists.
Another radical constituency in Detroit intensely interested in Malcolm was the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Its key figure, who would subsequently help shape Malcolm’s intellectual legacy through the publication of several books by and about him, was George Breitman. The editor of the SWPʹs newspaper, The Militant, Breitman also initiated the successful Friday Night Socialist Forum hosted at Wayne State University in the 1960s. The SWP also supported efforts to establish the Freedom Now Party, an independent black third party formed in Michigan. Consequently, when Malcolm accepted an invitation to address the Reverend Cleage’s Grassroots Conference, he may not have realized that thousands of his local supporters considered themselves more militant than he was. They, too, rejected the gradualism of the NAACP and SCLC and the nonviolent activism of Rustin and Farmer, and were sharply critical of the Negro bourgeoisie. With the collapse of McCarthyism and the most extreme forms of government harassment, American leftists and socialists were eager to participate in the national struggle for blacks’ rights. They looked to Malcolm X as a possible leader of that new movement.
When, on the evening of November 10, Malcolm walked up to the King Solomon Baptist Church’s pulpit, he saw a sea of two thousand mostly black faces. He probably had not intended to break new political ground. Certainly he had not planned to repudiate his allegiance to the NOI. Yet as he delivered his “Message to the Grassroots” address, his life was fundamentally changed—not unlike King’s, in the aftermath of “I Have a Dream.” In his address, Malcolm incorporated sections from recent speeches, especially “The Farce on Washington,” but he also drew parallels between the black freedom struggle in the United States, the Bandung Conference, and anti-colonial movements across Asia and Africa. He drew a sharp distinction between what he called a “Negro revolution” versus a black one. A true revolution, he declared, was represented by the Chinese communists—“There are no Uncle Toms” in China, he said—and by the Algerian revolution against French colonial rule. The “Negro revolution,” based on nonviolent direct action, was no revolution at all:
Revolution is bloody, revolution is hostile, revolution knows no compromise, revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way. And you, sitting around here like a knot on a wall, saying, “I’m going to love these folks no matter how much they hate me.” No, you need a revolution. Whoever heard of a revolution where they lock arms, as Rev. Cleage was pointing out beautifully, singing “We Shall Overcome”? You don’t do that in a revolution. You don’t do any singing; you’re too busy swinging. It’s based on land. A revolutionary wants land so he can set up his own nation, an independent nation. . . . If you’re afraid of black nationalism you’re afraid of revolution. And if you love revolution, you love black nationalism.
In the second half of his address came the dichotomy of the house Negro and the field Negro. Malcolm ridiculed the “modern house Negroes” such as King and Wilkins, casting himself as a modern-day slave rebel. He denounced the March on Washington as a “sellout.” “And every one of those Toms was put out of town by sundown,” he added, to gales of laughter. The major Negro endorsers of the march should even receive Academy Awards “for the best supporting cast.” As he finished, the response was electrifying: people cheered and waved their hands. The talk had some obligatory references to Muhammad, but these were deleted from the tape recording several months later, when “Message to the Grassroots” was released as a record. The enthusiasm was provoked by the crowd’s recognition that Malcolm appeared to have broken free politically. Grace Lee Boggs, who was sitting next to the Reverend Cleage on the speakers’ platform, thought that Malcolm’s “speech was so analytical, so much less [black] nationalist and more internationalistʺ than all his previous talks. Excited, Boggs whispered to Cleage, “Malcolm’s going to split with Elijah Muhammad.”
In mid-November, he revealed to Haley that when he visited Michigan in late October, he had driven with Philbert to Kalamazoo and secured the release of his mother from the state mental hospital. “It may shock you to learn that two weeks ago,” he wrote, “I had dinner with my mother for the first time in 25 years, and she is now home and residing with my brother Philbert in Lansing.” Haley meanwhile pushed on. He had just relocated from lower Manhattan to a small house in rural Rome, New York. He explained to Malcolm, “I don’t want [a telephone] even here,” until most of the Autobiography was completed. When he heard about Louise’s release, he responded: “Shocked? No, friend, I was most sincerely—moved very much . . . professionally, I was happy as I can be that there is added to the book for the millions of readers that it will have, this graphic human interest story, this caliber of a ‘happy ending.’ ”
Wallace Muhammad had invited Louis X to his Chicago home after Saviourʹs Day 1963. Over hot chocolate, he asked, “I want you to tell brother Malcolm that I would like to see him and you together. There’s something that I want to tell you both.” As fate would have it, for several months he was unable to schedule a meeting with Louis and Malcolm at the same time. He sat down with Malcolm alone in October, telling him that his fatherʹs extramarital sexual activity was “as bad as it ever was.”
Malcolm now had a choice. He could have stayed silent, continuing to give biblical and Qurʹanic analogies to explain away Muhammad’s errors in judgment. However, he felt that a more aggressive approach was needed, both to protect Muhammad and to stop the hemorrhaging of disillusioned members. He consulted with six or seven ministers whom he trusted. Among their number was, of course, Louis X—who knew significantly more than Malcolm suspected.
Malcolm’s initial conversation with Louis about the Messengerʹs transgressions had occurred in New York; as was his custom after their meeting, Malcolm drove Louis to the airport. According to Farrakhan, as Malcolm was driving to LaGuardia airport, Louis casually told him that he would have to inform Muhammad that Malcolm had been discussing the infidelities with other ministers. There was a brief silence. Then Malcolm, looking straight ahead, said, “Give me two weeks.” Malcolm wanted to explain his contacts with NOI ministers about the scandal first. Louis consented to Malcolm’s request. And although neither man knew this at the time, their roles and futures within the Nation would fundamentally change at that moment. When Louis gave his version of these events to Elijah Muhammad, the apostle would never fully trust Malcolm again, and he began to look at Louis as Malcolm’s possible successor.
It would be too easy to argue that the root cause of Malcolm’s disaffection from Elijah Muhammad was the knowledge that Evelyn, the woman with whom he had been romantically involved for years, had been impregnated by the Messenger. Farrakhan is the only one of his intimate friends to claim Malcolm was considering leaving Betty for Evelyn; no one else—not even James 67X—has made such a claim. Farrakhan may have a vested interest in exaggerating Malcolm’s anger about Evelyn in order to promote a nontheological reason for his break with the NOI, which set the stage for Farrakhan’s own rise to prominence. There is no doubt that Malcolm was extremely upset by this information, but in itself it seems unlikely he would have quit the NOI solely based on the incident with Evelyn.
Malcolm continued his hectic pace throughout the remainder of November. On November 20 he addressed a class at the journalism school of Columbia University. The short talk, followed by a lengthy discussion period, was an artful dance, incorporating politics, traditional NOI dogma, and classical tenets of Sunni Islam.
This class discussion represents one of the most revealing sessions ever conducted with Malcolm, because of the broad spectrum of issues covered. For example, in one of his rare comments about the nonblack Islamic community, Malcolm accused this group of largely Asian and Middle Eastern immigrants of not living up to the true tenets of the Islamic faith. These Muslims should give Elijah Muhammad credit for recruiting thousands to Islam and “not question his religious authenticity,” he said. When one student raised the American Nazi Party’s interest in the NOI, Malcolm responded, “More white people in the county are in sympathy with Nazism than they are with practicing democracy. . . . I don’t think any white is in a moral position to ask me what I think about Nazis in light of the fact you’re living in a country which in 1963 permits the bombing of Negro churches and the murder of little innocent and defenseless black children.” Without explaining why the NOI permitted Nazis to attend their gatherings, he insisted that “Rockwell couldn’t do what he’s doing . . . if there weren’t a large segment of whites in this country who think exactly like Rockwell does.” When asked about the administration’s civil rights policy, he stammered, “What about it?” Once again, he expressed his contempt for Kennedy : “Any time a man can become president, and after three years in office do as little for Negroes as he has done despite the fact that Negroes went for him 80 percent . . . I’ll have to say he’s the foxiest of the foxy.”
Even here, Malcolm continued to portray the NOI as a coiled snake ready to strike, despite all the missed chances to do so; he bragged that Muhammad taught Muslims to respect the law, “but any time anybody puts their hands on us, we should send them straight to the cemetery.” Someone asked about his attitude toward the newly created Freedom Now Party, for which he offered a convoluted quasi-endorsement. Because the NOIʹs position was to discourage its members from voting, he could not officially endorse any party, but he noted with interest the eight million unregistered black voters nationally. Imagine what “presidential candidates and others” would have to do if this group became active. “Why, they would upset the entire political picture.”
Although Malcolm’s responsibilities were now truly national, he tried hard not to neglect racial issues in New York City. Notably, he attended and supported a series of civil rights demonstrations occurring across the city. Herman Ferguson, a thirty-nine-year-old public school assistant principal who was actively involved in leading civil rights demonstrations in Queens, was pleasantly surprised when assistant minister Larry 4X and other Muslims offered their support. “Lots of them [Muslims] I had taught in school,” Ferguson explained. “They couldn’t become [directly] involved because they were not allowed to.” An agreement was reached where the Muslims would show up at the civil rights demonstrations to sell Muhammad Speaks but would also distribute the civil rights coalition’s flyers. Malcolm sent word through Larry that he supported the demonstrations, and he extended an invitation to Ferguson and other Queens activists to visit Mosque No. 7. Ferguson and the Queens activists began attending lectures there, and were deeply impressed. It was Ferguson who suggested organizing a major speaking event featuring Malcolm in Queens, an invitation Malcolm accepted. The Nation paid a New Jersey printer to produce attractive posters that were distributed throughout the largely black Queens neighborhood of South Jamaica.
Malcolm’s lecture was scheduled for the evening of Thanksgiving Day. Hundreds came out to attend, and the NYPD was also there in force. “It was like half the police force in Queens was assigned to that place that day,” Ferguson later recalled. “We didn’t realize the drawing power of Malcolm,” even on the Thanksgiving holiday.
There was an incident that day involving Malcolm that Ferguson would never forget. Shortly before going to the podium to speak, Malcolm was busily scrawling on a yellow legal pad, and Ferguson simply assumed the minister was making final notes on his speech. So he was truly surprised when Malcolm, looking out at the audience, said, “‘That fellow there is going with that white girl there,’” Ferguson recalled. “Now, there was quite a distance, a lot of space between them. . . . There was no indication, nobody would have known or suspected that there was anything going on.” Yet Malcolm was absolutely correct. Nearly every great speaker, like Malcolm, must also be a student of people and cultures. “He observed people and things that were going on around him, and from time to time he would make little comments, to let you know that he had picked up on something that was happening around him.”
Yet the central irony of Malcolm’s career was that his critical powers of observation, so important in fashioning his dynamic public addresses, virtually disappeared in his mundane evaluations of those in his day-to-day personal circle. Especially in the final years of his life, nearly every individual he trusted would betray that trust. As late as November 1963, Malcolm did not recognize that the political path he had deliberately chosen would quickly lead to his expulsion from the Nation. This was apparent, even to Ferguson, in 1963: “I felt that . . . eventually [he] would have to leave the Nation of Islam. He was just too political. . . . He was developing too fast.”