CHAPTER 11
Malcolm’s departure from the Nation of Islam coincided with one of the most intense periods of the civil rights struggle, a time at which the fragile unity that had made possible the great efforts in Montgomery and Birmingham was showing signs of strain. The arguments between radicals like John Lewis and more mainstream black leaders like King and Ralph Abernathy had not abated, and as long-desired goals finally came within sight, they had the peculiar effect of further splintering the movement. The success of the March on Washington in 1963 should have consolidated King’s power, yet almost immediately afterward many black leaders sought to move away from marches and public protests toward working to directly influence Democratic Party politics. The legislation for the long-awaited Civil Rights Act had reached the Senate by the end of 1963, yet two months later the deadlock forced by recalcitrant Southern senators gave no hint of breaking. As the weeks, and then months, wore on, frustration mounted, exacerbated by the backlash to the increasing American military action in Vietnam.
Out of the Nation yet hardly liberated, Malcolm found himself forced to grapple with the past and the future at once. His decision to cut ties made him a kind of free agent, and some groups and leaders realized the potential advantage in bringing him into the civil rights fold. Yet Malcolm was still working to consolidate his own ideas, on both Islam and politics, and the wounds left by his break with the Nation of Islam were still too fresh to give him a truly clean start. In these early weeks, he alternated between reaffirming his loyalty to Elijah Muhammad’s ideas and decrying his flawed morality, sometimes in speeches only days apart. At the same time, he struggled to stake out ground for Muslim Mosque, Inc., apart from the Nation, and here the most promising path was that which Elijah Muhammad had circumscribed: civil rights. In some way it must have been freeing; without John Ali and Raymond Sharrieff constantly looking over his shoulder, he could cast off the last vestiges of restraint. One of the MMIʹs initial press statements declared: “Concerning nonviolence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks. It is legal and lawful to own a shotgun or a rifle. . . . When our people are being bitten by dogs, they are within their rights to kill those dogs.” When New York police commissioner Michael Murphy condemned such comments as “irresponsible,” Malcolm responded that such a condemnation was a “compliment.”
In his efforts to establish himself as a solo force, he cast a wide intellectual net, swinging from powerful arguments on the importance of black nationalism to occasional expressions of support for desegregation. On March 14 he attended a meeting in Chester, Pennsylvania, of East Coast civil rights leaders, including the most prominent public school desegregation leader in metropolitan New York, the Reverend Milton Galamison; the comedian and social activist Dick Gregory; and the Cambridge, Maryland, activist Gloria Richardson. Only weeks earlier, he had still been in the Nation of Islam routinely denouncing integration, yet here he was embracing efforts to promote school desegregation and improvements in the quality of blacks’ public education. It marked an early, tentative concession to the idea that perhaps blacks could someday become empowered within the existing system. That same day he had given an interview to the Amsterdam News, during which he accused the Nation of attempting to murder him, a reference to the plot cooked up by Captain Joseph that Anas Luqman had divulged. While these comments were certain to provoke an angry response from the Nation, they also afforded Malcolm some breathing room. With the threat made public, it would be harder for the NOI to move against him. Still, Malcolm’s assertions were probably not widely believed by most observers of the Nation. Up to 1964 the Nation’s routine violence and beatings of its members had largely escaped public scrutiny. It was also well known that the Fruit never carried weapons, and Malcolm’s reputation for hyperbole and extremism probably led police and most blacks to dismiss his claims.
On March 16, Muslim Mosque, Inc., became a legal entity, filing a certificate of incorporation with the County of New York, listing its address as Hotel Theresa, Suite 128, 2090 Seventh Avenue—in reality, a large room located on the hotel’s mezzanine. Two days later at Harvard University, Malcolm set to work defining the goals of the organization. The black man, he said, had to “control the politics in his own residential areas by voting . . . and investing in the businesses within the Negro areas.” African Americans had become “disillusioned with nonviolence” and were now “ready for any action which will get immediate results.” In these remarks stirred the beginnings of what would evolve a few years later into the Black Power movement. According to FBI surveillance, during the question and answer session at Harvard he was asked whether he was advocating bloody revolution. Malcolm said no, although he did note that the African American “has bled all the time, but the white man does not recognize this as bloodshed and will not until the white man himself bleeds a little.” It was not an endorsement of violence, but this statement and others like it made it difficult for critics to gauge whether his militancy was receding. The following day, he gave a lengthy interview to the African-American writer A. B. Spellman, which appeared in the independent Marxist journal Monthly Review that May, and once again he denied his advocacy of violence. Yet if he sought to avoid controversy in that respect, his comments in the interview concerning Jews did nothing to endear him to progressives. “We are not racists at all,” he stated, but then continued, “The Jews have been the tradesmen and the business people of the ‘black community’ for such a long time that it is normal that they feel guilty when one says that the exploiters of the blacks are the Jews. This does not say that we are anti-Semitic. We are simply against exploitation.”
Along with crafting the MMIʹs agenda, Malcolm also hoped to establish the organization’s legitimacy. In the Nation, he had represented a group that numbered between seventy-five thousand and one hundred thousand, but with the MMI he started virtually from scratch. It was probably for this reason that he exaggerated the group’s size when a few days later he appeared on the show Listening Post, hosted by Joe Rainey on WDAS in Philadelphia. When Rainey asked whether MMI was a nationwide organization, Malcolm grandly proclaimed that “student groups from coast to coast” had requested information on how to join up. Yet though the group struggled early to put members on its rolls, Malcolm himself continued to attract sizable crowds. On March 22 he was the featured speaker at an MMI-sponsored rally held at the Rockland Palace that drew one thousand people, a surprisingly large audience given Malcolm’s recent death threat charges. Reporters covering the event speculated that Malcolm was planning to form “a black nationalist army.”
The work of building any kind of army would promise to be slow and labored. By name and nature the MMI was a religious organization, which limited its growth to Muslims; Malcolm had yet to establish a secular branch that could gather non-Muslims around his cause, so he now looked to members of the Nation that he might peel away, despite urgent warnings by James 67X and others that he should avoid conflict with the Nation. Scheduled to appear on the Bob Kennedy show on Boston radio on March 24, Malcolm decided to drive up early. Accompanied by James 67X and probably also by Charles 37X Kenyatta, he held meetings with several NOI members, almost certainly to discuss potential recruitment. Though he risked trouble by poaching on Louis Xʹs grounds, the trip made strategic sense. Malcolm had established the Boston mosque himself, and Ella’s presence in the city gave him an especially strong foothold in a certain part of the black community.
The subject of discussion on Bob Kennedy’s radio program had originally been billed as “Negro—Separation and Supremacy,” but Kennedy wanted Malcolm to explain how he had changed his views since leaving the Nation of Islam. Here Malcolm was forced to negotiate difficult terrain. Despite all that had transpired, he felt a lingering loyalty to the man who, more than any other in his life, had fulfilled a paternal role, and he responded by reaffirming his spiritual and ideological fidelity to the Messenger. “Everything” he knew, he asserted without hesitation, was “a result of Elijah Muhammad’s doing.” To reconcile this statement with his break from the Nation, he went on to explain that only by establishing himself as an independent force could he implement Muhammad’s teachings. With only one exception, he avoided criticism of civil rights leaders. “Martin Luther King must devise a new approach in the coming year,” he predicted, “or he will be a man without followers.” Once again, he wallowed in the pose of racial avenger: “So far only the Negroes have shed blood, and this is not looked on as bloodshed by the whites. White blood has to be shed before the white man will consider a conflict as a bloody one.”
Yet at this moment, Malcolm struggled greatly to come to terms with just how he felt about the Messengerʹs teachings. Over the years, as his fidelity to the core NOI dogma had waned, he had grown more interested in orthodox Islam. In his role as national minister, he had responded to tens of letters, public and private, written by orthodox Muslims attacking the Nation on its core religious principles, and the steady drumbeat of scorn had not failed to challenge his assumptions about Islam and increase his curiosity. Now, without an organization to define him, he realized that the structure of orthodox Islam could provide a new spiritual framework, and at this moment when almost any direction seemed possible, he saw his chance to fulfill the dream that he had carried since first visiting the Middle East in 1959: making a pilgrimage to Mecca.
Before his suspension the previous year, he had been back in contact with Dr. Mahmoud Shawarbi, the Muslim professor that he had first met in October 1960 at an NOI-sponsored event. They had kept in sporadic touch, but after Malcolm’s silencing their meetings became more frequent and intense. Malcolm’s expanded interest in orthodox Islam greatly pleased Shawarbi, and upon Malcolm’s departure from the Nation Shawarbi immediately began giving him instructional sessions in the proper Islamic rituals. He encouraged Malcolm’s trip and used his pull with the Saudis to pave the way for Malcolm through diplomatic channels; he also alerted his friends and associates in the Middle East about Malcolm’s upcoming visit to the region, requesting that they assist him.
Shawarbi was crucial to Malcolm’s development in other ways. Persistently, but without confrontation, he challenged Malcolm to rethink his race-based worldview, admitting that many orthodox Muslims also fell short of the color-blind ideals they professed. He finally convinced Malcolm that the Qurʹan, as conceived in the recitations of the Prophet Muhammad, was racially egalitarian—which meant that whites, through their submission to Allah, would become spiritual brothers and sisters to blacks.
By the time of his recruitment trip to Boston, Malcolm had made his decision to undertake the pilgrimage to Mecca. The chance for spiritual purification at this juncture of great change and uncertainty seemed too important to pass up. It was likely during his time in Boston that Malcolm visited Ella and asked her to loan him the money, some thirteen hundred dollars, that he would need to make the pilgrimage. Despite all the trouble they had given each other since he had moved in with her as a teenager, she agreed.
On March 26, Martin Luther King, Jr., was on Capitol Hill with plans to discuss the stalled 1964 civil rights bill with Senators Hubert Humphrey, Jacob Javits, and others. The moment caught King at a difficult time, when even close aides like James Bevel were warning that “people are losing faith . . . in the nonviolent movement.” When King moved to a conference room off the Senate floor to discuss developments with the press, Malcolm, who was also visiting that day, slipped in to listen. After the conference, the men left through separate doors, but as King was walking along the crowded Senate gallery observing the filibuster of pro-segregationist senators, he encountered Malcolm and several aides. Malcolm probably was not eager for an informal encounter, much less a staged photograph. It was James 67X who had cleverly set up the entire affair, pushing his boss around a marble column until he and King suddenly stood facing each other. A photographer in the gallery took a photo of them shaking hands, which would come to symbolize the two great streams of black consciousness that flourished in the 1960s and beyond. It was the only time the two men ever met.
Yet the handshake also marked a transition for Malcolm, crystallizing as it did a movement away from the revolutionary rhetoric that defined “Message to the Grassroots” toward something akin to what King had worked his entire adult life to achieve: improvement in the black condition through changing the American system. Three days after the meeting, Malcolm gave a speech at the Audubon Ballroom before six hundred people that served as a foundation for a more famous address he would give a week later. Though the announced topic, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” seemed incendiary, at its core the speech actually contained a far more conventional message, one that had defined the civil rights movement as far back as 1962: the importance of voting rights. In the speech, Malcolm emphasized that all Harlemites, and by extension blacks everywhere, had to register as voters. Gone was the old Nation of Islam claim that participation in the system could have little effect. Now Malcolm called for a united black front that would seek to wrest control of blacks’ economic and political future. “Unity is the right religion,” he insisted. “Black people must forget their differences and discuss the points on which they can agree.” He also questioned the ability of the civil rights movement to compensate blacks for “three hundred ten years of unpaid slave labor.” What was most significant was his shift from the use of violence to achieve blacks’ objectives to the exercising of the electoral franchise. By embracing the ballot, he was implicitly rejecting violence, even if this was at times difficult to discern in the heat of his rhetoric.
The next day he sat down for an interview with the Militant, the newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party. For decades, the SWP had promoted revolutionary black nationalism. Leon Trotsky himself had believed that Negro Americans would be the vanguard for the inevitable socialist revolution in the United States. Malcolm’s separation from the Nation of Islam and his endorsement of voter registration and mass protest by African Americans seemed to Trotskyists a move toward socialism.
By the time Malcolm arrived at the Cory Methodist Church in Cleveland on April 3 to address a major public rally hosted by the local CORE chapter, he had refined “The Ballot or the Bullet” into a formidable piece of oratory. Much of the Cleveland CORE group had embraced Malcolm as a movement leader, and a crowd of between two and three thousand people, including many whites, packed the church. The format of the evening’s program was a dialogue between Malcolm and his old friend Louis Lomax. Lomax spoke first, presenting a pro-integrationist civil rights message that won respectful applause from the audience. Malcolm’s talk drew from his recent Audubon addresses, yet ultimately cohered into something greater, a fierce commentary on the lay of the land. On the one hand, the speech caught the mood of black America as it slowly shifted from a belief in the efficacy of nonviolence into a general state of dissatisfaction and impatience with the civil rights movement. In early 1964, as SNCC and CORE began to take more militant positions, the atmosphere of race politics grew heavier with the possibility of violence; indeed, within six months race riots would break out in black neighborhoods throughout the Northeast. “Now we have the type of black man on the scene in America today,” Malcolm told the crowd, “who just doesn’t intend to turn the other cheek any longer.” In raising the specter of the “bullet,” he acknowledged that it would take great effort to pull the country from the path to catastrophe. Yet in discussing the “ballot,” he held out hope that such a change was possible.
The first part of Malcolm’s lecture made an appeal for black unity despite ideological quarrels. “If we have differences,” Malcolm argued, “let us differ in the closet; when we come out in front, let us not have anything to argue about until we get finished arguing with the man.” This sentiment directly contradicted the “Message to the Grassroots,” which had ridiculed King and other civil rights activists. For Malcolm, a precondition for unity was finding a secular basis for common ground, which is why he also strove to decouple his identity as a Muslim cleric from his political engagements. “Just as Adam Clayton Powell is a Christian minister,” Malcolm observed, he himself was a Muslim minister who was committed to black liberation “by whatever means necessary.” Malcolm then pivoted to denounce both major political parties as well as the U.S. power structure, which continued to deny most blacks a real chance at voting. Malcolm had come to see the vote as a necessary tool if black Americans were to take control of the institutions in their communities. He reminded his audience of the power that a black voting bloc could have in a divided country, claiming that “it was the black man’s vote” that secured the Kennedy-Johnson ticket victory in the previous presidential election. But he impressed on the crowd that of voting or violence, the United States was sure to get at least one. The writing was on the wall, with young black boys in Jacksonville throwing Molotov cocktails in the streets. “It’ll be Molotov cocktails this month, hand grenades next month, something else next month,” he assured the crowd. “It’ll be ballots, or it’ll be bullets.” Yet as ominous as this message sounded, it still represented a step back from the brink of inevitable violence suggested in “Message to the Grassroots.” The ballot offered a way out: Malcolm was suggesting that if the federal government guaranteed full voting rights for African Americans nationwide, it could avoid a bloody conflagration. What was also significant about the address was what was now missing: no longer did Malcolm claim that Elijah Muhammad possessed the best program addressing blacks’ interests.
The small cadre of Trotskyists at the Cory Methodist Church were thrilled with Malcolm’s presentation, which seemed to confirm their own theory that revolutionary black nationalism could be the spark for igniting a socialist revolution in the United States. The Militant’s coverage of the Cleveland event highlighted approvingly Malcolm’s castigation of “the Democratic party; the ʹcon game they call the filibuster,’ and the ‘white political crooks’ who keep the black man from control of his own community.” At times in the talk, Malcolm appeared to move away from a race-based analysis toward a class perspective. “I am not antiwhite,” Malcolm insisted. “I am antiexploitation, antioppression.” The Militant mentioned Malcolm’s support for the creation of a black nationalist party and his call for a “black nationalist convention by August [1964], with delegates from all over the country.”
Malcolm’s lecture was tape recorded, and soon thousands of record copies were being distributed. Second only to “Message to the Grassroots,” “The Ballot or the Bullet” would become one of Malcolm’s most widely quoted talks. The FBI monitored the lecture, and appeared to recognize Malcolm’s new appeal to a growing number of whites. The Bureau focused on two of his central arguments: that the civil rights bill being filibustered before the Senate either would not be passed or, if signed by President Johnson, would not be implemented; and that African Americans should initiate gun clubs. “It is lawful for anyone to own a rifle or a shotgun and it is everyone’s right to protect themselves from anyone who stands in their way to prevent them from obtaining what is rightfully theirs,” Malcolm was reported to have said.
By the beginning of April 1964, Malcolm eagerly looked forward to leaving the country; several days after the Cleveland speech, he purchased a plane ticket to travel throughout the Middle East and Africa, with tentative stops including Lagos, Accra, Algiers, Cairo, Jeddah, and Khartoum. If the trip promised spiritual restoration, it also offered a practical respite, giving him at least a month away from his increasingly combative relationship with the Nation and its representatives. The break was much needed. After his March 9 split, he had spent the rest of the month watching tensions escalate. Elijah Muhammad had pressured two of Malcolm’s brothers, Philbert and Wilfred, ministers of the mosques in Lansing and Detroit respectively, to publicly denounce him as a hypocrite and a traitor. Worse, the Nation soon took aim at Malcolm’s refuge. The day after Handlerʹs Times article appeared announcing the split, Captain Joseph had turned up at the Elmhurst home demanding the Mosque’s incorporation papers and other valuables, which Malcolm reluctantly turned over. On the last day of March, attorney Joseph Williams, on behalf of Mosque No. 7 secretary Maceo X Owens, filed papers in Queens County demanding the eviction of Malcolm and his family from the house. Outraged, Malcolm secured Harlem civil rights attorney Percy Sutton to oppose the suit, but the squabbling soon left him drained and dispirited. His heart was not in the fight. As April unfolded, he seemed disconnected from these legal proceedings, and he focused on the journey that lay ahead.
A little more than a week before his scheduled departure, the MMI held an evening forum at the Audubon, featuring Malcolm and North Carolina civil rights leader Willie Mae Mallory. Mallory’s participation directly associated Malcolm with the incendiary exile Robert Williams, author of Negroes with Guns and an early proponent of black armed self-defense. Malcolm insisted that the Black Freedom Movement had to refocus from a quest for “civil rights” to a demand for “human rights,” as defined by international law. Again, he stressed the necessity of the vote. The New York FBI office estimated the audience at five hundred. “He cited past lynchings of Negroes in America in accusing the government of genocide,” it reported.
On April 8, at New York’s Palm Gardens, Malcolm delivered a lecture that sharply broke with the NOI mold. The public lecture had been sponsored by the Militant Labor Forum, the nonpartisan outreach group of the SWP. In theory he was speaking to an eclectic group of nonaligned activists, independent Marxists, and black nationalists, but in reality it was a mostly Marxist audience with many of Malcolm’s core followers also in attendance.
Malcolm was also preparing his associates for his extended leave, authorizing James 67X to serve as the MMIʹs acting chairman and to answer all communications and correspondence. Despite all the last-minute arrangements that needed his attention, he agreed to fly to Detroit once again to address a GOAL (Group on Advanced Leadership) rally. The speech would pressure his already tight schedule, but he recognized that Detroit offered a fertile ground for the message he had been cultivating in “The Ballot or the Bullet.” In the years since he had delivered his monthlong series of sermons at Mosque No. 1 in 1957, the city had continued to develop as a national center for black working-class militancy. Black membership in the city’s chapter of the United Auto Workers union had exploded, and as in many other Midwestern cities, the heavy industrial base and de facto segregation produced a mass of militant workers living in impoverished, rundown ghettos. Already the seeds had been planted for the violent discontent that would seize the city by the end of the decade. Malcolm had registered the broad impact of Detroit in his “Message to the Grassroots” address in November 1963, but now his renewed emphasis on class exploitation and the plight of the black working class made for an even more natural fit with the mood of the city’s black community. As he sought a larger national constituency, he could ill afford to pass up a high-profile speaking engagement before such a promising audience.
GOAL booked the King Solomon Baptist Church in the Northwest Gold-berg neighborhood for Malcolm’s speech, but when the church leaders discovered that Malcolm would be the featured speaker, an ad hoc coalition of black ministers tried in vain to block his appearance. Despite their efforts, more than two thousand people came out to listen. Drawing on many ideas from the speeches in New York and Cleveland, Malcolm offered perhaps the most refined version of “Ballot” he would ever give; the audio recording that has survived of this speech shows Malcolm at the height of his powers as an orator. In this version, he moved the section on black nationalism front and center, giving one of the most trenchant exegesis of this political philosophy ever set down. Speaking in the urgent tones and pulsing rhythms of a jazz musician, Malcolm told the crowd that he was “a black nationalist freedom fighter.” Again he urged his supporters “to leave their religion at home in the closet,” because the goal was to unite all African Americans regardless of their religious views behind the politics of black nationalism. As in his Cleveland address, Malcolm placed great importance on blacks’ electoral empowerment. “[If] Negroes voted together,” he insisted, “they could turn every election, as the white vote is usually divided.”
Beneath the rhetoric, there was a glaring inconsistency in his logic. Malcolm was encouraging African Americans to vote, even to throw their weight behind either major party; yet simultaneously he accused both major parties of racism, incapable of delivering fairness to blacks. “I’m one of the twenty-two million victims of the Democrats—the Republicans—of Americanism,” he declared. The African American who habitually voted for the Democrats “is not only a chump but a traitor to his race.” Malcolm, in effect, was promoting electoralism but in practical terms gave blacks no effective means to exercise their power. Who were they supposed to vote for if no one on the ballot could bring any real relief?
Home from Detroit the morning of April 13, Malcolm barely had time to bid his wife and followers good-bye before catching a flight to Cairo that evening. He flew under the name Malik el-Shabazz. When Malcolm disembarked in Cairo the following night, he noticed several dark-complexioned airline staff at the terminal; they would have “fit right into Harlem,” he noted in his diary.
During the next two days in Cairo, Malcolm relished life as a tourist, as he had in 1959. Free from the ever present worries about the Nation, his fragile housing status, and the pressures of organization building, he allowed himself to evaporate into a state of rest, though the journey ahead would present its own challenges. On Thursday, April 16, he happened to meet and befriend a group of hajjis about to set off on their pilgrimage to Mecca. Since that was also his intended destination, they agreed to accompany each other to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the official center of embarkation for the hajj. Malcolm knew that to enter the Holy City of Mecca he would have to establish his religious credentials as an orthodox Muslim before the tribunal known as the “Hajj Court.” Arriving late Friday, a day when the Hajj Court was closed, Malcolm secured a bed in a dormitory housing hundreds of international hajjis. Throughout most of the following day, he was unsuccessful in securing a firm date and time for his Hajj Court appearance. The failure put him in a difficult position. To be considered official, the hajj must be completed within a set range of dates, beginning on the eighth day of the Dhu al-Hijjah, the twelfth month of the Islamic calendar; in 1964, this fell on April 20. To delay much longer in Jeddah would mean missing the start, which would technically make his completion of the rituals an umrah instead of an official hajj, as had happened with Elijah Muhammad’s pilgrimage years earlier. Frustrated, Malcolm then remembered something that might be of help. While he had prepared for his trip, Dr. Shawarbi had given him a book, The Eternal Message of Muhammad by Abd al-Rahman Azzam. Inside, Shawarbi had written the name and telephone number of the authorʹs son, who lived in Jeddah. Malcolm asked someone to dial the number for him, and shortly afterward Dr. Omar Azzam showed up at Malcolm’s dormitory. Within minutes Malcolm’s personal items were packed and the two men were driven to the residence of Azzam’s father. The elder Azzam allowed Malcolm to stay in his own well-appointed suite at the Jeddah Palace hotel. That night, Malcolm dined with the Azzams, explaining his situation, and they agreed to assist him in securing permission to participate in the hajj.
The next day, Malcolm, accompanied by Abd al-Rahman Azzam, stood before Sheikh Muhammad Harkon of the Hajj Court, humbly petitioning the body to allow him access to Mecca. Malcolm had already been introduced to Sheikh Harkon during his 1959 visit and had even enjoyed tea in the judge’s home, yet to gain approval he would have to convince him that he had left behind the heretical ideas of the Nation of Islam. Azzam spoke on his behalf, assuring the sheikh that Malcolm was a widely known and respected Muslim in the United States and that he was a sincere proponent of Islam. What proved to be even more persuasive was the supportive intervention of Muhammad Abdul Azziz Maged, the deputy chief of protocol to Saudi prince Muhammad Faisal. Malcolm’s acquaintanceship with the Azzams had tipped him into royal circles, as Abd al-Rahman’s daughter was married to Prince Faisal’s son. Maged’s endorsement of Malcolm meant the case was immediately approved, and soon Prince Faisal himself sent word to Malcolm that he had “decreed that I be a guest of the state.”
Malcolm’s undertaking of the hajj marked his formal entrance into the community of orthodox Islam, placing him in a tradition of pilgrims that stretched back thirteen hundred years, linking him with fellow sojourners of every nationality, ethnicity, and class background imaginable. As the hajj is one of Islam’s five pillars, all Muslims are obligated to complete it if able to do so; the essence of this pilgrimage ritual is a representation of episodes from the lives of Abraham (also Ibrahim), Hagar, and Ishmael (also Ismail). The most dramatic event is the tawaf, in which thousands of pilgrims circumambulate the Kaaba, the ritual site that symbolizes the spiritual center of the Islamic faith. As they circle the Kaaba, pilgrims attempt to touch or kiss it as a sign indicating the renewal of their covenant with Allah. The hajj also includes the say, the running of pilgrims between two small hills, replaying Hagarʹs desperate search for water for her son, Ismail; drinking water from the well of Zamzam; prayer on the plains of Arafat; and then walking to the valley of Mina to replay Ibrahim’s ordeal of nearly sacrificing his son Ismail. The hajj purges all previous sins of the pilgrim, and often coincides with major changes in an individual Muslim’s life, such as marriage or retirement. To Malcolm, his departure from the Nation of Islam was an ideal moment for spiritual reexamination and renewal, fitting well with the purpose of the hajj.
As the beneficiary of Saudi nepotism, Malcolm was given his own private car, which allowed him to cover much of the 120-mile hajj route without worry of falling behind. He was up well before dawn on Tuesday, April 21, and after morning prayers and breakfast he was off to Mount Arafat. The sight before him on the road to Arafat moved him deeply, as he watched thousands of pilgrims of many races jostle and bump their way along, some walking, others packed into buses or riding camels or donkeys. He had not thought possible the egalitarianism he was now witnessing. “Islam brings together in unity all colors and classes,” he observed in his diary. “Everyone shares what he has, those who have share with those who have not, those who know teach those who don’t know.” The common faith shared by all participants appeared to eradicate class divisions, at least as Malcolm could perceive them.
The next morning, Malcolm and other pilgrims awoke around two a.m. and traveled to Mina, where they each “cast seven stones at the devil,” a white monument. They then traveled to Mecca, where Malcolm did two rounds of circling the Kaaba seven times each; he attempted but was never able to touch the sacred site. “One look at the fervor of those crowded around it made me see it was hopeless to try,” he wrote. Again he was struck by the tremendous diversity of the hajjis. During the hajj rituals, “everyone was in white, the two-piece horum, with right shoulder bare,” he observed. At the end of the hajj, “everyone is wearing their own national colors (costumes) and it is really a beauty to behold. It seems every nation and form of culture on earth is represented here. . . .ʺ
Yet as much as Malcolm saw race and class distinctions dissolved in the uniting experience of the hajj, his own pilgrimage was anything but representative. The diplomatic difficulties that had almost kept him from the hajj had been sliced through by accommodating white Arabs with connections to the Saudi royal family, and he himself had been made a guest of state. Then, on one of the last days of the hajj, he joined a caravan led by “his excellency, Crown Prince Faisal . . . which included dignitaries from all over the world.” Across the hall from Malcolm’s hotel room was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin el-Husseini, a cousin of Yasser Arafat’s. In his diary, Malcolm observed that Husseini “seems well loved. He’s well up on world affairs and even the latest events in America.” Then, without a hint of irony, Malcolm added that the Grand Mufti “referred to New York as Jew York.”
Still, the powerful sight of thousands of people of different nationalities and ethnicities praying in unison to the same God deeply moved Malcolm, as he struggled to reconcile the few remaining fragments of NOI dogma he still believed in with the universalism he saw embodied in the hajj. Like many tourists, Malcolm purchased dozens of postcards and sent them to acquaintances back home. These letters revealed the profound shift in his attitudes about white people. Writing to Alex Haley on April 25, Malcolm confessed, “I began to perceive that ‘white man,’ as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it describes attitudes and actions.” In the Muslim world he had witnessed individuals who in the United States would be classified as white but who “were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been.” Malcolm was quick to credit Islam with the power to transform whites into nonracists. This revelation reinforced Malcolm’s newfound decision to separate himself completely from the Nation of Islam, not simply from its leadership, but from its theology.
If Malcolm found much to rejoice over in his travels through the Middle East, he also wished for a more active role for Islam on the world stage. Here the seeds of his role as a kind of evangelist for true Islam were planted, but he saw in the Arabs’ unwillingness to proselytize a problem that could hinder the religion’s spread. “The Arabs are poor at public relations,” he wrote. “They say insha Allah [if God wills it] and then wait; and while they are waiting the world passes them by.” Malcolm hoped that one day Muslims would understand “the necessity of modernizing the methods to propagate Islam, and project an image that the mind of the modern world can understand.” But his thoughts of returning home with a new knowledge of the religious rituals filled him with genuine pride and excitement. “America’s Black Muslims would fit right into the best of the earth’s Muslim[s] anywhere in the world if they would first be encouraged to learn the true prayer ritual and how to say their prayers in Arabic,” he wrote.
Upon his arrival in Jeddah, Malcolm encountered an “outspoken” African, a cabinet minister of Nigerian prime minister Ahmadu Bello. The minister informed Malcolm about recent civil disobedience demonstrations by blacks at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and recounted his own unhappy experiences with American racism. “He had suffered many indignities that he could now describe with intense passion, but could not understand why Negroes had not established some degree of business economic independence,” Malcolm observed.
Malcolm then flew to Medina, Saudi Arabia, on April 25, and en route he continued to make detailed notes in his travel diary. He was convinced that on the pilgrimage “everyone forgets Self and turns to God and out of this submission to the One God comes a brotherhood in which all are equals.” He embraced an inner peace he had not known since the years he was incarcerated in Massachusetts. “There is no greater serenity of mind,” Malcolm reflected, “than when one can shut the hectic noise and pace of the materialistic outside world, and seek inner peace within oneself.” Later that evening Malcolm wrote, “The very essences of the Islam religion in teaching the Oneness of God, gives the Believer genuine, voluntary obligations towards his fellow man (all of whom are One Human Family, brothers and sisters to each other) . . . the True Believer recognizes the Oneness of all Humanity.”
Returning to Jeddah the next day, he toured the local bazaar and purchased an attractive head scarf for Betty. His eyes were drawn to a beautiful necklace, but he could not afford it. Although Malcolm had prepared to depart Saudi Arabia for a quick visit to Beirut, Lebanon, Prince Faisal contacted him at his hotel, requesting to meet him at about noon the next day. Malcolm delayed his trip, and when the two men met, the prince explained “that he had no ulterior motive in the excellent hospitality I had received . . . than the true hospitality shown all Muslims by all Muslims.” Faisal also questioned Malcolm about the theological beliefs of the Nation of Islam, suggesting that “from what he had been reading, written by Egyptian writers, they had the wrong Islam”—in other words, their understanding and rituals were alien to orthodox Islam, beyond the boundaries of the community of the faithful. After his experience at Mecca and the hajj, Malcolm could not contest or deny this. In taking the necessary steps to become a true Muslim he had regained the certainty that had abandoned him with each new revelation of Elijah Muhammad’s perfidy or infidelity. He could also now see the role Islam would play not just in his spiritual life, but in his work. As Malcolm reflected on his hajj experiences, he concluded that “our success in America will involve two circles, Black Nationalism and Islam.” Nationalism was necessary to connect African Americans with Africa, he reasoned. “And Islam will link us spiritually to Africa, Arabia and Asia.”
Malcolm flew from Jeddah’s crowded airport and arrived in Beirut in the middle of the night of April 29; he secured a room at the Palm Beach Hotel upon the advice of his cab driver from the airport. Part of his agenda in Beirut was to become acquainted with Lebanon’s Muslim Brotherhood organization, which was dedicated to directing the tenets of Islam to political ends. The Brotherhood was originally established in Egypt in 1928, and it spread to other Arab countries, including Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Sudan, during and after World War II. Advocating national independence against European colonialists, social reform, charity, and political change in harmony with Islamic practices, by the 1950s it had developed a strong base among middle-class professionals, many workers and intellectuals. In Egypt, the most prominent theoretician in this regard was Sayyid Qutb, who advocated the expansive use of jihad.
Malcolm’s attraction to the Brotherhood was probably due to its Islamic foundations, grounding real-world politics in a spiritual basis. Ironically, it was exactly the opposite position he had reached in the United States, having concluded that he would need to keep separate his religious and political groups. In Beirut, he visited the home of Dr. Malik Badri, a professor at American University, whom he had previously met in Sudan in 1959. Badri informed Malcolm that he was scheduled to give a lecture the following day. Later that evening Malcolm met with a group of Sudanese students, who “were well informed on the Black Muslims,” Malcolm wrote, “and asked many questions on it and the American race problem in general.”
On April 30, after a lunch at the home of Dr. Badri, Malcolm gave a talk at the Sudanese Cultural Center in Beirut. The local Beirut Daily Star covered the speech, printing a front-page article about it the next day. The New York Times also briefly reported on Malcolm’s lecture, characterizing it largely as an attack on King. According to the Times, Malcolm “told students at the Sudanese Cultural Center that Negroes in the United States had made no practical gains toward achieving civil rights.” He also declared that “only a minority of Negroes believed in nonviolence.”
That evening, Malcolm mentioned in his diary that he visited “the offices of the Muslim brothers”—that is, the Brotherhood. Early the next morning, as Malcolm made his way to fly to Cairo, Dr. Malik “and others of the M. B. [Muslim Brotherhood] gave me a very touching send-off.” Arriving in Cairo the next morning, he met up with his local contact, Hussein el-Borai, an Egyptian diplomat who had accompanied Malcolm around Cairo in 1959 and would play the same role during Malcolm’s 1964 visit. The two men traveled by train to nearby Alexandria, reaching the ancient seaport city in the evening.
Malcolm spent several days as a tourist in Alexandria, where he soon discovered that photographs taken of himself with heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali had been widely circulated in the Egyptian press; consequently Malcolm was treated like a ʺVIP,ʺ he noted, being besieged by autograph seekers. “Just saying I was an American Muslim who just returned from hajj was enough,” Malcolm wrote in his diary. “Then mentioning Clay caused a real ‘landslide.’ ” Most of Malcolm’s day was spent at Alexandria’s harbor, “trying to unravel red tape and get imported items through customs.” After a late afternoon nap, that evening he returned to Cairo, and over several days reacquainted himself with local Muslim contacts, most of whom he had previously met in the United States or on his 1959 trip. Malcolm also kept encountering Egyptians who refused to believe that he could possibly be both an American and a Muslim. One waiter dismissed his assertions, telling el-Borai that Malcolm “was probably from Habachi (Abyssinia).”
On Tuesday morning, May 5, the nineteen-year-old son of Dr. Shawarbi, Muhammad Shawarbi, came by Malcolm’s hotel to accompany him around the city and later out to the airport to catch a flight to Lagos, Nigeria. After some delays, on May 6 he arrived in Lagos. A Nigerian official at the airport recognized Malcolm and escorted him to the Federal Palace hotel.
For the next few days Malcolm visited Nigeria, but due to his limited schedule he essentially toured only two major cities, Lagos and Ibadan. Unlike in Cairo, his arrival in Nigeria amid a sea of black faces informed him that he had landed in the center of the long historical struggle that had increasingly found expression in his rhetoric back in Harlem. Yet the situation on the ground hardly matched the idealization promised by his speeches. Here in West Africa he found a land battered by the effects of fierce internecine political battles; the political promises made when Nigeria had gained its independence in 1960 had not been fulfilled, and two years after Malcolm’s trip the country would descend into a nightmare of military dictatorship from which it would not emerge for decades.
On Thursday, May 7, he met with several reporters at his hotel, and in the late afternoon toured Lagos by car. Waiting at the hotel for him upon his return were several local contacts, including scholar E. U. Essien-Udom. The group departed for Ibadan by car, a trip Malcolm described as “frightening.” That night Malcolm delivered a powerful address at Ibadan University, sponsored by the National Union of Nigerian Students, to an enthusiastic audience of about five hundred. Malcolm would later note that a riot had barely been averted there when angry students mobbed a West Indian lecturer who had criticized Malcolm’s address. Most memorable for Malcolm, however, was the honor bestowed upon him by the Muslim Students’ Society of Nigeria: a membership card in their society with the name “Omowale,” which in the Yoruba language means “the son (or child) who has returned.”
With the exception of Mecca, the high point of Malcolm’s trip in April-May 1964 was his visit to Ghana, where he arrived on May 10. He came at the invitation of the small African-American expatriate community in the capital city of Accra, which was informally led by the writer/actor Julian Mayfield. Best known for the racially charged novels he wrote during the 1950s, Mayfield had fled to Ghana in 1961 following the kidnapping incident in North Carolina that had also sent Robert F. Williams into exile in Cuba. He was joined in Accra by a number of fellow African-American radicals, which included his wife Ana Livia Cordero, Maya Angelou, Alice Windom, Preston King, and W. E. B. and Shirley Du Bois.
Malcolm had first met Mayfield a few years before his arrival, at the home of Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, and they had kept in touch as Malcolm’s interest in postcolonial politics grew. When Malcolm informed him of his African tour, Mayfield and the other expats grew excited at the chance to bring America’s strongest voice for black nationalism to the country that had long epitomized African hopes of a better future. Since becoming the first black African nation to gain its independence from colonialism in 1957, Ghana had come to symbolize possibility for many different groups. The rise to power of Kwame Nkrumah and his Convention People’s Party provided a template for African self-rule for other colonized countries throughout the continent, while the peaceful transfer of power from the British colonial government, celebrated by blacks around the globe, gave further validation to American advocates of nonviolence, who saw in the transition clear proof of the efficacy of their methods. The nonviolent strategy also found support within the U.S. State Department, which was eager to limit Soviet influence in Africa.
Yet as in Nigeria, by the time of Malcolm’s arrival the bloom had come off the rose of Ghana’s celebratory moment. The controversial murder of Congo’s Patrice Lumumba in 1961 had marked for many a terrible turn in the continent’s affairs, as the policies of Western nations toward Africa complicated the already strained politics of new nations struggling with civil unrest and governmental chaos. The use of violence by the enemies of the African independence movement—and similarly by white supremacists in the United States—increasingly made nonviolence seem like an anemic response, and bolstered the influence of those in favor of a more revolutionary approach. By Malcolm’s visit, Ghana was suffering from many of the same political difficulties that he had seen in Nigeria, and his appearance had the dual effect of exciting a population hungry for the ideals he represented while making government officials uneasy about embracing him.
All this did little to dampen the enthusiasm of Accra’s African-American expat community, which had been anticipating Malcolm’s arrival for several weeks. When he arrived at Mayfield’s home early in the morning of Monday, May 11, Mayfield told Malcolm that he had already arranged two major speaking events for him. One was a lecture at the University of Ghana organized by Leslie Lacy, who had been radicalized during his student years at Berkeley and upon moving to Ghana had worked to set up the popular Marxist Study Group at the university. After Malcolm settled in, Mayfield took him to a lunch at Lacy’s home, where Alice Windom also joined them. Having first encountered Malcolm when he gave a talk at Chicago’s Mosque No. 2 in the early 1960s, she was happy to be reunited with him abroad.
Over lunch, Malcolm explained that he intended “to lend his talents to the building of unity among the various rights groups in America,” recalled Windom. “[I]n his view,” she wrote, “no useful purpose could be served by exposing all the roots of dissension.” This left open the question of Malcolm’s quite public struggle with the Nation, leading him to explain his departure from the NOI “in terms of the disagreement on political direction and involvement in the extra-religious struggle for human rights in America.” His first day in Ghana in the company of the expats left him feeling welcomed and contented, and late that same night back at his hotel, writing in his diary, Malcolm pondered the possibility of relocating to Africa: “Moving my family out of America may be good for me personally but bad for me politically.”
In a May 11 letter to the MMI updating his followers on his travels, Malcolm recounted his triumphal lecture at Ibadan University, where he had given “the true picture of our plight in America, and of the necessity of the independent African Nations helping us bring our case before the United Nations.” Politically, the highest priority was building “unity between the Africans of the West and the Africans of the fatherland [which] will well change the course of history.” This letter marks Malcolm’s final break with the NOI concept of the “Asiatic” black man and the beginning of his identification with Pan-Africanism similar to that espoused by Nkrumah.
By now the Ghanaian Times had been alerted of Malcolm’s presence, and a short announcement, “X is here,” appeared on the front page on May 12. The following day the paper covered his press conference, in which he emphasized “the establishment of good relationship between Afro-Americans and Africans at home [which] is bound to have far reaching results for the common good.” The next few days were a whirl of celebrity activity: escorted by Julian Mayfield to the Cuban embassy to meet their young ambassador, Armando Entralgo Gonzalez, “who immediately offered to give a party in my honor”; an intimate lunch at the home of a young Maya Angelou, then a dancer who was also employed as a teacher, whom he recalled fondly from their meeting several years before; meetings with the ambassadors of Nigeria and Mali; and a private conversation with Ghana’s minister of defense Kofi Boaka and other ministers at Boaka’s home.
On the evening of May 14, Malcolm delivered the lecture that Leslie Lacy had arranged for him, addressing a capacity crowd in the Great Hall of the University of Ghana. Alice Windom, observing the scene, commented that “many of the whites had come to be ‘amused.’ They were in for a rude surprise.” The speech forced Malcolm to be at his most politically adroit, and he warmly praised Nkrumah as one of the African continent’s “most progressive leaders.” The litmus test he proposed for African heads of state was based on how they were treated by the U.S. media, and thus the U.S. government: “[T]hese leaders over here who are receiving the praise and pats on the back from the Americans, you can just flush the toilet and let them go right down the drain,” he told the crowd, which roared with laughter and applause.
Yet in its appreciation of Nkrumah the speech masked the great divisiveness that had emerged in Ghanaian politics. Though Nkrumah had been revered as a national hero during independence, by the mid-1960s his government had degenerated into an authoritarian regime characterized by rigged elections, the loss of an independent judiciary, the decline of the Convention People’s Party as a popular democratic force, the expansion of corruption and graft, and a cult of personality surrounding Nkrumah. Although Nkrumah employed Marxist rhetoric, his regime could be best described as Bonapartist: deeply hostile to the existence of a free civil society and ruled from above by a bureaucracy estranged from the nation’s population. In 1964, C. L. R. James, Nkrumah’s former mentor, publicly broke with the African president over his suppression of democratic rights in the country. Malcolm undoubtedly heard these criticisms from some of the African-American expatriates, but he wisely used his remarks to emphasize the Pan-Africanist common ground that black Americans continued to share with the Ghanaian president. At times, he even seemed to endorse the authoritarian measures Nkrumah had established over economic and social policies, explaining that only when the “colonial mentality has been destroyed” will the masses of citizens “know what they are voting for, then you give them a chance to vote on this and vote on that.”
Malcolm also used his speech to characterize the United States as a “colonial power” like Portugal, France, and Britain. And he predicted that Harlem was “about to explode.” The Ghanaian Times reported that Malcolm called for Third World unity: “Only a concerted attack by the black, the yellow, the red and the brown races which outnumber the white race would end segregation in the U.S., and the world.”
The next morning, Malcolm had been scheduled to speak before Ghana’s national parliament, but because of transportation delays, he arrived shortly after the formal session ended. However, members of parliament were still there, and most gathered in the building’s Members Room, where Malcolm addressed the group and engaged legislators in a lively discussion. At noon, Malcolm was taken to Christiansborg Castle, the seat of the Ghanaian government, for a private hourlong meeting with President Nkrumah. The fact of the meeting itself was somewhat extraordinary, given that Nkrumah was reluctant to associate with Malcolm; only the appeal of W. E. B. Du Bois’s widow, Shirley, who continued to be a friend to Nkrumah after her husband’s death in 1963, convinced him to give Malcolm an audience. Later Malcolm spoke before two hundred students at the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute in Winneba, about forty miles from Accra. He even found time to dine with other American expatriates at the Chinese embassy, where they viewed three Chinese documentary films, including one proclaiming Maoist China’s support for African-American liberation.
It was a thoroughly triumphal visit. As Alice Windom observed, Malcolm Xʹs “name was almost as familiar to Ghanaians as the Southern dogs, fire hoses, cattle prods, people sticks and ugly hate-contorted white faces, and his decision to enter the mainstream of the struggle was heralded as a hopeful sign.” Only two sour events blemished a near perfect week. The first was a negative encounter with Muhammad Ali, who was touring West Africa. As Malcolm was departing from his hotel on the way to the airport, the two men bumped into each other and Ali snubbed him. Later Ali eagerly expressed his unconditional loyalty to Elijah Muhammad, ridiculing Malcolm to a New York Times correspondent and laughing at the “funny white robe” his onetime friend wore and his newly grown beard. “Man, he’s gone. He’s gone so far out he’s out completely.” With words he would later regret, the boxer added, “Nobody listens to that Malcolm anymore.”
Then, within hours of leaving Ghana, Malcolm was attacked in the Ghanaian Times by Nkrumah’s ideological lieutenant, H. M. Basner. A communist, Basner accused Malcolm of failing to comprehend the “class function of all racial oppression.” Malcolm’s emphasis on black liberation instead of class struggle would only serve the interests of “American imperialists. . . . If Malcolm X believes what he says, then both Karl Marx and John Brown are excluded by their racial origin from being regarded as human liberators.” Julian Mayfield immediately responded to Basnerʹs critique. Mayfield argued that what was so upsetting to Basner was Malcolm’s rejection of the classical communist strategy telling blacks to unite with white workers to achieve meaningful change. “The black American has been down that road before,” Mayfield observed. “No single factor has so retarded his struggle as his attempt to unite with liberal or progressive whites.” The average black American worker “has no more in common with the white worker in America than he has in South Africa.” Leslie Lacy later recalled that what truly appalled the African-American expatriate group was that Basnerʹs criticisms of Malcolm had “appeared in a black, revolutionary, government-controlled newspaper. . . . No criticism, however objective, could have appeared attacking Nkrumah.”
Malcolm’s experiences in Ghana strengthened his commitment to Pan-Africanism. Writing to the MMI, Malcolm praised Ghana as “the fountainhead of Pan-Africanism. . . . Just as the American Jew is in harmony (politically, economically and culturally) with World Jewry, it is time for all African-Americans to become an integral part of the world’s Pan-Africanists.” He called for a return to Africa “philosophically and culturally.” Before he departed on May 17, the American expatriates in Ghana organized a “V.I.P. send off,” Malcolm wrote in his diary, adding that an enthusiastic “Maya [Angelou] took the bus right up to the plane.” When the airplane stopped briefly in Dakar, the French airport manager escorted Malcolm around the facility. “I signed many autographs,” Malcolm wrote, and he prayed with many others.
He arrived in Casablanca, Morocco, well after dark, where he would spend the next day quietly. After touring Casablanca by taxi, Malcolm joined his local contact, a man named Ibrahim Maki, and a friend. The three ended up in the Muslim district, the Medina, where they chatted and dined until late. “They were very race-conscious, proud of the Black Muslims, and thirsting for faster ‘progress.’ ”
Malcolm celebrated what would be his final birthday, turning thirty-nine on May 19, 1964. Part of that day was spent flying from Casablanca to Algiers, where he arrived in the afternoon, before surveying the city by foot and eating a late dinner. This city, his last on the African journey, however, did not yield much. Malcolm was disappointed to find few people who could speak English; plus his calls to the Ghanaian embassy were fruitless and his contact in the Algerian foreign ministry wasn’t at his office when Malcolm stopped by. On the twentieth, Malcolm toured the city by taxi, leaning out the car window to take photographs. Meanwhile, that same day back in the United States, he would later learn, a warrant was issued for his arrest for failing to appear at a trial to respond to the speeding ticket he had been given in the hectic days surrounding Cassius Clay’s visit to New York.
On departure day, May 21, Malcolm was briefly detained by police at the Algiers airport, who believed that the photos he’d taken were a security risk. It was only by providing evidence of his status as a Muslim that he was released, with apologies. Malcolm arrived home to JFK airport in the late afternoon to a crowd of about sixty, mostly family and friends. A press conference was arranged for that evening at the Hotel Theresa, where, as he would in the days that immediately followed, Malcolm emphasized his desire to create a new “organization which will be open for the participation of all Negroes, and we will be willing to accept the support of people of other races.” Malcolm candidly admitted that his “racial philosophy” had been altered after all he had seen—“thousands of people of different races and colors who treated me as a human being.”
Malcolm was ready to enter the international political stage, leaving the parochialism and backwardness of Yacub and the Nation far behind him. Yet in returning to the world he had left a month before, he would find that the profound transformation he’d experienced in the Middle East and Africa had not similarly taken root in his MMI brothers. At the airport greeting, despite their break from the sect, they were still wearing the standard Nation of Islam uniform, the “dark blue suits, white shirts and distinctive red or grey bow ties.” Malcolm may have traveled to a different world, spiritually and politically, but his followers would not be so easily transported.