CHAPTER 14
At the OAAU Homecoming Rally for Malcolm on November 29 at the Audubon Ballroom, Charles 37X mingled in the modest crowd of three hundred, shaking hands and displaying his usual charm and good cheer. No one had yet told Malcolm, still freshly arrived, about the rumors concerning Betty and his duplicitous lieutenant. James 67X, however, did know. In October, hoping to ease tensions over leadership of the MMI in Malcolm’s absence, he had traveled to Boston and spent several days as a houseguest of Ella Collins, where he met with MMI supporters. During his stay, Ella told him about the gossip. In its way, the news of Charles and Betty’s liaisons helped settle him, perhaps because it gave him something he could use to his advantage if the power struggle escalated further. As it was, he took the opportunity to reassert his leadership through magnanimity. On October 18 he and Benjamin 2X held an MMI meeting in Harlem, where they encouraged members to attend an OAAU rally scheduled for later that day. Two nights later, he held a further meeting at his West 113th Street apartment, to discuss the formation of an MMI judo program. The participants, who included Reuben Francis, had been some of his staunchest critics; this overture to his opponents may have quelled their worries. Toward Kenyatta himself, James displayed generosity, inviting his rival to speak at events. By the time of the Audubon rally, James had largely reestablished his leadership role in the MMI.
Even so, members of the OAAU and MMI were excited about having Malcolm back. Arguments and feuds that had threatened to destroy both organizations could now be resolved. Both groups had closely followed Malcolm’s itinerary and adventures from abroad, the honors bestowed upon him by such worthies as Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere, Sékou Touré, and Prince Faisal, all of which was in part a recognition of their efforts. Yet the changes he had clearly undergone during the trip produced conflicting reactions among his followers. The OAAU had approved of Malcolm’s political evolution and of the frequent comments he had sent to M. S. Handler for publication in the Times. For the MMI, however, the question to be answered was whether Malcolm X was still their Malcolm—a committed black separatist who espoused the core ideas he had promoted as a Nation of Islam minister. Many had agreed with Herman Ferguson in seeing Malcolm’s May press conference comments offering an olive branch to whites as a kind of necessary smoke screen, but the news of him from Africa conveyed only further movement in a more inclusive direction. The MMI, its heels dug in on race issues, saw little to approve of in the deeper change in their leaderʹs philosophical outlook. James 67X, for one, was glad that Malcolm “had not changed his position one whit” after his second African sojourn. And even after he came back, James said with relief, “he would refer to certain people as devils.”
Yet his separatism-minded supporters could not have been pleased with the undercurrent of his speech at his Audubon homecoming. He was introduced there by Clifton DeBerry, the Socialist Workers Party 1964 presidential candidate. After touching briefly on current events in Stanleyville, Malcolm spent the bulk of the talk recounting his trip, going country by country and focusing on the African continent’s unprecedented social change. “This is the era of revolution,” he proudly announced, taking the opportunity to draw negative contrasts between the nonviolent civil rights leaders in the United States and the African revolutionaries who were seeking to overthrow colonial dictatorships. “Whenever you hear a man saying he wants freedom, but in the next breath he is going to tell you what he won’t do to get it . . . he doesn’t believe in freedom.” Yet in espousing the necessity for a Pan-Africanist approach, Malcolm once again made an important distinction between whites who “don’t act all right” compared to antiracist whites. “When I say white man, I’m not saying all of you,” he explained, “because some of you might be all right. And whichever one of you acts all right with me, you’re all right with me.” His point left little room for interpretation of his changing values: all whites weren’t “devils”; many were antiracist and sympathetic to the black struggle, while African leaders like Tshombe may have been black but were a threat to blacks’ interests. The message cost him further support among those who wished for a hard line when it came to race.
From Africa, Malcolm had contacted James 67X to help arrange a brief lecture tour in Britain, for which he would depart on November 30 and return on December 6—once again setting off abroad after he had barely settled back in the United States. Early on his day of departure he set aside time to contact patrons and colleagues in the Muslim world, where he was involved in a delicate balancing act. During his trip he had courted and received sponsorship from both the Muslim World League in Mecca and the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs in Cairo, an arm of Nasserʹs government. These groups shared a deep commitment to Muslim ideals but otherwise could not have been more different, with the Saudi Muslim World League’s conservatism and staunch anticommunism putting them at odds with Nasser, who by then had made Egypt practically a client state of the Soviet Union. The schism required Malcolm to become a pluralist in the Muslim world, an approach that had produced real breakthroughs during his travels. While he had been in Mecca, the Muslim World League had agreed to assign Sheikh Ahmed Hassoun to the New York Muslim community, and now Malcolm wrote the league’s secretary-general, Muhammad Surur al-Sabban, to express his appreciation. His letter, however, was actually a cover under which to bring up a delicate issue. Malcolm had returned home to find the MMI virtually broke, with no funds to pay Hassoun’s salary or to cover the cost of his lodgings. He blamed the lack of resources on the split with Elijah Muhammad: “We represent the Afro-American Muslims who have broken away from the Black Muslim Movement. We had to leave all our treasures behind.” Estimating that it would cost four hundred to five hundred dollars for Hassoun’s monthly living expenses, he did not ask for funds directly, but obliquely requested “instructions on how to solve this problem.”
That same morning, perhaps anticipating the problems that might be caused in Egypt by news of his involvement with the Muslim World League, Malcolm also contacted Muhammad Taufik Oweida of the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs. Since the SCIA had granted Malcolm twenty scholarships, he recognized the importance of presenting an organized official front for his groups, noting that “there is much reorganization to be done here.” The immediate task was “to separate our religious activities from our nonreligious,” which implied increasing the division between MMI and OAAU. Then, in a revealing comment, Malcolm explained his motives for cultivating the more conservative Muslims in Saudi Arabia:
I have gone quite far in establishing myself and the Muslim Mosque Inc., also with the Muslim World League which is headquartered at Mecca. I am hoping that you understand my strategy in cementing good relations with them. My heart is in Cairo and I believe the mose [sic] progressive relations forces in the Muslim world are in Cairo. I think that I can be more helpful and of more value to these progressive relation forces at Cairo by solidifying myself also with the more moderate or conservative forces that are headquartered in Mecca.
Touching down in London on December 1, he spent some of the next few days preparing for his most significant UK appearance, an event at Oxford University on the third. The student union had invited him to defend, in a formal debate, Barry Goldwaterʹs statement that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” The BBC televised the event, which featured three speakers for the motion and three against it. In his presentation, Malcolm once again carefully separated himself from his Black Muslim past, emphasizing his commitment to orthodox Islam. He argued that since the U.S. government had failed to safeguard the lives and property of African Americans over several centuries, it was not unreasonable for blacks to use extreme measures to defend their liberties. Yet he also tried to ground this sentiment in a multiracial approach. “I firmly believe in my heart,” he declared, that when the black man acts “to use any means necessary to bring about his freedom or put a halt to that injustice, I don’t think he’ll be by himself. . . . I for one will join in with anyone, I don’t care what color you are, as long as you want to change this miserable condition.” A few days later he lectured before a mostly Muslim audience of three hundred people, at the University of London. The British press registered the change in his outlook. The Manchester Guardian declared, “At one time whites in the United States called him a racialist, an extremist, and a Communist,” but based on his university presentation, there was noted the appearance of a new Malcolm X: “relaxed, mellifluous and reasonable. He has the assurance of Dr. Billy Graham and details are swamped by the powerful generalities of his message. And no one should doubt the power.”
Malcolm returned to the United States on December 6, and that same day he met privately with Wallace Muhammad. If the two men had followed the same arc in fleeing the ideas of the Nation and earning its enmity in the process, their journeys had ultimately left them in different circumstances. For all their disagreement with Elijah Muhammad and what they perceived as his heretical version of Islam, Wallace remained the heir apparent and had much more to lose than Malcolm. And while Malcolm had risen in stature and continued to make headlines, Wallace was toiling practically in obscurity in Philadelphia and Chicago, where he led Muslim groups so small they seemed under threat of dissolving at any moment. In fact, by the end of 1964, he was weeks away from giving up his leadership role altogether and taking up a carpet cleaning business in Chicago. He, too, had suffered through months of death threats from his fatherʹs men, yet for him, unlike Malcolm, standing down and staying alive remained an option, and an appealing one.
Despite the obstacles, Malcolm continued to ponder the idea of a merger with Wallace, perhaps because he believed the two of them standing together at the head of a major Muslim organization would present the most powerful repudiation possible of the Nation of Islam. At their meeting, Malcolm told Wallace that he was now truly an orthodox Muslim and that he did not consider the MMI or OAAU as permanent organizations—either could be disbanded. This made a certain kind of sense; Malcolm likely already saw that the MMIʹs overlap with the Nation left it ill equipped to grow into the kind of religious organization that could have the reach he wanted. The OAAU was still young and inchoate enough to be morphed into something more politically effective without discarding too many sunk costs. He may even have proposed that Wallace become the imam of a restructured MMI, so becoming the chief beneficiary of the extensive contacts Malcolm had forged in the Middle East. Wallace expressed interest, but remained noncommittal. Malcolm’s incendiary rhetoric made him uncomfortable, and his interest in such a joint project ended where Malcolm’s political passions began. He also knew as well as anyone the unpleasantness likely to be visited on Malcolm by the Nation at any time. Throwing in his lot so publicly would mean crossing the same threshold Malcolm had, and he had little desire to join his spiritual kinsman as marked man in his fatherʹs eyes. Ever perceptive, Malcolm sensed the roots of this reluctance, and a few weeks after their meeting he wrote Wallace (by then calling himself Walith) urging him to focus attention on his followers in Philadelphia, and to “forget Chicago . . . I would ignore the Black Muslim Movement completely.” Pointedly he tried to keep Wallace clear of his own continuing war with Elijah Muhammad. “You are not ruthless enough to deal with a man like your father and his bloodthirsty henchmen. This is one reason why he doesn’t molest you but he knows I can be just as ruthless and cold-blooded.”
Around the time Malcolm returned from London, he learned about the romantic relationship between his wife and Charles Kenyatta. James 67X had been dreading the moment when his boss would finally ask him about it, and when Malcolm did broach the subject he was careful to be deliberately vague. Alone together in the office, Malcolm turned to James and said sadly, “I understand that my wife has been ‘tripping the light fantastic’ while I’ve been gone.”
James kept his eyes glued to the papers on his desk and said nothing, but Malcolm pushed the issue. “Brother, they say that my wife is going with Charles 37.”
James did not relish confirming this, nor did he wish to reveal that he had heard the rumors from Ella, so he lied, hoping to leave enough room in his response to suggest various interpretations of Charles’s behavior. “I don’t know anything about that,” he told Malcolm. “But take this into consideration : Charles 37 is a street man, and he’s very egotistical. So he could do things to make it seem like something is going on between him and your wife.”
Malcolm thought for a moment and said, “If such a thing is going on, I’m not going to allow any of my personal problems to interfere with what I have to do.”
At a meeting soon thereafter, Malcolm put a permanent end to the conflict between James and Charles by reaffirming that James was his number two man. In the black-and-white world of the MMI, this decision quickly made Charles persona non grata and put him in considerable danger of retaliation. The old pipe-squad instincts of the MMI brothers, ready to punish dissenters and betrayers at a moment’s notice, were never far from the surface. But Malcolm quickly stepped in to calm the storm. He put out the word that absolutely no harm should come to Charles, and that he would not be barred from participation in any MMI or OAAU meetings. “The word was out to kill [Kenyatta],” James said. “And it was Malcolm who kept him from being ‘terminated with extreme prejudice.’ ”
Malcolm’s skillful defusing of the Betty situation lent the impression that cooler heads had prevailed, yet inwardly the news of infidelity seems to have loosened Malcolm’s own marital bonds. What is difficult to know is whether the first such transgressions on his part occurred even earlier. Betty’s speculation as to the nature of Malcolm’s close relationship with Lynne Shifflett may have been paranoid, but it may also have been grounded in truth. And Malcolm’s hesitant diary entries about the night spent with Fifi in Switzerland suggest the possibility of a more intimate involvement. Of these, no certainty can be had, but after his return from Africa, Malcolm appears to have begun an illicit sexual affair with an eighteen-year-old OAAU secretary named Sharon 6X Poole. Little is known about her or about their relationship except that it appears to have continued up to Malcolm’s death. She joined Mosque No. 7 only months before Malcolm’s silencing. Knowledge of the affair did not spread widely like the gossip of Betty’s involvement with Kenyatta, but stayed close within Malcolm’s core circle, for whom his protection was a paramount concern.
Though the specter of internal violence had been quelled, external threats continued to make their grim presence known. On December 12, Malcolm addressed a local group, the Domestic Peace Corps, as part of its Cultural Enrichment Lecture Series. Before an audience of two hundred on West 137th Street, Malcolm urged blacks to remain in the United States, but to “migrate to Africa culturally, philosophically, and spiritually.” Emphasizing that he rejected violence “despite what the press may tell you,” he also affirmed his opposition to “any form of racism.” Black Americans needed to construct a coalition with emerging, independent African nations. He spoke again about the bombings of Congolese villages carried out by Belgian mercenaries and “American-trained, anti-Castro Cuban pilots” as acts of mass murder. But some of his most interesting commentary had to do with the capacity of the U.S. government to reform itself. “United States history is that of a country that does whatever it wants to by any means necessary . . . but when it comes to your and my interest, then all of this means become limited,” he argued. “We are dealing with a powerful enemy, and again, I am not anti-American or un-American. I think there are plenty of good people in America, but there are also plenty of bad people in America and the bad ones are the ones who seem to have all the power.” What he was conceding was that the solution to America’s racial dilemma would not be found by African Americans alone. Also attending the lecture were several dozen NOI members, all dressed in dark suits and wearing “I am with Muhammad” red and white buttons, a reminder of the ever-present threat. Six police officers were assigned to the event, and no trouble erupted.
That same week, to Malcolm’s excitement, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the former guerrilla leader of the Cuban revolution, swept into town to address the General Assembly of the UN on December 11. At that moment, Guevara was perhaps Malcolm’s closest analogue on the world stage, a relentless supporter of the struggles of oppressed people and a committed revolutionary. Like Malcolm he was deeply concerned about ongoing and recent events in Africa. In making broad connections between the Cuban revolution and other struggles around the globe, he gave special mention to “the painful case of the Congo, unique in modern history, that shows how the rights of the peoples can be thwarted with the utmost impunity.” He insisted that the root of the Congo’s misery was that nation’s “immense wealth, which the imperialist nations want to keep under their control.” In a language markedly similar to Malcolm’s, he described the dynamics of neocolonialism as forms of military and economic collaboration between Western powers: “Who committed those crimes? Belgian paratroopers, brought in by U.S. planes, which left from English bases. . . . All free men in the world should prepare to avenge the crime in the Congo.”
Malcolm invited Guevara to address his OAAU rally at the Audubon on December 13, but the Argentine declined to attend, concerned that his presence might be seen as a provocative foray into internal U.S. politics. Still, many of the themes Guevara had addressed at the UN were central to the discussion that evening, especially when Malcolm took the stage to fill time after Tanzanian minister Abdulrahman Muhammad Babu, who also happened to be in New York for the General Assembly, was late in arriving. “We’re living in a revolutionary world and in a revolutionary age,” Malcolm told the overflowing crowd, numbering at least five hundred and, by some reports, many more. We must realize, he said, “the direct connection between the struggle of the Afro-American in this country and the struggle of our people all over the world.” For those who might suggest resolving the racial crisis in Mississippi before worrying about the Congo, he warned, “You’ll never get Mississippi straightened out. Not until you start realizing your connection with the Congo.” His argument defined Pan-Africanist logic, but also ran deeper in light of the “imperialist” connections that Guevara had drawn at the UN. Underlying Malcolm’s main argument about the unity of the black struggle was an important point about exploitation. The “connection with the Congo” for black Americans had as much to do with the commonality of economic oppression as it did with race. It was this leap from race-specific ideas to broader ones about class, politics, and economics that pushed Malcolm’s thinking forward in late 1964, a lesson that his travels in Africa had brought into focus.
Yet he continued to have difficulty conveying the change in his thinking to Harlem audiences, often because of his reliance on an older, cumbersome political language that lumped nearly all whites into one hostile group. He also defined the enemy as “the man” rather than in the more nuanced terms of class and politics. Indeed, at one point when he was calling for “a firm, uncompromising stand against the man,” Malcolm was forced to stop in midsentence to explain that by “the man” he meant “the segregationist, lyncher, and exploiter.” These speaking efforts found his mind in transition, and still struggling to find a new terminology to translate increasingly complex ideas into crowd-friendly language.
Babu finally arrived at the Audubon nearly two hours late, but before he took the stage, Malcolm presented the crowd with a delicious surprise: a statement of solidarity from Che Guevara, which Malcolm read aloud with pride: “Dear brothers and sisters of Harlem, I would have liked to have been with you and Brother Babu, but the actual conditions are not good for this meeting. Receive the warm salutations of the Cuban people and especially those of Fidel, who remembers enthusiastically his visit to Harlem a few years ago. United we will win.” As the audience applauded, Malcolm relished the moment. The man, Malcolm said, “was in no position anymore to tell blacks who we should applaud for and who we shouldn’t applaud for. And you don’t see any anti-Castro Cubans around here—we eat them up.”
Circumstantial evidence provided by James 67X suggests that Malcolm and Guevara briefly met that week in December. Although there is no direct evidence, Guevara’s subsequent actions in 1965 can be accurately described as carrying out Malcolm’s revolutionary agenda for the continent. The two men were kindred spirits politically, a bond revealed not only by the similarity of their worldviews but by Guevara’s subsequent travels. Days after his UN speech, Guevara flew to Africa and literally traced Malcolm’s steps from Algiers; on January 8 he was in Guinea; and from January 14 to 24 he visited Accra. He met with Julius Nyerere, and it was through Tanzania that Cuban guerrillas gained safe passage into the eastern provinces of Congo. And only days following Malcolm’s assassination, Guevara met Nasser in Cairo, where he obtained the Egyptian government’s support for the guerrilla war. That both men eventually met such a violent fate in the name of their struggles and found in death iconic stature as revolutionaries seems only to further bind their legacies.
During his final two months in Africa and the Middle East, Malcolm had said relatively little publicly about his feud with the Nation of Islam. After his return, he tried to remain silent about his dispute, but the gears set in motion within the Nation could no longer be stopped. There would be no more negotiation. The charismatic minister who had whipped members into a frenzy now became the object of that violent energy, and Malcolm’s outspokenness about the Nation through 1964 had given its leaders more than enough fuel to keep the fires burning. NOI membership had stagnated without Malcolm’s recruitment appeal, and as the paternity suit against Elijah Muhammad wended its way through the court system, it continued to produce damning public revelations, which could only be refuted as lies spread by their former national minister.
And though Malcolm had mostly kept quiet about the Nation during his time abroad, his political actions had been all too provocative. Muhammad and the Chicago headquarters bristled at Malcolm’s successful negotiations with Islamic organizations in Cairo and Mecca, which had the effect of furthering perceptions of the Nation in the United States and the Middle East as beyond the boundaries of true Islam. This especially infuriated Muhammad, who had worked hard to Islamify the Nation in recent years, though always around the central, heretical idea of his own divinity. Hiring teachers of Arabic, cultivating relations with Islamic states abroad—all this had been done to strengthen the Nation’s religious bona fides, yet by embracing orthodox Islam under his own program, Malcolm had marginalized the Nation in one fell swoop, circumscribing its membership growth at the most critical moment. This move, and its continuing ramifications as Malcolm broadened his reach, had made his murder all the more necessary from an institutional standpoint.
Throughout Malcolm’s long absence in the summer and fall, the Nation had waged what might be called a one-sided jihad against him. On July 15, John Ali informed a meeting of Mosque No. 7 that the X had been stripped from Malcolm’s name. He reminded the faithful that Malcolm had after all been a “thief, dope addict, and a pimp.” Such vitriolic speeches found their complement in the slanderous campaign unfolding in the pages of Muhammad Speaks. On September 25, Captain Joseph and Atlanta leader Jeremiah X published an article entitled “Biography of a Hypocrite,” aimed at characterizing Malcolm’s entire career within the Nation as a record of opportunism. Since Malcolm had personally opened or had a hand in developing nearly every NOI mosque between 1953 and 1962, their task was difficult. Nevertheless, they constantly denigrated Malcom and managed to identify scores of transgressions that supposedly had undermined the Nation of Islam. In the same issue, Minister Carl of Wilmington, Delaware, described Malcolm as a “shift-with-the-wind WEATHERCOCK.ʺ Captain Clarence 2X Gill of Boston also denounced Malcolm and all other hypocrites, adding, “May Allah burn them in hell.” On Malcolm’s return to the United States he was met with another Muhammad Speaks broadside, dated November 26, by Edwina X of the Newark mosque. For Edwina X, the struggle to defeat everything Malcolm represented was vital: “As in all great struggles for truth and freedom, there are the envious, the insincere and the hypocritical who will attempt to smear and wreck the work of a Divine leader. We have had such a hypocrite in the NOI in the form of one Malcolm X Little.” She then warned, “For one who has heard the truth and still wants to go astray—there is nothing but total destruction for such a defector.” Probably the single most influential attack appeared in Muhammad Speaks under the name Louis X on December 4. “The die is set, and Malcolm shall not escape, especially after such evil, foolish talk,” Farrakhan declared. “Such a man as Malcolm is worthy of death.” This code phrase was a call to arms within the sect.
On the street, safety soon proved elusive for Malcolm’s people in the MMI. In late October, Kenneth Morton, who had quit the mosque at the time of Malcolm’s departure, was ambushed by members of the Fruit in front of his Bronx home. He was so severely beaten in the head that he subsequently died from his wounds. Captain Joseph denied that Mosque No. 7 and its officers had had any involvement in Morton’s death, but no one in the MMI needed proof to convince them to keep a low profile. Benjamin 2X narrowly escaped a beating or worse at the hands of Malcolm’s former driver Thomas 15X Johnson and a group of Nation thugs who chased him for several blocks. Almost as much a target as Malcolm himself, James 67X avoided sleeping in the same place for more than a night, rotating between four apartments, including one kept by his former roommate Anas Luqman.
Despite this gathering storm, Malcolm did not curtail his public activities. In mid-December he took off several days to speak at Harvard Law School. His talk, “The African Revolution and Its Impact on the American Negro,” explained his ideas about Islam, drawing connections with Judaism and Christianity. He embraced the “brotherhood of all men,” he said, “but I don’t believe in wasting brotherhood on anyone who doesn’t want to practice it with me.” He drew again on a theme developed by Frantz Fanon, suggesting a link between the self-reinvention of black identity with the dismantling of racism. “Victims of racism are created in the image of the racists,” Malcolm argued. “When the victims struggle vigorously to protect themselves from violence of others, they are made to appear in the image of criminals, as the criminal image is projected onto the victim.” Liberation, he implied, was not simply political but cultural. His central point, however, was the necessity for blacks to transform their struggle from “civil rights” to “human rights,” redefining racism as “a problem for all humanity.” The OAAU favored getting “our problem before the United Nations,” but it also supported black voting and voter education.
As Christmas drew near, Malcolm was invited to appear at the Williams Institutional Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in Harlem, where the principal speaker was the Mississippi freedom fighter Fannie Lou Hamer. The crowd at the Williams was somewhat small, about 175 people, but Malcolm gave a spirited and provocative presentation. His explorations in the philosophy of social movements in recent months had brought him face-to-face with an old debate within the Western left over how human beings come to perceive themselves as social actors, asking whether an external force, such as a tightly organized party, is necessary to bring oppressed people to full political consciousness, or if the oppressed by themselves have the ability to transform their own situations. Addressing this question, Malcolm came down strongly on the side of what has often been called spontaneity. “I, for one, believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what it is that confronts them, and the basic causes that produce it, they’ll create their own program,” he remarked. “And when the people create a program, you get action.” In effect, Malcolm’s remarks implicitly rejected the Marxist-Leninist theory of a cadre-style revolutionary party and embraced C. L. R. James’s belief that the oppressed possessed the power to transform their own existence.
If ordinary people possess the intelligence and potential for changing their conditions, around what economic principles should that take place? Here again Malcolm returned to socialism, but explained it in a new, geopolitical context. In his judgment, the basic geopolitical division of the world was not between the United States and the Soviet Union, but America versus communist China. “Among Asian countries, whether they are communist, socialist . . . almost every one . . . that has gotten independence has devised some kind of socialistic system, and this is no accident.” Although Malcolm had visited neither China nor Cuba, it was clear that the socialist societies he admired most drew from the models of Mao and Castro.
That he should have looked to Asia, and specifically China, for examples made sense given the direction of his recent investigations into the history of global politics, and could also be placed in a much older context of black interest in China as a model for the struggle of oppressed peoples. As early as the turn of the century, W. E. B. Du Bois had made reference to the “color line” in The Souls of Black Folk, with the implication that “colored” people included Africans, Asians, Jews, and other minorities around the world engaged in a struggle against Western imperialism. Based on this argument, some blacks had entertained great sympathy for the Japanese empire in the 1930s. A generation later, many black leftists saw Mao Zedong as a triumphant leader of nonwhite people. The idea of black identification with Asia had even been reflected in the ideology of the Nation of Islam, which had viewed African Americans as genealogically “Asiatic,” a classification that Malcolm had abandoned before eventually coming to see the connection differently, in global-political terms. He was encouraged in this direction by his relationship with Shirley Graham Du Bois and her son, David, who enthusiastically picked up the torch their patriarch had long carried. Indeed, by the end of his life, W. E. B. Du Bois had come to be a revered figure in Asia, celebrated both by the Chinese and by Nehru in India. He had perceived revolutionary China as a triumph for all colored people.
In the Williams church speech, Malcolm drew on the triumph of Asian socialism to return to the notion that capitalism as an economic system was inherently exploitative: “You can’t operate a capitalistic system unless you are vulturistic; you have to have someone else’s blood to suck to be a capitalist.” The tide of history for people of African descent was moving inextricably toward the East: “When we look at the African continent, when we look at the trouble that’s going on between East and West, we find that the nations in Africa are developing socialistic systems to solve their problems.”
At the event, Malcolm invited Fannie Lou Hamer and the SNCC Freedom Singers, traveling with her, to attend the OAAUʹs rally at the Audubon that evening. The successful rally with Hamer opened for Malcolm and the OAAU a long-desired conduit for political work with a progressive organization in the South. Attention in the civil rights movement was directed at this moment at Selma, Alabama, where various groups hoped to launch a major voting rights initiative in the new year. Malcolm found Selma intriguing, and continued his efforts to redefine his image within the civil rights community. On Christmas Eve, accompanied by James 67X, he visited the home of James Farmer. Malcolm had learned that the CORE leader was soon embarking on a six-week tour of Africa, and he wanted to suggest local contacts. Farmer was oddly offended by James’s presence. “Why did you bring the bodyguard?” he asked. “Do you think I’m going to kill you?”
Malcolm explained that James’s presence was necessary because “there are a lot of people after me . . . they’re bound to get me.” During the visit, Farmer retrieved two postcards he had received from Malcolm when he was in Mecca, and he asked if Malcolm’s inscriptions on the cards reflected a new racial outlook. Malcolm confirmed that his thinking had profoundly changed and that the distance between the two leaders, while still considerable, had been narrowed.
Yet Malcolm’s progress on so many fronts was increasingly impeded by the Nation of Islam, which had begun to draw tight the net around him. By yearʹs end, he was not safe in any city with an NOI presence, and when he traveled he was subjected to direct physical intimidation and threats. On December 23, when he appeared on the Joe Rainey program in Philadelphia, the station received a message that an attempt on his life would be made; Philadelphia police were called to protect Malcolm as he left the station. Two days later, on Christmas, the Nation sent Malcolm a clear message, brutal in its particulars, when four Boston Fruit led by mosque captain Clarence Gill ambushed Malcolm associate Leon 4X Ameer in the lobby of Boston’s Sherry Biltmore hotel. Ameer, a former NOI officer who had been assigned to be a press representative of Muhammad Ali, had fallen from Ali’s favor after Malcolm’s split with the Nation, and took to laying low at the Biltmore. He suffered mightily at the hands of Gill and his men until the beating was broken up at gunpoint by a police officer. Yet this was not the worst of it. Later that night, after Gill had retreated to his hotel room to recover, a second Nation pipe squad broke into his room to finish what their brothers had started. Ameer was so severely injured that he was hospitalized for more than two weeks, yet Gill and his men, arrested after the first incident, were fined a mere hundred dollars each.
The day after Ameerʹs beatings, Malcolm returned to Philadelphia to be a guest on WPENʹs Red Benson show. The program was broadcast from an auditorium open to the general public, and it soon became clear that without the presence of MMI security personnel and on a public stage or podium, Malcolm would be completely vulnerable. At least four NOI members were in the audience throughout the program. Returning to Philadelphia four days later, at two p.m. on December 30, Malcolm held a press conference at the Sheraton hotel, criticizing both black and white newspapers on their distorted coverage of the Congo crisis, and of Africa generally. Five hours later he attended the International Muslim Brotherhood dinner, where he delivered a talk of thirty to forty minutes. A significant number, perhaps more than thirty of those in attendance, were anti-Malcolm NOI members from Philadelphia. By nine p.m. Malcolm and a cordon of MMI security and MMI and OAAU supporters had returned to the Sheraton. An hour and a half later, approximately fifteen NOI members entered the hotel and began a frontal assault of MMI members. The brawling stopped when a police officer appeared. Malcolm immediately phoned Betty, instructing her not to let anyone into their house. One of his final acts of 1964 was to write to Akbar Muhammad, warning him that NOI leaders were trying “to destroy your image in the sight of the Black Muslims in the same way they did mine.” He urged him to hold a press conference denouncing “these vicious people.” Recent events had made him understand that international religious bodies of the Islamic world did not consider the Nation of Islam “as authentical [sic] . . . it is time [for them] to speak out and verify what I am saying. I am going to send letters to religious officials there in the Muslim world, enclosing your fatherʹs statements against you, claiming himself to be the Messenger of Allah and I am going to insist that they take a stand on your side.” Malcolm’s intervention was probably too manipulative, getting in the middle of the long-standing conflict between Akbar and his father. However, his basic threat—mobilizing international Islamic organizations to boycott the Nation of Islam—was no bluff. Nation headquarters genuinely feared that Malcolm could lead an international campaign that could effectively exclude it from being part of the ummah. Akbar and Wallace had been petulant in their criticisms of Elijah Muhammad, and little they had said actually threatened to damage the Nation. That was not true for Malcolm. The fatwa, or death warrant, may or may not have been signed by Elijah Muhammad; there is no way of knowing. It is far more likely that Muhammad, like the fabled King Henry II, announced no decision but made his feelings all too clear, allowing his underlings to take their own murderous initiative.
Despite his many other obligations, Malcolm continued to make time available for Alex Haley. The journalist now understood the importance of Malcolm’s most recent reinvention, and it required him to expand the length of the Autobiography. In an October 1964 letter to Paul Reynolds, Haley had estimated that the book would be ready to hand over to Doubleday by late January 1965. “I am a little put-out,” Haley pouted, that Malcolm “has rather crossed up the project by, one, staying away so long and, two, his new conversion.” But Haley recognized that Malcolm’s embrace of Islamic orthodoxy might, after all, be beneficial to increased book sales and “intense interest in the Moslem countries where he is viewed as the most famous Orthodox Brother in America.” On November 19, Haley contacted Reynolds again, “happy to report” that Malcolm would be returning to the United States within the week. “So I am going to be on a plane Monday, to be awaiting him, to get the information I’ll need to write new final chapters.” Haley thus met with Malcolm several times in December 1964 and January 1965, incorporating his new views into the final chapters of the Autobiography. Surprisingly little about the OAAU was mentioned in the new material, however. On February 14, Haley reported to Reynolds that he was “deep into winding up Malcolm Xʹs book. . . . You’ll have it prior [to] March . . . it’s a powerful book.”
Malcolm was increasingly a magnet for representatives of the freedom struggle, who no longer viewed him as a racial separatist. The end of 1964 marked a moment of convergence, when Malcolm’s move away from stark separatism brought him into alignment with elements of the civil rights movement that were growing increasingly radicalized. Had Malcolm continued to mainstream his views, it is unclear how he would have negotiated relations a few years later with the Black Panthers, a group born of much of the intellectual framework Malcolm had assembled in the early to mid-1960s. Yet in this moment, Malcolm found himself able to straddle both the most leftist elements of the struggle and the mainstream. Early in 1965, the Malcolm-minded Floyd McKissick took control of CORE from James Farmer, continuing the group’s decisive shift away from King’s nonviolent integrationist model. And in the months after Freedom Summer, SNCC, too, had splintered along similar lines, with the pacifist Bob Moses set against the increasingly radicalized Stokely Carmichael, who would subsequently join the Black Panthers and later form the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party. Near the end of 1964, a letter and attached money order had arrived at the OAAUʹs offices from future Panthers cofounder Bobby Seale, requesting a subscription to Blacklash.
Yet this period also saw Malcolm’s most concerted and successful effort to court the civil rights mainstream. Just before the new year, he received a delegation of thirty-seven teenagers from McComb, Mississippi, who had traveled to New York City on the sponsorship of the SNCC. Greeting the young people at his Hotel Theresa office, Malcolm urged them to think for themselves, applauding those who were committed to nonviolence but also insisting that “if black people alone are going to be the ones who are nonviolent, then it’s not fair.” He presented the OAAU as “a new approach,” rejecting traditional integrationist and separatist strategies in favor of “making our problem a world problem.” The plight of Mississippi could not be overcome by focusing narrowly just on its problems. “It is important for you to know that when you’re in Mississippi, you’re not alone. . . . You’ve got as much power on your side as the Ku Klux Klan has on its side.” Malcolm promised to send some of his militant followers to aid the freedom fighters. “We will organize brothers here in New York who know how to handle these kind of affairs,” he vowed, “and they’ll slip into Mississippi like Jesus slipped into Jerusalem.”
On Sunday, January 3, the OAAUʹs evening program at the Audubon Ballroom featured color films taken by Malcolm during his travels. Despite freezing weather, the program attracted a crowd of seven hundred. Two days later Malcolm visited Montreal for an unusual reason: he was to appear on the CBC television program Front Page Challenge. With a format similar to the 1950s U.S. television show What’s My Line?, guests answered questions from masked panelists, who attempted to guess their identities. Malcolm’s panelists were Gordon Sinclair, Betty Kennedy, and Charles Templeton. Why would he go on a television game show? Perhaps it was another means to generate funds for his family. Or perhaps it was a way to display his softer personality to a mass audience.
He also continued to expand his rhetoric on the internationalist connections between Asia, Africa, and black America. As the featured speaker at the Militant Labor Forum at Palm Gardens on January 7, he noted that Vietnamese rice farmers had successfully fought “against all the highly mechanized weapons of warfare” of the United States. China’s explosion of a nuclear bomb, he declared, “was a scientific breakthrough for the oppressed people of China.” The communist Chinese displayed “their advanced knowledge of science to the point where a country which is as backward as this country keeps saying China is, and so behind everybody, and so poor, could come up with an atomic bomb. I had to marvel at that.” He tied these developments to the legacies of imperialism and colonialism. Moise Tshombe, Malcolm explained, was an “agent of Western imperialism” in Africa, and he pointed out that in 1964 both Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, after years of effort, had successfully overthrown colonial powers, becoming independent Zambia and Malawi respectively. Taken together, these international events were all driven by the same global political forces, and African Americans’ issues had to be addressed within that same dynamic context.
Over the next few days, Malcolm wrote a series of letters to consolidate the OAAU as an international movement. From Carlos Moore, an anti-Castro black Cuban who had nevertheless assisted Malcolm during the week he was in Paris, Malcolm solicited help in starting an office there. In a friendly letter to Maya Angelou, Malcolm praised her critique against talking “over the head of the masses,” telling her that she was able to communicate with “plenty of [soul] and you always keep your feet firmly on the ground. This is what makes you, you.ʺ Without overt appeals, Malcolm’s letter so flattered Angelou that it accelerated her decision to give up her teaching position in Ghana immediately to join this man in whom she had placed her faith and hopes.
On January 17, Malcolm showed up at a Harlem public vigil of one thousand people, standing in heavy snow, demanding school desegregation. Though he was constantly on the watch for NOI attacks, he seems to have decided that significantly large crowds presented a stronger deterrent to violence. In this case, he may have also been persuaded by the fact that most of the protesters were white, which made an attack even more unlikely. Organized by EQUAL, a parents group, the protest began at four p.m. on Saturday afternoon and ended twenty-four hours later. Among those participating were the Reverend Milton Galamison and Dr. Arthur Logan of the advocacy group HARYOU (Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited), two black liberals whose favor Malcolm sought.
Yet although he had braved the cold and potential threats to be there, Malcolm’s comments about the effort reported by the Times were neither supportive nor encouraging. “Whites should spend more time influencing whites,” he advised. “These people have good intentions, but they are misdirected.” His complaint—that “Harlem doesn’t need to be told about integration”—largely missed the point.
Malcolm frequently ran into trouble like this in his speeches and remarks in early 1965, partly because he was trying to appeal to so many different constituencies. He took different tones and attitudes depending on which group he was speaking to, and often presented contradictory opinions only days apart. That he was not caught up in these contradictions more often owed to the fact that news traveled slowly across the country, that black politics were underreported, and that speeches were not regularly recorded. In his later speeches outside the United States, he was at his most revolutionary. There the Malcolm who sometimes advocated armed violence would appear, generating significant controversy, as would soon be the case in England. At home, he was more subdued, more conciliatory, yet on many occasions he would alternately praise King and other civil rights leaders one day and ridicule them and liberal Democrats the next. He also counted on the support of the Trotskyists, making overt appeals to them in speeches that seemed to be in support of a socialist system, often at the expense of building alliances to his ideological right. But Malcolm could not restrain himself, because he sincerely believed that blacks and other oppressed Americans had to break from the existing two-party system.
This balancing act partly explains his contradictions, but when it came to his ambivalence about King and movement liberals, Malcolm’s political beliefs may have led him to misunderstand the fundamental importance of the mainstream civil rights struggle to the large majority of black Americans. Whereas he, along with an increasingly large faction of the black left, criticized the flaws in the nonviolent approach, they did not acknowledge how rewarding even incremental progress was. In several speeches, Malcolm explained away Lyndon Johnson’s massive electoral mandate from millions of black voters by claiming that African Americans had been duped and “controlled by Uncle Tom leaders.” It apparently did not occur to him that great social change usually occurs through small transformations in individual behavior; that for blacks who had been denied voting rights for three generations, casting their ballots for reformist candidates wasn’t betraying the cause or being “held on the plantation by overseers.” To them, King was an emancipating figure, not an Uncle Tom.
He similarly misread the sentiment behind the EQUAL school desegregation rally. By 1965, the masses of black parents and children were fed up with substandard schools and the racial tracking of black and Latino children into remedial education. The vigil was part of a citywide struggle for educational reform. Social change that matters to most people occurs around practical issues they see every day, yet Malcolm still failed to appreciate the necessary connection between gradual reforms and revolutionary change.
That same weekend, Jack Barnes and Barry Sheppard of the Trotskyist Young Socialist Alliance interviewed Malcolm for the group’s publication, Young Socialist. In the resulting article, Malcolm explained why in recent months he had dropped the phrase “black nationalism” to describe his politics. During his first visit to Ghana the previous May, he had been impressed by the Algerian ambassador, “a revolutionary in the true sense of the word.” When told that Malcolm’s philosophy was “black nationalism,” the Algerian asked, “Where does that leave him? Where does that leave the revolutionaries of Morocco, Egypt, Iraq, Mauritania?” The phrase “black nationalism” was highly problematic in a global context, because it excluded too many “true revolutionaries.” This was the main reason that Malcolm increasingly sought refuge under the political rubric of Pan-Africanism. But he may also have recognized that there were enormous difficulties with this theoretical category as well, which ranged from the anticommunism of George Padmore to the angry Marxism-Leninism of Nkrumah in exile after 1966.
Despite his newfound reluctance at being described as a black nationalist, Malcolm still perceived political action in distinctly racial categories, which may further explain why he made no moves to integrate his groups. For example, when Barnes and Sheppard asked what contributions antiracist young whites and especially students could make, he urged them not to join Negro organizations. “Whites who are sincere should organize among themselves and figure out some strategy to break down the prejudice that exists in white communities.” In the year ahead, Malcolm predicted more blood in the streets, as white liberals and Negro moderates would fail to divert the social unrest brewing. “Negro leaders have lost their control over the people. So that when the people begin to explode—and their explosion is fully justified, not unjustified—the Negro leaders can’t contain it.”
The next day Malcolm flew to Toronto, to be the guest on the Pierre Berton Show on CFTO television. He resisted discussing Muhammad’s out-of-wedlock children, but still managed to castigate him as a false prophet. “When I ceased to respect him as a man,” he told Berton, “I could see that he was also not divine. There was no God with him at all.” Malcolm now claimed that God embraced Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike—“We all believe in the same God”—and denied that whites were “devils,” insisting “this is what Elijah Muhammad teaches. . . . A man should not be judged by the color of his skin but rather by his conscious behavior, by his actions.” Malcolm explicitly rejected the separatist political demand for a black state or nation, stating, “I believe in a society in which people can live like human beings on the basis of equality.” When Berton asked whether his guest still believed in the Nation of Islam’s eschatology of “an Armageddon,” Malcolm artfully turned this NOI theory into the language of revolution and Marxist class struggle:
I do believe that there will be a clash between East and West. I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those that do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice, and equality for everyone, and those who want to continue the systems of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don’t think that it will be based upon the color of the skin, as Elijah Muhammad has taught it.
At the next OAAU public rally, held on January 24, he spoke on African and African-American history, from ancient black civilizations and slavery up to the present era. The OAAU leadership planned for Malcolm to follow this lecture with two others: a second analyzing current conditions, and a third about the future, presenting the organization’s program to the public.
Malcolm extensively read history, but he was not a historian. His interpretation of enslavement in the United States cast black culture as utterly decimated by the institution of slavery and framed slavery’s consequences in America as the very worst forms of racial oppression. As historical analysis, this approach did not adequately measure the myriad forms of resistance mounted by enslaved blacks. But in political terms, his emphasis on American exceptionalism and its unrelenting oppression of blacks was a brilliant motivating tool for African Americans. Peter Goldman explained that Malcolm “differentiated between America and the rest of the world. . . . I don’t think he romanticized Western Europe, but I think he probably thought they were doing a little better than we were.” Placing the United States on the last level of racial oppression, even below South Africa, in a curious way recognized the importance of the African-American struggle.
Two days after his history lecture at the OAAU rally, Malcolm gave an address at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire. The talk was arranged by a Muslim undergraduate student, Omar Osman, who was affiliated with the Islamic Center in Geneva. Demand for admission was so great that while fifteen hundred attended, five hundred more were unable to get in. Malcolm’s lecture built upon his new image as a human rights advocate. Barriers like religion, race, and color could no longer be used as excuses for inaction against injustice. “We must approach the problem as humans first,” he stated, “and whatever else we are second.”
Bold lectures like this before large crowds stood in stark contrast to the scrambling he often took to avoid altercations with the Nation, though he continued even at this late date, and despite all warnings from those who cared about him, to provoke his former brothers. He had not let go of his involvement in the paternity lawsuit pending against Elijah Muhammad in Los Angeles, which was now on the verge of proceeding. The case had been delayed until a hearing was finally set on January 11, 1965. However, on the day of the hearing neither Evelyn Williams nor Lucille Rosary showed up. The judge consequently removed the case from the calendar until an explanation was given, and when it came it was hardly surprising: the women had been so intimidated by the NOI that they had become frightened for their own safety. They were living together in Los Angeles, but had moved twice out of fear. When contacted by Los Angeles attorney Gladys Towles Root, Malcolm encouraged her to speed up her efforts, saying, “If the case doesn’t get to trial soon, I won’t be alive to testify.”
His prophecy gained credence almost immediately. At approximately eleven fifteen p.m. on January 22, Malcolm opened the front door of his home and took several steps outside when suddenly several Muslims who had been hiding rushed toward him. “They came at me three seconds too soon,” Malcolm later recounted. He ran back inside, secured the door, and called the police. But the Nation had made its point: once he left his home, Malcolm would be safe nowhere. The police arrived, searched the surrounding blocks, but unsurprisingly failed to find the attackers. Malcolm denied allegations in the press that he traveled only with a bodyguard. He retorted, “My alertness is my bodyguard.” In truth, he routinely traveled with James 67X or Reuben Francis or both, and had recently taken to carrying a tear gas pen for self-defense.
Undeterred by the attack, Malcolm flew out to the West Coast, where on January 28 he met with Evelyn, Lucille, and Gladys Root to secure their continued commitment to the lawsuit. Malcolm promised personally to testify at the hearing. Then, by coincidence, a group of NOI loyalists ran into Malcolm in the lobby of his hotel. Over the next two days they closely tracked his movements, always staying close enough to let Malcolm know he was being watched and that they might strike at any moment. Root attested later that Malcolm seemed truly frightened throughout this trip. On the day he was to leave town, two carloads of Fruit tailed Malcolm’s automobile on the highway to the airport. Without any weapon to defend himself, Malcolm found a cane in the car, poked it out a side window, and aimed it like a rifle. It was convincing enough; the would-be attackers quickly pulled back. At the airport, though, there were several more Muslims waiting. The LAPD responded by taking Malcolm through an underground tunnel to reach his plane. Prior to embarking, the captain of the flight ordered all the passengers off and had the plane thoroughly searched for bombs. As soon as he arrived in Chicago, Malcolm was placed under close police guard.
The stop in Chicago was itself a bold provocation. Malcolm had come to the Nation’s base for the very purpose of further undermining its reach. He was there to be interviewed by the Illinois attorney general’s office, which was considering him as a witness in a legal case, Thomas Cooper v. State of Illinois. Cooper, a prisoner and follower of Elijah Muhammad at the Illinois state penitentiary, was suing the state on constitutional grounds, claiming that while incarcerated he had been restricted from obtaining a copy of the Qurʹan and other reading materials related to the Nation of Islam. As a witness, Malcolm was prepared to argue that the Nation was not a legitimately Islamic religious organization, and that therefore it did not merit access to penal institutions. His newfound hostility to the Nation’s religious activities inside prisons directly contradicted his extensive efforts to convert prisoners, going back to his own incarceration in the 1940s. But his opposition to the Nation was now so intense that he was willing to support the efforts of the Illinois attorney general to ban the Nation from access to those in the penal system. This purpose alone would have raised the Nation’s hackles, but Malcolm did not pass quietly through town. Instead, he devoted nearly ten full hours to television, radio, and newspaper interviews, including a taped appearance on the popular Kup’s Show on WBKB.
Though Malcolm returned safely to New York City on January 31, the incident in Los Angeles had left him shaken. That night he seemed subdued addressing an OAAU rally at the Audubon before a crowd of 550, an unusually large draw for the group. The next day, he gave a revealing interview to the Amsterdam News. “My death has been ordered by higher-ups in the movement,” he said of the NOI. He had become convinced that the greater the negative publicity concerning the Nation’s attempts to kill him, the safer he would be; if any harm came to him, he figured, law enforcement would immediately place members of the Nation under arrest. The statement, however, had no immediate effect. Two days later, after he appeared as a panelist on the TV show Hotline, on WPIX in New York City, with Ossie Davis, Jimmy Breslin, and others, Nation thugs swarmed Malcolm’s men outside the television studio, precipitating a violent brawl. Malcolm again escaped unharmed.
During these final days, many of Malcolm’s closest associates detected disturbing changes in his behavior and physical appearance. For years, Malcolm had come to public meetings and lectures impeccably dressed, always wearing a clean white shirt and tie. But now, he always seemed to be tired, even exhausted and depressed. His shoes weren’t shined; his clothing was frequently wrinkled. There was even “a kind of fatalism” in his conversations, observes Malcolm X researcher Abdur-Rahman Muhammad. In his personal exchanges with Anas Luqman during this time, Malcolm ruminated that “the males in his family didn’t die a natural death.” To Luqman, just before the assassination, the leader seemed to resign himself to his fate: “Whatever’s going to happen, is going to happen.” The disenchantment of Malcolm loyalists in their leader was also directly related to the confusion and alienation they felt about the new political directions they had been given. In practical terms, as Abdur-Rahman Muhammad explains, the ex-Black Muslims who had followed Malcolm into the MMI “didn’t sign up for orthodox Islam. They didn’t sign up for this OAAU thing. And they positively resented the fact that the OAAU seemed to be where Malcolm was putting all of his energy.”
Despite his growing uncertainty and bouts with depression, Malcolm steeled himself to press forward. On February 3 he took an early-morning flight from New York City, arriving in Montgomery, Alabama, around noon. An hour and a half later he was addressing three thousand students at Tuskegee Institute’s Logan Hall. The auditorium was so crowded that even before the formal program began hundreds had to be turned away. Malcolm’s title for the lecture, “Spectrum on Political Ideologies,” did not reflect its content, which covered much of the same ground as his other recent addresses. He condemned the Tshombe regime, the Johnson administration’s links to it, and the growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam, suggesting the United States was “trapped” there. When asked about his disputes with Elijah Muhammad, he responded with a soft, theological argument: “Elijah believes that God is going to come and straighten things out. . . . I’m not willing to sit and wait on God to come. . . . I believe in religion, but a religion that includes political, economic, and social action designed to eliminate some of these things, and make a paradise here on earth while we’re waiting for the other.”
The students affiliated with SNCC who attended his lecture invited him to visit Selma, then the headquarters of the national campaign for black voting rights, and only one hundred miles west in the heart of the Black Belt. Malcolm could not refuse. The beauty of the Selma struggle was its brutal simplicity: hundreds of local blacks lined up at Selma’s Dallas County building daily, demanding the right to register to vote; white county and city police beat and arrested them. By the first week in February thirty-four hundred people had been jailed, including Dr. King. Under cover of darkness, terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan harassed civil rights workers, black families, and households. On February 4, Malcolm addressed an audience of three hundred at the Brown’s Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Significantly, while the event had been arranged through SNCC, after some negotiations it was formally cosponsored by King’s SCLC. Malcolm’s sermon praised King’s dedication to nonviolence, but he advised that should white America refuse to accept the nonviolent model of social change, his own example of armed “self-defense” was an alternative. After the talk he met with Coretta Scott King, stating that in the future he would work in concert with her husband. Before leaving, he informed SNCC workers that he planned to start an OAAU recruitment drive in the South within a few weeks. In this one visit, he had significantly expanded the OAAUʹs purpose and mission, from lobbying the UN to playing an activist role in the grassroots trenches of voting rights and community organizing.
Back in New York, he purchased air tickets for London, with stops in Paris and Geneva, for what would be his final trip out of the country. He planned to attend the first Congress of the Council of African Organizations, held in London on February 6-8, and then to move on to Paris to work with Carlos Moore in consolidating the OAAUʹs presence there. Arriving in London, he gave interviews to the New China news agency and the Ghanaian Times. As had happened so many times before, the good rapport he had developed with movement activists in Selma and Tuskegee quickly disappeared in favor of more radical sentiments. He told the Chinese media that “the greatest event in 1964 was China’s explosion of an atom bomb, because this is a great contribution to the struggle of the oppressed people in the world.” He deplored the 1964 Civil Rights Act as “nothing but a device to deceive the African people,” and characterized U.S. racism as being “an inseparable part of the entire political and social system.” And his opposition to the Vietnam War was escalating: the basic choice America had was “to die there or pull out. . . . Time is against the U.S., and the American people do not support the U.S. war.”
In his interview with the Ghanaian Times, he promoted the call by Nkrumah for the establishment of an African union government. Those leaders who reject the creation of a union, he declared, “will be doing a greater service to the imperialists than Moise Tshombe.” Once again Malcolm the visionary anticipated the future contours of history, with the creation of the African Union a half century later. Addressing the conference on February 8, he encouraged the African press to challenge the racist stereotypes and distortions of Africans in the Western media. In the Western press, he noted, the African freedom fighter was made to look “like a criminal.”
On February 9 he flew on to Paris, yet at customs the authorities detained him and refused to allow him to enter the country. During a subsequent two-hour delay, he learned that the government of Charles de Gaulle had determined that his presence was “undesirable,” and that a talk he had scheduled with the Federation of African Students might “provoke demonstrations.” Returning to London, he quickly organized a press conference, challenging the French decision. “I did not even get as far as immigration control,” he complained. “I might as well have been locked up.”
A telephone interview was arranged in London that was audiotaped and later played on speakers for a crowd of three hundred in Paris. The incident seemed to have pulled him back for the moment, and he once again returned to the language of unity and racial harmony. “I do not advocate violence,” he explained. “In fact, the violence that exists in the United States is the violence that the Negro in America has been a victim of.” On the issues of black nationalism and the Southern civil rights movement, he once again channeled King. “I believe in taking an uncompromising stand against any forms of segregation and discrimination that are based on race. I myself do not judge a man by the color of his skin.”
Already he suspected that the restriction on his travel went deeper than mere concern on the part of the French government, and the next day he forwarded a letter of protest to U.S. secretary of state Dean Rusk. “While in possession of an American passport, I was denied entry to France with no explanation.” He called for “an investigation being made to determine why this incident took place.” The enforced change of schedule allowed Malcolm to explore the racial politics of Great Britain for several additional days, and during this time he was interviewed by Flamingo magazine, a London-based publication read primarily by blacks in Great Britain. What is surprising is the harshness Malcolm displayed to distinguish himself from civil rights moderates in the States. “King and his kind believe in turning the other cheek,” he stated, almost in contempt. “Their freedom fighters follow the rules of the game laid down by the big bosses in Washington, D.C., the citadel of imperialism.” He once more disavowed any identification as a “racialist”: “I adopt a judgment of deeds, not of color.” He appeared to call not for voting rights and electoral change, but Guevara-inspired insurrection. “Mau Mau I love,” he stated, applauding the Kenyan guerrilla struggle of the 1950s. “When you put a fire under a pot, you learn what’s in it.” He added, “Anger produces action.” When asked about his reasons for leaving the Nation, he focused on politics, not personalities or religion. “The original brotherhood [of the NOI] became too lax and conservative.” He accused some NOI leaders of greed, in response to which “I formed the Muslim Mosque, which is not limited by civil rights in America, but rather worldwide human rights for the black man.”
On February 11 he delivered a lecture at the London School of Economics, a frank and lively assessment of the politics of race in the United States. Racial stigmatization, he explained, projects negative images of nonwhites as criminals; as a consequence, “it makes it possible for the power structure to set up a police state.” He then drew parallels between the U.S. treatment of African Americans with the conditions of the West Indian and Asian populations in Great Britain, where racist stereotypes promoted political apathy among minorities, making them believe that change was impossible. “Police state methods are used . . . to suppress the people’s honest and just struggle against discrimination and other forms of segregation,” he insisted.
Malcolm described a generational change that separated the older African leaders from the rising generation of young revolutionaries. The older “generation of Africans . . . have believed that they could negotiate . . . and eventually get some kind of independence.” The new generation rejected gradualism: “If something is yours by right, then you fight for it or shut up.” Next he addressed the problem of black cultural identity. “We in the West were made to hate Africa and to hate Africans.” West Indians in Britain, he said, “don’t want to accept their origin; they have no origin, they have no identity . . . they want to be Englishmen.” The same process of identity confusion occurred among African Americans. “By skillfully making us hate Africa . . . our color became a chain. It became a prison.” An appreciation of black culture would liberate blacks to advocate their own interests.
Finally, he returned to the concept of a two-stage African revolution—first gradual reform, then revolution. The same social process, he implied, might be at work in the United States. “The Black Muslim movement was one of the main ingredients in the civil rights struggle,” he claimed, remarkably, without referencing the massive evidence to the contrary. “[Whites] should say thank you for Martin Luther King, because Martin Luther King has held Negroes in check up to recently. But he’s losing his grip; he’s losing his control.”
For Malcolm, the strategic pursuit of Pan-African and Third World empowerment meant addressing new constituencies who looked to him for inspiration and leadership. South Asians and West Indians who experienced ethnic and religious discrimination in the English working-class town of Smethwick, for example, contacted him to solicit his support. The BBC, which at that time was filming a documentary on Smethwick, followed Malcolm around with a camera crew—although it was unsuccessful in its attempts to arrange a meeting between Malcolm and the right-wing Conservative Party member Peter Griffiths, who represented Smethwick’s parliamentary seat. After meeting with local minority leaders, Malcolm determined that town authorities were buying up vacant houses and selling them only to whites, thus restricting what houses were available for Asians and blacks. At a press conference in nearby Birmingham, he denounced the schemes to limit home sales and rentals in the town to non-Europeans. “I have heard that the blacks of Smethwick are being treated in the same way as the Negroes were treated in Birmingham, Alabama—like Hitler treated the Jews,” he charged. This was inflammatory enough, but as so often he took the argument even further, toward a call for violent revolution. “If colored people here continue to be oppressed,” he warned, “it will start off a bloody battle.”
A major national debate erupted, with the BBC roundly condemned for assisting Malcolm’s investigations. Even the Sun, at that time a liberal newspaper, editorialized that Malcolm’s visit had been a “deplorable mistake.” Cedric Taylor, the chairman of the Standing Conference of West Indian Organizations for the Birmingham district, condemned his visit. “Conditions here are entirely different from Alabama,” he told a Los Angeles Times reporter. The West Indians in his town, he judged, were “not the sort of people who would want to follow Malcolm X.ʺ
Before leaving the UK, Malcolm was interviewed by a correspondent for the liberal South African newspaper Sunday Express. His rhetoric grew even more heated, as he urged blacks in Angola and South Africa to employ violence “all the way. . . . I don’t give the [South African] blacks credit in any way . . . for restraining themselves or confining themselves to ground rules that limit the scope of their activity.” He dismissed the Nobel Peace Prize recipient Chief Albert Luthuli as “just another Martin Luther King, used to keep the oppressed people in check.” To Malcolm, South Africa’s “real leaders” were Nelson Mandela of the African National Congress and Robert Sobukwe, founder of the Pan-African Congress. He then entertained the possibility of the OAAU taking up the cause of Australian aborigines. “Just as racism has become an international thing, the fight against it is also becoming international. . . . [Racism’s] victims were kept apart from each other.” The larger point for him was to make the case for Pan-Africanism—that blacks regardless of nationality and language had a common destiny. “We believe,” he explained, “that it is one struggle in South Africa, Angola, Mozambique, and Alabama. They are all the same.”
Malcolm arrived back at John F. Kennedy airport on February 13 to grim news. Several weeks before, he had submitted to the Queens court a request for a “show cause” order aimed at staying his family’s scheduled eviction. It was now obvious, however, that his family would lose their home and would have to begin looking for temporary housing. Malcolm had also just learned that Betty was again pregnant, this time with twins. What had been an extremely difficult financial situation—supporting four children—would soon be even more challenging with six.
But his thoughts soon returned to politics. He had not been able to shake off the larger implication of his incident at French customs. As he entered his Hotel Theresa office, he admitted to his associates that he had been making a “serious mistake” by focusing attention on the NOI Chicago headquarters, “thinking all of my problems were coming from Chicago, and they’re not.” Colleagues asked where the “trouble” was coming from. “From Washington,” Malcolm replied.
After a few hours of conversation with staff at his office, he drove to his East Elmhurst home. This time, it was without incident. Malcolm was scheduled to wake up early to fly to Detroit to deliver an important public address that day. As on so many other nights, he fell asleep upstairs while working late into the night in his study.
At two forty-five a.m., the Shabazz family’s sleep was shattered by the crack of a window downstairs, and seconds later a Molotov cocktail exploded, quickly filling the entire house with black smoke. As Malcolm raced downstairs to the children’s room, a second bomb landed. A third struck a rear window but glanced off, without combusting. Malcolm helped Betty escape through the rear door, then gathered the children together and led them into the backyard. A few seconds later he dashed back into the now blazing house to retrieve important property and clothing. “I was almost frightened by his courage and efficiency in a time of terror,” Betty would later reflect. “I always knew he was strong. But at that hour I learned how great his strength was.” By the time firefighters arrived to put out the blaze, the house was engulfed in flames.
For decades there has been intense speculation regarding the firebombing of Malcolm’s home on February 14, 1965. The actions of three parties have been questioned: Malcolm himself, the Nation of Islam, and law enforcement. Since the Shabazz family faced imminent eviction, some thought that Malcolm firebombed the house out of malice. The argument placing the blame on the Nation was evident, based on the escalating violence aimed against Malcolm. Firebombing his home, endangering his wife and four small children, was a logical next step. There was also speculation that either BOSS or the FBI, or perhaps their informants, committed the bombing, which was the view held by OAAU stalwarts like Herman Ferguson and Peter Bailey. The most persuasive evidence pointed to the Nation of Islam. Almost forty years after the firebombing, NOI member Thomas 15X Johnson acknowledged that the Nation “definitely did it.” One participant, he recalled, was Edward X—“a close friend of mine, and I didn’t know until after it happened that he was a part of that.” Edward was “just a dedicated follower. Him and two other brothers did that firebombing [of the] house.”
Malcolm’s supporters had quickly gathered outside the burning house, where it was decided that Betty and the four girls would be taken to the home of Tom Wallace, who also lived in Queens. Standing outside in the freezing cold, Betty learned that Malcolm still intended to travel to Detroit that day, and she erupted into an almost uncontrollable rage. But his mind was made up. The firebombing would not frighten him into canceling his speaking commitments. Death had missed him and his family that night; he would not run from it tomorrow.