CHAPTER 3
On March 8, 1946, a Massachusetts state psychiatrist interviewed prisoner number 22843. “He got called every filthy name I could think of,” Malcolm remembered. He described himself as being “physically miserable and as evil-tempered as a snake.” The “Psychometric Report,” written nearly two months later, however, described him as attentive and apparently cooperative. Malcolm blithely informed his interviewer that his parents had been missionaries and his mother a “white Scot” whose marriage to a black man had led to Malcolm’s being taunted by racial abuse throughout his childhood. Other misinformation followed. The psychiatrist, apparently troubled by all he had heard, observed that the prisoner “has fatalistic views, is moody, cynical, and has a sardonic smile which seems to be affected because of his sensitiveness to color.”
His defense lawyer had prevented his speaking on his own behalf during the trials, and Malcolm was convinced that his lengthy sentence was due solely to his involvement with Bea and the other white women. He also dreaded, being not yet twenty-one years old, the challenges of prison life, a dangerous world about which he knew only horror stories. During the weeks he was held in county jails prior to his transfer to the state penitentiary, Malcolm decided he had to exaggerate his criminal experiences, making himself appear tougher and more violent than he really was. He would also present a made-up history of his own family, making it almost impossible for the authorities to know his true background. He already felt outraged by how corrections officers recognized only a convict’s number, rather than his name. In prison, “you never heard your name, only your number,” he would recall years later. “On all of your clothing, every item was your number, stenciled. It grew stenciled on your brain.”
Two months later, another caseworker filed a report on Malcolm. “Subject is a tall light-complexioned negro,” it ran in part, “unmarried, a child of a broken home, who has grown up indifferently into a pattern of life he liked, colorful, cynical, a-moral, fatalistic.” The report indicated that the prison authorities viewed him as the ringleader of the burglary ring. Perhaps Malcolm once again launched into a string of profanities, for the caseworker judged his prognosis as “poor. His present ‘hard’ attitude will no doubt increase in bitterness. . . . Subject may prove an intermediate security risk as he will find it hard to adjust from the accelerated tempo of night spots to the slow pace of institution life at Charlestown [prison].”
Both Malcolm and Shorty Jarvis had been assigned to Charlestown State Prison, at that time the oldest penal facility in continuous use in the world. It had been constructed in 1804–5 on the west banks of the Charlestown peninsula along the Boston Harbor, and its physical conditions were wretched: its mice-infested cells were tiny—seven feet by eight—and devoid of plumbing and running water. Prisoners relieved themselves in buckets that were emptied only once in twenty-four hours. There was no common dining room, so prisoners were forced to eat in their cells. The atmosphere was hardly improved by the prison’s grotesque history of executions, the most notorious being the 1927 electrocution of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who had previously been unfairly convicted for a 1920 robbery and double homicide. The place was so beastly that in May 1952, shortly before Malcolm’s release, state governor Paul A. Dever described it as “a Bastille that eclipses in infamy any current prison in the United States.”
At first Malcolm had great difficulty accepting his sentence, and especially what he perceived as Bea’s betrayal in the trial. His fits of outrage and alienation were plain. Shorty, still upset with Malcolm for turning him in, began calling him the “Green-Eyed Monster.” During his first months, Malcolm routinely insulted guards and prisoners alike. He had never been particularly religious, but he now concentrated his profanities against God and religion in general. Other prisoners, listening to Malcolm’s tirades, came up with a further nickname for him: “Satan.” In the Middlesex jail during his trial, Malcolm had been forced to get clean, but once in Charlestown he soon resumed his old drug habit, first getting high on ground nutmeg. In small amounts—roughly four to eight teaspoons—nutmeg is a mild hallucinogen, creating euphoria and visual distortions; when taken in large amounts, as Malcolm may have done, it has similar effects to those of ecstasy. Nutmeg users can achieve highs lasting as long as seventy-two hours, but can also suffer mental breakdown. Some of the symptoms Malcolm described during his early months at Charlestown sound like the effects of nutmeg poisoning, especially the episodes of depression and paranoia. When Ella started sending small amounts of money, he used it to purchase drugs from corrupt guards who were happy to conduct business. Prisoners could obtain almost any drugs they wanted, from hash to heroin.
Malcolm had lived for years in a close web of family and stayed in relatively constant touch through mail and visits wherever he moved, but now, in his anger and shame about what had happened to him, he was reluctant to contact his siblings, especially Ella. During his first year in prison, he wrote only a few letters, including one or more to William Paul Lennon. The first one he received was from Philbert, to say that he had become a member of an evangelical church in Detroit. Philbert’s assurance that the entire congregation was praying for the soul of his younger brother enraged Malcolm. “I scrawled him a reply I’m ashamed to think of today,” he later admitted. Things went no better when Ella visited. On one occasion, about fifty prisoners and visitors were crowded into the small visitation center, all of them surrounded by armed guards. Ella attempted to exchange pleasantries, but was so upset that it was almost impossible for her to talk. Malcolm became so defensive that he “wished she hadn’t come at all.”
His attitude soon left him isolated, but he was not without visitors entirely. Malcolm’s most regular, and perhaps most sympathetic, visitor was a teenager, Evelyn Lorene Williams. Evelyn’s foster mother, Dorothy Young, was a close friend of Ella’s. Indeed, the two women were such good friends that Ella’s son, Rodnell, referred to Young as Aunt Dot. Malcolm had occasionally dated Evelyn during his years in Boston, and Ella had strongly encouraged the relationship. Malcolm had little sexual interest in Evelyn—compared, say, with the chemistry he had with Bea. Evelyn, however, seems to have fallen deeply in love with Malcolm.
Another frequent visitor was Jackie Mason, a Boston woman who had been sexually involved with Malcolm before his incarceration. Ella sharply disapproved of Mason, describing her as a “common street woman” unfit for her brother. Her attitude, according to Rodnell Collins, was that she “was well aware of how much havoc [an] older, experienced predatory woman could wreak on a teenaged, adventurous, highly impressionable” boy.
When Ella did go to see him, she was not happy with what she found— that he was not reflecting in any serious way on why he had wound up in prison or what its consequences might be for him. She was upset about his continuing contact with Paul Lennon, and was scandalized by his resumption of drug use. After several disappointing visits, Ella decided not to see her brother again. When Malcolm learned about this, he appeared contrite. In a plaintive letter dated September 10, he thanked Ella for mailing photos of family members, and for small amounts of cash. But then he incensed her again by trying to get her to contact Paul Lennon on his behalf. “The person that you said called me is a very good friend of mine,” Malcolm explained. “He’s only worth some fourteen million dollars. If you read the society pages you’d know who he is. He knows where I am now because I’ve written and told him, but I didn’t say what for.” Without mentioning Lennon’s name, he appealed to Ella to be cordial. “He may call and ask you. Whatever answer you give him will have to do with my entire future but I still depend on you.” Apparently Malcolm was convinced that Lennon could use his wealth and political contacts to reduce his prison term. According to Collins, Lennon never contacted Ella. In her words, though, she was “outraged” that her half brother had given her phone number to Lennon and that he had asked her to act as a go-between. Lennon, she thought, was obviously “one of those decadent whites whom he had been hustling.”
In the end Malcolm was forced to confront the challenges of prison life by himself. And it didn’t help matters that his attitude toward prison work detail was noncooperative. During his first seven months at Charlestown, he was assigned to the prison auto shop; then, that October, to work as a laborer in the yard. The month following, he was moved again, this time to sew in the underwear shop. Here he immediately ran into problems, being charged with shirking his duties; for this he was given three days’ detention. His work performance improved somewhat when he was reassigned to the foundry, where he was considered “cooperative, poor in skill, and average to poor in effort.” It was also here that he met a tall, light-complexioned former burglar named John Elton Bembry: the man who would change his life.
Bembry, who was about twenty years older than Malcolm, dazzled the young man with his mind. He was the first black man Malcolm would meet in prison (and possibly outside of prison as well) who seemed knowledgeable about virtually every subject and had the verbal skills to command nearly every conversation. Intellectually, Bembry had an astonishing range of interests, able to address the works of Thoreau at one moment, and then the institutional history of Massachusetts’s Concord prison at another. Malcolm was especially attracted to Bembry’s ability to “put the atheist philosophy in a framework.”
Malcolm’s brain came alive under Bembry’s tutelage. Here, finally, was an older man with both intellectual curiosity and a sense of discipline to impart to his young follower. Both men were assigned to the license plate shop, where after work inmates and even a few guards would cluster around to listen to Bembry’s wide-ranging discourses on any number of topics. For weeks, Bembry carefully noted the wild behavior of his young workmate. Finally, taking Malcolm aside, he challenged him to employ his intellect to improve his situation. Bembry urged him to enroll in correspondence courses and to use the library, Malcolm recalled. Hilda had already offered similar advice, imploring her brother to “study English and penmanship.” Malcolm consented: “So, feeling I had time on my hands, I did.”
It is possible that the details Bembry (“Bimbi” in the Autobiography) related to other convicts about his successful history of thefts found their way into Malcolm’s tales about his own burglary exploits, but above all Malcolm envied Bembry’s reputation as an intellectual. There was also a strong motive of self-interest: his own newfound enthusiasm for study and self-improvement might get him recommended for a transfer to the system’s most lenient facility, Massachusetts’s Norfolk Prison Colony. The bait of increased freedom was enough to instill discipline within Malcolm, such that he finally chose to pursue a self-directed course of formal study. During 1946–47, he devoted himself to a rigorous program, fulfilling the requirements for university extension courses that included English and elementary Latin and German. He devoured books from Charlestown’s small library, particularly those on linguistics and etymology. Following Bembry’s advice, he began studying a dictionary, memorizing the definitions of both commonly used and obscure words. Education now had a clear, practical goal: it offered a way out, to a prison with better conditions, and maybe even a reduction in prison time. Ironically, it also had the side benefit of making him a more persuasive con man. Refining his oratorical skills, he found new success in hustles of various kinds, including betting on baseball.
Malcolm was duly transferred in January 1947—but to the Massachusetts Reformatory at Concord, only a slight improvement over Charlestown. Concord maintained a so-called mark system of discipline, which set a confusing schedule of penalties and the loss of prisoners’ freedoms for acts of misconduct. No inmate council existed to negotiate the conditions of work and supervision. The new regulations and the lack of prisoners’ rights probably contributed to Malcolm’s continued acts of noncompliance.
During his incarceration at Concord he received a total of thirty-four visits. Among them were five from Ella, three from Reginald, and nineteen from “friends” (according to the redacted files)—undoubtedly Jackie Mason and Evelyn Williams, and possibly William Paul Lennon.
His hard work and professions about wanting to become a better man seem to have convinced Ella that he was finally committed to transforming his life, and she launched a letter-writing campaign to officials urging that he be relocated to the Norfolk Prison Colony. She encouraged Malcolm to write directly to the administrator in charge of transfers there. On July 28, in just such a letter, Malcolm employed his enhanced language skills to good effect: “Since my confinement I’ve already received a diploma in Elementary English through the State Correspondence Courses. I’m very much dissatisfied, though. There are many things that I would like to learn that would be of use to me when I regain my freedom.” Still, he undermined his efforts by continuing to cause trouble. Throughout 1947, he was assigned to the prison’s furniture shop, where he was evaluated as a “poor and uncooperative worker.” In April, he had been suspected of possessing “contraband”—in this case, a knife. In September he would be charged with disruptive behavior, and on two more occasions penalized for poor work. But Malcolm was as adept as Ella in skirting penalties. After each infraction he improved his job performance sufficiently so as to avoid severe discipline.
In early 1948, a curious letter arrived from his brother Philbert, one that would have enormous consequences. Philbert explained that he and other family members had all converted to Islam. Malcolm was not surprised by the sudden enthusiasm, and did not take this particular turn very seriously. Philbert “was forever joining something,” he recalled. Philbert now asked his brother to “pray to Allah for deliverance.” Malcolm was not impressed. His reply, written in proper English, was completely dismissive.
Philbert’s letter was in fact the opening salvo in a family campaign to convert Malcolm to a nascent movement called the Nation of Islam. As Wilfred later explained, “It was a program designed to help black people. And they had the best program going.” They were determined to get Malcolm on board. After Philbert’s letter had no effect, the family decided that an overture from Reginald might be more effective. Reginald wrote a “newsy” missive that contained no overt references to the Nation of Islam, but concluded with a cryptic promise: “Don’t eat any more pork, and don’t smoke any more cigarettes. I’ll show you how to get out of prison.” For days, Malcolm was puzzled. Was this some new way to hustle? He still had many doubts, but decided to follow the advice and stopped smoking. His new refusal to eat pork provoked surprise among inmates at the dining hall.
Meanwhile, Ella’s appeals and letter writing finally won out: in late March 1948, Malcolm was transferred to the Norfolk Prison Colony. Established in 1927 as a model of correctional reform, the facility was located twenty-three miles from Boston, near Walpole, on a thirty-five-acre, ovalshaped property that looked more like a college campus than a traditional prison. However, it did possess strong escape deterrents, most prominently a five-thousand-foot-long, nineteen-foot-high wall surrounding the entire grounds, topped by three inches of electrified barbed wire. The philosophy behind the prison was rehabilitation and reentry into society. Prisoners lived in compounds of twenty-four houses, with individual and group rooms, all with windows and doors.
Compared to Charlestown, Malcolm had a life as eased of restrictions as one might find in a state penitentiary. First and foremost, he was treated like a human being. He was not locked into a room at night. He had two lockers, one in his room for personal clothes and toiletries, the other in his housing unit’s basement, for his work uniform. Two inmates in each house were responsible for serving meals, cleaning the dining and common rooms, and minor repairs. There were meetings every Saturday night, at which inmates’ concerns were addressed. Prisoners could elect their own representatives to house committees, and an inmate chairman was responsible for running them. Norfolk encouraged the prisoners to participate in all sorts of educational activities, such as the debating club and the prison newspaper, the Colony. Entertainment, which consisted of both outside groups and inmate-initiated shows, was organized on Sunday evenings. Religious services were held weekly for Roman Catholics, Protestants, Christian Scientists, and Theosophists, while monthly group meetings and religious holiday observances were permitted for “Hebrews.”
This new life suited the newly disciplined Malcolm well, and he continued his plan to educate himself broadly. He eagerly participated in the facility’s activities, and extended his reading agenda to include works on Buddhism. Unfortunately, his new commitment to self-improvement did not extend to improved work habits. In the prison laundry and on kitchen duty, his work performance was once again rated as substandard, his supervisors describing him as “lazy, detested work in any form, and accepted and performed given work seemingly in silent disgust.” He was careful, however, to work just enough to avoid any major infraction, which would have jeopardized his place at Norfolk. He also stopped cursing the guards and fellow prisoners.
Reginald was the first relative to visit Malcolm in the new place. First he filled him in on family gossip and told him about a recent visit to Harlem he’d made, but eventually he turned the conversation to a new subject: Islam, or the “no pork and cigarettes riddle,” as described in the Autobiography.
“If a man knew every imaginable thing that there is to know, who would he be?” Reginald asked.
“Some kind of a god,” replied Malcolm.
Reginald explained that such a man did exist—“his real name is Allah”—and had made himself known years before to an African American named Elijah—“a black man, just like us.” Allah had identified all whites, without exception, as devils. At first, Malcolm found this extremely difficult to accept. Not even Garveyism had prepared him for such an extreme antiwhite message. But afterward, when he had carefully cataloged each significant relationship he had ever developed with a white person, he concluded that every white he had ever known had held a deep animus toward blacks.
The seed was sown. Not long after this conversation, Hilda paid a visit and filled in the backdrop to the family’s conversion. It had begun quietly and casually. Sometime in 1947, while waiting at a bus stop, Wilfred had struck up a conversation with a young, well-dressed black man, who began discussing religion and black nationalism and invited him to visit the Nation of Islam’s Temple No. 1 in Detroit. When Wilfred went, he found a modest storefront church. It was a rental property with a hall that could probably accommodate about two hundred people, though there seemed to be fewer than a hundred actual members. What Wilfred heard there sounded comfortingly familiar: a message of black separatism, selfreliance, and a black deity that reminded him instantly of Earl Little’s Garveyite sermons.
It took only a few months for Hilda, Philbert, Wesley, and Reginald to also become members. Wilfred would later explain, “We already had been indoctrinated with Marcus Garvey’s philosophy, so that was just a good place for us. They didn’t have to convince us we were black and should be proud or anything like that.” There were personal connections to the NOIʹs first family, Clara and Elijah Poole, that made the family’s attraction to the Nation of Islam natural. When Earl had been living in Georgia, he had occasionally preached in the town of Perry, the home of Clara Poole’s parents. Ella had grown to adulthood in Georgia before moving to the North, and she had met both Clara and Elijah Poole years before they were linked to the Nation.
During her visit, Hilda also explained to Malcolm the central tenet of Nation of Islam theology, Yacub’s History, which told how an evil black scientist named Yacub had genetically engineered the creation of the entire white race. Allah, in the person of an Asiatic black man, had come into the world to reveal this extraordinary story, and to explain the legacies of the white race’s monstrous crimes against blacks. Only through complete racial separation, Hilda explained, could blacks survive. She urged Malcolm to write directly to the Nation of Islam’s supreme leader, Elijah Muhammad—as Elijah Poole had renamed himself—who was based in Chicago. He would satisfy any doubts Malcolm might have. Malcolm was amazed by his sisterʹs obvious devotion, and afterward wrote, “I don’t know if I was able to open my mouth and say goodbye.”
Over the next few weeks, he grappled with what he had been told. The black nationalist message of racial pride, a rejection of integration, and self-sufficiency rekindled strong connections with the driving faith of his parents. The NOIʹs condemnation of all-white institutions, especially Christianity, also fitted with his experiences. Yet the bitter young nonbeliever had never shown the least interest in organized religion or the spiritual life. For Malcolm, the lure was more secular: Nation of Islam held out the possibility of finding self-respect and even dignity as a black man. This was a faith that said blacks had nothing for which to be ashamed or apologetic.
But above any spiritual or political goals was one important personal one: conversion was a way to keep the Little family together. As all the Little children had reached adulthood, the possibility of the family’s disintegration had again become a problem. By 1948, both Wilfred and Philbert had been married for several years. In 1949, Yvonne Little married Robert Jones, and the couple relocated to Grand Rapids. As the family grew and spread across new communities, the Nation of Islam would provide a common ground. Malcolm was the last to join, but his commitment was complete, and he embraced this opportunity to enact a wholesale change in his future life. Malcolm—Detroit Red, Satan, hustler, onetime pimp, drug addict and drug dealer, homosexual lover, ladies’ man, numbers racketeer, burglar Jack Carlton, and convicted thief—had convinced himself that a total revolution in his identity and beliefs was called for. After redrafting a one-page letter to Elijah Muhammad “at least twenty-five times,” he mailed it off. It wasn’t long before he received Muhammad’s reply, together with a five-dollar bill. He had taken his first decisive step toward Allah.
Although Malcolm did not realize it, by becoming members of the Nation of Islam, his brothers and sisters had entered into the richly heterodox community of global Islam. Extremely sectarian by the standards of orthodox Islam, the Nation of Islam nevertheless became the starting point for a spiritual journey that would consume Malcolm’s life.
Islam was established in what is today Saudi Arabia in the early seventh century CE by a man known as the Prophet Muhammad. Over the course of more than two decades, from roughly 610 CE to 632 CE, hundreds of beautiful verses were revealed to Muhammad and passed on by poetic recitations, just like Homerʹs stories or the love songs of the troubadours. These verses became known as the Qur’an, and Islam’s enduring power as a religion rests, in part, on its elegance and simplicity. At its core is the metaphor of the five pillars. The first pillar is the profession of faith, or shahada : “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is God’s Messenger.” The other four are acts a devout Muslim must perform: daily prayers (salat); tithing, or alms to those less fortunate (zakat); fasting during the month of Ramadan; and making a pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj). Many Muslims characterize jihad, meaning “striving” or “struggle,” as a sixth pillar, separating it into two types: the “greater jihad” that refers to a believer’s internal struggle to adhere to Islam’s creed, and the “lesser jihad,” the struggle against those who oppose Muhammad’s message.
In the Prophet’s day, Islam was an embracing, not excluding, religion that drew on the practices of other contemporaries. Muhammad had taught that both Jews and Christians were ahl al-Kitab (People of the Book), and that the Torah, the Gospels, and the Holy Qurʹan were all a single divine scripture. Early Islamic rituals drew directly upon Jewish traditions. At first, Muslims prayed in the direction of Jerusalem, not Mecca. The Prophet’s mandatory fast was initiated each year on the tenth day (Ashura) of the first month of the Jewish calendar, the day more commonly known as Yom Kippur. Muhammad also adopted many Jewish dietary laws and purity requirements, and encouraged his followers to marry Jews, as he himself did. Second only to the Qurʹan, and also central to Islam, is the Sunna, the collective traditions associated with Muhammad, which include thousands of stories, or hadith, all roughly based on the actions or words of the Prophet or those of his closest disciples.
What was truly revolutionary about the Islamic concept was its transethnic, nonracial character. Islam is primarily defined by a series of actions and obligations that all believers follow. In theory, differences in native language, race, ethnicity, geography, and social class become irrelevant. Indeed, from the beginning, individuals of African descent have become Muslims (literally, “those who submit” to God). Muhammad had encouraged the emancipation of African slaves held by Arabs; his first muezzin (the individual who calls believers to prayer) was an Ethiopian former slave named Bilal.
Over time, the religious pluralism of the ummah—the transnational Islamic community—gave way to an exclusive monotheism. After the Prophet’s death, Jews and Christians were perceived to be excluded from the community; centuries later, Islamic legal scholars would divide the entire world into two, the dar al-Islam (House of Islam) and the dar al-Harb (House of War), or those who oppose the believers.
By the eighth century, Islam dominated northern Africa, soon penetrating the Sudan and, in West Africa, the sub-Saharan regions. The Arab elite within this growing Muslim world had a long tradition of slavery, and over the centuries millions of black Africans were subjugated and transported to what today is the Middle East, northern Africa, and the Iberian peninsula. There were, however, many prominent examples of black converts to Islam who came into power in the Muslim world—such as Yaqub al-Mansur, the twelfth-century black ruler of Morocco and parts of what are today Portugal and Spain. Several great Islamic empires dominated West Africa from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. As European states colonized the Americas and the Caribbean in the sixteenth century, they ultimately transported about fifteen million chattel slaves into their respective colonies. A significant minority were Muslims: of the approximately 650,000 involuntarily taken to what would become the United States, Muslims made up about 7 or 8 percent.
During the nineteenth century, a series of black intellectuals from the Caribbean and the United States were attracted to Islam. This was an era of evangelical Christianity, and social Darwinism, which promoted religious and scientific justifications for white supremacy. People of African descent increasingly became attracted to Islam as an alternative to Christianity. By far the most influential black intellectual of the period was Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832-1912), who came to the United States from the Danish West Indies as a candidate for the Presbyterian ministry. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, which permitted blacks to be arrested and deported to the slave South, Blyden left for Liberia in 1851. During the next sixty years he had an extraordinary career as a scholar, traveler, and diplomat.
Blyden’s contributions to Malcolm Little’s spiritual and political journey were threefold. First, long before W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Blyden argued that the black race possessed certain spiritual and cultural strengths, a collective personality, uniting black humanity throughout the world. During the 1960s, this insight would form the basis for what would be called “black cultural nationalism”—a deep pride in African antiquity, history, and culture, together with the celebration of rituals and aesthetics drawing upon Africa and the black diaspora.
Second, long before Garvey, Blyden had envisioned a program of “Pan-Africanism”—the political and social unity of black people worldwide—leading to a strategy of group migration back to Africa. Blyden was convinced that conditions for American blacks would eventually become so oppressive that millions would return to the land of their ancestors. His writings on Pan-Africanism paved the way for the back-to-Africa movement among Southern blacks in the 1890s, and provided the intellectual arguments for Garveyites a generation later.
His most original contribution, however, was to link Pan-Africanism with West African Islam. In his classic 1888 treatise, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, he argued that Christianity, despite its Middle Eastern origins, had evolved into a distinctly European religion that was discriminatory and oppressive. He insisted that among the world’s great religions, only Islam permitted Africans to retain their traditions with integrity.
By the early twentieth century, the first significant religious organization in the United States that identified itself as Islamic was the Moorish Science Temple of America. The group’s founder, a North Carolina–born African American named Timothy Drew, established the cult in Newark, New Jersey, in 1913, as the Canaanite Temple. Proclaiming himself Noble Drew Ali, he told followers that he was the second prophet of Islam, Mahdi, or redeemer. In orthodox Islam, Muhammad is widely described as the Seal of the Prophets, the last of a line of Qurʹanic prophets beginning with Adam. Any such claim to the status of prophet is inherently blasphemous, but Ali’s deviation from Islam’s five pillars didn’t stop there. The sacred text of his cult was the Holy Koran, also known as the Circle Seven Koran, a sixty-four-page synthesis that drew on four sources: the Qurʹan, the Bible, the Aquarian Gospels of Jesus Christ (an occult version of the New Testament), and Unto Thee I Grant (a publication of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood, a Masonic order influenced by the Egyptian mystery schools).
Noble Drew Ali’s major appeal to black Americans paralleled Blyden’s arguments. He claimed that Islam was the spiritual home for all Asiatics, a term that embraced Arabs, Egyptians, Chinese, Japanese, black Americans, as well as several other ethnicities and nationalities. African Americans were not Negroes at all, Ali insisted, but “an olive-skinned Asiatic people who were the descendants of Moroccans.” Members consequently acquired “Islamic” names, as well as new identities as “Asiatic” blacks, or Moroccans. The Moorish Science Temple preached that blacks’ authentic religion was Islam; their national identity was not American, but Moorish; and their genealogy extended back to Christ. Ali’s strange quasi-Masonic creed attracted hundreds of followers in Newark, chiefly drawn from illiterate sharecroppers and landless workers who had trekked from the rural South during the initial wave of the Great Migration. By the late 1920s, the Moorish Science Temple claimed thirty thousand members, with temples in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond, Petersburg (Virginia), Cleveland, Youngstown (Ohio), Lansing, Chicago, and Milwaukee, among others.
Ali’s awareness of orthodox Islam’s core tenets was sketchy at best. He demanded that followers adhere to many of Islam’s dietary laws; the eating of pork was forbidden. There was some overlap between the Temple people and Garveyism, but the two movements differed in fundamental ways. The Moorish Science Temple was essentially a cult, while the Universal Negro Improvement Association was a popular movement with many different local leaders. However, as the UNIA fragmented, some of its former members joined the Temple, or began to influence it. In March 1929, Ali was arrested on suspicion of murdering an opposition leader, Sheikh Claude Greene. Released on bail, he died mysteriously several months later. His movement almost immediately split into feuding factions. The two major groups were led, respectively, by Ali’s former chauffeur, John Givens-El, who announced he was the reincarnation of Ali, and by Kirkman Bey, “Grand Sheikh” and president of the Moorish Science Temple Corporation. By the 1940s, Kirkman’s followers came under intense scrutiny by the FBI, and a significant number of their temples were investigated for sedition. The Moorish Science Temple largely disintegrated after World War II, with fewer than ten thousand members remaining nationwide, but it had prepared the path for more orthodox expressions of Islam within black America.
From a theological standpoint, the most successful sect in America was the Ahmadiyya movement, which had been founded by Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (c. 1835-1908) in the Punjab. At first, it adhered to the core tenets of Islam, but in 1891 Ahmad declared himself Islam’s Mahdi, as well as an avatar of Krishna to the Hindus and Messiah to the Christians. Several years later, he further asserted that Christ did not die on the cross, but survived and made his way to India, where he did finally die and physically ascended into heaven. Such claims outraged Muslims, who declared the sect blasphemous and heretical. Following Ahmad’s own death in 1908, the Ahmadiyya cause fractured into the Qadianis, the more conservative faction connected with landowners and the merchant classes, who supported strict adherence to Ghulam Ahmad’s version of Islam, and a more liberal group, the Lahoris, who supported rapprochement with orthodox Islam.
Between 1921 and 1925, Ahmadiyya made its first great inroads in America when the first Qadiani Ahmadi missionary, Mufti Muhammad Sadiq, persuaded more than one thousand Americans to convert, both white and black. Many African-American Ahmadi Muslims joined the faith in Chicago and Detroit, cities where the UNIA was also strong. In July 1921, Sadiq initiated the first Muslim publication in the United States, the Moslem Sunrise, through which he reached out to Garveyites, encouraging them to link Islam with their advocacy of black nationalism and Pan-Africanism. In a January 1923 issue, he declared:
My Dear American Negro . . . the Christian profiteers brought you out of your native lands of Africa and in Christianizing you made you forsake the religion and language of your forefathers—which were Islam and Arabic. You have experienced Christianity for so many years and it has proved to be no good. It is a failure. Christianity cannot bring real brotherhood to the nations. Now leave it alone. And join Islam, the real faith of Universal Brotherhood, which at once does away with all distinctions of race, color and creed.
For all his proselytizing, however, Sadiq was not a natural leader. By the late 1920s, the movement languished; but it did not die away completely. Under the guidance of a new leader, Sufi Bengalee, the Ahmadi movement surged again. In 1929-30 Bengalee delivered over seventy public lectures throughout the United States, reaching thousands. Many of these events were designed to attract black and interracial groups. For example, in November 1931 the Ahmadi-sponsored program “How Can We Overcome Color and Race Prejudice?” attracted more than two thousand attendees at one Chicago venue. By 1940, through its extensive missionary work, the Ahmadis claimed between five and ten thousand American converts, half of them African Americans. The Ahmadis’ primary missionary centers were based in Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, and Kansas City (Missouri). The movement was largely responsible for introducing the Qurʹan and Islamic literature to a large African-American audience. Because many of the proselytizers Sadiq selected were African Americans, some Garveyites were attracted to the movement, although the multiracial character of the Ahmadiyya made it difficult for most black Garveyites to convert. By the Great Depression their numbers were still significantly smaller than those of the Moorish Science Temple.
It was within this rapidly changing social context that an olive-skinned peddler calling himself Wallace D. Fard made his appearance in Detroit’s black ghetto. He regaled his poor audiences with exotic tales of the Orient, which he mixed with the militant, antiwhite views of the staunch Garveyite. Little is known of his origins. Years later, when he commanded a large number of followers, a story circulated that he had been born in Mecca, the son of wealthy parents of the tribe of the Koreish, which connected in ancestry to Muhammad. Others believed that Fard had been a Moorish Science Temple local leader on the West Coast.
Fard (pronounced FA-rod) preached in the emotional style of a Pentecostal minister, exhorting audiences to avoid alcohol and tobacco, and praising the virtues of marital fidelity and family life. Blacks should work hard, save their meager resources, and if possible own their homes and businesses. Within months, after he had attracted a sympathetic following, his message took an apocalyptic turn when he “revealed” that he was actually a prophet, sent by God to preach a message of salvation. African Americans were not Negroes at all, he announced, “but members of the lost tribe of Shabazz, stolen by traders from the Holy City of Mecca 379 years ago. . . . The original people must regain their religion, which is Islam, their language, which is Arabic, and their culture, which is astronomy and higher mathematics, especially calculus.”
Fard employed elementary physics to challenge his audience’s unquestioned belief in the Bible. As one follower later explained:
The very first time I went to a meeting I heard him say: “The Bible tells you that the Sun rises and sets. That is not so. The Sun stands still. All your lives you have been thinking that the Earth never moved. Stand and look toward the Sun and know that it is the Earth that you are standing on which is moving.” Up to that day I always went to the Baptist church. After I heard that sermon from the prophet, I was turned around completely.
Fard did not claim to be divine: he presented himself as a prophet, like Muhammad, and added Muhammad to his name. By 1931, news of his controversial addresses attracted hundreds of blacks, many desperately seeking a message of hope as the country sank into depression. Fard wrote two basic texts: “The Secret Ritual of the Nation of Islam,” a pamphlet which was generally presented orally and which adherents were to memorize, and the manual “Teaching for the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in a Mathematical Way.” Formal membership in the “Lost-Found Nation” required converts “to return to the holy original Nation.” Members were required to surrender their surnames, which Fard ridiculed as being identified with slavery. In turn, he promised to bestow upon each new member “an Original name,” printed on a national identification card that showed its bearer to be a righteous Muslim. Members were given sets of questions and answers to be memorized perfectly:
Q: “Why does [Fard] Muhammad and any Moslem murder the devil? What is the duty of each Moslem in regard to four devils? What reward does a Moslem receive by presenting the four devils at one time?”
A: “Because he is one percent wicked and will not keep and obey the laws of Islam. His ways and actions are like a snake of the grafted type. So Mohammed learned that he could not reform the devils, so they had to be murdered. All Moslem will murder the devil because they know he is a snake and also if he be allowed to live, he would sting someone else. Each Moslem is required to bring four devils, and by bringing and presenting four at one time, his reward is a button to wear on the lapel of his coat, also a free transportation to the Holy City of Mecca.”
The most controversial dimension of Fard’s preaching concerned Euro-Americans. Since black Americans were both Asiatics and Earth’s Original People, what were whites? The reason that both Marcus Garvey and Noble Drew Ali had failed, Fard taught, was that neither had fully grasped the true nature of whites: as Malcolm Little was to learn, they were “devils.” To explain this, Fard presented his parable, Yacub’s History, centered on the genetic plot of an evil “Big Head” scientist named Yacub, who lived thousands of years ago. A member of the exalted tribe of Shabazz, Yacub nevertheless used his scientific skills to produce genetic mutations that culminated in the creation of the white race. Although the naturally crafty and violent whites were banished to the caves of Caucasus, they ultimately achieved control over the entire earth. The Original People, Fard taught, subsequently “went to sleep” mentally and spiritually. The task of the Nation of Islam was to bring into consciousness the “lost-found” Asiatic black man from his centuries-long slumber.
The demonizing of the white race, the glorification of blacks, and the bombastic blend of orthodox Islam, Moorish science, and numerology were a seductive message to unemployed and disillusioned African Americans casting about for a new rallying cause after the disintegration of Garveyism and the inadequacies of the Moorish Science Temple. One evening in August 1931, Fard gave a lecture to an audience of hundreds at the former UNIA hall on West Lake Street in Detroit. One young man in particular, a thirty-three-year-old migrant from Georgia named Elijah Poole, found the address mesmerizing. Recalling it later, he approached Fard and said softly, “I know who you are, you’re God himself.”
“That’s right,” Fard quietly replied, “but don’t tell it now. It is not yet time for me to be known.”
Born in Sandersville, Georgia, in 1897, Poole had been a skilled laborer for years, working in his home state as a foreman at a brick-making company. Thin, wirily built, and of below average height, at the age of twenty-two he moved to Detroit along with his wife, Clara, where he quickly became an active member of the UNIA. After Garvey’s imprisonment and exile in 1927, Poole had been searching for a new movement dedicated to black racial pride. In Fard, he felt the presence of a messianic leader who could realize the shattered dreams of Garveyites.
The large number of converts to the Lost-Found Nation of Islam required Fard to institute rudimentary administrative units, a level of lieutenants and captains, and a small number of assistant ministers. He set about promoting his most dedicated followers. In 1932, the sect established a small parochial school in Detroit, followed by another in Chicago two years later. For the male members, he established the Fruit of Islam (FOI), a paramilitary police corps which quickly became the organization’s security force. Women and girls were coordinated through Muslim Girls Training (MGT) classes, which instructed them in their roles as Muslim wives.
In the desperate months of 1932, as black unemployment rates in Detroit reached 50 percent, the sect surrounding Fard expanded exponentially, and with its rising fortunes grew those of Elijah Poole. Although Poole was a poor public speaker, without charisma or even basic language skills, Fard saw something in him, bestowing on him an original name, Elijah Karriem, and a new title, “top laborer.” He was soon representing Fard in a number of capacities, but what neither man anticipated was the surveillance and harassment by Detroit police. On the night of November 20, 1932, Robert Harris, a Nation of Islam member, was arrested for a gruesome ritualistic murder; he had hung up his victim to die on a wooden cross. Under questioning, Harris ranted that his actions were necessary to permit his “voluntary” victim to become a “savior.” The story made headlines, and the Nation of Islam was quickly dubbed the “Voodoo Cult.” Police broke into the group’s headquarters, arresting Fard and one of his lieutenants. Harris was subsequently committed to a mental institution, but the Nation of Islam remained under intense police scrutiny; Fard was arrested on two further occasions. Finally, on May 26, 1933, he fled Detroit for Chicago, where his recent missionary efforts had been particularly well received.
Fard named Karriem to be the “supreme minister.” A bitter feud sprang up among those who had been passed over, most of whom were better educated than Karriem, and more articulate. But the dissent only reinforced Fard’s conviction that Elijah was the most suitable candidate. He renamed his chief lieutenant once more, this time as Elijah Muhammad.
Then, in 1934, Fard simply vanished. The last public notice of any kind to mention him is a Chicago police record, dated September 26, 1933, citing his arrest for disorderly conduct.
Even before this mysterious disappearance, his followers had split sharply over who should succeed him. A vocal majority in Detroit strongly opposed Elijah’s elevation; Muhammad had little choice but to take his wife and children and a handful of supporters into exile to Chicago. Even here, his leadership was soon challenged by his youngest brother, Kallat Muhammad, who had been appointed “supreme captain” by Fard. One of Elijah’s assistant ministers in Chicago, Augustus Muhammad, defected to Detroit, and later helped initiate the pro-Japanese black American organization, Development of Our Own. Over the next decade, the majority of Nation members quit the cult, either drifting into Christian sects or becoming Ahmadi Muslims. Elijah Muhammad stubbornly refused to give up, traveling the road for years like an itinerant evangelist, eking out his existence by soliciting donations for his sermons. In later years, NOI loyalists would see parallels in the Prophet Muhammad’s flight from Mecca in 622 CE and Elijah Muhammad’s wanderings. Elijah was never a charismatic speaker, but his sheer persistence earned him followers.
Still under FBI surveillance, on May 8, 1942, Elijah was arrested in Washington, D.C., and charged with failure to register for the draft and for counseling his followers to resist military service. Convicted, he did not emerge from federal prison until August 1946. Somehow the Lost-Found Nation of Islam managed to survive, largely due to the administrative talents of his wife, Clara, who became especially active in the running of the Chicago temple, corresponding regularly with her husband and visiting him in prison. But the hard years living underground and the demands of prison life took their toll. Muhammad’s asthma and other chronic health problems became worse, his body frail and thin, but the experience of enforced isolation provided him ample time to redesign his tiny sect in his own image. He would use his “martyrdom” to convince former members to return to the Nation.
Even years before his incarceration, Elijah Muhammad had revealed to his closest followers that Fard had informed him privately that he, Fard, was God in person. Fard’s elevation from prophet to savior also thrust Elijah into the exalted role of being the sole “Messenger of Allah.” Elijah later explained that an angel had descended from heaven with a message of truth for the black race. “This angel can be no other than Master W. D. Muhammad who came from the Holy City of Mecca, Arabia, in 1930.” Thus the recipient of one message became himself the messenger to his people.
Malcolm learned of all this—Fard’s teachings, his persecution, his disappearance, and the ultimate triumph of Elijah Karriem—at Norfolk. Reading the letters from his siblings and the occasional letters from Elijah himself, with whom Malcolm had struck up a correspondence, he drew further into the world and worldview of the Nation of Islam. He soon convinced himself about Fard’s divinity. “The greatest and mightiest God who appeared on the earth was Master W. D. Fard,” Malcolm would eventually profess. “He came from the East to the West, appearing at a time when the history and prophecy that is written was coming to realization, as the non-white people all over the world began to rise, and as the devil white civilization, condemned by Allah, was, through its devilish nature, destroying itself.”
Under Fard, the Nation’s preachers had always mentioned the cosmic inevitability of the white race’s decline, associating this with an apocalyptic vision of the final days. Fard and Elijah Muhammad both used the Torah’s tale of Ezekiel’s Wheel to explain the existence of a mechanical device from heaven that could save the faithful. In his most widely read work, Message to the Blackman in America, Elijah gave even greater emphasis to this than Fard, as well as the specific details for the pending apocalypse:
There is a similar wheel in the sky today which very well answers the description of Ezekiel’s vision. . . . The Great Wheel which many of us see in the sky today is . . . a plane made like a wheel. The like of this wheel-like plane was never seen before. . . . The present wheel-shaped plane known as the Mother Plane, is one-half of a half-mile and is the largest mechanical manmade object in the sky. It is a small human planet made for the purpose of destroying the present world of the enemies of Allah. . . . It is capable of staying in outer space six to twelve months at a time without coming into the earth’s gravity. It carried fifteen hundred bombing planes with the most deadliest explosives—the type used in bringing up mountains on the earth. The very same method is to be used in the destruction of this world.
To Elijah Muhammad, the world was divided into two: the community of devout believers, which included “Asiatics” and “Asiatic blacks” such as American Negroes who might be converted; and, in orthodox Islamic terms, the “House of War,” all Europeans or white people, the devils. No reconciliation or integration was possible or even conceivable. If the millions of black Americans could not physically return to Africa, then a partition of the United States along racial lines had to be instituted. Middle-aged and older African Americans who had belonged to the UNIA immediately recognized Muhammad’s program as similar to Garvey’s, but with a kind of divinely based apocalyptic fury, and it ignited a revolutionary spark that touched Malcolm in a way Garveyism never would have.
Since neither wholesale emigration nor the secession of several Southern U.S. states under blacks’ authority was immediately likely, Muhammad counseled his followers to withdraw from active civic life. America’s political institutions would never grant equality to the Original People. Muhammad preached that registering to vote or mobilizing blacks to petition the courts, as the NAACP did, was a waste of time. In the years prior to Brown v. Board of Education, the May 1954 Supreme Court decision that outlawed racial segregation in the country’s public schools, Muhammad’s arguments could be reasonably defended, but his “audience” among blacks still remained small. By 1947, he had consolidated control over Fard’s followers in only four cities—in Washington, D.C., Detroit, Milwaukee, and at his headquarters in Chicago. The Nation’s combined membership was four hundred, an insignificant number compared to the thousands of African-American members of the growing Ahmadiyya movement, or even the fading remnants of the Moorish Science Temple.
Yet there was also a growing group of black prisoners converting to the Nation of Islam while still in prison, where the depression caused by long confinement made inmates particularly vulnerable. Muhammad’s own prison experience had taught him to channel his recruitment efforts at convicted felons, alcoholics, drug addicts, and prostitutes. Malcolm numbered among these, and as he sat in isolation, anxiously writing letters to Elijah on an almost daily basis, the intensity of his commitment grew until he reached total acceptance.
Prison life can shatter the soul and will of anyone who experiences it. “It destroys thought utterly,” Antonio Gramsci observed in his prison notebooks. “It operates like the master craftsman who was given a fine trunk of seasoned olive wood with which to carve a statue of Saint Peter; he carved away, a piece here, a piece there, shaped the wood roughly, modified it, corrected it—and ended up with a handle for the cobblerʹs awl.” Confined to Mussolini’s prisons for over a decade, Gramsci struggled fiercely to maintain his sense of purpose, and eventually realized that only through a dedicated program of intellectual engagement could he endure the physical hardships. He wrote, “I want, following a fixed plan, to devote myself intensely and systematically to some subject that will absorb me and give a focus to my inner life.” Faced with a similar dilemma, Malcolm committed himself to a rigorous course of study. In doing so, he consciously remade himself into Gramsci’s now famous “organic intellectual,” creating the habits that, years later, would become legendary. His powers of dedication and self-discipline were extraordinary, and directly opposite to the wayward drifting of his earlier years. The trickster disappeared, the clowning side of disobedience, leaving the willful challenger to authority.
At Norfolk, the prisoners in the debate club engaged in weekly exchanges on a variety of issues. Malcolm and Shorty, who had also been transferred to Norfolk, found a forum for Malcolm’s new beliefs and arguments. “Right there, in the prison, debating, speaking to a crowd, was as exhilarating to me as the discovery of knowledge through reading,” Malcolm wrote. “Standing up there, the faces looking up at me, things in my head coming out of my mouth, while my brain searched for the next best thing to follow what I was saying, and if I could sway them to my side by handling it right, then I had won the debate—once my feet got wet, I was gone on debating.” It soon did not matter what the formal topic was. Malcolm had by now become an expert debater, thoroughly researching his subjects in the prison library and planning his arguments accordingly. The common theme of his public discourses, however, was his indictment of white supremacy.
Malcolm now began perfecting what would become his distinctive speaking style. He possessed an excellent tenor voice, which helped him attract listeners. But even more unusual was how he employed his voice to convey his thoughts. Coming into maturity during the big band era, he quickly picked up on the cadence and percussive sounds of jazz music, and inevitably his evolving speaking style borrowed its cadences.
Once he had started reeducating himself, there was no limit to his search for fact and inspiration. Through Norfolk’s library, Malcolm devoured the writings of influential scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, and J. A. Rogers. He studied the history of the transatlantic slave trade, the impact of the “peculiar institution” of chattel slavery in the United States, and African-American revolts. He learned with satisfaction about Nat Turner’s 1831 uprising in Virginia, which to him provided a clear example of black resistance: “Turner wasn’t going around preaching pie-in-the-sky and ‘non-violent’ freedom for the black man.” Nor did Malcolm restrict his studies to black history. He plowed through Herodotus, Kant, Nietzsche, and other historians and philosophers of Western civilization. He was impressed by Mahatma Gandhi’s accounts of the struggle to drive the British out of India; he was appalled by the history of China’s opium wars, and the European and American suppression of the 1901 Boxer Rebellion. “I could spend the rest of my life reading,” he reflected. “I don’t think anybody ever got more out of going to prison than I did.” Malcolm had undertaken his studies with the idea of becoming, like Bembry, the well-respected figure of wisdom behind the prison’s walls. But as 1948 drew to a close, his breadth of understanding had transformed him into a trenchant critic of white Western values and institutions. There was something passive about teaching, and Malcolm was not passive.
His routine at Norfolk provided him with the leisure time to correspond extensively with family members and friends, and he now became a devoted letter writer. In an undated note to Philbert, probably written mid-1948, he was preoccupied with family gossip. “Phil, I love all my brothers and sisters. In fact, they are the only ones in the world I love or have. However,” he emphasized, “never say ‘we are happy to own you as a brother.’” Such language smacked of tolerance rather than love. “Under no circumstances don’t ever preach to me,” he warned. Malcolm also continued to correspond with Elijah Muhammad, and by late November the tone of his letters to Philbert had been transformed. He now opened each letter with the declaration: “In the Name of ‘Allah,’ the Beneficent, the Merciful, the Great God of the Universe . . . and in the Name of His Holy Servant and Apostle, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad . . .” He praised family members for bringing him into the grace of Elijah Muhammad’s guidance. Now a devoted NOI follower, he shared his belief that “things are jumping out there . . . I’m unaware of what is actually occurring, but I know it is being Directed by the Hand of Allah and will rid the planet of these wretched devils.” Malcolm’s new commitment undoubtedly provided another reason to figure out some way out of prison.
His letters were also filled with lines of verse. He explained, “I’m a real bug for poetry. When you think back over all of our past lives, only poetry could best fit into the vast emptiness created by men.” Later that same month, he wrote, “I will have three years in [prison] on the 27th of this month. I want to get out this year if I can.” But he recognized how improbable his parole would be. “It’s my own fault I’m here,” he admitted. “The whole ordeal, though, has benefited me immensely because I have fully awakened to what I’m surrounded by. I certainly woke up the hard way, hmm?”
In another letter to Philbert, his thoughts turned to racial politics. “Yes, I’m aware many Brothers were put into the federal institutions for not taking active part in the war. Surely you must remember, I would have taken imprisonment first also.” Although he had not been aware of Elijah’s teachings during World War II, Malcolm claims that “I was even at that time aware of the devil and knew it to be foolish for yours truly to risk his neck fighting for something that didn’t exist.” He also expressed a new appreciation for their mother.
Reginald visited in late 1949, but all was not well. Malcolm was dumbfounded when his brother began to speak ill of Elijah Muhammad. He learned subsequently that Reginald had been expelled from the Nation of Islam for having sexual relations with the female secretary of the New York City temple. Reginald was his closest Little sibling, and his disaffection provoked a crisis of faith within Malcolm, which he only partially revealed later in the Autobiography. How could a religion devoted to the redemption of all black men expel Reginald? Frustrated and confused, he promptly wrote to Elijah in his brotherʹs defense. The next night, in the solitude of his prison cell, he thought he had been awakened by a vision of someone next to him:
He had on a dark suit. I remember. I could see him as plainly as I see anyone I look at. He wasn’t black, and he wasn’t white. He was light-brown-skinned, an Asiatic cast of countenance, and he had oily black hair. I looked right into his face. I didn’t get frightened. I knew I wasn’t dreaming. I couldn’t move, I didn’t speak, and he didn’t. . . . He just sat there. Then, suddenly as he had come, he was gone.
He would come to believe that his vision had been that of “Master W. D. Fard, the Messiah.” Days later, Elijah Muhammad sent a stern reply, chastising his new disciple for his pleas. “If you once believed in the truth, and now you are beginning to doubt the truth, you didn’t believe the truth in the first place,” he charged.
Such a letter of rebuke, combined with the twilight vision of “Master Fard,” convinced Malcolm that Reginald’s censure was not only justified but absolutely necessary. His actions could not be tolerated within the Nation’s small community. Months later, when Reginald visited again, Malcolm noted his physical and mental deterioration, and reasoned that this was evidence of “Allah’s chastisement.” Several years later, Reginald’s complete mental collapse led to his being institutionalized. To Malcolm, struggling to make sense of his brotherʹs fate, there was only one explanation: Reginald had been used by Allah “as a bait, as a minnow, to reach into the ocean of blackness where I was to save me.”
By early 1950, Malcolm had converted several black inmates, including Shorty. The small group began to demand concessions from the prison administrators, on the grounds that they were exercising their rights of religious freedom. They requested that Norfolk’s menu be changed, to accommodate the dietary restrictions of Muslims, and also refused to submit to standard medical inoculations. Norfolk’s officials viewed these requests as disruptive, and in March 1950 Malcolm and Shorty were told that they would be transferred back to Charlestown along with several other Black Muslims. Norfolk’s officials also recorded that Malcolm’s letters provided indisputable evidence of “his dislike for the white race.”
Malcolm rationalized the transfer as best he could. “Norfolk was getting on my nerves in many ways, and I didn’t have as much Solitude as I wished for,” he complained to Philbert. “Here we are in our cells for seventeen of the twenty-four hours in each day . . .” He also recounted a brief visit by their sister. “Ella wants to try to get me out. What should I do? Previously when she had asked me if I wanted out I have said ‘not particularly.’ But Saturday I told her to do whatever she can.”
He began agitating for even greater concessions, impelled by the requirements of his faith. He and other Muslims not only insisted on changes in their food and on the rules governing typhoid inoculations; they asked to be moved into cells that faced east, so that they could pray more easily toward Mecca. When the warden rejected their requests, Malcolm threatened to take their grievances to the Egyptian consul’s U.S. office, at which point the warden backed down. The local media learned about the controversy, and several articles soon appeared, the first to present Malcolm to a public audience. On April 20, 1950, the Boston Herald reported the incident under the headline “Four Convicts Turn Moslems, Get Cells Looking to Mecca.” More colorful and descriptive was the Springfield Union: “Local Criminals, in Prison, Claim Moslem Faith Now: Grow Beards, Won’t Eat Pork, Demand East-Facing Cells to Facilitate ‘Prayers to Allah.’”
In the middle of the controversy, Malcolm sent a sober, detailed letter to the commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Correction. His purpose was to provide examples of discrimination against Muslims, appealing for greater religious freedom. He highlighted the case of one Muslim who had been placed in solitary confinement at Norfolk for four months. “He wholeheartedly embraced Islam,” Malcolm argued, “and by doing this he incurred the wrath [of prison authorities]. Because the Brother wishes to be Black (instead of negro or collared [sic]), because of his desire to be a good Muslim . . . he is being maliciously prosecuted.”
In a second letter to the commissioner, and in subsequent correspondence, he shifted his argument, accusing Charlestown’s authorities of severely restricting the books by black authors that were available in the prison library. The tone was intellectual but increasingly intense and argumentative. “Is it actually against the ‘law’ for a Black man to read about himself? (let me laugh!),” he complained. He deplored the harassment experienced by Muslims who he claimed had done nothing wrong, and contrasted the example of one Black Muslim who had been rejected from enrolling in a prison literacy workshop with “the homosexual perverts” behind bars who “can get job-changes whenever they wish to change or acquire new ‘husbands.’” In more explicit language than ever before, he warned the commissioner that the Muslims would prefer to be kept separate from other prisoners, but if denied fair treatment they would be forced to become disruptive. “If it becomes the Will of Allah for peace to cease,” Malcolm predicted, “peace will cease!” This was a step beyond self-invention : Malcolm was in effect developing his powers of protest. He was teaching himself to be a great orator.
In June 1950, the United States initiated military actions in Korea, under the auspices of the United Nations, to suppress communist insurgency. On June 29, Malcolm brazenly wrote a letter to President Truman, declaring his opposition to the conflict. “I have always been a Communist,” he wrote. “I have tried to enlist in the Japanese Army, last war, now they will never draft or accept me in the U.S. Army. Everyone has always said MALCOLM is crazy so it isn’t hard to convince people that I am.”
It was this letter that brought Malcolm to the attention of the FBI, which opened a file on him that would never be closed. It also marked the beginning of their surveillance of him, which would continue until his death.
Malcolm kept up his letter-writing campaign throughout 1950 and into 1951, even reaching back to people who had known him as a juvenile delinquent. One such letter, dated November 14, 1950, was addressed to the Reverend Samuel L. Laviscount of Roxbury. Apparently, Malcolm had occasionally attended meetings at Laviscount’s St. Mark’s Congregational Church in 1941. “Dear Brother Samuel,” he began. “When I was a child I behaved like a child, but since becoming a man I have endeavored to put away childish things. . . . When I was a wild youth, you often gave me some timely advice; now that I have matured I desire to return the favor.” He recounted his involvement in crime, his arrest, and subsequent incarceration. But “this sojourn in prison has proved to be a blessing in disguise, for it provided me with the Solitude that produced many nights of Meditation.” The experiences of imprisonment had confirmed the validity of Elijah Muhammad’s indictments. Malcolm proclaimed that he had subsequently “reversed my attitude toward my black brothers,” and “in my guilt and shame I began to catch every chance I could to recruit for Mr. Muhammad.” The task of emancipating black people from the effects of racial oppression, he explained, required a fundamental rejection of white values: “The devil[’s] strongest weapon is his ability to conventionalize our Thought . . . we willfully remain the humble servants of every one else’s ideas except our own . . . we have made ourselves the helpless slaves of the wicked accidental world.”
After months back in Charlestown, however, the terrible conditions there took their toll. In a letter to Philbert sent in December 1950, Malcolm complained, “I have ulcers or something but I’ve had my fill of hospitals since being here. Ole man, I think I’m actually falling apart physically. Nothing more physically wrecks a man, than a steady prison diet.” He explained that he was “reading the Bible diligently,” but worried whether his interpretations of scriptures were “sound, or even on the correct track,” and looked forward to when he could listen to Elijah Muhammad’s latest teachings. For the first time, he signed his name, “Malcolm X (surprised?).” He also revealed that “a very wealthy man for whom I once worked, visited me today and is going to try and get me a recommendation from the parole board (Insha Allah) The Will of Allah will be done.” The “wealthy man” almost certainly was Paul Lennon. The most striking aspect of Malcolm’s continuing contacts with Lennon was that his affluent benefactor was white; given Malcolm’s professed hatred of all “white devils” (and his comments on homosexual inmates), his continuing contacts with Lennon may have indicated that his determination to get out of prison exceeded his commitment to Yacub’s History. Or perhaps the physical intimacies between the two men created a bond. Malcolm uncharacteristically stumbled somewhat as he explained, “By the way, he’s not an original”—meaning that he was not a Negro. “However he can give me a home and a job . . .”
Malcolm’s choice of words—“a home”—implies more than a business association. The fact that Lennon went to see Malcolm behind bars suggests a degree of friendship. But Malcolm’s commitment to the Nation eventually made any kind of continued contact with Lennon impossible. No correspondence between Malcolm and Lennon has been found following Malcolm’s prison sentence ending in 1952. Malcolm firmly put behind him the episodes with Lennon, along with some other events from Detroit Red’s life of drugs and criminality. Malcolm Little, petty criminal and trickster, had transformed himself into Malcolm X, a serious political intellectual and Black Muslim. That metamorphosis left no space for a rich gay white man.
Malcolm’s subsequent FBI files cite a revealing letter, written in January 1951, to someone whose name has been redacted in its records, but from the tone of the correspondence may have been Elijah Muhammad. “You once told me that I had a persecution complex,” it runs. “Quite naturally I refused to agree with you. . . . I was blinded by my own ignorance.” The letter recounts a visit to Charlestown by several family members, who raised with him the wrongs that he had committed:
With great remorse I now think of the hate and revenge that I have been preaching in the past. But from here on in my words shall all be of Love and Justice. . . . Now that the Way has been made clear to me my sole desire is to replace the seeds of hate and revenge, that I have sown into the hearts of others, with the seed of Love and Justice . . . and to be Just in all that I think, speak and do.
Malcolm’s further “apology for the unrest and misrepresentation of the Truth” was probably prompted by Elijah’s disapproval over the publicity surrounding the campaign for Muslim prisoners’ rights. For months, Malcolm had attempted to “embarrass” penal authorities by sending a stream of letters to local and state officials. Given Muhammad’s own prison hardships, the NOI leader recognized that any adverse publicity could threaten the sect’s survival. He also feared that prisoners who had converted to the Nation of Islam in other institutions might become targets of harassment by prison guards.
Malcolm had himself already experienced such harassment at Charlestown. When prison cooks learned about the Muslims’ refusal to eat pork, they frequently served Malcolm’s food from utensils that had been used to process the meat, and made sure Malcolm and his fellow Muslims knew. In response, over his final two years in prison Malcolm existed on a diet composed primarily of bread and cheese. Such deprivations, combined with the lack of competent medical care while in prison, caused him health problems that would plague him the rest of his life. After arriving back at Charlestown, he was diagnosed with astigmatism and received his first pair of glasses. He came to believe that his impaired vision had been caused at Norfolk because he had “read so much by the lights-out glow in my room.”
In late 1950, Malcolm had submitted a petition to the commissioner of corrections requesting an official pardon from Massachusetts governor Paul A. Dever. On December 13 the district attorney for the Northern District of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts recommended the petition be denied. Not surprisingly, Dever agreed.
That same month, Charlestown’s officials had refused to allow Muslim prisoners to leave their beds after lights-out curfew, to face east in solemn prayer. Writing in protest, Malcolm condemned the ban as an attack upon religious rights and warned that such an abridgment might require him to issue an appeal for redress to “the Whole Body of Islam”—that is, Islamic countries throughout the world. There might have been differences between the rituals of the Nation of Islam and orthodox Islam, but Malcolm saw himself in a global community.
His next request to be paroled would be considered on June 4, 1952. After a review of his prison records, he was granted parole on condition that he go to Detroit to live with Wilfred. On August 4 the Massachusetts supervisor of parole, Philip J. Flynn, informed the parole board that Malcolm had obtained full-time employment at the Cut Rate department stores in Detroit. The date for his release was set for August 7. Wilfred’s willingness to sponsor Malcolm in his home and to secure a job for him was a collective decision by Little family members, including Ella. Given their brotherʹs chaotic histories in both Roxbury and Harlem, they must have decided that it was preferable for him to be in Detroit. At the time, Wilfred was working at Cut Rate and persuaded his boss to take his younger brother on as a salesman.
Just weeks before Malcolm’s release, however, the state experienced several prison uprisings. On July 1, 1952, 41 out of approximately 680 men at Concord prison rioted. This may have inspired some inmates at Charlestown to plan their own revolt. On July 22 about forty prisoners there staged an even more destructive outburst. Two prison guards were seized as hostages. When state police at last retook the facility, everybody who had taken part was placed in solitary confinement; some were also prosecuted. The two officers who had been hostages were retired, and fourteen guards were added to the prison staff for greater security. Eventually an inmates’ council was established, elected by prisoners, which regularly met with the warden to resolve grievances. Malcolm was not involved in the uprising and it did not affect his release. Indeed, he would have felt little sense of solidarity with rioting white inmates.
Malcolm was finally released on August 7. He later described the occasion as just one more humiliation: “They gave me a lecture, a cheap L’il Abner suit, and a small amount of money, and I walked out of the gate. I never looked back . . .” Hilda was waiting outside. After the two embraced, they went to Boston to spend the night at Ella’s house. That evening, Malcolm visited a Turkish bath, to get “some of that physical feeling of prisontaint off me.” To start his new life, he purchased a new pair of glasses, a suitcase, and a wristwatch. Reflecting on his purchases, he wrote, “I was preparing for what my life was about to become.” He would see more, he would travel, and he would seize the time.