CHAPTER 8
Within days of his return from Los Angeles, Malcolm began to quietly pursue a strategy of limited political engagement. His muzzling by Elijah Muhammad continued to rankle, as did Muhammad’s belittling theory about Ronald X Stokes’s death resulting from his submission to the authorities. Before leaving Los Angeles on May 22, Malcolm had told an electrified crowd that Stokes “displayed the highest form of morals of any black person anywhere on this earth,” and he arrived in New York a few days later feeling charged with purpose. Though Muhammad had restrained him from coalition building with non-Muslim moderates in Los Angeles, on Malcolm’s home turf he held much greater latitude. On May 26, Mosque No. 7 organized a rally in front of the Hotel Theresa. The press release advertising this event linked the “cold-blooded murder of Ronald T. Stokes and the shooting of seven other innocent, unarmed Negroes” in Los Angeles with the Freedom Riders in Alabama and the then current mass desegregation campaign led by King in Georgia. Malcolm invited the two candidates competing for Harlem’s congressional seat to attend, Powell and attorney Paul Zuber, and he called for all Harlem leaders to support a coalition against police brutality. He was challenging Elijah Muhammad and his Chicago superiors by carrying out in New York the civil rights approach he had planned for Southern California.
Malcolm’s critics in the Nation of Islam took this as proof that he had become mesmerized by the media, diverting his attention from religious matters into the dangerous realm of politics. Even Los Angeles minister John Shabazz, whose mosque stood at the center of the political maelstrom and who was presently a defendant in the LAPDʹs criminal suit against the Muslims, kept to the party line. In a June 1962 letter addressed to “Brother Minister” and copied to Malcolm, Shabazz argued that excessive force by the police could not be ended primarily through politics: The letter declared that “a religious solution will fit the problem of Police Brutality.”
Undaunted, Malcolm’s frustration pushed him forward, yet it soon led him to make a misstep that put him sharply on the defensive. On June 3 an airplane crashed in Paris, killing 121 well-to-do white citizens of Atlanta; given its timing, Malcolm found the tragedy too tempting a target. Before an audience of fifteen hundred in Los Angeles, he described the disaster as “a very beautiful thing,” proof that God answers prayers. “We call on our God—He gets rid of 120 of them.” The following month, the press picked up the statement, and many prominent Negroes wasted little time in denouncing both Malcolm and the NOI. Dr. Rufus Clement, president of Atlanta’s University Center, described Malcolm’s remarks as “unchristian and inhuman,” while NAACP leader Roy Wilkins referred to the crash as “a mass tragedy,” adding in bewilderment, “Even when Negroes had their most violent [white] enemies against them, they did not descend to any glad feelings over death.” But the most eloquent—and damning—statement came from Martin Luther King, Jr., who sought to reassure white Americans “that the hatred expressed toward whites by Malcolm X [was not] shared by the vast majority of Negroes in the United States. While there is a great deal of legitimate discontent and righteous indignation in the Negro community, it has never developed into a large-scale hatred of whites.” Above all, Malcolm’s statement was a public relations disaster. It made it much easier for Negro moderates in groups like the NAACP and National Urban League to refuse to cooperate with the NOI, and it almost certainly increased the level of FBI infiltration. It was probably even what prompted the Bureau to discredit him in France; shortly thereafter, J. Edgar Hoover contacted the French government’s legal attaché in Paris, warning that a French film director, Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau, had recently been in contact with Malcolm, leader of a “fanatical” and “anti-white organization.”
Even more than the 1959 television series The Hate That Hate Produced, Malcolm’s comments on the crash reinforced his reputation as a demagogue. He may have considered his remark as part of a polemical jihad of words, designed to place Christian whites on the defensive, but it reinforced the Lomax-Wallace thesis that the NOI was the product of black hate. For Malcolm’s critics in the civil rights movement, the statement, and others like it, marked him as representative of white society’s failure to integrate. Yet in retrospect, many of Malcolm’s most outrageous statements about the necessity of extremism in the achievement of political freedom and liberty were not unlike the views expressed by the 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who declared that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Nearly two years before, in 1962, Malcolm argued, “Death is the price of liberty. If you’re not ready to die for it, put the word ‘freedom’ out of your vocabulary.”
For a few weeks Malcolm avoided speaking to the press while attempting to smooth things over within the NOI. On June 9 he attended a two-day rally featuring Elijah Muhammad at Detroit’s Olympia Stadium. After the end of the second public event, all NOI members were ordered to stay. Malcolm had the unpleasant responsibility of reading to the crowd a letter from Raymond Sharrieff that had already been sent to all FOI captains, ordering “every Muslim to begin obtaining no less than two new subscriptions to Muhammad Speaks per day.” The subscription drive would continue for three months. The letter ended noting that “those who failed to comply would be eliminated from the mosque.” This new edict showed Chicago’s determination to turn the budding success of its newspaper into a cash cow. Members were already tithing from their wages to their mosques as well as voluntarily donating funds to Muhammad and his family; now they were expected to generate even more money.
The Nation’s craven financial squeeze began to cause unrest at mosques throughout the country, and tensions in Boston rattled the organization. By 1962, Louis X was earning about $110 weekly serving as minister, yet as former Boston NOI official Aubrey Barnette would later note, “Each member was supposed to donate $2.95 a week toward Louis’s upkeep, which means that if 100 members were contributing regularly he was receiving another $15,000 a year in expense money.” Technically, none of the other mosque officials drew salaries, but in practice the FOI captain received eighty-five dollars weekly and the mosque secretary another thirty-five dollars each week, plus “frequent contributions from the membership.” During the three-year period that Barnette and his wife, Ruth, belonged to the mosque, they donated one thousand dollars, about one-fifth of Barnette’s income, which was itself slightly above average for NOI members at the time. Moreover, a cult of violence and intimidation began to grow around FOI captain Clarence 2X Gill. Barnette recalled Captain Clarence as “a stocky man of medium height” who looked “like an ex-middleweight boxer . . . and is arrogant, suspicious, dictatorial.” Members could not speak to Clarence directly, but were forced instead to communicate through intermediaries. At his Monday night FOI sessions, he put Fruit members through a two-hour-long “mishmash of drill, hygiene lectures, current events briefings, pep talks, physical exercise and miscellaneous instruction.” His legendary paranoia infected the ranks, as members were constantly instructed to look out for possible FBI informants. When Barnette urged him to dial down the rants, Clarence immediately accused him of being an “FBI spy.”
The push to increase sales of Muhammad Speaks sparked an already disgruntled Boston membership to open revolt. About fifty black businessmen—small merchants and entrepreneurs mostly—had joined the mosque in part for their enthusiasm for Louis X. They didn’t mind the weekly payments to sustain officials’ salaries and to cover administrative costs. But they balked when told they were each to sell two hundred copies of Muhammad Speaks at fifteen cents per issue, and that they’d be responsible for a full financial account whether or not the papers were sold. Elijah Muhammad, Jr., by then the FOIʹs assistant supreme captain, flew to Boston to quell potential dissent, warning Boston’s Fruit that “if you don’t want to sell the paper, then don’t even bother to come in here. I’m the judge tonight, and you are guilty.” He even reminded members “that in the old days recalcitrant brothers were killed.”
The threats and physical intimidation backfired. Within days, forty-two men, all businessmen, resigned from the mosque. Faced with shrinking membership and commensurately shrinking income, Louis X announced a “general amnesty” and invited all those who had left the mosque to attend a meeting. He promised them that the newspaper quotas would no longer be enforced, and that Clarence was out. But when the Chicago headquarters learned about Louis’s leniency, he was overruled. Two days later, Louis spoke to the entire mosque: “Some of you seem to have misunderstood me.” Upon learning that nothing had changed, Barnette immediately walked out, never to return to the mosque. But matters weren’t finished as far as Captain Clarence was concerned. Months later, as Barnette and another ex-Muslim drove past the mosque on a busy Roxbury street, a pink Cadillac pulled from the curb and cut in front of Barnette’s car. Six or more Muslims rushed both sides of Barnette’s blocked automobile, pulling the two men out. In plain daylight and in public, Barnette and the second man, John Thomas, were punched, kicked, and stomped repeatedly. Barnette suffered a broken ankle, a fractured vertebra, fractured ribs, damaged kidneys, and internal bleeding, placing him in the hospital for a week. “I believe we were beaten as punishment for quitting and also as a warning to keep our mouths shut,” he said.
In New York, where Malcolm and Joseph exerted a firmer grasp on the membership, such troubles were largely avoided. Instead, increased salesmanship of Muhammad Speaks drew hassles from local cops. On July 2, Malcolm addressed Mosque No. 7, warning that if police bothered the NOI for selling the paper, then members should do what the officers instructed. But he also suggested that Muslims had a legal right to sell their publication, as guaranteed by the Constitution. He went on to predict, “The time will come when the Muslims will not be able to leave their homes.” NOI members should never carry weapons, he explained, but “if attacked, self-defense is granted throughout the world.”
A week later, he flew to Chicago to participate in a rally featuring Elijah Muhammad, at which the Nation would unveil the two pieces of literature that would later come to define it. Although the NOI had grown rapidly, it had not participated in the desegregation struggles across the South that had won the respect and admiration of people throughout the world. To blacks, it was abundantly clear what groups like the NAACP and CORE wanted; the NOI, by contrast and largely by design, had no clear social program that realistically could be implemented. Since it was unlikely that blacks could seize a separate territory for themselves inside the United States, what did the NOI propose to do? For as much as Muhammad disliked and discouraged Malcolm’s inclinations toward activism, he was not a fool when it came to surveying the landscape of black politics and calibrating the NOIʹs place within it.
By the middle of 1962, CORE had come to national prominence for its Freedom Rides, and King was back in Albany, Georgia, where he was leading a desegregation campaign that found him briefly jailed until the chief of police released him to avoid further negative media coverage. The successes of the civil rights movement had emboldened America’s black communities and made the NOIʹs strict noninterventionist, antiactivist platform seem out of step or, worse, backward. To bolster his case in the court of public opinion, Muhammad and his Chicago lieutenants developed a ten-point policy statement that he unveiled in his address at the rally. Before a large crowd at the Arie Crown Theater on Lake Shore Drive, he presented a list of demands that preserved the Nation’s anti-integrationist stance—later codified as “What the Muslims Want”—and included religious freedom, an end to police brutality, and the release “of all Believers of Islam now held in federal prisons.” But the statement also astutely contained major concessions to the civil rights movement. “As long as we are not allowed to establish a state or territory of our own, we demand not only equal justice under the laws of the United States, but equal employment opportunities, now!ʺ Muhammad followed this statement with a twelve-point “What the Muslims Believe,” a summary of the Nation of Islam’s basic creed. Over the next thirteen years, until Muhammad’s death in 1975, these two statements would become the most widely disseminated of NOI manifestos. For Malcolm, who had pushed for greater involvement with the movement, the revelation was bittersweet; he had moved toward these ideas long before Chicago.
His own push for action renewed shortly in New York, where Mosque No. 7 now organized rallies almost every other week, focused mainly on bringing broad change to Harlem’s impoverished and embattled blacks. Malcolm’s involvement with A. Philip Randolph’s Emergency Committee continued to shape his efforts, and on July 21 he addressed a crowd of two thousand packed in front of the Hotel Theresa. The five-hour program featured a saxophone, drum, and bass trio, which helped attract onlookers. Fruit of Islam members circulated through the crowd, selling Muhammad Speaks and NOI-produced records featuring Louis X. Malcolm focused largely on Harlem’s social and economic conditions. “Unemployment, juvenile delinquency, prostitution, gambling, the dope traffic and other forms of organized crimes are on the rise,” he explained:
Even our women, young girls and boys, are falling victim to the organized evils that are destroying the moral fiber of the Negro community. The fuse has already been lit . . . if something is not done immediately, there will be an explosive situation in the Negro community more dangerous and destructive than a hundred megaton bombs.
The intensity of the speech reflected the growing depths of his own commitment to embracing a united black community. Covering the event, the Chicago Defender noted that Malcolm’s words contained such “sentiment and emotional drive” that the cries from the audience “became at times almost a chant, coming at the cadenced pauses in his oratory.” But the most significant feature of this largely NOI-sponsored rally was the list of guest speakers, which ran to far more moderate figures and included none other than Malcolm’s old sparring partner, Bayard Rustin.
The very next day, Betty gave birth to the couple’s third daughter. She was named Ilyasah, the feminized Arabic version of Elijah. By now, Malcolm’s quick departures after the births of his children had become almost routine; that same day, he ducked out and joined several FOI members to watch a labor rally of mostly blacks and Latinos held on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and organized by the Committee for Justice to Hospital Workers. Although forbidden to participate in civil rights-style demonstrations, the Muslims expressed their support from the sidelines. Malcolm even briefly addressed the strikers—technically a violation of Muhammad’s orders, but once again he presumably reasoned that in his own territory, so long as he sang Muhammad’s praises, neither Raymond Sharrieff nor anyone else had the power to stop him.
Ongoing legal issues stemming from events in Los Angeles continued to consume him throughout the summer. The day after Ilyasah’s birth, he was in Connecticut, raising funds on behalf of the late Ronald Stokes’s family. On July 28 he returned to New York, having heard that Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty would be speaking at a symposium at the Waldorf-Astoria on the subject of the urban crisis. Shortly after the assault, Yorty had given LAPD commissioner William Parker his full backing on the mosque shootings and went so far as to meet with attorney general Robert Kennedy in hopes of prompting a federal investigation of the NOI. When Malcolm, having gained admittance to the audience, spoke up from the floor, Yorty was apoplectic: “I didn’t fly here to be questioned by Malcolm X,ʺ he retorted. “I regard the Black Muslim movement as a Nazi-type of movement preaching hate.” Malcolm responded by telling the New York Times, “I’d rather be a Nazi than whatever Mr. Yorty is.”
The next month, together with a large group of Muslims, Malcolm packed a hearing room in the Los Angeles County Superior Court to express support for the NOI members who had been indicted for assault on April 27. Through repeated entreaties, he had convinced Earl Broady, a criminal attorney and former Los Angeles police officer, to represent the thirteen Muslims facing charges. Race promised to play a prominent role in determining the course of the case. The FBI agent monitoring the proceedings noted, “It is understood that these defendants would argue that there was an improper[ly] impaneled jury because of the lack of sufficient numbers of Negroes.”
For several days in mid-August, Malcolm visited St. Louis for a local NOI rally. Although he spoke, most attention was focused on Muhammad, who was promoted as the featured speaker. Sometime during this visit, Muhammad expressed concern to Malcolm about recent damage to the NOIʹs image. He was especially agitated about Malcolm’s university lectures, which he felt “gained no converts and only provided an opportunity for the NOI to be blasted in public.” Malcolm had little choice except to cancel all his remaining college appearances. Internal FBI documents establish that the Bureau almost immediately knew about these cancellations; someone with direct access to the highest level inside the NOI was providing information to the agency. The most likely such person was national secretary John Ali; all business-related correspondence and ministers’ weekly reports went across Ali’s desk. Ali personally knew, and could demand the firing of, every local mosque’s secretary. The FBI would have easily recognized the value of his strategic place inside the Nation’s hierarchy.
While Malcolm was in St. Louis, he kept an interview appointment with a white journalist who had recently caught his attention with a series of thoughtful pieces on the city’s somewhat sleepy mosque. Peter Goldman was a news writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, a conservative newspaper that also had on its editorial staff a young Patrick Buchanan. Goldman’s interest in the NOI went back two years to his postgraduate fellowship at Harvard in 1960, where he had started reading Lincoln’s The Black Muslims in America and then had seen Malcolm’s remarkable debate with Walter Carrington at Sanders Theatre. Though Goldman had become a liberal integrationist in college, going so far as to join CORE and attend local sit-ins in the fifties, Malcolm’s performance in the debate profoundly affected him. Goldman was stunned by both the man and his message, and he was especially impressed by Malcolm’s bearing, recalling it as “both soldierly and priestly. His carriage was amazing.” He also was struck by the NOI members who accompanied Malcolm: “There were members of the Brothers of Islam in the hall, a protective presence, and as I left, I could see them spotted around the nearby campus. There’d be a guy standing under a tree with the narrow tie and the sort of Ivy League suit (and bald head).”
When Goldman returned to St. Louis and landed at the Globe-Democrat, he quickly began writing about the local mosque, and though his series’ chief effect was probably to bring the local NOI under greater scrutiny from the authorities, it also earned him Malcolm’s attention. Several weeks after the articles appeared, he called Goldman to explain that he was about to visit the city. “Would you like to get together,” he asked, the better to “understand the Nation of Islam?”
An interview was arranged through the local mosque, to take place at the Shabazz Frosti Kreem, an NOI-affiliated luncheonette in the North Side ghetto. Goldman was extremely nervous: “I was then prisoner to all the white liberal views of the world, of race in America, including the view that the locus of tragedy was the American South, that Jim Crow was the central struggle.” Helen Dudar, Goldman’s wife and also a journalist, accompanied him to the meeting, and together they waited outside the luncheonette for their subject to arrive. After a few minutes a car pulled up, with Malcolm sitting “sort of jackknifed in the backseat.” As soon as he got out, Goldman recalled, “Just from the moment you saw him, [you felt] this incredible presence.” The three of them, accompanied by the local minister, Clyde X, went inside and sat at a table. Malcolm quickly gravitated to the jukebox. Dropping in a coin, he chose Louis Xʹs “A White Man’s Heaven Is a Black Man’s Hell.”
To Goldman’s surprise, the interview lasted nearly three hours. Malcolm “told us perfectly pleasantly that whites were inherently the enemies of Negroes; that integration was impossible without a great bloodletting and was undesirable anyway; [and] that nonviolence—‘this mealy-mouth beg-in, wait-in, lead-in kind of action’—was only a device for disarming the blacks and, worse still, unmanning them.” Although Malcolm was impressive, Goldman remained a committed liberal who struggled to overcome his ideological prejudices to write about the Nation fairly.
Over the next three years, Goldman conducted at least five lengthy interviews with Malcolm. They spoke over the telephone on individual stories frequently. Sometimes Goldman was simply seeking a publishable quote; but he sensed that for some reason he had become part of “a relatively small target group of media people whom [Malcolm wanted to] seduce.ʺ These were the journalists Malcolm trusted “to get the serious message out.” For most people, however, his normal approach was “the cocked fist . . . It was very easy to scare the pants off most white reporters . . . Their attention span was the quote—the most inflammatory quote you can put on the air, and Malcolm liked to serve those up.” But Goldman also sensed that Malcolm knew, deep down, “if you create an atmosphere of threat, a sense of threat . . ., never throw the punch, because if you throw the punch, people will be out on the street dying.” So he was never an “advocate of suicidal activity,” still believing “the threat was useful.”
Another journalist who would have a profound impact on Malcolm’s life and legacy was Alex Haley. Born in 1921, Haley had just retired after twenty years’ service in the U.S. Coast Guard. A liberal Republican, Haley completely rejected the racial separatism and intolerance of the NOI. He believed the Nation was the consequence of mainstream America’s failure to assimilate Negroes into the existing system. Yet in the wake of the publicity surrounding The Hate That Hate Produced in 1959, Haley drafted a short article about the group, “Mr. Muhammad Speaks,” that was published in the March 1960 issue of Reader’s Digest. Although Haley had characterized the Nation as a “potent, racist cult,” NOI leaders generally praised the article’s objectivity. The essay focused primarily on Elijah Muhammad’s history and leadership of the sect; Malcolm was mentioned but only as a secondary figure. In 1962, Haley contacted the NOI again, requesting its cooperation for a longer story to be published in the widely read Saturday Evening Post. It would be coauthored with a white journalist, Alfred Balk, who had apparently been recruited to convince white readers that the piece reflected an integrationist viewpoint, despite the fact that Haley himself was an avowed integrationist. On the strength of Haley’s previous article, he and Balk were given substantial access to NOI activities throughout the country. Malcolm even agreed to give Haley a detailed interview about his life prior to becoming a follower of Muhammad. What the Muslims could not have known was that simultaneously Balk was talking to the FBI, meeting on October 9 with an agent in their Crime Research Section in Chicago. Balk explained that his and Haley’s story had “to give an accurate and realistic appraisal of the Nation of Islam” while illustrating “that many of the statements about the successes of the organization among the Negro people are also exaggerated.” The Bureau agreed to funnel them selective information about the NOI, based on its years of covert surveillance, but none of it could be attributed.
The Nation was facing unanticipated challenges resulting from its rapid expansion. The real estate investments and the forced “taxation” on NOI members to obtain thousands of Muhammad Speaks subscriptions—despite the resistance it raised in many members—generated impressive sums for the Chicago headquarters, and for Muhammad’s family. Raymond Sharrieff and John Ali had consolidated their control over the organization’s day-to-day operations, and they did not share the Messengerʹs paternal fondness for Malcolm, nor did Muhammad’s children appreciate the close bond their father had developed with his greatest protégé. It made for an awkward and strained relationship between the Nation’s largest branch, in New York, and Chicago. Malcolm’s tireless barnstorming over the previous few years and his magnetic personality had driven much of the Nation’s growth—and in turn the growth in its coffers—yet continued press speculation that he was Muhammad’s heir apparent challenged everyone’s sense of security, despite Malcolm’s constant efforts to keep the spotlight on Elijah.
By 1962, the secretary of every mosque was directly reporting to John Ali, who had become firmly allied with Malcolm’s critics. Farrakhan recalled that “the captains were under Raymond Sharrieff and Elijah, Junior . . . and the sister captains were under Ethel Sharrieff or Lottie, [the] Messengerʹs daughter. . . . They had these positions that they wanted to keep, [so] they began to persecute brother Malcolm from headquarters.” Muhammad Speaks began reducing its coverage of his speeches. “He would speak in places, and really he’d do a lot of great work,” said Farrakhan, “but our paper would hardly say anything.” Occasionally Malcolm expressed his disappointments to his Boston friend. “He would say things to me—he said, ‘You know, I work hard for the Nation, and, man, for me to be doing this and I get no recognition.’ So it began eating away at [my] brother.” Malcolm kept quiet about his unhappiness to his subordinates, but rather, following Muhammad’s instructions, began turning down college engagements—for instance, canceling a speaking event at the University of Bridgeport because of “throat trouble.”
To counter the animosity building against him in Chicago, he also drew closer to the allies that surrounded him in New York, chief among them Mosque No. 7’s assistant minister Benjamin 2X Goodman. Like many in the NOI, Goodman had come to the organization following an unhappy tenure in the armed forces during the years after World War II. Having enlisted in the air force in 1949, he was cited for “company punishment” four times before being court-martialed in August 1951 and discharged in late 1952. The experience hardly endeared him to white authority, and in 1957, shortly after his arrival in New York, he became a member of the Harlem temple. He showed immediate promise, and two years later, nearing his thirtieth birthday, he was named the instructor for the Great Black Man’s History course in Temple No. 7’s adult education program. To support himself, he started a bookselling business, and also found employment as a building supervisor. In 1961, NOI literature described Benjamin as manager of Crescent Book Sales, a “specialist in Islamic literature and history.”
Though Benjamin 2X had begun serving as a ministry assistant in 1958, it was not until the early 1960s that Malcolm came to rely on him for a wide variety of duties. Although Henry X remained Mosque No. 7’s official chief assistant minister, everyone knew that Benjamin was the closest to Malcolm. The spiritual bond between the two was second only to that between Malcolm and Louis X. In 1961-62, Benjamin’s role within the mosque significantly changed, and consequently so did his relationship with Malcolm. The FBI noted that Benjamin was increasingly given additional assignments. For example, from September 1961 until August 1962, he attended meetings to establish an NOI mosque in Bridgeport, Connecticut. During May and June 1962, he was one of several featured speakers at Philadelphia’s Mosque No. 12, and in mid-July of that year was named the mosque’s “main speaker.” He also increasingly accompanied Malcolm on out-of-town engagements.
His greatest value, so far as Malcolm was concerned, lay in the humble attitude he brought to his position. By all accounts, his disposition was pastoral and spiritual; he sought the meaning of his faith through the good works he did. Over the years, he enjoyed meals and other forms of fellowship in Malcolm’s home hundreds of times. He knew, and lovingly admired, his senior minister, making him the pastoral counterbalance to James 67X, the men representing two distinctive aspects of Malcolm’s personality. Yet unlike James, who was the only man who would vigorously argue with Malcolm to his face, there was always a distance, an absence of intimacy, between Benjamin and Malcolm. “He used to send me out of town, and I’d come back and go to his house maybe at one in the morning and we’d talk,” Benjamin recalled. “But we didn’t get close. Not in the buddy sense. He was always in command.ʺ
After his Sunday sermons at Mosque No. 7, Malcolm usually invited his assistants back home for dinner. The young ministers thought of such occasions as tutorials. Increasingly, however, they witnessed tense confrontations between Betty and Malcolm. Betty’s anger and anxiety became so overwhelming that by early 1963 she had fled again, to Detroit. When Malcolm arrived back home one evening after being away, he discovered his spouse and children were gone. This time he didn’t go looking. After a few days, Betty grew terribly worried; perhaps she finally had pushed her husband too far. Eventually Malcolm learned where she was, and he contacted her: “I don’t have a job where I can leave at a certain time. . . . You knew that when you married me. If you leave again, I’m not coming after you.” Sometimes, when the couple was experiencing difficulties, he dispatched Betty and the children to stay at the Boston home of Louis Farrakhan and his wife. “Because he knew I loved him,” Farrakhan explained, “and he knew that I would defend him. . . . It was a good place for Betty to be.”
By the early fall of 1962, Malcolm had decided that he would not seek an open confrontation with his critics inside the Nation. He greatly reduced the number of interviews and television appearances he accepted, to dispel the impression that he saw himself as Muhammad’s successor. Nevertheless, he still did some radio and television. On the night of September 30, when thousands of federal troops were occupying the University of Mississippi to ensure the enrollment of James Meredith, he was on the Barry Gray radio show, denouncing racial intermarriage. As for Meredith, Malcolm curtly commented, “One little black man going to a school in Mississippi in no way compensates for the fact that a million black people don’t even get to the grade school level in Mississippi.” At every opportunity he made plain his boundless belief in Elijah Muhammad’s perfection. At a Mosque No. 7 meeting on October 19, he drew attention to a negative newspaper article about the Messenger. No one, he preached, must be permitted “to defame the name of Elijah Muhammad,” adding that if he saw the reporter of the article on the street he would punch him “right in the mouth.”
One part of Malcolm’s strategy to promote the cult around Muhammad involved taking a more aggressive role in defending the Islamic legitimacy of the NOIʹs religious views, especially when criticized by orthodox Muslims, who often took great offense at Muhammad’s claim of connection with the divine. Near the end of the summer a Sudanese Muslim college student, Yahya Hayari, publicly criticized the NOI, prompting Malcolm to write him a letter of protest, not so much addressing the meat of Hayari’s critique, but taking him to task for airing his complaint publicly. It is “difficult for me to believe that you’re a Muslim from the Sudan,” Malcolm began. “No real Muslim will ever attack another Muslim just to gain the friendship of Christians.” Differences, he suggested, should be settled “in private . . . but never to the public delight of Jews and Christians.” Malcolm drew upon international conflicts to explain the dangers of Muslim disunity: “The Europeans are still in the Congo because the Congolese have been kept busy fighting each other. . . . It would be quite foolish for Muslim students to come here from the Sudan or any other part of Africa and allow themselves to be used to attack us in a Christian country, a white country, a country in which 20 million of their own ‘Darker Brothers’ are yet being held as Second-Class Citizens, which is only a modified form of 20th Century Colonialism.” Hayari’s criticisms against the Nation continued, prompting Malcolm to send a letter of protest to the Pittsburgh Courier. Hayari “has been in Christian America too long,” Malcolm advised, because he “sounds like . . . [a] brainwashed, American Negro.” Malcolm minimized the theological differences between his sect and global Islam, arguing that the tactics of “the police of the enemies of Islam have always been ‘divide and conquer.’ ” Hayari was clearly among those who “suffer” from a “colonial mentality.” Hayari’s response appeared in the October 27, 1962, issue of the Pittsburgh Courier. “Mr. Elijah does not believe in or teach Islam,” Hayari insisted. “What he teaches in the name of Islam is his own social theory.” Because of Muhammad’s heresies, “all those that follow him should know that they are being led straight to Hell.”
On November 24, Malcolm’s letter criticizing an Afghani Muslim’s critique of the NOI appeared in the Amsterdam News. To demonstrate his fidelity to Islamic orthodoxy, Malcolm responded by citing verses from the Qurʹan. “Messenger Elijah Muhammad’s followers here in America live by a higher moral code and practice a more strict form of religious discipline than Muslims do anywhere else on this earth,” Malcolm insisted. “Oh, you who believe, take not the Jews and the Christians for friends . . . And whoever takes them for friends he is indeed one of them,” Malcolm praised Elijah Muhammad as “Allah’s last messenger today, and by accepting his divine message we receive such strong spiritual strength from him that we are able to reform ourselves from the evils of this Christian world overnight.”
Also in 1962, another Sudanese Muslim, Ahmed Osman, studying at Dartmouth College, attended Mosque No. 7 services and directly challenged Malcolm X during a question and answer period. Osman was particularly agitated by the NOIʹs claims that Elijah Muhammad was the “Messenger of God,” and that whites were literally “devils.” Osman came away “greatly impressed with Malcolm,” but “unsatisfied” with his answers. He began sending literature from the Islamic Center in Geneva, Switzerland, and writing to him about the “true Islam.” Malcolm appreciated the literature and asked Osman for more. Yet despite his exposure to orthodox Islam, Malcolm was still unprepared to break from the Nation.
Yet the more challengers he engaged on the question of Islam, the more emerged to confront him. In March 1963, he debated Louis Lomax and others as part of a program on Los Angeles Channel 11, during which he appeared to distance himself from Muhammad. He explained, “One becomes a Muslim only by accepting the religion of Islam, which means belief in one God, Allah. Christians call him Christ, Jews call him Jehovah.” This statement was a tacit rejection of Yacub’s History, and of the NOI demonology of whites. Despite such modification, Malcolm adhered to other aspects of NOI orthodoxy, stating at one point in the debate, “The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us that God taught him that the white race is a race of devils and what a white person should do if he is not a devil is prove it. As far as I’m concerned, the history of the white race as it has been taught to us by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is pretty strong evidence against that particular race.” The debate ran late, and he and Lomax did not leave the television studio until after one thirty in the morning. When they reached the parking lot, they were confronted by a group of angry Arab students from UCLA who had viewed with dismay Malcolm’s “white devil” statements, which directly contradicted the color-blind, abstract orthodoxy of Islam. Malcolm explained that the phrase “white devils” was essential “in waking up the deaf, dumb and blind American Negro,” but the students were unconvinced. Malcolm, upset, left in a waiting automobile. What he was beginning to comprehend was that he could no longer claim to be part of Islam’s ummah while reviling all whites as a race beyond redemption. He would have to choose.
On November 15, 1962, aging boxing legend Archie Moore climbed into the ring in Los Angeles for a late-career fight against an opponent almost half his age. By round four he was finished, giving another victory to his brash challenger, who was as yet unbeaten in sixteen professional fights. In New York, Malcolm, due in the city the next week, kept an eye out for news of the fight. Though the Nation looked unfavorably upon boxing, and though Malcolm himself had never shown much interest in the sport, this particular young fighter presented a special case. Earlier that year, in Detroit, Malcolm had been relaxing at the Students’ Luncheonette next door to Mosque No. 1 when he was approached by a handsome, well-built black man who excitedly thrust out his hand to introduce himself: “I’m Cassius Clay.” Just nineteen years old, he and his brother, Rudy, had driven all the way from Louisville to hear Elijah Muhammad speak.
Few men would play such an outsized role in Malcolm’s life as this enigmatic, irrepressible figure, who would become legendary as Muhammad Ali. The two men shared important childhood connections: though Clay’s father, Cassius, Sr., remained very much alive well into his son’s life, like Earl Little he had been deeply influenced by Marcus Garvey and had imparted the lessons of black pride and self-sufficiency to his son. Born on January 17, 1942, Cassius, Jr., had taken up boxing at the age of twelve under the guidance of a local police officer, at once excelling. However, at first he won more plaudits for his charm than for his pugilistic skills, making a name for himself by spouting comedic rhymes celebrating his prowess. He broke through in 1960 by winning a gold medal in the 175-pound light heavyweight division at the Rome Olympics. Promptly turning professional, Clay was backed by a syndicate of wealthy white men calling themselves the Louisville Sponsoring Group.
Clay’s fierce individualism and Garvey-inspired sense of pride made him a natural fit for the Nation of Islam, and when he first encountered the group in 1959, it caught his attention. He had traveled to Chicago to fight in a Golden Gloves tournament and returned to Louisville clutching a long-playing record of Elijah Muhammad’s speeches. Still in high school, he pestered one of his teachers, unsuccessfully, to be allowed to write a paper about the sect. In March 1961, by this time a professional training in Miami, Clay encountered Captain Sam X Saxon (later Abdul Rahman) selling copies of Muhammad Speaks on the street. He struck up a conversation and Saxon invited him to attend the city’s small mosque. From his very first visit, the young boxer was fascinated. “This minister started teaching, and the things he said really shook me up,” he told Alex Haley.
Things like that we twenty million black people in America didn’t know our true identities, or even our true family names. And we were the direct descendants of black men and women stolen from the rich black continent and brought here and stripped of all knowledge of themselves and taught to hate themselves and their kind. And that’s how us so-called ʺNegroesʺ had come to be the only race among mankind that loves its enemies. Now, I’m the kind that catches on quick. I said to myself, listen, this man’s saying something!
He later claimed that it was “the first time I ever felt spiritual in my life.” Soon he started reading Muhammad Speaks regularly and developed friendships with NOI members, eventually coming to the attention of Jeremiah X, Atlanta’s minister and the NOIʹs regional boss, who traveled to Miami on several occasions to see him. Through Saxon, Clay obtained the services of a Muslim cook, who helped him observe Muslim dietary requirements.
To Malcolm, Clay was a jovial, “clean-cut, down-to-earth youngster.” He saw through Clay’s clown routine, which perhaps reminded him of his own comedic antics as Sandwich Red while serving whites on trains during the war. After their introduction at the luncheonette in early 1962, the two men stayed in contact throughout the year, and soon Malcolm asked his friend Archie Richardson (later Osman Karriem) to watch over Clay in Miami. Malcolm sensed that Clay had potential as a fighter; his conversion to the NOI could allow the sect to reach an entirely different audience. Ferdie Pacheco, Clay’s trainer, later observed, “Malcolm X and Ali were like very close brothers. It was almost like they were in love with each other.” To Clay, Malcolm was “the smartest black man on the face of the earth.” Even Pacheco was impressed. “Malcolm X was bright as hell, convincing, charismatic in the way that great leaders and martyrs are. It certainly rubbed off on Ali.”
Four days after Clay’s fight with Moore, Malcolm touched down in Los Angeles, where, according to the Los Angeles Herald-Dispatch, he would be helping out with a fund-raising drive and teaching classes for two weeks. But this was only part of Malcolm’s new plan. He had decided to quietly countermand Elijah’s ban on cooperation with civil rights and non-Muslim groups. To that end, between November 19 and 24, he participated in forums on “Integration or Separation” and “Militants in Negro Leadership,” the latter largely organized by the Afro-American Association. Founded earlier in 1962 by activist Donald Warden, the association was a progressive network of largely militant black students. Some of the activists who emerged from this group would soon have a major impact on the Black Freedom Movement. The association chapter in the Bay Area claimed future Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton as a member, and in Los Angeles the local leader was Ron Everett, who subsequently became the high priest of black cultural nationalism, known as Maulana Karenga.
Although the conference and rally managed to bring out only four hundred people—much smaller than the thousands of Harlemites that Mosque No. 7 regularly massed—it attracted the attention of the New York Times as well as the national black press. The daylong program featured a series of workshops under the theme “The Mind of the Ghetto.” In the plenary session, Wilfred Ussery of the Afro-American Association vigorously propounded COREʹs nonviolent approach, but the crowd was overwhelmingly for Malcolm. The Times observed, “There appeared to be a considerable number of Black Muslim supporters, judging from shouts of approval that punctuated the statements made by Malcolm X.ʺ
The cheers reflected the increasing complexity of Malcolm’s relationship with the leftmost wing of the civil rights movement. Unlike the NAACP, whose discrete units largely moved in lockstep thanks to its rigid, multitiered hierarchy, CORE had a freer organizing structure with less oversight from national headquarters. Local branches often took on a different, more militant character that found greater common ground with the NOIʹs black nationalism. Whereas Malcolm and James Farmer had long disagreed on philosophy and tactics, in the CORE outposts more and more activists were aligning themselves with Malcolm.
At the conference, Malcolm did not obscure his political differences with CORE, criticizing the Freedom Rides as a waste of resources and repeatedly underscoring the fundamental difference that separated integrationist liberals from black nationalists: the former believed that the predominantly white political system possessed the capacity to reform itself on matters of race, whereas the latter viewed that as impossible. “Our problem will never be solved by the white man,” said Malcolm. “We must solve it for ourselves.” When eventually he returned from the Los Angeles visit, he had reached certain conclusions about his future. Despite Muhammad’s warnings, he would return to the lecture circuit. He also favored direct involvement in civil rights, engaging in frequently critical dialogues with militants in SNCC, CORE, and local groups such as the Afro-American Association. CORE may have moved toward Malcolm, but he was not himself unmoved.
This strategy would soon be tested. On Christmas Day 1962, two Muslims were arrested while selling Muhammad Speaks in Times Square. Three days later, at a Mosque No. 7 meeting, Malcolm told his followers that it grieved him every time that the NOI had to go to court, but he could not condone cowardice. On January 2 he sent a telegram to New York City mayor Robert Wagner, with copies to the district attorney, Frank Hogan, and police commissioner Michael Murphy, challenging the arrests. Malcolm denounced the arrests as a suppression of press freedom, and “the freedom of religious expression.”
But the Nation’s legal troubles continued to mount. In Rochester, on January 6, police invaded the city’s mosque during a service, after receiving a call claiming that a man with a gun was inside the building where the mosque was located. Two policemen said they were beaten during the raid, and more than a dozen Muslims were arrested. Malcolm at once flew to Rochester. “We allow no intrusions at ou[r] religious services and will give our lives if necessary to protect their sanctity,” he told the press, before filing formal complaints. Returning to New York City, he led a nonviolent demonstration in front of Manhattan’s Criminal Court. The flyers circulated at the protest could have been written by SNCC radicals. “America has become a Police-state for 20 Million Negroes,” one declared. “We must let [Rochester’s NOI members] know they are not alone. We must let them know that the whole Dark World is with them.ʺ Later that evening, Malcolm told a crowd at a Mosque No. 7 meeting that he was “tired of hearing about Muslims being pistol-whipped.” On January 25 the two Muslim newspaper salesmen were sentenced to sixty days in jail.
That same week Malcolm’s new militancy was on full display at Michigan State University. Before an audience of more than a thousand, he sounded out many familiar themes, but with a new twist:
So you have two types of Negro. . . . Most of you know the old type . . . during slavery he was called “Uncle Tom.” He was the house Negro. And during slavery you had two Negroes. You had the house Negro and the field Negro. The house Negro usually lived close to his master. He dressed like his master. He wore his masterʹs second-hand clothes. He ate food that his master left on the table. And he lived in his masterʹs house . . . he always identified himself in the same sense that his master identified himself. When his master said, “We have good food,” the house Negro would say, “Yes we have plenty of good food.” . . . When the master would be sick, the house Negro identified himself so much with his master he’d say, “What’s the matter boss, we sick?” . . . But then you had another Negro out in the field. The house Negro was in the minority. The masses—the field Negroes were the masses. They were in the majority. When the master got sick, they prayed that he’d die. If his house caught on fire, they’d pray for a wind to come along and fan the breeze.
The address also showcased his evolving ideas about race. For decades, the NOI had preached that the ethnic identity of black Americans was Asiatic, descendants of the lost tribe of Shabazz that had its origins in the Middle East. But now Malcolm affirmed the common cultural heritage that united Africans with African Americans. “The man that you call Negro is nothing but an African himself,” he explained. “The unity of Africans abroad and the unity of Africans here in this country can bring about practically any kind of achievement or accomplishment that black people want.” During the question and answer period, Malcolm also denounced South African apartheid, making a sharp distinction between that system and the separatism advocated by Muhammad. Once more, he criticized COREʹs James Farmer for his marriage to a white woman, quipping that it “almost makes him a white man.” He turned finally to the Jewish people as an appropriate role model for black empowerment. “Whenever the Jews have been segregated and Jim Crowed, they haven’t sat-in,” he insisted. “They usually go and use the economic weapon.”
The mosque assault in Rochester animated Malcolm, as it provided a counterpoint and companion piece to the legal proceedings unfolding against the Muslims in Los Angeles. Preliminary hearings had begun there at the end of 1962, and the trial itself was scheduled for the upcoming spring. But the high profile of the Los Angeles case meant that Malcolm had little room to maneuver or make way on his protest plans; Muhammad and his Chicago lieutenants would be watching. In Rochester, however, deep in upstate New York, he could be more vocal. On January 28 he addressed an audience of four hundred at the city’s university, where his speech moved him even closer to openly promoting equality over racial separation. “Americans have come to realize that the black man is capable of doing things equal to him,” he told his largely student audience. “But they are not fully prepared to accept that the black man can take a role in political and economic society.” Without acknowledging his shift, Malcolm had drawn closer to both Rustin and Farmer. If African Americans received the full measure of their constitutional rights and equal opportunities across the board, could racism be abolished? In the Rochester talk, Malcolm answered: no race problem would exist in the United States “if the Negro could ‘speak as an American.’ ”
He seemed more than ever of two minds, pulled both by his loyalty to Muhammad and by a need to engage in the struggle. Having just ventured to discuss the role of the black man in society, he quickly shifted gears. On February 3, during an interview broadcast on radio and television, he again pressed Elijah Muhammad’s plan for a separate black state inside the United States. Then, turning back to protest ten days later, he led a Manhattan street demonstration of about 230 Fruit of Islam members to denounce police harassment. The police had cautioned him that protest rallies were illegal in Times Square and that he and his men would be subject to arrest. Malcolm replied that he was going to walk through Times Square as an individual, which was his constitutional right. If others voluntarily walked in file behind him, that was not his responsibility. No one was arrested.
Word soon reached him that twelve of the Muslims jailed after the police raid on Rochesterʹs mosque were planning a hunger strike, and he quickly came to their support. He informed the press that the protesting Muslims were prepared to fast “until they die.” Alluding to the Black Freedom Movement, he boasted that soon “Rochester will be better known than Oxford, Mississippi,” the Southern town where thousands of angry whites erupted in street violence attempting to halt the desegregation of Ole Miss. The very next day, February 16, the Rochester Times reported that twelve of the thirteen prisoners had been released, pending charges. The funds for their bail had been forwarded by Elijah Muhammad. The same day, Malcolm addressed another Harlem rally, organized around the theme that “America has become a police state for 20 million Negroes.” Following the demonstration, he once again led hundreds of protesters down affluent midtown Manhattan streets.
The Saturday Evening Post published Alex Haley and Alfred Balk’s collaboration “Black Merchants of Hate” on January 26, 1963, giving the story six full pages and including numerous illustrations. The article brought into stark relief the tensions simmering between Malcolm and the Chicago headquarters, and for anyone paying close attention it marked the shift in public perception of both the Nation and Malcolm in the previous two years. The article differed from “Mr. Muhammad Speaks” in several significant ways, opening with the dramatic story of Johnson X Hinton’s beating and the provocative response led by Malcolm. It briefly covered Elijah Muhammad’s personal history and role within the sect, whose national membership it estimated at the absurdly low figure of five to six thousand, with another fifty thousand sympathizers. Haley and Balk emphasized that the Nation of Islam was never part of the larger Muslim world: “Muhammad himself has no known tie with orthodox Islam.” But the greatest discontinuity from the initial article was the coverage given to Malcolm, whom the authors moved to center stage, succinctly charting his fatherʹs terrifying death, the vices and crimes of Harlem’s Detroit Red—incorrectly placing his incarceration “at the age of 19”—and his ultimate salvation as an NOI zealot:
Articulate, single-minded, the fire of bitterness still burning in his soul, Malcolm X travels the country, organizing, encouraging, trouble-shooting . . . While Muhammad appears to be training his son Wallace to succeed him when he retires or dies, many Muslims feel that Malcolm is too powerful to be denied the leadership if he wants it.
By building up Malcolm’s role at Muhammad’s expense, and suggesting a possible internal conflict, “Black Merchants of Hate” fostered even greater jealousy and dissent within the NOIʹs ranks: exactly what the FBI had hoped for when it agreed to feed information to Balk. Still, the piece was so successful that Haley, who had begun conducting interviews for Playboy magazine, proposed Malcolm as his next subject, and the two men met over several days in the winter of 1963 at the NOIʹs restaurant in Harlem to generate material.
As Saviourʹs Day 1963 approached, Malcolm found himself increasingly at odds with Muhammad’s children and John Ali. Paranoid that the gravy train afforded them by the flow of tithe money to Chicago might be disrupted if Muhammad died, they had not been reassured by the tone of “Black Merchants of Hate.” By late 1962, the tales of their fatherʹs sexual adventures had reached New York City and the West Coast, further complicating matters and heightening their suspicions of Malcolm. For his part, Malcolm pretended that he knew nothing about the rumors, desperately hoping that somehow they would go away. In past years, he had traveled to Chicago a week or more in advance of Saviourʹs Day to prepare for the celebration, but now the antiharassment campaign in New York kept him mercifully busy. Meanwhile, NOI officials announced that the chronic illnesses of Elijah Muhammad had forced the patriarch to cancel his own appearances; Chicago headquarters reduced the program to one day, February 26, and placed Malcolm in charge. The absence of Muhammad and the shortened program reduced the turnout to three thousand NOI faithful, but the crowd still buzzed with whispers of impropriety. Muhammad’s illness surely made it ill-advised for him to fly up from Phoenix, but his decision to skip Saviourʹs Day was also partially motivated by a desire to discourage mosques from sending large delegations and to limit the discussions of swirling rumors. He also may have been reacting to the uninvited presence in Chicago of several unwed mothers of his illegitimate children. Writing later in his diary, Malcolm observed that Ola Hughes, the mother of Muhammad’s illegitimate two-year-old son, Kamal, was “telling everybody” and had a “very nasty attitude.”
At the convention, Muhammad’s family turned its embarrassment into angry tirades against Malcolm. Family members had sent notes demanding that Wallace Muhammad, recently released from prison, be permitted to address the assembly during Malcolm’s major Saviourʹs Day address. Yet Wallace, who had grown even more skeptical of his fatherʹs dogma while incarcerated, wanted no part of it, and he and Malcolm had agreed that Malcolm would find a way around the family’s demands. From the podium, Malcolm announced that, due to the program’s delayed start, there was no time left for Wallace to speak; but in a gesture of appreciation, he recognized Muhammad’s family members in the hall and solicited applause from the audience. It did little good: as FBI informants observed, “The family was especially resentful of [Malcolm’s] attempts to advise and tell the family what to do.”
Although there was pressing business at home, Malcolm remained in Chicago for several weeks, hoping to investigate for himself the rumors about Muhammad. The family thought that shortening the Saviourʹs Day program had solved the problem, but after Malcolm consulted with Wallace, who confirmed that the rumors were true, he knew that more needed to be done. In the next weeks, he met with three of Muhammad’s former secretaries, including Evelyn, and found they all had similar stories. Once their pregnancies had been discovered, they had been summoned before secret NOI courts and received sentences of isolation. Muhammad provided little or no financial support for his out-of-wedlock children.
The revelations should not have been a complete surprise to Malcolm, who first heard hints about Muhammad’s sexual misconduct in the mid-1950s. Yet for years, it had been impossible for Malcolm to imagine that the sect’s little lamb was using his exalted position to sexually molest his secretarial staff. Only when Malcolm confronted the women themselves did he see the truth—not just of the affairs, but of the way the Messenger had frequently talked him down to others. “From their own mouths I heard that Elijah Muhammad had told them I was the best, the greatest minister he ever had,” Malcolm recalled, “but that someday I would leave him, turn against him—so I was ‘dangerous.’ . . . While he was praising me to my face, he was tearing me apart behind my back.”
Hearing this broke Malcolm’s heart, but his greatest anguish was reserved for the violation of Evelyn, though she told him that she believed her pregnancy “to be prophetic” and reserved her hostility for the entourage surrounding the Messenger. Malcolm had known for years about Evelyn’s pregnancy and the birth of her daughter, but had simply assumed the father was a member of Mosque No. 2. Yet Evelyn was never far from his mind. At times, his unhappiness with Betty was so profound that he considered reestablishing his love affair with Evelyn. He even unburdened himself to Louis X, who sharply rebuked him, saying, “You are a married man!” Louis worried that Malcolm “would really hurt Betty.” Malcolm had agreed to back away from any involvement with Evelyn, at least for the time being. But now, with the realization that the father of Evelyn’s child was Muhammad, Malcolm must have felt a deep sense of betrayal. Two decades before, Malcolm had posed as a pimp, hustling prostitutes in Harlem. Now, unwittingly, he had been maneuvered into becoming Elijah Muhammad’s pimp, even bringing the woman he had loved to be violated.
Many NOI observers who did not know of Malcolm’s detective work interpreted his lingering presence in Chicago as a personal affront; to some it seemed he was merely indulging in media appearances. Spurred on by his angry children, Muhammad may have instructed Malcolm to return to New York City, which he did on March 10, canceling several scheduled appearances with the excuse that Betty had fallen and broken her leg. Arriving home, he mulled a course of action. He now sensed the outlines of the spiritual and moral journey that he knew lay ahead, but decided that he would try to find a way to remain inside the NOI if he could. He wrote to Muhammad requesting a meeting, and in early April flew to Phoenix to learn his future.