Between You and Me (12 page)

The Muslim who emerged from our documentary as the star of the movement (formally known as the Nation of Islam) was not its

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titular leader. Elijah Muhammad was a remote and rather shy man who, in his rare public appearances, did not come across as all that articulate and forceful. The man who did possess those qualities in great abundance was the movement’s most visible and vocal spokesman, Malcolm X, an ex-convict who had converted to the Nation of Islam while serving time for burglaries. Malcolm had a magnetic presence, and even though he railed against white America in a calm, even-tempered manner, the edge to his voice revealed the depth and passion of his beliefs. When he appeared on television and vowed that black separatism and other Muslim goals would be achieved “by any means necessary,” there was no mistaking the resolve and sense of menace in his message.

Since I was manifestly one of the “white devils,” neither Muhammad nor Malcolm would consent to be interviewed by me. Without Louis Lomax or another black reporter, we wouldn’t have gotten the story. In time, Malcolm became more accessible to the mainstream media, and I was one of the first white television reporters to interview him. Although he never confirmed this in so many words, I suspected that he had come to appreciate all the hoopla our broadcast had generated for him and the Muslims. I did a number of stories on Malcolm over the next few years, first at Channel 13 and later at CBS

News. He proved an excellent source of information and insights about the black community, and however hostile his feelings were toward white people in general, I always thought he played fair in his dealings with me. In fact, there gradually formed between us a mutual respect, even a kind of friendship, although I didn’t fully realize how mutual it was until I read in the autobiography he wrote with Alex Haley that he regarded me as one of the few white reporters he could trust.

As time passed, Malcolm toned down his harsh views to the

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point where he was no longer driven by a visceral hatred of white America. The decisive change in his outlook occurred during his 1964 pilgrimage to Mecca, where he worshipped side by side with devout Muslims who were white. When he came home from that journey, Malcolm renounced the racism that he had been preaching for the past several years, and I asked him about the dramatic shift in his attitude when I interviewed him on the CBS Morning News in the early summer of ’64.

W A L L A C E : Then the white man is no longer the devil and evil?

M A L C O L M X : The Holy Koran teaches us to judge a man by his conscious behavior, by his intentions. So I judge a man by his conscious behavior. I am not a racist. I don’t subscribe to any of the tenets of racism.

W A L L A C E : And so you feel that there are good whites and good blacks and bad whites and bad blacks?

M A L C O L M X : It’s not a case of being good or bad blacks and whites. It’s a case of being good or bad human beings.

Even before his epiphany in Mecca, Malcolm had experienced a sharp rift in his relationship with Elijah Muhammad. The split was attributed largely to the resentment Muhammad and some of his top deputies felt about all the prominence Malcolm enjoyed in the media. He was widely viewed as the chief spokesman for the movement, and that did not sit well with other Muslim leaders. By March 1964

the discord had become so severe that Malcolm broke away from the Nation of Islam and, later that year, formed a rival group called the Organization of Afro-American Unity.

But the rupture in the relationship between the two Muslim leaders had to do with a lot more than jealousy, as I learned when

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I talked to Malcolm in June 1964. He had come to my office to discuss the interview I had in mind for the Morning News, and when I asked him about Muhammad, he suddenly glowered and said, “Mike, he is not the man he’s cracked up to be. His morals aren’t what he would have you believe. This man Muhammad who paints himself as an ascetic, who paints himself as a holy prophet of God, is a lecher. I’m telling you, this man Muhammad is a lecher!”

“Oh, Malcolm, come on,” I replied. “Be serious.”

“I am serious. I can tell you that he takes girls as secretaries, girls within the movement, and gets them pregnant, and then farms them and their children out. Elijah Muhammad is the father of several children by several different teenage girls.”

Needless to say, I found that hard to believe; yet even before I had a chance to ask if he had any proof to back up his allegation, he volunteered to telephone one of the girls Muhammad had impreg-nated and let me listen in on their conversation. The call was made, and I heard the young woman confirm Malcolm’s story. He also agreed to disclose what he knew when I talked to him on-camera.

Suddenly, the interview I’d been planning now promised to have a lot more relevance than the change in Malcolm’s attitude toward white folks. When we did the interview and I asked him about his former leader’s lechery, he did not hesitate to repeat and elaborate on what he had told me in the privacy of my office.

M A L C O L M X : He made six sisters pregnant. They all had children. Two of those six had two children. One of those two is having a child right now. I am told that there is a seventh sister who is supposed to be in Mexico right now, and she’s supposed to be having a child by him.

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W A L L A C E : Do you feel perhaps that you should now take over the leadership of the Black Muslims?

M A L C O L M X : No. I have no desire to take over the leadership of the Black Muslims, and I have never had that desire. . . .

W A L L A C E : Are you not perhaps afraid of what might happen to you as a result of making these revelations?

M A L C O L M X : Oh, yes. I probably am a dead man already.

He made that observation in such a calm, matter-of-fact tone that I assumed he was merely being metaphorical. But in retrospect, I’m convinced that he knew then what fate had in store for him. In February 1965—about eight months after our interview—Malcolm X

was shot and killed while addressing a meeting of his followers at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights. His three assailants were later identified as Black Muslims. Like Martin Luther King, Jr., he was gunned down in his prime; it is a morbid coincidence that both of these charismatic black leaders were assassinated at the age of thirty-nine. The bitter irony, of course, is that unlike King, who was slain by a white man, Malcolm was murdered by members of his own race and adherents of the faith he had done so much to propagate.

Posterity has been kind to Malcolm, who went on to acquire more stature in the years since his death than he ever enjoyed during his lifetime. One of the more ambitious homages to him was Spike Lee’s feature film Malcolm X, which starred Denzel Washington.

When that movie was released in 1992, I did a retrospective piece on Malcolm for 60 Minutes. Among the people I interviewed was Alex Haley, the author of Roots and the coauthor of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Haley had also engaged in extensive conversations with Martin Luther King, Jr., so I asked him how the two leaders viewed each other.

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H A L E Y : I didn’t know Dr. King as well as I knew Malcolm by any means, but I did do a rather lengthy Playboy interview of Dr. King. He would sort of hedge around awhile, and it might be forty-five minutes before he would say, in his very casual sort of southern way, “Well, what’s brother Malcolm saying about me these days?” And then I would go back to New York.

Malcolm, unlike Dr. King, the first thing out of his mouth was

“What did he say about me?” It was so interesting.

W A L L A C E : Were they jealous of each other?

H A L E Y : I wouldn’t say jealous, because I think both had a very distinct sense that they were both working toward the same objective, but different paths.

W A L L A C E : Opposite sides of the same coin.

H A L E Y : Yes, exactly.

Toward the end of that 1992 story, I said that “today his message touches young blacks in ways that even Martin Luther King’s message never touched,” and when I interviewed Spike Lee, I asked him why more recent black leaders had failed to measure up to the standards set by Malcolm.

“Well,” he replied, “I don’t want to name names. But the black masses do not feel like these other guys are doing what needs to be don e. . . . But Malcolm speaks to them.”

Taking that as our cue, we concluded the piece with an excerpt from a speech Malcolm gave when he was at the height of his combative power:

“We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.”

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L o u i s F a r r a k h a n

O N E O F T H E M A N Y B L A C K Americans who answered the evangelical call to join the Nation of Islam was a young calypso singer from Bostonwho billed himself as “The Charmer.” By all accounts, he had talent as well as charm, and in later years he would sometimes claim that if he had pursued a musical career, he might have become another Harry Belafonte. He was formally known in those days as Louis Eugene Walcott, but that lasted only until 1955, when, at the age of twenty-two, he became a Black Muslim and changed his name to Louis X. The minister who guided and nurtured his con-versionto the Nationof Islam was Malcolm X, and Louis X soonbe-came on

e of his most devoted acolytes. In1956, onMalcolm’s recommendation, he was appointed minister of the Muslim mosque in Boston, and not long after that, he adopted yet another name—

Louis Farrakhan.

He continued to revere Malcolm as his mentor and role model until 1964, the year Malcolm broke away from the Nation of Islam.

In that internal dispute, Farrakhan chose to pledge his allegiance to the movement’s leader, Elijah Muhammad, and as a reward for his loyalty, he was appointed minister of the New York mosque shortly after Malcolm was killed in 1965. From that power base, he steadily strengthened his position within the Black Muslims, and after Muhammad died, Farrakhan took over the leadership of the Nation of Islam in 1978.

Throughout his public ministry, Farrakhan did his best to present himself as another Malcolm X. There’s no denying that his inflammatory attacks on white Americans were reminiscent of his mentor’s

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menacing diatribes during the years when he was preaching racial hatred. But try as he might, Farrakhan could never get out from under the long shadow cast by Malcolm’s life, or the far more sinister shadow of his death. For years, even decades, after Malcolm was slain, Farrakhan was suspected of having been the chief instigator of the assassination.

Malcolm’s widow, Betty Shabazz, went to her grave believing in Farrakhan’s guilt, and that belief was shared by her four children, starting with her eldest daughter, Attallah, who, as a six-year-old child, had witnessed the murder of her father at the Audubon Ballroom.

Inthe spring of 2000, I was able to persuade Attallah Shabazz and Louis Farrakhanto appear together on-camera and talk about the assassination. My interview with them formed the core of a 60 Minutes story we called “Who Killed Malcolm X?” At one point I reminded Far-rakhanabout anincendiary editorial he’d writtenfor the Nationof Islam’s newspaper a few months after Malcolm’s split with the Muslims and his public revelations about Muhammad’s sexual transgressions.

W A L L A C E : Let me read what you wrote in December of 1964:

“The die is set and Malcolm shall not escape, especially after such evil, foolish talk about his benefactor, Elijah Muhammad, in trying to rob him of the divine glory which Allah has bestowed upon him. Such a man as Malcolm is worthy of death.” This was only two months before he was shot down.

That is why people believe that you were responsible for the death of Malcolm X.

F A R R A K H A N : No, not at all. My name was not among those at that time who were considered the players.

According to Attallah Shabazz, those “players” were known to her father, for he had told his family and a few close friends that he had

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obtained the names of the Nation of Islam members who had been assigned to kill him.

W A L L A C E : Did your father not have a list of the people?

S H A B A Z Z : Oh, my father knew everybody personally.

W A L L A C E : The people who were out to kill him?

S H A B A Z Z : The list was longer than those who actually pulled the trigger.

Farrakhan did not go so far as to confess that he had been directly involved in the plot to kill Malcolm X, but toward the end of the tense and often wrenching encounter, he did admit to a certain culpability.

F A R R A K H A N : May I, Miss Shabazz, say . . . I wish that Malcolm X were alive today and not dead. Yes, it is true that black men pulled the trigger. We cannot deny any responsibility in this. Where we are responsible, where our hands are a part of this, we beg God’s mercy and forgiveness.

W A L L A C E : What did you expect to come out of this conversation? What did you hope would come?

F A R R A K H A N : I genuinely hope that perhaps a healing can come to Miss Shabazz and her family. As I may have been complicit in words that I spoke leading up to February twenty-first [the date of Malcolm’s murder], I acknowledge that, and regret that any word that I have said caused the loss of life of a human being.

When I asked for Shabazz’s reaction to the meeting, she said,