Malcolm X (17 page)

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:

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 cobbler's 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.