Malcolm X (34 page)

These expressions of affection probably were insufficient to reassure Betty about his love. She had come to resent the fact that for Malcolm, the work of the Nation always came first—the letter had even included a request for Betty to iron out details about the possibility of an NOI show at Carnegie Hall. With little in the way of an emotional connection to build from, inviting his spouse to share in his duties for the NOI may have been his way of trying to bridge the distance between them.

If the great difficulties Malcolm encountered with Betty ever led him to wonder whether he’d made the right choice of partners, he must have been surprised to learn, sometime in late 1959, that Evelyn Williams, the woman he had turned away, was pregnant. Unmarried, she had been working for only a short time in the secretarial pool at the Nation’s Chicago headquarters, and her scandalous condition brought upon her the full weight of the NOI's draconian policy of punishment and scorn. Yet what no one including Malcolm knew, and would not know until 1963, was that the unborn child’s father was none other than the Messenger himself, Elijah Muhammad.

With his network of informants throughout the NOI, Muhammad was well aware of the troubles between Malcolm and Betty, and he certainly knew of the romantic feelings Evelyn still harbored toward Malcolm. And yet he selfishly chose to have her anyway. His decision, however, set off a chain reaction that quickly tested the limits of his control. Evelyn became pregnant in the middle of 1959, and by October she began phoning Muhammad at his home, demanding money. She strongly implied that she would cause trouble for him if it was revealed that she was carrying his child. Muhammad was outraged, convinced that he was being blackmailed. “You must think I’m a fool or Santa Claus,” he told her. After another telephone conversation with Evelyn, Muhammad turned to a minister who had heard the exchange and said coldly, “It looks like she will have to be put down.” In an organization where members were routinely beaten for transgressions as innocuous as smoking a cigarette, this statement could not be simply dismissed as tough talk. But Muhammad did nothing to harm Evelyn, and she gave birth to their daughter, Eva Marie, at St. Francis Hospital, in Lynwood, California, on March 30, 1960.

It would be easy to ascribe Muhammad’s trysts with Evelyn to some secret jealousy he felt over Malcolm’s growing media profile, but Evelyn’s case was not unique. Three months before her child was born, another unmarried NOI secretary, Lucille X Rosary, also gave birth to a child; two more children were born to NOI secretaries that year, in April and December. All were the progeny of Elijah Muhammad, who had taken advantage of the weeklong Chicago MGT tutorials—such as the one Betty had attended—to select attractive and talented young women for service in the national headquarters’ secretarial staff. Once they arrived, it took little for him to get what he wanted from them.

On the surface, Muhammad was not an impressive-looking man. He was short, mostly bald, homely, and his thin body had been crippled by severe bronchitis. But these external features obscured the attractive power that he exercised over his followers. They were convinced that he had actually spoken to God, and that his mission on earth was to redeem the black race. Muhammad radiated power and authority. When he demanded sex from a woman in his organization, it was inconceivable to him that his overtures would be rejected, or even questioned. The fact that his actions directly violated his own sect’s rules regarding sexual transgressions and morality were irrelevant to him.

For a time Muhammad’s long-suffering wife, Clara, pretended that she was unaware of her husband’s lascivious behavior, talking only to her daughter, Ethel Sharrieff, and other female confidantes. She complained bitterly to Ethel, for instance, when she discovered a love letter from one of his mistresses. When she refused to turn it over to him, he angrily stopped speaking to her. Clara Muhammad told her daughter, “I don’t know what he thinks my heart is, flesh and bone or a piece of wood or what.” Leading up to the February 1960 Saviour's Day, Clara became overwhelmed by news of additional relations concerning her husband. On February 13, 1960, after a shrill argument, Elijah abruptly abandoned his home. Tearfully, Clara complained to Ethel, “I’m sick of being treated like a dog.”

Thanks to its wiretaps and informants, the FBI was fully apprised of Muhammad’s infidelities. Having been frustrated in their attempts to find Malcolm’s weaknesses, Bureau officials now considered ways to turn Muhammad’s actions to their advantage. On May 22, 1960, FBI assistant director Cartha De Loach approved the text of a fictive anonymous letter to be sent to Clara Muhammad and several NOI ministers. The letter provocatively charged that “there appears to be a tremendous occupational hazard in being a young unmarried secretary employed in the household of Elijah Muhammad.” He had “preached against extramarital relationships but he doesn’t seem to be able to keep things under control in his own household.” To ensure greater privacy with his mistresses when in Chicago, Muhammad rented a love-nest apartment on South Vernon Avenue, but the Bureau kept one step ahead of him: its Chicago field office contacted the director, who gave approval for telephone taps and electronic bugging devices in the apartment. The Chicago field agent explained, “Muhammad, feeling he is secure in his ‘hideaway,’ may converse more freely with high officials of the NOI and his personal contacts. Through this it is hoped to obtain policy and future plans of Muhammad.”

By 1961, Muhammad had purchased a second, luxurious home at 2118 East Violet Drive in sunny Phoenix; NOI members were informed that due to the deterioration of Muhammad’s health from severe bronchitis, it was beneficial for him to spend most of the year in the arid southwest. The family home in Chicago, however, was retained. The new property also afforded Muhammad yet another layer of privacy for his sexual adventures. By early October the FBI counted at least five different NOI women who were regularly having sexual intercourse with Muhammad, two of whom were sisters. Like a young gigolo, Elijah tried to play one woman against the others as they competed for his affections.

Soon there were so many illegitimate children to take care of that new household arrangements were necessary. In October 1961, Muhammad telephoned Evelyn Williams in Chicago and asked her if she would be willing to raise and supervise his illegitimate children in a large home located on the West Coast. He approached with flattery, telling her that he needed to have his “Sweet and Honey come and stay with me for two or three months . . . or years.” Faced with financial burdens and a child, Evelyn agreed, but it didn’t take long for the new arrangement to sour. In July 1962, she phoned Muhammad demanding more money, and accused him of treating his illegitimate children like “stray dogs.” “You don’t allow your other children to live on $300 a month,” she argued. “All I want is money to pay the rent and to get some food and clothing.”

Muhammad once again complained of blackmail. “I won’t speak to you,” he told her, “or give you one red cent!” Stymied, Evelyn and Lucille Rosary took their children to Muhammad’s Phoenix home, and when no one answered the front door, they left the children at the entrance. Raymond Sharrieff eventually came to the front door and called out to the women to take their children back. Evelyn and Lucille refused, and left. Sharrieff went back inside and called the police, reporting that several small children had been abandoned on their doorstep. The children were subsequently turned over to social workers for investigation. The next day, Muhammad called Evelyn in a fury, but she refused to back down. “From now on, I’m not going to protect you in any way, shape or form,” she warned him. “If you want trouble, you’ll get it.” She told Muhammad that calling the police on his own children was “the dirtiest thing you could do.” Yet whether out of fear, love, or a lingering sense of loyalty, when police interrogated Evelyn about the father of her child, she would not divulge his name. Both Lucille and Evelyn were placed on notice for “child neglect,” but neither was formally charged. These emotional and legal conflicts could not be entirely suppressed or contained by national secretary John Ali, Raymond Sharrieff, or other Chicago officials. By mid-1962 rumors of Muhammad’s messy sex life were circulating widely in Chicago. Malcolm undoubtedly heard these rumors but continued to refuse to examine whether they were true and never imagined that Evelyn was involved.

Before leaving Atlanta during his travel to the South in January and February 1961, Malcolm attended an hourlong lecture delivered by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., at Atlanta University on January 17. At the time, Schlesinger was also a prominent adviser to president-elect John F. Kennedy. Schlesinger's talk, “America’s Domestic Future, Its Perils and Prospects,” was given before a standing-room-only audience and included a passing reference to the Nation of Islam: “Nothing can obstruct . . . recognition of the brotherhood of the human community more than the racist doctrines preached by the White Citizens Councils, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Black Muslims.” Schlesinger praised Thurgood Marshall and Roy Wilkins for advancing “effective ways to [achieve] equality through the courts,” and applauded Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for promoting nonviolence as “the best way to attack prejudice.” After the talk, Schlesinger moved to the much smaller Dean Sage Auditorium on the Clark College campus to field questions; Malcolm was waiting.

Identifying himself only as “a Muslim,” he demanded to know on “what do you base your charge that the Black Muslims are racists and black supremacists?ʺ Schlesinger cited a recent article by the black journalist William Worthy. “But, sir, how can a man of your intelligence, a professor of history, who knows the value of thorough research, come here from Harvard and attack the Black Muslims, basing your conclusions on one small article?” Schlesinger asked if Malcolm had read Worthy’s article. Malcolm acknowledged that he had read it but noted that the article, which had quoted Schlesinger, did not attack the NOI as racist, but instead had focused on the negative conditions all blacks endured that had produced the Nation. The mostly black audience favored Malcolm’s arguments, but Schlesinger still insisted that the white racists and the “Black Muslims are two sides of the same coin.” He had no way of knowing how right he was, given Malcolm’s upcoming détente with the Klan. The black press, however, judged the confrontation between the Kennedy adviser and the NOI minister as a clear-cut victory for Malcolm. The
Pittsburgh Courier
declared that “the fiery Mr. X victoriously crossed swords” with Schlesinger, forcing the Harvard historian “into a 'diplomatic withdrawal’ of his earlier statement.” The February 4, 1961, issue of the
New Jersey Herald
also covered the debate with the headline “Muslims Give the JFK Man a Fit.” The informal debate with Schlesinger reinforced Malcolm’s belief that the Nation had to confront its critics. And there was no better venue for such confrontations than American universities.

During the next five months, he planned appearances at a series of colleges. Within the Nation, he explained that his purpose was to present the views of Elijah Muhammad and to challenge distortions about their religion. In fact, his objectives were to turn upside down the standard racial dialectic of black subordination and white supremacy, and to show off his rhetorical skill at the expense of white authorities and Negro integrationists. He had become convinced that the Nation’s elders were making a big mistake in shying away from public confrontations. The NOI’s survival depended on its ability to answer its critics, to divide white opinion about the group, and to win over converts.

Nowhere in the academic world was Malcolm’s and the NOI's divisiveness within the black community more prominently on display than at Howard University, the historically black college in Washington, D.C. The Howard campus chapter of the NAACP invited Malcolm to speak on February 14, 1961, as part of Negro History Week, a tradition established by the historian Carter G. Woodson and which would later be expanded into Black History Month. Though the national organization still found Malcolm too hot to touch, his growing reputation as a militant appealed to the NAACP's younger members, who increasingly sought him out for debates and speeches despite the reticence of the old guard. The invitation by Howard students rattled the school’s administrators, almost all of whom were staunch integrationists and who could little afford to have the university’s federal funding threatened by appearing to embrace the Nation of Islam’s most prominent spokesman. When the student group failed to clear approval with the student activities office, the lecture had to be canceled. Undaunted, the NAACP chapter then secured the use of New Bethel Baptist Church, but—probably under pressure from the university—it too decided to cancel, using the excuse that the sanctuary was too small to accommodate the anticipated audience. Writing to Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm explained that the whole affair was fortunate: “We really threw a 'stone of stumbling’ onto the Howard University campus because they are all divided and arguing now, and it places us in an even better position to pour ‘boiling water’ on them when we get there.”

It was not until October 30, 1961, that Malcolm finally appeared at Howard, thanks largely to the efforts of E. Franklin Frazier. The author of
Black Bourgeoisie
, Frazier had been associated with Howard since 1934. A leftist during his early years, he had long been critical of the black middle class’s lack of social responsibility toward the black poor. He convinced the school administration to sanction Malcolm’s appearance, but as a concession the format would now be a debate, to ensure the presentation of a counterpoint to Malcolm’s opinions. To provide the opposing view, the school secured an appearance by the man who had frustrated and outmaneuvered Malcolm in the radio debate just a year earlier, Bayard Rustin.

The Howard debate would enter history as an important moment for both Bayard Rustin and Malcolm X. That evening, fifteen hundred people packed Howard’s brand-new Cramton Auditorium, and five hundred more crowded the building’s entrance in hopes of getting in. Malcolm had not forgotten the drubbing he had taken from Rustin during their first encounter, and he carefully worked on what he would say. Unlike the first debate, which had taken place in the isolation of a radio station studio, this appearance would give Malcolm the advantage of addressing a large black crowd and allow him to draw on his tremendous strength as a public speaker. He went for the rafters from his opening statement, telling the audience members that he stood before them not as a partisan of any major political party, or by religion or nationality: Malcolm announced that his only credential for speaking the truth was his identity as
ʺA BLACK MAN!
ʺ