Malcolm X (35 page)

Throughout the speech he hammered home the thesis of Frazier's
Black Bourgeoisie
—that the privileged African-American middle class had not played the leadership role it should assume to advance the black masses. At the center of Malcolm’s attack was his relentless criticism of “so-called Negro leaders. . . . The black man in America will never be equal to the white man as long as he attempts to force himself into his house.” Malcolm suggested that the entire philosophy of racial integration was doomed to failure, because the great majority of whites would never acquiesce to racial assimilation. As a result, a fraudulent black leadership had developed that did not effectively advocate the interests and concerns of African Americans. “The anemic Negro leader,” Malcolm sneered, “who survives and thrives off of gifts from white people, is dependent upon the white man whom he gives false information about the masses of black people.” Frequently employing humor in his presentation, Malcolm praised Elijah Muhammad’s method of isolating “ourselves from the white man long enough to analyze this great hypocrisy and begin to think black, and now we speak black.” He urged students not to seek the white man’s “love,” but rather to “demand his respect.”

It was not in Rustin’s character to abandon a fight, and he vigorously challenged Malcolm. At one point, a
Chicago Defender
reporter noted that Rustin “received loud cheers,” when he said to Malcolm, “you say America constituted is a sinking ship, and Negroes should abandon this ship, for another called ‘Separation’ or another state. If this ship sinks,” Rustin asked, “what possible chance do you think your ‘separate’ state would have?” But in front of a youthful black audience, Rustin’s warnings seemed tired and stale. As the reporter observed, it was Malcolm who effectively drew upon “reference(s) to history and his many sharp criticisms of current practices won over the majority of students.”

One other aspect of Malcolm’s address that was especially effective in appealing to civil rights organizers and leftists was proletarian appeal. He claimed that Muhammad and the Nation represented blacks who were unemployed, impoverished, and angry. The majority of urban blacks were confined to the ghetto, where they were subjected to police brutality; indeed, law enforcement authorities functioned like an occupying army under colonial conditions. In effect, Malcolm was using the analogy of postcolonial Africa to define the political conflict between black leaders in the United States. Although Frantz Fanon’s writings would not be known or translated in the United States until the late 1960s, Malcolm’s analysis anticipated Fanon’s famous “Wretched of the Earth” thesis. By the end of the great debate, despite the older man’s point-scoring, however, it was Malcolm who was largely setting the agenda now, capturing the militancy of most college students, black and white. As one bewildered faculty member at the debate admitted, “Howard will never be the same. I feel a reluctance to face my class tomorrow.”

Malcolm’s oratory brought him not just to the heights of esteemed black institutions, but to landmark locales in the upper-crust white world as well. On March 24 of the following year, he was invited to debate the black attorney Walter C. Carrington at the Harvard Law School Forum. The excitement generated by Malcolm’s appearance was so intense that at the last minute the venue was changed from Lowell Hall to Sanders Theatre, Harvard’s largest auditorium. There, on the stage that had hosted American presidents and foreign heads of state, Malcolm presented the NOI program to a record-breaking crowd. “Allah is now giving America every chance to repent and change before He destroys this wicked Caucasian world,” he declared. He went on to argue that desegregated public facilities and integrated schools were not enough. America’s twenty million blacks “number a nation in their own right.” For that nation to be successful, blacks “must have some land of our own.” Louis X, who had come out for the debate from the Boston mosque, recalled Malcolm’s powerful presence onstage. The white audience at Harvard, he remembered, was enamored with this black man who could handle their questions with ease. If Malcolm’s abrupt shift from political and international themes to jeremiads about the coming destruction of white civilization seemed jarring, this hodgepodge construction was not of his design; Elijah Muhammad, ever vigilant about Malcolm’s growing platform, would often dictate parts of his speeches; the Harvard debate was probably no exception. Chicago headquarters also insisted that Malcolm’s lectures be audio-recorded, with copies forwarded to them, so that both Muhammad and John Ali could monitor the addresses.

Through the spring of 1961, Malcolm’s campus speaking engagements took him far and wide, rarely failing to generate controversy or to prompt blistering debates about free speech. In California, for instance, students at UC Berkeley were scheduled to hear Malcolm, but the university administration banned the lecture, which had to be relocated to the local YMCA. On April 19, Malcolm was back in the Ivy League, at Yale, to debate Louis Lomax, and four days later he appeared on the NBC television program
Open Mind
as part of a panel that included the conservative George Schuyler and the writer James Baldwin. When host Eric Goldman introduced Malcolm as the NOI's “number two man,” at the first opportunity Malcolm denied that such a position existed. More important, the show’s taping marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship between Malcolm and Baldwin.

Although most of Malcolm’s public lectures were now aimed at university audiences, he also tried to establish an interfaith dialogue between the Nation and African-American Christians. As the Nation continued to deny the necessity of politics, it became even more important to establish its legitimacy within the black community as a real religious organization; acknowledgment by important Christian groups brought it closer to that goal. To this end, Malcolm organized events that brought groups of Muslims to a black church, where he would deliver a sermon focused on the connections between Christianity and Islam. Probably the first of these occurred on June 16, 1961, at Elder Solomon Lightfoot Michaux’s New York Church of God. In his sermon, Malcolm exuded praise “to Allah for putting into Elder Michaux’s heart to invite those of us who are Muslims here this evening to explain what the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is teaching.” He explained that the NOI did not believe in politics, because no “president that has ever sat in the White House” has ever kept his promises to black people. Instead, he advised, we must “turn toward the God of our forefathers,” by emulating what “Moses taught his people to do in the house of bondage four thousand years ago.” If these interfaith gestures brought new respect to the Nation from outsiders, Malcolm’s internal speeches often undermined their sincerity. Speaking on July 14, only four weeks after his eloquent appeal at Elder Michaux’s Church of God, he bluntly told followers at the mosque that “Christianity is evil and also America is evil.” And he continued to characterize as “Uncle Toms” the mainstream civil rights leaders and integrationists, many of whom professed a deep Christian faith.

Increasingly, Malcolm had to address a growing variety of competing issues and demands: problems within the NOI, street demonstrations, debates with civil rights leaders and organizations. But he continued to balance these new obligations with his commitment to building Mosque No. 7. He still set aside a significant share of time for the Nation, even if his extensive travels in the early sixties left relatively little room for his mosque. His first sermon there after his January 1961 meeting with the Ku Klux Klan had been on February 6, when he melodramatically asserted that if a white man should hit a Muslim in the South, it could very well be “the start of a holy war.” But the next controversy involving the NOI did not begin in Dixie, but rather on Manhattan’s east side.

In the early dawn of independence in postcolonial Africa, Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba came to be recognized as a symbol for postcolonial African aspirations. He would not be beholden to colonial Western powers or the United States. On January 17, 1961, he was murdered by Belgian mercenaries in Congo’s Katanga province. The delayed news of Lumumba’s death was finally announced on February 13, leading to militant demonstrations throughout the world. The Soviets blamed UN troops stationed in the Congo for failing to protect Lumumba, and demanded secretary Dag Hammarskjöld’s firing. On February 15 a coalition of widely divergent groups put up several long picket lines blocking the entrance to the UN building in New York. One organization taking part, the Cultural Association for Women of African Heritage, included an individual who would later influence Malcolm’s life: the writer Maya Angelou, the association’s director. As the crowd grew, scuffles broke out between demonstrators and security guards. In the ensuing mêlée, forty-one people were injured, including eighteen UN personnel. Reporters and press photographers claimed they had been attacked by rioters with brass knuckles and knives. United States diplomats accused the demonstrators of being “Communist-inspired, linked [to] mob violence against Belgian embassies in Moscow, Cairo and Warsaw over the death” of Lumumba. New York police commissioner Stephen P. Kennedy blamed the rioting on the “Muslim Brotherhood, a fanatic Negro national cult, which is one of the most dangerous gangs in the city.” Somehow the police along with the U.S. ambassador to the UN, Adlai Stevenson, believed that the Muslim Brotherhood “gang” was affiliated with the NOI and Malcolm X. “It wasn’t us,” Malcolm responded bluntly. “We don’t involve ourselves in any politics, whether local, national, or international.” But Malcolm could not resist expressing Pan-Africanist solidarity with the protesters: “I refuse to condemn the demonstrations . . . because I am not Moise Tshombe, and will permit no one to use me against the nationalists.”

Several days after the UN riot, Maya Angelou and an associate contacted the NOI to arrange a meeting with Malcolm. The two went uptown to the NOI restaurant and met the minister in a rear room. “His aura was too bright and his masculine force affected me physically,” Angelou recalled years later. ʺA hot desert storm eddied around him and rushed to me, making my skin contract, and my pores slam shut. . . . His hair was the color of burning embers and his eyes pierced.” As representatives of the Cultural Association of Women of African Heritage, the women explained, they had been involved in the UN demonstration, but had not anticipated thousands of protesters turning out. Malcolm responded that the Muslims had not been involved in the protest. “You were wrong in your direction,” Malcolm said, chastising his guests. United Nations demonstrations “and carrying placards will not win freedom for anyone, nor will it keep the white devils from killing another African leader.” Angelou had anticipated receiving Malcolm’s endorsement of the protest and tried hard not to display her disappointment. But then, surprisingly, Malcolm’s voice softened, she remembered, “and for a time the Islamic preacher disappeared.” Malcolm warned the women that conservative African-American leaders would be used by the white power structure to denounce them as “dangerous and probably communists.” He promised that he would make a statement to the press describing the demonstration as “symbolic of the anger in this country.” Although Angelou left feeling the “fog of defeat,” her encounter with Malcolm struck her to the core. She would eagerly renew her acquaintance with him several years later, after she had moved to Ghana.

Throughout mid-1961, Malcolm would devote more time to his pastoral duties in Mosque No. 7. Lecturing there on July 9, for instance, he explained the Nation’s official interpretation of what would unfold during the final days. “In the next war, the War of Armageddon,” he predicted, “it will be a race war and will not be a 'spooky war.’ ” Using a blackboard, he explained why the ideals of freedom, justice, and equality were impossible to achieve under the “American flag.”

He was also actively involved with many of the business-related aspects of the NOI. For instance, Elijah Muhammad wrote Malcolm in March asking whether C. Eric Lincoln’s book
The Black Muslims in America
should be carried by the Nation despite its criticism of the sect. The book’s publisher had agreed to sell five thousand copies at “a very good commission to the Muslims.” But Elijah also stressed in his letter, ʺTHIS IS NOT TO BE MENTIONED IN PUBLIC.ʺ Astutely, he realized that the deal was good business if not good publicity. Apparently the sale agreement went ahead and the NOI duly sold discounted copies of the book.

On August 11, Malcolm unexpectedly received a telegram from labor leader A. Philip Randolph: “I am appointing you to the Ad Hoc Working Committee of Unity for Action. First meeting scheduled for 3 p.m., Monday, August fourteenth, 217 West 125th Street.” Nothing in Randolph’s communication indicated what the committee’s agenda might be, or who else had been invited.

At the time, Randolph was a lion of the civil rights effort and, even at age seventy-two, had lost little of his enthusiasm for leading the charge; he remained the most powerful black labor leader in the United States. Still based in Harlem, he had seen the fight shift in recent years from demanding more black jobs at businesses on 125th Street to seeking full representation for blacks within the political system. Such an effort required a united front from Harlem’s black community, and Randolph knew that Malcolm represented an increasingly significant constituency. But his admiration for Malcolm likely had an ideological component. Almost fifty years before, Randolph had introduced newcomer Marcus Garvey to a Harlem audience, and though he never endorsed black nationalism, he maintained throughout his career a sense of admiration for its fundamental embrace of black pride and self-respect. Randolph was old enough to take the historical long view, and he saw Malcolm as a legitimate voice in the militant tradition of Garvey and Martin R. Delaney.

The respect was mutual; Malcolm put aside his reservations and attended the meeting. The goal of the committee, he learned, was to establish a broad coalition—from black nationalists to moderate integrationists—to address social and political problems in Harlem. To join officially, Malcolm realized, meant to go beyond the limited venture he had made into politics up to that time. Though he was interested, he knew he would have to justify his participation to the Nation.