Malcolm X (38 page)

An opportunity soon arose to test Muhammad’s boundaries. On March 7, Cornell University invited Malcolm and CORE executive director James Farmer to debate the theme “Segregation or Integration?” During the previous year, Farmer's Freedom Riders had grabbed national headlines with their challenges to segregated bus systems in the South, and the promise of real gains to be made through concerted activism gave him a strong chip to play against Malcolm. In his opening remarks, Malcolm emphasized that black Americans were part of the “non-white world.” And just as “our African and Asian brothers wanted to have their own land, wanted to have their own country, wanted to exercise control over themselves,” it was reasonable for black Americans to desire the same. “It is not integration that Negroes in America want, it is human dignity.” Once more, he attacked integration as a scheme benefiting only the black bourgeoisie:

But Farmer, like Rustin, was not intimidated, aggressively going after the conservatism and weaknesses in the NOI's program. “We are seeking an open society . . . where people will be accepted for what they are worth, will be able to contribute fully to the total culture and the total life of the nation,” he declared. Racism was America’s greatest problem. Turning to Malcolm, he asked, “We know the disease, physician, what is your cure? What is your program and how do you hope to bring it into effect?” Malcolm had been long on rhetoric but short on details. “We need to have it spelled out,” Farmer pressed him. “Is it a separate Negro society in each city? As a Harlem [or] a South Side Chicago?” He also effectively countered Malcolm’s claim that only the black middle class favored integration by pointing out that the majority of student Freedom Riders were from working-class and low-income families. In fact, Farmer argued, the opposite was true: black entrepreneurial capitalists favored Jim Crow, because it created a self-segregated black consumer market without white competition; it was usually the black middle class that opposed desegregation. Malcolm sensed that he was losing the debate and, to score points, resorted to mentioning that Farmer was married to a white woman.

Unlike the NAACP representatives that Malcolm had previously debated, Farmer was able to explain the tactics of the Black Freedom Movement in clear, everyday terms. To Malcolm’s claim that desegregated lunch counters were unimportant, for instance, he had a sensible response: “Are we not to travel? Picket lines and boycotts brought Woolworth’s to its knees.” CORE's Freedom Riders had “helped to create desegregation in cities throughout the South.” What Malcolm undoubtedly grasped that night was that CORE's approach to desegregation was fundamentally different from that of the older civil rights establishment, which relied on litigation and legislation. CORE was actively committed to building mass protests in the streets—in Farmer’s words, “The picketing and the nationwide demonstrations are the reason that the walls came down in the South, because people were in motion with their own bodies marching with picket signs, sitting in, boycotting, withholding their patronage.” Ironically, the net result of the Farmer-Malcolm debate, which was widely discussed among movement activists, was to give greater legitimacy to the Black Muslim leader. Even integrationists who sharply rejected black nationalism found Malcolm’s argument persuasive. Within two years, entire branch organizations of CORE, especially in Cleveland, Detroit, Brooklyn, and Harlem, would become oriented toward Malcolm X.

Perhaps Malcolm’s most important public address during the first half of 1962 was at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, where Congressman Powell had invited him as part of a lecture series on the theme “Which Way the Negro?” Abyssinian church administrators informed the press that the overwhelming response they had received was larger “than all the previous Harlem ‘leaders’ combined.” To an audience of two thousand, Malcolm repeated his thesis. “We don’t think it is within the nature of the white man to change in his attitude toward the black man,” he argued, while also responding to charges that, although the NOI talked a militant line, it didn’t involve itself in the black community’s politics. “Just because a man doesn’t throw a punch doesn’t mean he can’t do so whenever he gets ready, so don’t play the Muslims and the [black] nationalists cheap.” Wisely, he praised Powell as a model of independent leadership. “Adam Clayton Powell is the only black politician who has been able to come off the white man’s political plantation, buck against the white political machine downtown, and still hold his seat in Congress.” Malcolm’s comments set the stage for what would become a much closer partnership between the two men in the year to come.

Still, the divergence between his own views and those at the core of the NOI continued to trouble him, and he increasingly solicited the advice of those he trusted, though at times he found this circumstantially difficult. In Boston, a natural confidant would have been Louis X. However, throughout most of 1962, Louis was preoccupied with his fierce power struggle with Clarence 2X Gill over demands for selling bulk copies of
Muhammad Speaks
. Although Ella was no longer a member of the Boston mosque, Malcolm continued to be in touch, and may have reached out to her. She had also become interested in orthodox Islam during these years, which helped to draw them closer after their falling out over the power struggle in Boston.

Despite the continuing tensions in their marriage, Malcolm also occasionally consulted Betty, who worried about their stability. Over the years she had become comfortable with many of the perks that were bestowed on her as the wife of the mosque’s minister. Her grocery shopping, done by others, was dutifully boxed and dropped off at her kitchen; Thomas 15X Johnson or other FOI members chauffeured her to NOI events. At official occasions Betty enjoyed front-row seats, and the applause of the adoring crowd. And occasionally, when the Messenger visited New York City, it was at Betty and Malcolm’s house that the honor of hosting him was extended. As James 67X later observed, “Every woman would have liked to [have been] in her position.”

Unlike Malcolm, however, Betty was growing increasingly suspicious of the NOI leadership. Because of her husband’s high position in the hierarchy, she had ample opportunity to observe for herself the greedy behavior of Muhammad’s family and entourage. By comparison, she and Malcolm lived almost in poverty, owning virtually nothing beyond a small amount of household furniture, their clothing, and personal items. His Oldsmobile belonged to the NOI; likewise, the title to his home was not in his name, but the mosque’s. Through the early 1960s Malcolm received around three thousand dollars every month to cover his transportation, overnight accommodations, and meals when traveling. He kept meticulous records, collecting receipts for every expenditure to justify his account. The NOI forbade ministers from purchasing life insurance, Betty claimed, perhaps to make their representatives totally dependent on the sect. Quietly at first, then more forcefully, she pleaded with her husband to take appropriate measures to protect his family financially. She tried him with the Garveyite argument that black families should at least own their own homes. Malcolm’s stern response was that if anything should happen to him, the Nation would certainly provide for Betty and their children.

Malcolm may have publicly commanded his followers to obey the law, but this did little to lessen suspicion of the Muslims by law enforcement in major cities. Nowhere did tensions run hotter than in Los Angeles, where Malcolm had established Temple No. 27 in 1957. For most whites who migrated to the city, Los Angeles was the quintessential city of dreams. For black migrants, the city of endless possibilities offered some of the same Jim Crow restrictions they had sought to escape by moving west. As early as 1915, black Los Angeles residents were protesting against racially restrictive housing covenants; such racial covenants as well as blatant discrimination by real estate firms continued to be a problem well into the 1960s. The real growth of the black community in Southern California only began to take place during the two decades after 1945. During this twenty-year period, when the black population of New York City increased by nearly 250 percent, the black population of Los Angeles jumped 800 percent. Blacks were also increasingly important in local trade unions, and in the economy generally. For example, between 1940 and 1960, the percentage of black males in LA working as factory operatives increased from 15 percent to 24 percent; the proportion of African-American men employed in crafts during the same period rose from 7 percent to 14 percent. By 1960, 468,000 blacks resided in Los Angeles County, approximately 20 percent of the county’s population.

These were some of the reasons that Malcolm had invested so much energy and effort to build the NOI's presence in Southern California, and especially the development of Mosque No. 27. Having recruited the mosque’s leaders, he flew out to settle a local factional dispute in October 1961. Such activities were noticed and monitored by the California Senate Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, which feared that the NOI had “Communist affiliations.” The state committee concluded that there was an “interesting parallel between the Negro Muslim movement and the Communist Party, and that is the advocacy of the overthrow of a hated regime by force, violence or any other means.” On September 2, 1961, several Muslims selling
Muhammad Speaks
in a South Central Los Angeles grocery store parking lot were harassed by two white store detectives. The detectives later claimed that when they had attempted to stop the Muslims from selling the paper, they were “stomped and beaten.” The version of this incident described in
Muhammad Speaks
was strikingly different, with the paper claiming that “the two ‘detectives’ produced guns, and attempted to make a ‘citizen’s arrest.’ Grocery packers rushed out to help the detectives . . . and black residents of the area who had gathered also became involved. For 45 minutes bedlam reigned.” About forty Los Angeles Police Department officers were dispatched to the scene to restore order. Five Muslims were arrested. At their subsequent trial, the store’s owner and manager confirmed that the NOI had been given permission to peddle their newspapers in the parking lot. An all-white jury acquitted the Muslims on all charges.

Following the parking lot mêlée, the LAPD was primed for retaliation against the local NOI. The city’s police commissioner, William H. Parker, had even read Lincoln’s
The Black Muslims in America
, and viewed the sect as subversive and dangerous, capable of producing widespread unrest. He instructed his officers to closely monitor the mosque’s activities, which is why, just after midnight on April 27, 1962, when two officers observed what looked to them like men taking clothes out of the back of a car outside the mosque, they approached with suspicion. What happened next is a matter of dispute, yet whether the police were jumped, as they claimed, or the Muslim men were shoved and beaten without provocation, as seems likely, the commotion brought a stream of angry Muslims out of the mosque. The police threatened to respond with deadly force, but when one officer attempted to intimidate the growing crowd of bystanders, he was disarmed by the crowd. Somehow one officer's revolver went off, shooting and wounding his partner in the elbow. Backup squad cars soon arrived ferrying more than seventy officers, and a full-scale battle ensued. Within minutes dozens of cops raided the mosque itself, randomly beating NOI members. It took fifteen minutes for the fighting to die down. In the end, seven Muslims were shot, including NOI member William X Rogers, who was shot in the back and paralyzed for life. NOI officer Ronald Stokes, a Korean War veteran, had attempted to surrender to the police by raising his hands over his head. Police responded by shooting him from the rear; a bullet pierced his heart, killing him. A coroner’s inquest determined that Stokes’s death was “justifiable.” A number of Muslims were indicted.

News of the raid shattered Malcolm; he wept for the reliable and trustworthy Stokes, whom he had known well from his many trips to the West Coast. The desecration of the mosque and the violence brought upon its members pushed Malcolm to a dark place. He was finally ready for the Nation to throw a punch. Malcolm told Mosque No. 7’s Fruit of Islam that the time had come for retribution, an eye for an eye, and he began to recruit members for an assassination team to target LAPD officers. Charles 37X, who attended one of these meetings, recalled him in a rage, shouting to the assembled Fruit, “What are you here for? What the
hell
are you here for?” As Louis Farrakhan related, “Brother Malcolm had a gangsterlike past. And coming into the Nation, and especially in New York, he had a tremendous sway over men that came out of the street with gangster leanings.” It was especially from these hardened men that Malcolm demanded action, and they rose to his cry. Mosque No. 7 intended to “send somebody to Los Angeles to kill [the police] as sure as God made green apples,” said James 67X. “Brothers volunteered for it.”