Malcolm X (40 page)

In New York, where Malcolm and Joseph exerted a firmer grasp on the membership, such troubles were largely avoided. Instead, increased salesmanship of
Muhammad Speaks
drew hassles from local cops. On July 2, Malcolm addressed Mosque No. 7, warning that if police bothered the NOI for selling the paper, then members should do what the officers instructed. But he also suggested that Muslims had a legal right to sell their publication, as guaranteed by the Constitution. He went on to predict, “The time will come when the Muslims will not be able to leave their homes.” NOI members should never carry weapons, he explained, but “if attacked, self-defense is granted throughout the world.”

A week later, he flew to Chicago to participate in a rally featuring Elijah Muhammad, at which the Nation would unveil the two pieces of literature that would later come to define it. Although the NOI had grown rapidly, it had not participated in the desegregation struggles across the South that had won the respect and admiration of people throughout the world. To blacks, it was abundantly clear what groups like the NAACP and CORE wanted; the NOI, by contrast and largely by design, had no clear social program that realistically could be implemented. Since it was unlikely that blacks could seize a separate territory for themselves inside the United States, what did the NOI propose to do? For as much as Muhammad disliked and discouraged Malcolm’s inclinations toward activism, he was not a fool when it came to surveying the landscape of black politics and calibrating the NOI's place within it.

By the middle of 1962, CORE had come to national prominence for its Freedom Rides, and King was back in Albany, Georgia, where he was leading a desegregation campaign that found him briefly jailed until the chief of police released him to avoid further negative media coverage. The successes of the civil rights movement had emboldened America’s black communities and made the NOI's strict noninterventionist, antiactivist platform seem out of step or, worse, backward. To bolster his case in the court of public opinion, Muhammad and his Chicago lieutenants developed a ten-point policy statement that he unveiled in his address at the rally. Before a large crowd at the Arie Crown Theater on Lake Shore Drive, he presented a list of demands that preserved the Nation’s anti-integrationist stance—later codified as “What the Muslims Want”—and included religious freedom, an end to police brutality, and the release “of all Believers of Islam now held in federal prisons.” But the statement also astutely contained major concessions to the civil rights movement. “As long as we are not allowed to establish a state or territory of our own, we demand not only equal justice under the laws of the United States, but equal employment opportunities,
now
!ʺ Muhammad followed this statement with a twelve-point “What the Muslims Believe,” a summary of the Nation of Islam’s basic creed. Over the next thirteen years, until Muhammad’s death in 1975, these two statements would become the most widely disseminated of NOI manifestos. For Malcolm, who had pushed for greater involvement with the movement, the revelation was bittersweet; he had moved toward these ideas long before Chicago.

His own push for action renewed shortly in New York, where Mosque No. 7 now organized rallies almost every other week, focused mainly on bringing broad change to Harlem’s impoverished and embattled blacks. Malcolm’s involvement with A. Philip Randolph’s Emergency Committee continued to shape his efforts, and on July 21 he addressed a crowd of two thousand packed in front of the Hotel Theresa. The five-hour program featured a saxophone, drum, and bass trio, which helped attract onlookers. Fruit of Islam members circulated through the crowd, selling
Muhammad Speaks
and NOI-produced records featuring Louis X. Malcolm focused largely on Harlem’s social and economic conditions. “Unemployment, juvenile delinquency, prostitution, gambling, the dope traffic and other forms of organized crimes are on the rise,” he explained:

The intensity of the speech reflected the growing depths of his own commitment to embracing a united black community. Covering the event, the
Chicago Defender
noted that Malcolm’s words contained such “sentiment and emotional drive” that the cries from the audience “became at times almost a chant, coming at the cadenced pauses in his oratory.” But the most significant feature of this largely NOI-sponsored rally was the list of guest speakers, which ran to far more moderate figures and included none other than Malcolm’s old sparring partner, Bayard Rustin.

The very next day, Betty gave birth to the couple’s third daughter. She was named Ilyasah, the feminized Arabic version of Elijah. By now, Malcolm’s quick departures after the births of his children had become almost routine; that same day, he ducked out and joined several FOI members to watch a labor rally of mostly blacks and Latinos held on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and organized by the Committee for Justice to Hospital Workers. Although forbidden to participate in civil rights-style demonstrations, the Muslims expressed their support from the sidelines. Malcolm even briefly addressed the strikers—technically a violation of Muhammad’s orders, but once again he presumably reasoned that in his own territory, so long as he sang Muhammad’s praises, neither Raymond Sharrieff nor anyone else had the power to stop him.

Ongoing legal issues stemming from events in Los Angeles continued to consume him throughout the summer. The day after Ilyasah’s birth, he was in Connecticut, raising funds on behalf of the late Ronald Stokes’s family. On July 28 he returned to New York, having heard that Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty would be speaking at a symposium at the Waldorf-Astoria on the subject of the urban crisis. Shortly after the assault, Yorty had given LAPD commissioner William Parker his full backing on the mosque shootings and went so far as to meet with attorney general Robert Kennedy in hopes of prompting a federal investigation of the NOI. When Malcolm, having gained admittance to the audience, spoke up from the floor, Yorty was apoplectic: “I didn’t fly here to be questioned by Malcolm X,ʺ he retorted. “I regard the Black Muslim movement as a Nazi-type of movement preaching hate.” Malcolm responded by telling the
New York Times
, “I’d rather be a Nazi than whatever Mr. Yorty is.”

The next month, together with a large group of Muslims, Malcolm packed a hearing room in the Los Angeles County Superior Court to express support for the NOI members who had been indicted for assault on April 27. Through repeated entreaties, he had convinced Earl Broady, a criminal attorney and former Los Angeles police officer, to represent the thirteen Muslims facing charges. Race promised to play a prominent role in determining the course of the case. The FBI agent monitoring the proceedings noted, “It is understood that these defendants would argue that there was an improper[ly] impaneled jury because of the lack of sufficient numbers of Negroes.”

For several days in mid-August, Malcolm visited St. Louis for a local NOI rally. Although he spoke, most attention was focused on Muhammad, who was promoted as the featured speaker. Sometime during this visit, Muhammad expressed concern to Malcolm about recent damage to the NOI's image. He was especially agitated about Malcolm’s university lectures, which he felt “gained no converts and only provided an opportunity for the NOI to be blasted in public.” Malcolm had little choice except to cancel all his remaining college appearances. Internal FBI documents establish that the Bureau almost immediately knew about these cancellations; someone with direct access to the highest level inside the NOI was providing information to the agency. The most likely such person was national secretary John Ali; all business-related correspondence and ministers’ weekly reports went across Ali’s desk. Ali personally knew, and could demand the firing of, every local mosque’s secretary. The FBI would have easily recognized the value of his strategic place inside the Nation’s hierarchy.

While Malcolm was in St. Louis, he kept an interview appointment with a white journalist who had recently caught his attention with a series of thoughtful pieces on the city’s somewhat sleepy mosque. Peter Goldman was a news writer for the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
, a conservative newspaper that also had on its editorial staff a young Patrick Buchanan. Goldman’s interest in the NOI went back two years to his postgraduate fellowship at Harvard in 1960, where he had started reading Lincoln’s
The Black Muslims in America
and then had seen Malcolm’s remarkable debate with Walter Carrington at Sanders Theatre. Though Goldman had become a liberal integrationist in college, going so far as to join CORE and attend local sit-ins in the fifties, Malcolm’s performance in the debate profoundly affected him. Goldman was stunned by both the man and his message, and he was especially impressed by Malcolm’s bearing, recalling it as “both soldierly and priestly. His carriage was amazing.” He also was struck by the NOI members who accompanied Malcolm: “There were members of the Brothers of Islam in the hall, a protective presence, and as I left, I could see them spotted around the nearby campus. There’d be a guy standing under a tree with the narrow tie and the sort of Ivy League suit (and bald head).”

When Goldman returned to St. Louis and landed at the
Globe-Democrat
, he quickly began writing about the local mosque, and though his series’ chief effect was probably to bring the local NOI under greater scrutiny from the authorities, it also earned him Malcolm’s attention. Several weeks after the articles appeared, he called Goldman to explain that he was about to visit the city. “Would you like to get together,” he asked, the better to “understand the Nation of Islam?”

An interview was arranged through the local mosque, to take place at the Shabazz Frosti Kreem, an NOI-affiliated luncheonette in the North Side ghetto. Goldman was extremely nervous: “I was then prisoner to all the white liberal views of the world, of race in America, including the view that the locus of tragedy was the American South, that Jim Crow was the central struggle.” Helen Dudar, Goldman’s wife and also a journalist, accompanied him to the meeting, and together they waited outside the luncheonette for their subject to arrive. After a few minutes a car pulled up, with Malcolm sitting “sort of jackknifed in the backseat.” As soon as he got out, Goldman recalled, “Just from the moment you saw him, [you felt] this incredible presence.” The three of them, accompanied by the local minister, Clyde X, went inside and sat at a table. Malcolm quickly gravitated to the jukebox. Dropping in a coin, he chose Louis X's “A White Man’s Heaven Is a Black Man’s Hell.”

To Goldman’s surprise, the interview lasted nearly three hours. Malcolm “told us perfectly pleasantly that whites were inherently the enemies of Negroes; that integration was impossible without a great bloodletting and was undesirable anyway; [and] that nonviolence—‘this mealy-mouth beg-in, wait-in, lead-in kind of action’—was only a device for disarming the blacks and, worse still, unmanning them.” Although Malcolm was impressive, Goldman remained a committed liberal who struggled to overcome his ideological prejudices to write about the Nation fairly.

Over the next three years, Goldman conducted at least five lengthy interviews with Malcolm. They spoke over the telephone on individual stories frequently. Sometimes Goldman was simply seeking a publishable quote; but he sensed that for some reason he had become part of “a relatively small target group of media people whom [Malcolm wanted to]
seduce
.ʺ These were the journalists Malcolm trusted “to get the serious message out.” For most people, however, his normal approach was “the cocked fist . . . It was very easy to scare the pants off most white reporters . . . Their attention span was the quote—the most inflammatory quote you can put on the air, and Malcolm liked to serve those up.” But Goldman also sensed that Malcolm knew, deep down, “if you create an atmosphere of threat, a sense of threat . . ., never throw the punch, because if you throw the punch, people will be out on the street dying.” So he was never an “advocate of suicidal activity,” still believing “the threat was useful.”

Another journalist who would have a profound impact on Malcolm’s life and legacy was Alex Haley. Born in 1921, Haley had just retired after twenty years’ service in the U.S. Coast Guard. A liberal Republican, Haley completely rejected the racial separatism and intolerance of the NOI. He believed the Nation was the consequence of mainstream America’s failure to assimilate Negroes into the existing system. Yet in the wake of the publicity surrounding
The Hate That Hate Produced
in 1959, Haley drafted a short article about the group, “Mr. Muhammad Speaks,” that was published in the March 1960 issue of
Reader’s Digest
. Although Haley had characterized the Nation as a “potent, racist cult,” NOI leaders generally praised the article’s objectivity. The essay focused primarily on Elijah Muhammad’s history and leadership of the sect; Malcolm was mentioned but only as a secondary figure. In 1962, Haley contacted the NOI again, requesting its cooperation for a longer story to be published in the widely read
Saturday Evening Post
. It would be coauthored with a white journalist, Alfred Balk, who had apparently been recruited to convince white readers that the piece reflected an integrationist viewpoint, despite the fact that Haley himself was an avowed integrationist. On the strength of Haley’s previous article, he and Balk were given substantial access to NOI activities throughout the country. Malcolm even agreed to give Haley a detailed interview about his life prior to becoming a follower of Muhammad. What the Muslims could not have known was that simultaneously Balk was talking to the FBI, meeting on October 9 with an agent in their Crime Research Section in Chicago. Balk explained that his and Haley’s story had “to give an accurate and realistic appraisal of the Nation of Islam” while illustrating “that many of the statements about the successes of the organization among the Negro people are also exaggerated.” The Bureau agreed to funnel them selective information about the NOI, based on its years of covert surveillance, but none of it could be attributed.