Malcolm X (59 page)

He arrived in Casablanca, Morocco, well after dark, where he would spend the next day quietly. After touring Casablanca by taxi, Malcolm joined his local contact, a man named Ibrahim Maki, and a friend. The three ended up in the Muslim district, the Medina, where they chatted and dined until late. “They were very race-conscious, proud of the Black Muslims, and thirsting for faster ‘progress.’ ”

Malcolm celebrated what would be his final birthday, turning thirty-nine on May 19, 1964. Part of that day was spent flying from Casablanca to Algiers, where he arrived in the afternoon, before surveying the city by foot and eating a late dinner. This city, his last on the African journey, however, did not yield much. Malcolm was disappointed to find few people who could speak English; plus his calls to the Ghanaian embassy were fruitless and his contact in the Algerian foreign ministry wasn’t at his office when Malcolm stopped by. On the twentieth, Malcolm toured the city by taxi, leaning out the car window to take photographs. Meanwhile, that same day back in the United States, he would later learn, a warrant was issued for his arrest for failing to appear at a trial to respond to the speeding ticket he had been given in the hectic days surrounding Cassius Clay’s visit to New York.

On departure day, May 21, Malcolm was briefly detained by police at the Algiers airport, who believed that the photos he’d taken were a security risk. It was only by providing evidence of his status as a Muslim that he was released, with apologies. Malcolm arrived home to JFK airport in the late afternoon to a crowd of about sixty, mostly family and friends. A press conference was arranged for that evening at the Hotel Theresa, where, as he would in the days that immediately followed, Malcolm emphasized his desire to create a new “organization which will be open for the participation of all Negroes, and we will be willing to accept the support of people of other races.” Malcolm candidly admitted that his “racial philosophy” had been altered after all he had seen—“thousands of people of different races and colors who treated me as a human being.”

Malcolm was ready to enter the international political stage, leaving the parochialism and backwardness of Yacub and the Nation far behind him. Yet in returning to the world he had left a month before, he would find that the profound transformation he’d experienced in the Middle East and Africa had not similarly taken root in his MMI brothers. At the airport greeting, despite their break from the sect, they were still wearing the standard Nation of Islam uniform, the “dark blue suits, white shirts and distinctive red or grey bow ties.” Malcolm may have traveled to a different world, spiritually and politically, but his followers would not be so easily transported.

CHAPTER 12

“Do Something About Malcolm X”

May 21-July 11, 1964

 

 

 

M
alcolm’s growing fame in the wake of his split from the Nation of Islam attracted interest from people of many stripes, and throughout March and April secular activists, writers, and even celebrities tried to make personal contact with him. Hundreds of people craved his time and attention at a moment when he desperately needed to find peace. The hajj to Mecca was not unlike a journey to some undiscovered country to learn what a spiritual commitment to Islam would mean in his life. Yet thousands of miles distant from the site of this spiritual pilgrimage, a whirlwind of political activity continued to spiral around Malcolm X.

Within several weeks after Malcolm’s break, Muslim Mosque, Inc., had established a regular routine at its Hotel Theresa headquarters. In these early, often chaotic days, stability came at a premium. MMI business meetings were held on Monday nights. On Wednesday evenings, an Islamic religious service was held. On Thursday nights, the MMI office was turned over to MMI women, who were still referred to as MGT. On Sunday nights, if Malcolm was in the city, a public rally or event was scheduled at the Audubon. An FBI informant reported that at the March 26, 1964, MMI gathering about seventy-five people attended the “open meeting,” which was followed by a closed session restricted to about forty-five “registered Muslims.” James 67X ran the private meeting, focusing on security matters and warning the sisters and brothers “to be careful of the NOI.”

As Malcolm traveled and gave speeches throughout the country during this time, he encountered many young African Americans with no prior membership or contacts with the Nation who wanted to devote themselves to his cause. One of these idealistic young people who greatly impressed him was Lynne Carol Shifflett. Born January 26, 1940, Shifflett was raised in an upper-middle-class family, her childhood and teenage years in California filled with the elite social activities of the black bourgeoisie, such as membership in the Jack and Jill organization. Enrolling in Los Angeles City College in the fall of 1956, Shifflett was soon elected student body vice president. A three-month trip to Africa in 1958, in which she met Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, dramatically expanded her political and social outlook. Her parents, in solidarity with their activist daughter, staged a Freedom Gala to raise funds for Freedom Riders in the South.

By 1963, Shifflett had relocated to New York City, where she was among a handful of blacks then employed at NBC television in Rockefeller Center, and it appears to have been around this time that Malcolm met her. The confident young woman impressed him, and he entrusted her to identify young secular activists like herself who would help him start a new black nationalist group. One of her initial recruits was Peter Bailey, an aspiring young African American who also worked in Rockefeller Center, at Time, Inc. Two years her elder, Bailey was largely raised by his grandparents in Tuskegee, Alabama, and had served as an army medic before enrolling in Howard University in 1959. By the time of his first meeting with Shifflett, Bailey had already grown familiar with Malcolm through NOI rallies in Harlem. “Every Saturday we’d make it down to 116th and listen to him speak,” Bailey recalled. “I was fascinated by what he was saying intellectually because of my whole integrationist background.” Bailey did not join the Nation of Islam, but continued to attend public events featuring Malcolm as a speaker. After Malcolm’s silencing in December 1963, Bailey counted himself among many who felt that the minister's “chickens” remark was fully justified: “All he was saying was that because the situation in this country allowed what happen to black people, that white people would also begin to feel the effects of this.”

In early 1964, Shifflett met with Bailey at breakfast, where she asked, “How would you like to be a part of the founding of a new black nationalist organization?” Although Shifflett was extremely secretive, Bailey agreed to help. “I’m going to call you Saturday morning at eight a.m. and tell you where to meet and what time,” Shifflett told him. “And don’t ask no questions, just be there.” When she rang him the next Saturday, she instructed him to go to a Harlem hotel on West 153rd Street, where he arrived to find a small gathering of about fifteen people. Moments later, he was stunned to see Malcolm walk in. These Saturday morning meetings, geared toward the creation of an independent, secular organization that supported Malcolm’s goals, soon became a regular event, though mostly without Malcolm’s personal direction. Knowing the danger posed by the Nation, Malcolm made sure that his people had no illusions about what they were getting into. Bailey explained, “Malcolm is telling us, ‘You know if you get involved with me that you might get harassed by the police and the FBI.’ . . . Everyone knew this already and it didn’t bother us.” It was among this small cadre of young followers that Bailey became, as he described it, a “true believer” completely dedicated to Malcolm. “Somehow this man could absorb the ideas. . . . He was very relaxed and he laughed and he’d joke.” Bailey claims the Saturday meetings started in January or February 1964, weeks prior to Malcolm’s break with the Nation. If true, this would explain the highly secretive character of these clandestine meetings, suggesting that perhaps Malcolm was pursuing a dual-track strategy: continuing to appeal to rejoin the Nation while simultaneously building an independent base loyal to himself.

Herman Ferguson, the Queens educator, soon became part of this new group. In Ferguson’s view, Malcolm had outgrown the Nation. “Long before I’d met Malcolm, [I felt] that he needed to break with the Nation of Islam because [it] held him back, his development.” What black nationalists like Ferguson were seeking was an “alternative to integration” and to Dr. King. “I didn’t know what would happen when he [Malcolm] left, but I had made up my mind if he left the Nation of Islam . . . that I would join up with anything that Malcolm did,” Ferguson said.

From the beginning, there were tensions and rivalries between the former Black Muslims in Muslim Mosque, Inc., and the secular activist newcomers like Shifflett and Ferguson. The MMI brothers and sisters “felt they owned him,” Ferguson complained. James 67X, Benjamin 2X Goodman, and the others had joined MMI “with the knowledge that the Nation of Islam would not be friendly toward them,” Ferguson went on. “So they felt, to a great extent, responsible for Malcolm and his safety.” In the weeks following the split, rallies at the Audubon featured MMI brothers who carried weapons while protecting Malcolm. “Their rifles and shotguns were carried openly,” Ferguson remembered. At the time, he convinced himself that this display of force was necessary: “I felt very proud that these were black men . . . escorting our leader out of the building, that he was safe, he had these weapons. . . . As far as I was concerned, [this] is the way that the movement would have to go.” Yet this aggressive stance ultimately provoked greater ire from the Nation and increased its members’ desire for retaliation. Nation members were not permitted to carry firearms; despite the small size of Muslim Mosque, Inc., three dozen well-armed men constituted a genuine threat to the much larger Mosque No. 7.

As Malcolm’s secular organization took shape, it drew in members, like Ferguson, who had been waiting for Malcolm to form a group distinct from the Nation. One of the recruits was, in fact, one of his oldest supporters. In Boston, it had been nearly five years since Ella had bitterly broken with Louis X and the local NOI mosque. She probably felt vindicated by her brother's decision to leave the sect, and their relationship grew closer during this time. Her immediate concerns were to help Malcolm overcome his financial fears and personal doubts through this transition. When Doubleday’s promised advances fell behind due to the slow progress of the book, Ella subsidized her brother and his family. The money she lent him for his hajj had been intended to finance her own pilgrimage, but evidently the sacrifice made sense to her. Ella would later insist that, far from desiring the opportunity to experience the hajj, her brother initially resisted going. Supposedly, in an emotional midnight conversation she forced a tearful Malcolm to concede that the Nation of Islam would never readmit him.

A number of progressive African-American artists, playwrights, and writers also welcomed Malcolm’s departure from the Nation and anticipated his entry into civil rights causes. Actor and playwright Ossie Davis was one of the most prominent. Davis occupied a peculiar position within the Black Freedom Movement, not unlike that of James Baldwin—an artist who had credentials among integrationists and black separatists alike. Davis had served as master of ceremonies at the 1963 March on Washington, but in Malcolm he saw a proponent of the black class struggle, an advocate “for connecting with people out in the street, drug addicts, criminals, and hustlers—these were folks outside the middle class, people that Dr. King certainly couldn’t relate to.”

I remember walking on the street with Malcolm, and people would come up to him and he’d respond to them, and I would respond to them in a different way. While some would be chastising him, Malcolm always had something positive to say. Malcolm was an expert on the damage that slavery and racism had done to the black man’s image of himself. He was equally expert in what had to be done to remedy that egregious lack of self-esteem. He knew it would take more than civil rights legislation, jobs, and education to really save the black man. And he knew that none of the traditional organizations that serviced black folk, such as black churches, colleges, sororities and fraternities, the NAACP, the Urban League, were capable of doing what needed to be done. He felt, as did some of us, that to ask a man who had already been beaten up and beaten down to be nonviolent was only to change black pathology into another religion.

For his part, Malcolm had loved Davis’s 1960 play
Purlie Victorious
, which used comic stereotypes to make sharp criticisms of racism, and over the next few years the two men continued to run into each other at demonstrations. By 1964 Malcolm was on a first-name basis with Davis and his actor activist wife, Ruby Dee. Ruby’s brother, Tom Wallace, was so influenced by Malcolm that he joined the Nation of Islam, and later Muslim Mosque, Inc.

Writers and journalists who knew Malcolm also generally welcomed his latest move. Peter Goldman continued to maintain close contact and came away impressed with the “complexity and sophistication of [his] political thought.” Like many observers during the months of Malcolm’s silencing, the writer had been unaware of any impending split. “I’d been hearing rumors about jealousy of Malcolm’s prominence,” Goldman recalled, “but I didn’t know it had come to any kind of crisis.” After the fact, though, he came to see the break as necessary to Malcolm’s intellectual evolution; leaving the Nation, combined with his excursions in Africa, had prompted him to think “black politically. I think his nationalism had been enriched by his travels.” The earlier Malcolm had preached a simplistic, “mom-and-pop . . . economic model.” By 1964, he had transformed himself, “moving, I think, probably closer to Pan-Africanism, certainly to a connection with the nonwhite majority of the world.”