Malcolm X (64 page)

Malcolm must have been in anguish, sitting before a white judge, listening to himself being accused of theft and corruption in an organization for which he once would have gladly sacrificed his life. He could accept many things, but not dishonor. And the legal maneuvering was merely a way of avoiding the central issue, the real reason for the split, which he remained hesitant to bring up on the record. He told Williams that the funds purchasing the residence never came from the incorporated Mosque No. 7; no mosque trustees met to issue a check covering the home’s down payment. “It came from the spiritual body from the Muslims.”

Then, after nearly two hours, he finally told the court that “the Honorable Elijah Muhammad had taken on nine wives besides the one that he had. . . . This is the reason for my suspension.” He emphasized that he had been prepared to keep “the whole thing secret and private if they would give me a hearing. . . . They would rather take the public court than keep it quiet among Muslims.”

What Malcolm may not have fully appreciated until the trial was that the ideological campaign against him was turning into a religious jihad, and the issues raised by the Queens trial only increased the tensions between the two camps. On the first day of courtroom proceedings, 180 men attended Mosque No. 7’s regular FOI meeting, whose topic was “So What if He [Elijah Muhammad] Is Not All Pure, Look What He Did for You and I [
sic
].ʺ During this lecture, the speaker asserted, “We should destroy Malcolm.” An FOI captain at the meeting—probably Joseph—instructed the Fruit, saying, “Malcolm is not to be touched, the rest is okay”—a statement that amounted to a declaration of open season on any Malcolm loyalist.

The next evening, shortly after eleven p.m., six of Malcolm’s followers, believing rumors that their leader had been either kidnapped or murdered, drove to Mosque No. 7, at 102 West 116th Street. The man instigating the confrontation was William George, who was armed with a .30 caliber M-1 carbine rifle containing a clip with thirty rounds of ammunition. Fifty-one-year-old Herbert Dudley, another Malcolmite, brought a 6.75 Beretta rifle. About thirty to thirty-five Nation members rushed out into the street to confront the attackers with improvised weapons of self-defense, such as broom handles. For a few minutes there was a tense standoff, since neither side was prepared to start the hostilities. The NYPD raced to the street scene and largely concurred with the NOI group that Malcolm’s people had provoked the incident. The Malcolmites were arrested and their firearms seized. A day later, at Mosque No. 24 in Richmond, Virginia, Minister Nicholas of Washington, D.C., declared that “Malcolm X really should be killed for teaching against Elijah Muhammad.”

For as much as the trial and the increasing threats on his life consumed Malcolm, they did not keep him from maintaining a hectic schedule of speeches and organization building. Already he sensed that his days were numbered—“I’m probably a dead man already,” he’d candidly told Mike Wallace—and as the summer progressed he pushed through events with great speed, straining to accomplish his goals. He accepted many speaking invitations, including one from Henry Kissinger at Harvard, and continued to work at simultaneously building the size and credibility of both Muslim Mosque, Inc., and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Chairing an MMI business meeting in Harlem, he announced that he was considering asking MMI members to tithe ten dollars weekly, for a period of six months. A report would then be circulated on “all the money taken in” along with all expenditures. His plan was to establish a newspaper similar to
Muhammad Speaks
. MMI branch organizations were also to be established in Boston and Philadelphia, then in other cities. It was finally clear that Malcolm envisioned a national Islamic network that one day could be truly competitive with the Nation of Islam. At an MMI rally in late June he praised Islam as “the only true faith” for black people and promoted the OAAU, which would develop “an educational program” to highlight blacks’ contributions to history. This new formation would not engage in sit-ins, he promised, but instead “they will take what is rightfully theirs.”

He also returned to his correspondence with a renewed sense of urgency. News of a workers’ strike in Nigeria had reached Malcolm, so he wrote to his friend Joseph Iffeorah, of the Ministry of Works and Surveys, asking for information. Malcolm was also highly attentive in efforts to recruit new followers. A letter he wrote on June 22 to a young, single African-American woman working at the
New Yorker
magazine displayed charm and flattery. “Your recent correspondence is really one of the best written letters that I’ve ever received,” she replied. It was “very poetic, but at the same time your thoughts were very clear.” The young woman told Malcolm that she did not want to join any organization because she wanted to feel “free.” Malcolm reminded her that it takes “organization to coordinate the talents of various people.” He urged her to come to the OAAU's founding public gathering at the Audubon on June 28: “Even if you have no desire to become an active participant, I do wish you would come out Sunday as a spectator.” The young woman, Sara Mitchell, not only attended that rally, but within several months became an invaluable leader of the OAAU.

The progress Malcolm made in these weeks was constantly under threat of being undone by the growing violence of his increasing public feud with the Nation. In the streets, things were getting out of control. In the Corona neighborhood of Queens, assistant minister Larry 4X Prescott had recently established a Muslim restaurant on Northern Boulevard. On June 22 seventeen-year-old Bryan Kingsley, a Malcolm supporter, was loitering at the restaurant’s entrance, talking tough. Larry went outside and smacked the boy hard across the head before—along with other NOI members—he chased Kingsley down the street. The boy telephoned Tom Wallace, Ruby Dee’s brother and a strong advocate of Malcolm’s. Wallace drove his station wagon to the restaurant, pulled out a rifle, and confronted Larry and another NOI member. “Thomas and I [had] worked together, and I knew something about [his] character,” Larry 4X recalled in a 2006 interview. “I said, ‘Well, go ahead and shoot if you’re going to shoot me.’ ” Wallace warned him not to approach him, but Larry walked toward him, convinced he would not pull the trigger. When he got close enough, Larry grabbed the rifle and, turning the weapon butt-first, “beat him with it. And then I broke out all of his car windows.” His face shattered and bloody, Wallace filed charges with the NYPD, which arrested Larry; Larry in return filed assault charges against Wallace, who was also arrested. Both men were charged five hundred dollars bail, with their cases remanded to the Queens Criminal Court.

Malcolm was extremely disturbed by Wallace’s beating. From a personal perspective, it was a deep betrayal: Larry 4X had been one of his trusted protégés. Perhaps worse, the incident threatened to damage connections he needed for his political work, as Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee had become pivotal to his access to the black arts and entertainment community. To the
Amsterdam News
, Malcolm asserted that Muhammad was responsible for the escalating violence. “The followers of Elijah Muhammad,” Malcolm explained, “will not do anything unless he tells them to.”

Larry 4X clearly recalled his Queens Criminal Court appearance because he had “my suit on, and bow tie.” All the other prisoners began to laugh. “They said, ‘Look at this guy, and he’s clean as a pimp, and he has assaulted somebody!’” Soon after Larry was taken to court, Malcolm entered the chamber: “He came over to me,” Larry recalled. “He said—and this is the part where I have lost my respect for him—he said, ‘Larry, you’re dead.’ ” The court dismissed the charges against both men, but the damage was done. “That was the last time I had any words with Malcolm,” Larry stated. “Then things just got progressively worse.”

The beating of Tom Wallace and similar incidents in these weeks prompted Malcolm to issue an “open letter” of conciliation to Elijah Muhammad. Both groups, Malcolm wrote, needed to address the civil rights issues confronting Southern blacks. “Instead of wasting all this energy fighting each other we should be working in unity . . . with other leaders and organizations.” On the surface, it was an appeal for the feuding sides to end the violence, but to those in the Nation who could read between the lines, Malcolm’s letter was yet another provocation. The appeal asked Muhammad how, since the Nation had refused to use violence in response to “white racists” in Los Angeles and Rochester, it could employ violence against another Black Muslim group. Muhammad’s earlier failure to authorize retaliatory violence against excessive police force was still a sore point for many of Malcolm’s followers.

In the midst of the feuding, Malcolm managed to steer the Organization of Afro-American Unity to its triumphant public birth. At a major rally on June 28, a thousand people gathered at the Audubon Ballroom to celebrate the group’s official founding. Just over twenty blocks away, the Nation of Islam was holding its own rally before a crowd at least six times as large, but at the Audubon a pivotal event in black American history was unfolding, with the emergence of a militant black nationalist political group that had the potential for redefining both the civil rights mainstream and black electoral politics. And unlike the Nation of Islam or even Muslim Mosque, Inc., the Organization of Afro-American Unity was purely secular, which vastly expanded its potential reach. As Herman Ferguson recalled, “I felt that if Malcolm could . . . present his politics minus the religious side of it, that would remove a lot of the concerns that many black people had.” This sentiment could be felt deeply among the group’s early organizers. Even before the founding rally, the “nonreligious people” like Shifflett, Ferguson, and others had long felt “they were not a part of the old guard. There was tension and resentment.” Finally, though, it was their moment, as Malcolm publicly reached out to the mainstream of the civil rights struggle and the most progressive elements of the black middle class. Present at the rally to acknowledge Malcolm’s turn were attorney Conrad Lynn, writer Paule Marshall, newspaper editor William Tatum, and Juanita Poitier, Sidney Poitier's wife.

The high point of the rally was Malcolm’s reading of the OAAU's “Statement of Basic Aims and Objectives,” in which the new group dedicated itself “to unify[ing] the Americans of African descent in their fight for Human Rights and Dignity” and promised to “dedicate ourselves to the building of a political, economic, and social system of justice and peace” in the United States. The statement praised, among other historic documents, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, which “are the principles in which we believe and these documents if put into practice represent the essence of mankind’s hopes and good intentions.” Central to the OAAU's program was Malcolm’s campaign to bring the United States before the United Nations, where “we can indict Uncle Sam for the continued criminal injustices that our people experience in this government.” The bold statement placed the OAAU firmly within the rich protest traditions of black America going back to Frederick Douglass in the nineteenth century.

Instead of demonizing whites, Malcolm now offered them a role in his human rights initiative. White allies could contribute financially to the OAAU, and they were encouraged to work for racial justice within white communities. Black liberation, however, came with a price: OAAU membership cost two dollars, and members were expected to donate one dollar each week to the organization. The group also promised to mobilize the entire African-American community “block by block to make the community aware of its power and potential.” Taken in the broad view, the OAAU's founding marked the first major attempt to consolidate black revolutionary nationalism since the age of Garvey.

In June, Paul Reynolds negotiated a “one-shot sale” of excerpts from the
Autobiography
that would appear in the
Saturday Evening Post
prior to the book’s publication. To obtain Doubleday’s consent, Reynolds volunteered to cut the authors’ advances to $15,000. Since Haley and Malcolm together had already been paid a total of $17,769.75, the authors had to agree to pay back $2,500, plus not to request any additional advance money from Doubleday until after the book was published. Unfortunately Haley was still hard-pressed for money, and the new Doubleday agreement provided no material incentive to finish the book project.