Malcolm X (65 page)

Although Malcolm’s schedule had become too hectic to accommodate new interviews with Haley, the two men continued to communicate. On June 8, Haley confessed that, after getting a postcard from Malcolm, he had submitted it to “one of the ranking grapho-analysts in the country” and wanted to include “such objective findings” in his afterword of the autobiography. The analyst described Malcolm as an outgoing personality, broad-minded and possessing “a definite feeling of purpose, a calling. His goals are practical.” But the subject was also “not a deep thinker” and showed “a lack of decisiveness in his makeup.” Despite the questionable basis of the report, Haley wrote confidently that “it comes very close to you, I feel, from my own personal appraisals.”

Less than two weeks later, Haley again wrote to Malcolm, as well as to Paul Reynolds. In his seven-page typed letter to Malcolm, he urged him to exercise caution: “I sometimes think that you do not really understand what will be the effect of this book. There has never been, at least not in our time, any other book like it. Do you realize that to do these things you will have to be
alive
?ʺ He pleaded with his subject to consider Betty’s predicament if he should die—”and for the rest of her life, trying to explain to your and her four children what a man you were.” To Reynolds, Haley revealed an entirely different agenda. Reviewing the “wealth of material” in the still unfinished manuscript, he wrote that the book could benefit from “careful, successive rewritings, distilling, aligning, [and] balancing . . . to get it right.” Its conclusion, he now recognized, was “all important,” because it placed his subject “on the world stage.” He cited an article by Malcolm, “Why I Am for Goldwater,” and the existence of his recent tour diary, a “soupçon of even fissionable international religious and political concerns.” Haley said that he wanted to edit and expand both, asserting that the texts would “keep [Malcolm] on-stage, while providing him with more funds.” (These extraordinary materials would not be seen by scholars or the general public until 2008. Malcolm never had the time, or opportunity, to develop his travel diaries into a second book.) Within the severe limitations of his schedule, he read through Haley’s
Autobiography
drafts as they were produced. The final essay chapters that had been prepared earlier were cut, a decision that may have been Haley’s alone; these are what today are called the book’s “missing chapters.” Malcolm probably sensed that the
Autobiography
might become a crucial part of his political legacy, and he became more determined to complete the project. Ironically, his extended absence from the United States beginning in July gave Haley an excuse for not working vigorously on the manuscript. As the summer began, Haley moved his attention to more potentially lucrative writing projects. He was already pitching to Kenneth McCormick a book manuscript idea called
Before This Anger
, which a decade later would become the best seller
Roots
.

In the meantime, Malcolm was besieged—by writers, by other activists seeking favors and alliances, and by people who just wanted to have a piece of history. Most met him only once or twice but were changed by these encounters; some were transformed by his rhetoric or writings, still others by his message.

Robert Penn Warren, one of America’s most respected Southern writers in the sixties, met Malcolm at the Hotel Theresa on June 2, where they engaged in a mutually revealing conversation. Warren was at first surprised at how animated Malcolm was: “I discovered that the pale, dull yellowish face that had seemed so veiled, so stony, as though beyond all feeling, had flashed into its merciless, leering life—the sudden wolfish grin, the pale pink lips drawn hard back to show the strong teeth.” Both intimidated and fascinated, Warren presented Malcolm with a series of scenarios in which white liberals had provided assistance to blacks. When Warren mentioned that “the white man” had been willing to go to jail to oppose segregation, Malcolm retorted, “My personal attitude is that he has done nothing to solve the problem.” Malcolm went on to emphasize the necessity to transform institutional arrangements in the U.S. political economy, if blacks were ever to exercise power. Stunned, Warren asked for another chance for liberalism: “You don’t see in the American system the possibility of self-regeneration?” “No,” Malcolm replied.

Malcolm was clearly toying with Warren—it was several weeks later that he would affirm precisely Warren’s point, in his appeal to the country’s founding documents at the opening conference of the OAAU, a claim on democracy he could not have advanced had he judged U.S. political institutions incapable of reform. Warren nervously went on to inquire about the new movement’s political objectives. In practical terms, what Malcolm sought was not fundamentally different from what waves of European immigrants—the Irish, Italians, and Jews—fought to achieve: equitable representation of their ethnic groups within all levels of government. “Once the black man becomes the political master of his own community, it means the politicians will also be black, which means that he will be sending black representatives even at the federal level.” Malcolm’s strategy was hardly a Leninist recipe for social revolution, but Warren, a guilty white liberal, could not understand his objectives. He gave far too much weight to Malcolm’s incendiary rhetoric and insufficient commentary on the social program he was advancing. At one tense moment Warren inquired if Malcolm believed in political assassination, “and [he] turns the hard, impassive face and veiled eyes upon me, and says, ‘I wouldn’t know anything about that.’ ”

At the other end of the political spectrum was a series of meetings between Malcolm and the political activist Max Stanford (later known as Muhammad Ahmed). The two had first met in 1962, when Stanford, then twenty-one, had sought out Malcolm to ask if he should join the Nation of Islam. Malcolm had shocked him by replying, “You can do more for the Honorable Elijah Muhammad by working on the outside.” The young man had taken Malcolm’s words to heart, and that same year he and Cleveland activist Donald Freeman created a small, militant nationalist group, the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM). Based originally at Central State University in Ohio, the network developed a presence in Philadelphia in the 1960s and soon had relationships with CORE chapters in Brooklyn and Cleveland. Ideologically, they were influenced by black militants like the exiled Robert Williams and the independent Marxists Grace Lee and James Boggs. The Revolutionary Action Movement perceived itself as an underground organization, “a third force,” Stanford later explained, “between the Nation of Islam and SNCC.ʺ In late May 1964, Stanford arrived in Harlem asking to see Malcolm. The two met at the Harlem restaurant 22 West, Malcolm’s favorite, where Stanford made an outrageously bold request: Would Malcolm consent to be RAM's international spokesman? Robert Williams had already agreed to be their international chairman.

At that time, the proposal likely appealed to Malcolm. For some time he had felt that the absence of clear objectives and a united front within the Black Freedom Movement was attributable, in part, to organizational deficiencies. The NAACP, CORE, SCLC, and other groups were like feuding factions at the national level; worse, the parochialism and personal jealousies of their leaders frequently disrupted cooperation at the grassroots level. Stanford argued that what was required was a more clandestine, cadrelike structure that could operate beyond the gaze of the media. ʺRAM would be the underground cadre organization,” Stanford explained, while “the OAAU would be the public front, united front.” At 22 West, Malcolm looked over RAM's organizational chart and said, “I see that you have studied the Nation of Islam’s structure.ʺ He was correct: the model did draw from the Nation of Islam, as well as from the Communist Party.

Stanford remained in New York City for several months, and at OAAU meetings he was struck by Malcolm’s finely honed ethnographic skills and powers of observation. He recalled:

Stanford was also keenly tuned to Malcolm’s emotional state at the time. “The only time I ever saw Malcolm emotional, and in a sense irrational,” the younger man recalled, “was in his public actions against the NOI in June-July 1964.” These moves threatened to destroy a potential relationship with Stanford’s group. When Malcolm “accused Elijah of fornicating with his secretaries, [and] put it out in the street that he had illegitimate children,” RAM sharply dissented with his tactics. “Malcolm was very disturbed,” Stanford said, because, spiritually and personally, “he had not only misled people, but he had physically abused people for their violation of what he thought was Elijah’s policy. So he felt like the biggest fool on planet earth.”

Stanford claims that Malcolm finally agreed to some kind of association with RAM, and he ordered James 67X to serve as his liaison. However, Stanford was less successful in convincing him to relocate the OAAU. Malcolm was determined to “build a base” in New York, even though James and Grace Lee Boggs were urging him to relocate to Detroit, a city where he had thousands of enthusiastic supporters and where there was “more of the radical base.” RAM, Stanford explained, “wanted him to expand the OAAU all over the country because we felt that they couldn’t attack him if he had a national base.” But Malcolm would not budge. Perhaps he feared that if he moved his operations out of Harlem, the thousands of loyal Mosque No. 7 members would never allow him to reestablish a foothold there. By the 1960s Malcolm no longer lived in the Harlem community, yet Harlem remained the central metaphor for black urban America, and he understood that this sometimes magical, often tragic neighborhood’s fortunes were intertwined with his own.

By now, Malcolm had spent years under surveillance by both federal and local officials, but in the summer of 1964 the man listening on the other end of his wiretapped telephone would come to play an important, if hidden, role in Malcolm’s life. Gerry Fulcher had graduated from the city police academy less than two years earlier, and as a young Harlem-born cop he had internalized many of the racist, conservative views his father had held about blacks. “I was going to stop all crime in New York City . . . ,” he remembered about his attitude in the days fresh out of the academy. “I was going to be the supercop.” On his first day as a rookie officer, Fulcher and his partner were confronted by an African American who seriously injured Fulcher's fellow officer when the man hurled a chair at him. Fulcher managed to handcuff the suspect, and when his sergeant arrived at the scene, he gave a clear order: “I don’t want that nigger walking by the time you get back to the station house.” Fulcher may have been raw, but he wasn’t about to disobey. “So I, with the guy handcuffed, with his arms around his back, I beat the crap out of him,” he said. “And I was a hero.”

After one year on the streets, Fulcher advanced to detective and was transferred into the BOSS unit. By early 1964, he was given his first important assignment, the covert surveillance of Malcolm X. Fulcher had already decided that Malcolm was “one of the bad guys,” an opinion shared by many of his fellow cops. “The whole civil rights movement,” he would say later, “was considered a brand of communism in the cops’ mind back in those days.” Fulcher had Malcolm down as a “former junkie and a pusher, when he was called Big Red . . . we knew all that.” With his break from the Nation, Malcolm had become an even greater threat, the possible leader of civil unrest and black protest. From BOSS's perspective, all of Malcolm’s activities had to be closely monitored, which included the recruitment of black cops to join both Malcolm’s group and Mosque No. 7. Fulcher's assignment was no less invasive. A small room had been set up in the 28th Precinct station house with tape recording equipment connected to the bugs that operatives had placed in Malcolm’s phone at the Hotel Theresa. The listening devices could pick up any conversations in the room where the telephone was. Fulcher's task was twofold: to wiretap Malcolm, hand-delivering the tapes to police authorities on a daily basis; and to attend OAAU events, doing general surveillance.

Fulcher soon learned that wiretapping required diligence and an attention to detail that made the job difficult. “You had to listen to the bug all the time, and the minute you heard the phone ring you almost had to time with him picking it up,” Fulcher recalled. “And then I had to record, decide what I was putting on the [tape] reels.” At first, he proudly carried out his duties, believing that Malcolm hated whites and wanted to overthrow the U.S. government. “They are the enemies of police,” Fulcher stated, recalling his views in 1964 and 1965. “They [the police] would kill them every chance they have.” As far as the cops were concerned, Malcolm and his followers should be targeted.