Malcolm X (69 page)

From Nairobi, Malcolm flew back briefly to Addis Ababa before departing on October 28 for Nigeria, where his friend the scholar Essien-Udom had arranged several events. Malcolm arrived in Lagos two days later and had settled in for dinner alone before a phone call interrupted him: it was Nigerian president Nnamdi Azikiwe’s secretary, seeking to arrange a private meeting the next morning. Writing later of the meeting, Malcolm found Azikiwe not lacking in humility, and noted that he had a good grasp of the key players in the U.S. civil rights struggle. Later that day, Malcolm went to a party attended by members of the press, the diplomatic corps, and Nigerian officials. “A great deal of soul-searching was being done,” he recalled, about the difficult state of Nigerian politics. Malcolm must have shuddered in drafting this prediction, which regrettably would come all too true, with the Biafran War only several years away: “It will take much bloodshed to straighten this country out and I don’t believe it can be avoided.”

It was only during this trip that he fully grasped the profound divisions among Africans in the postindependence era. On November 1, for example, he was confronted by two young reporters for several hours, much to his surprise, who disagreed with the positive comments he had made about their president at a public event. The mood among young Nigerians, he pondered, “is mostly impatient and explosive.”

During the twenty-four weeks from April through November 1964 when Malcolm was out of the United States, his followers were responsible for fashioning his image and message. It did not go well. “Malcolm was aware of the fact that we were having problems,” Herman Ferguson later admitted. “There was [MMI] resentment against the members of the OAAU because they didn’t go through the struggle in the Nation of Islam.” Another source of conflict was the role of women in the organization. Former Black Muslims believed that “women played a secondary role to the men. The men were out front, the protectors, the warriors,” Ferguson observed. Malcolm tried to break this patriarchy, insisting that in the OAAU “women [should have an] equal position to the men.” His new commitment to gender equality confused and even outraged many members. “A couple of brothers came to me,” Ferguson recalled. “They wanted me to approach [Malcolm] about their concerns about the role of the women and how it was not sitting well with many of the brothers.” Ferguson decided against carrying the appeal directly to Malcolm. “The women that Malcolm seemed to place a lot of confidence in, they were responsible, they were well educated.”

By midsummer the tensions between MMI and OAAU occasionally sparked into verbal combat. James 67X made no secret of his bitter hostility toward Shifflett. The two fought each other constantly, over everything from the content of the OAAU's public rallies and speakers’ invitations to the OAAU's struggling efforts to recruit new members. “The Muslim Mosque, Inc. and the OAAU . . . drifted apart,” Ferguson explained. “Some people came in and were not a part of the MMI, and all of the MMI people were not part of OAAU. So there was a gap.” Even inside the OAAU, there were growing divisions between the pragmatists like Shifflett, who wanted OAAU to join forces with black elected officials and civil rights groups, and Ferguson, who considered himself a revolutionary nationalist and Pan-Africanist. What evolved was a core of “dedicated people,” who performed the lion’s share of all work without salaries, and the great majority of OAAU members, who came out only for the rallies.

As a result, by late July some of the OAAU committees that had been created a month earlier began falling apart. South Carolina activist James Campbell and Ferguson did establish the Liberation School, which held classes and attracted a dozen or so students. Peter Bailey started the OAAU's newsletter,
Blacklash
, and Muriel Gray led a very productive cultural arts committee. However, the factional discord upset many OAAU people, who felt discouraged and disoriented without their leader's presence. Most had joined after being inspired by Malcolm, but in his long absence members had to assume greater responsibilities. “We sort of hoped [Malcolm] would be like the magnet that would draw the people in,” Ferguson explained. Hundreds would regularly turn out for OAAU events but refuse to pay the two-dollar membership fee. Paradoxically, Ferguson attributed the recruitment problems directly to Malcolm. “When you became a known member of Malcolm’s organization, you stuck out like a sore thumb. It was easier to be a Black Panther than a Malcomite.” Ferguson also blamed the OAAU's problems on the MMI, which was increasingly detached from providing any assistance. “Malcolm recognized the limitations of the brothers,” he observed. “They . . . would lay down their lives for him, and he knew that.” But “in terms of building and developing and bringing people in, they would tend to frighten people.” Early one Saturday morning at their Hotel Theresa office just before his second trip abroad, Malcolm became irate when he saw an MMI brother lounging in a comfortable chair. “Don’t you have anything to do?” he snapped. “Go out and deliver some leaflets!” Ferguson narrated the story’s bitter conclusion: “The guy left and we didn’t see him for several weeks. And then when we saw him next, he was all bandaged up. He went down in the subway, and Nation of Islam guys jumped him, and they put him in the hospital.”

Throughout this difficult time three individuals played key roles: James 67X Warden (Shabazz), Benjamin 2X Goodman (Karin), and Charles 37X Morris (Kenyatta). These close associates of Malcolm’s had all served in the military and had all joined the NOI; Benjamin and James had both risen to positions of authority in the NOI. When the split occurred, all of them placed their lives on hold to follow Malcolm even without knowing where he was going. The activities of this triumvirate largely defined how Malcolm was presented to the public during the second half of 1964.

James’s power rested partially on the fact that he was the only person who could act, or write, on Malcolm’s behalf. “I paid the bills, I rented the Audubon Ballroom, [I wrote] every press release that he made.” He even purchased “books on how to have press conferences, and advised Malcolm how to engage the media.” He also had the authority to send on behalf of Malcolm correspondence and press releases he wrote himself. For all his labors, James was paid a total of one hundred dollars during nearly a year. Despite all these sacrifices, Malcolm occasionally questioned his loyalty.

He got little thanks either from any of his fellow members, who viewed him as notoriously secretive and argumentative. He was constantly receiving a stream of orders from Malcolm, but though he could speak freely on his leader’s behalf, he was rarely given full authority to render truly important decisions. On one occasion when he attended an OAAU business meeting, he became so frustrated by the group’s disorganization and hopelessness at “getting anything done” that he stood up and slammed his Samsonite briefcase on a nearby table. “Brother Malcolm is holding
me
responsible for the formation of this organization,” he warned. “Now, I’m going to leave with these parting words: either
you
organize it or
I’ll
organize it.” After this stern rebuke, “things started happening.”

Benjamin 2X had an easier time ingratiating himself. His primary role kept him busy with MMI; unlike James, he was not tasked with an organization-building role in the OAAU, which made it easier for him to go out of his way to support its development. On July 18, when New York City police shot James Powell, the event that would precipitate the Harlem riot, Benjamin spoke as the OAAU representative at a protest rally that was hastily organized by CORE in Harlem. Though he did not take part in the riots, NYPD and FBI interest in him subsequently increased sharply. According to agents at the rally, Benjamin “stirred them up by stating that Negroes should arm themselves for self-protection and that Negroes must be willing to spill blood for freedom.” Looking for someone to blame, especially with Malcolm out of the country, the FBI and Justice Department focused on Benjamin, though they eventually decided that there was insufficient evidence to arrest him.

Throughout the summer, James and Benjamin tried gamely to fill the hole left by their absent leader. On July 5 Benjamin spoke at the second public rally of the OAAU, held at the Audubon; then, on July 12, he presided over an OAAU rally that attracted 125 people and featured guest speakers Percy Sutton and Charles Rangel, who urged the audience to promote voter registration. Almost by default, James became Malcolm’s emissary to the United States left. He addressed a meeting at Columbia University sponsored by the Trotskyist DeBerry-Shaw presidential campaign committee on July 23. About one week later he lectured at the Socialist Workers Party’s Militant Labor Forum in Manhattan, charging that the recent Harlem riot was being used as a pretext to “set down” the black community. As Malcolm’s absence grew longer, by late summer James finally began making major political and financial decisions without his input. In early August, when a cluster of supporters wanted to initiate an MMI branch in Philadelphia, he promised that any funds collected locally should remain there until the group “got on its feet.” James’s decision not only represented a sharp break from the Nation’s autocratic centralism, but it also fragmented the potential resources of pro-Malcolm forces.

As the summer rolled on, James found himself left with relatively few allies within the MMI because, ironically, members felt he had been excessively accommodating to the OAAU, allowing that group to usurp resources and space at MMI headquarters. James recalled, “We had a space, and men tend to be territorial. . . . And they came in and wanted to do things their way, or spoke to the brothers in a way that brothers were not accustomed to.” James believed that OAAU members saw themselves “as intellectually capable individuals who were taking over from these ex-criminals, these . . . nincompoops, and it caused resentment.” But if James bore the brunt of their anger, he was not the source of it. For that, the responsibility fell to Malcolm himself, and the changes he had made to his platform, by will or by concession, in order to broaden the appeal of his message. In separating his politics from religion, he had inadvertently undermined the political authority of the MMI. His determination to play a major role in the civil rights movement meant denouncing much of his old past and Nation of Islam beliefs, especially the forceful emphasis on class divisions within the black community. But the MMI was an embodiment of that past, and its members resented those middle-class, better-educated blacks who now pushed to encircle their minister. “The OAAU seemed to be treating us as last year's news,” James reflected bitterly. “‘We are replacing them,’ see?”

James’s own Marxist take on the black community left him deeply skeptical of the OAAU's mission, a sentiment at odds with his responsibility to help the group get off the ground. For him, the OAAU's artists like Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, and its intellectuals like John Oliver Killens, represented the black petite bourgeoisie that Malcolm had once portrayed as part of the problem. “Their bread was buttered on the integrationist side,” he complained. “These were not people that were on welfare. They were middle class for America and upper middle class for black America. They didn’t have to wonder whether there was milk in the refrigerator.” James believed that Malcolm had created the OAAU primarily to serve as a platform to carry out his international objectives. “An African diplomat or African politician could see it and accept it [the OAAU] and understand that . . . what was good for the African-American people would be good for his group.” During his April-May visit to Africa, Malcolm had been surprised that “some of the most revolutionary people over there said, ‘Well, how does Martin Luther King stand on this?’ And they felt that if Martin Luther King wasn’t in it, who was this Johnny-come-lately Malcolm?” James continued. “So [Malcolm] made adjustments.” Among them was to pursue a recruitment strategy bringing middle-class blacks, liberal celebrities, and intellectuals into the OAAU. “Besides,” added James, Malcolm’s views were “changing so rapidly that almost as soon as he reached a particular level [they would become] obsolete, because he was at another place.” This was pragmatic, self-interested politics: “He needed people of stature and substance that would allow him to have that kind of dialogue with Africa, or with the UN, or international bodies. And people like Ossie Davis or Ruby Dee or Sidney Poitier are people who are well known.”

The tug-of-war between the OAAU and MMI finally surfaced into open conflict when several MMI brothers were arrested on weapons possession charges. Though the brothers were also OAAU members, the OAAU made no effort to post their bail. “When they came out,” James recalled, “they were behind in their annual [OAAU] dues. So they . . . went to go to [an OAAU] meeting, and the sisters said, ‘No, you can’t come to the meeting because you’re behind in your dues.’ ” The brothers were stunned, and over the next few months many MMI members with dual membership would quit the OAAU, or simply drift away from both organizations. One furious MMI member named Talfiq brought his grievances to James, who explained that Malcolm had given him the responsibility to build the OAAU. “[This brother] had enough respect for me to abide his plans for revolution.” The fragmentation grew still worse when Betty initiated her own group of supporters. “Betty had a group going on at her house, who thought they should [take over] the OAAU, because Lynne Shifflett wasn’t moving fast enough.” Betty also had a special dislike for Shifflett, who she feared might be sexually involved with her husband. According to Max Stanford, at an OAAU meeting, an irate Betty charged in and accused Shifflett and an OAAU secretary of sleeping with Malcolm.