Malcolm X (75 page)

At the next OAAU public rally, held on January 24, he spoke on African and African-American history, from ancient black civilizations and slavery up to the present era. The OAAU leadership planned for Malcolm to follow this lecture with two others: a second analyzing current conditions, and a third about the future, presenting the organization’s program to the public.

Malcolm extensively read history, but he was not a historian. His interpretation of enslavement in the United States cast black culture as utterly decimated by the institution of slavery and framed slavery’s consequences in America as the very worst forms of racial oppression. As historical analysis, this approach did not adequately measure the myriad forms of resistance mounted by enslaved blacks. But in political terms, his emphasis on American exceptionalism and its unrelenting oppression of blacks was a brilliant motivating tool for African Americans. Peter Goldman explained that Malcolm “differentiated between America and the rest of the world. . . . I don’t think he romanticized Western Europe, but I think he probably thought they were doing a little better than we were.” Placing the United States on the last level of racial oppression, even below South Africa, in a curious way recognized the importance of the African-American struggle.

Two days after his history lecture at the OAAU rally, Malcolm gave an address at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire. The talk was arranged by a Muslim undergraduate student, Omar Osman, who was affiliated with the Islamic Center in Geneva. Demand for admission was so great that while fifteen hundred attended, five hundred more were unable to get in. Malcolm’s lecture built upon his new image as a human rights advocate. Barriers like religion, race, and color could no longer be used as excuses for inaction against injustice. “We must approach the problem as humans first,” he stated, “and whatever else we are second.”

Bold lectures like this before large crowds stood in stark contrast to the scrambling he often took to avoid altercations with the Nation, though he continued even at this late date, and despite all warnings from those who cared about him, to provoke his former brothers. He had not let go of his involvement in the paternity lawsuit pending against Elijah Muhammad in Los Angeles, which was now on the verge of proceeding. The case had been delayed until a hearing was finally set on January 11, 1965. However, on the day of the hearing neither Evelyn Williams nor Lucille Rosary showed up. The judge consequently removed the case from the calendar until an explanation was given, and when it came it was hardly surprising: the women had been so intimidated by the NOI that they had become frightened for their own safety. They were living together in Los Angeles, but had moved twice out of fear. When contacted by Los Angeles attorney Gladys Towles Root, Malcolm encouraged her to speed up her efforts, saying, “If the case doesn’t get to trial soon, I won’t be alive to testify.”

His prophecy gained credence almost immediately. At approximately eleven fifteen p.m. on January 22, Malcolm opened the front door of his home and took several steps outside when suddenly several Muslims who had been hiding rushed toward him. “They came at me three seconds too soon,” Malcolm later recounted. He ran back inside, secured the door, and called the police. But the Nation had made its point: once he left his home, Malcolm would be safe nowhere. The police arrived, searched the surrounding blocks, but unsurprisingly failed to find the attackers. Malcolm denied allegations in the press that he traveled only with a bodyguard. He retorted, “My alertness is my bodyguard.” In truth, he routinely traveled with James 67X or Reuben Francis or both, and had recently taken to carrying a tear gas pen for self-defense.

Undeterred by the attack, Malcolm flew out to the West Coast, where on January 28 he met with Evelyn, Lucille, and Gladys Root to secure their continued commitment to the lawsuit. Malcolm promised personally to testify at the hearing. Then, by coincidence, a group of NOI loyalists ran into Malcolm in the lobby of his hotel. Over the next two days they closely tracked his movements, always staying close enough to let Malcolm know he was being watched and that they might strike at any moment. Root attested later that Malcolm seemed truly frightened throughout this trip. On the day he was to leave town, two carloads of Fruit tailed Malcolm’s automobile on the highway to the airport. Without any weapon to defend himself, Malcolm found a cane in the car, poked it out a side window, and aimed it like a rifle. It was convincing enough; the would-be attackers quickly pulled back. At the airport, though, there were several more Muslims waiting. The LAPD responded by taking Malcolm through an underground tunnel to reach his plane. Prior to embarking, the captain of the flight ordered all the passengers off and had the plane thoroughly searched for bombs. As soon as he arrived in Chicago, Malcolm was placed under close police guard.

The stop in Chicago was itself a bold provocation. Malcolm had come to the Nation’s base for the very purpose of further undermining its reach. He was there to be interviewed by the Illinois attorney general’s office, which was considering him as a witness in a legal case,
Thomas Cooper v. State of Illinois
. Cooper, a prisoner and follower of Elijah Muhammad at the Illinois state penitentiary, was suing the state on constitutional grounds, claiming that while incarcerated he had been restricted from obtaining a copy of the Qur'an and other reading materials related to the Nation of Islam. As a witness, Malcolm was prepared to argue that the Nation was not a legitimately Islamic religious organization, and that therefore it did not merit access to penal institutions. His newfound hostility to the Nation’s religious activities inside prisons directly contradicted his extensive efforts to convert prisoners, going back to his own incarceration in the 1940s. But his opposition to the Nation was now so intense that he was willing to support the efforts of the Illinois attorney general to ban the Nation from access to those in the penal system. This purpose alone would have raised the Nation’s hackles, but Malcolm did not pass quietly through town. Instead, he devoted nearly ten full hours to television, radio, and newspaper interviews, including a taped appearance on the popular
Kup’s Show
on WBKB.

Though Malcolm returned safely to New York City on January 31, the incident in Los Angeles had left him shaken. That night he seemed subdued addressing an OAAU rally at the Audubon before a crowd of 550, an unusually large draw for the group. The next day, he gave a revealing interview to the
Amsterdam News
. “My death has been ordered by higher-ups in the movement,” he said of the NOI. He had become convinced that the greater the negative publicity concerning the Nation’s attempts to kill him, the safer he would be; if any harm came to him, he figured, law enforcement would immediately place members of the Nation under arrest. The statement, however, had no immediate effect. Two days later, after he appeared as a panelist on the TV show
Hotline
, on WPIX in New York City, with Ossie Davis, Jimmy Breslin, and others, Nation thugs swarmed Malcolm’s men outside the television studio, precipitating a violent brawl. Malcolm again escaped unharmed.

During these final days, many of Malcolm’s closest associates detected disturbing changes in his behavior and physical appearance. For years, Malcolm had come to public meetings and lectures impeccably dressed, always wearing a clean white shirt and tie. But now, he always seemed to be tired, even exhausted and depressed. His shoes weren’t shined; his clothing was frequently wrinkled. There was even “a kind of fatalism” in his conversations, observes Malcolm X researcher Abdur-Rahman Muhammad. In his personal exchanges with Anas Luqman during this time, Malcolm ruminated that “the males in his family didn’t die a natural death.” To Luqman, just before the assassination, the leader seemed to resign himself to his fate: “Whatever’s going to happen, is going to happen.” The disenchantment of Malcolm loyalists in their leader was also directly related to the confusion and alienation they felt about the new political directions they had been given. In practical terms, as Abdur-Rahman Muhammad explains, the ex-Black Muslims who had followed Malcolm into the MMI “didn’t sign up for orthodox Islam. They didn’t sign up for this OAAU thing. And they positively resented the fact that the OAAU seemed to be where Malcolm was putting all of his energy.”

Despite his growing uncertainty and bouts with depression, Malcolm steeled himself to press forward. On February 3 he took an early-morning flight from New York City, arriving in Montgomery, Alabama, around noon. An hour and a half later he was addressing three thousand students at Tuskegee Institute’s Logan Hall. The auditorium was so crowded that even before the formal program began hundreds had to be turned away. Malcolm’s title for the lecture, “Spectrum on Political Ideologies,” did not reflect its content, which covered much of the same ground as his other recent addresses. He condemned the Tshombe regime, the Johnson administration’s links to it, and the growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam, suggesting the United States was “trapped” there. When asked about his disputes with Elijah Muhammad, he responded with a soft, theological argument: “Elijah believes that God is going to come and straighten things out. . . . I’m not willing to sit and wait on God to come. . . . I believe in religion, but a religion that includes political, economic, and social action designed to eliminate some of these things, and make a paradise here on earth while we’re waiting for the other.”

The students affiliated with SNCC who attended his lecture invited him to visit Selma, then the headquarters of the national campaign for black voting rights, and only one hundred miles west in the heart of the Black Belt. Malcolm could not refuse. The beauty of the Selma struggle was its brutal simplicity: hundreds of local blacks lined up at Selma’s Dallas County building daily, demanding the right to register to vote; white county and city police beat and arrested them. By the first week in February thirty-four hundred people had been jailed, including Dr. King. Under cover of darkness, terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan harassed civil rights workers, black families, and households. On February 4, Malcolm addressed an audience of three hundred at the Brown’s Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Significantly, while the event had been arranged through SNCC, after some negotiations it was formally cosponsored by King’s SCLC. Malcolm’s sermon praised King’s dedication to nonviolence, but he advised that should white America refuse to accept the nonviolent model of social change, his own example of armed “self-defense” was an alternative. After the talk he met with Coretta Scott King, stating that in the future he would work in concert with her husband. Before leaving, he informed SNCC workers that he planned to start an OAAU recruitment drive in the South within a few weeks. In this one visit, he had significantly expanded the OAAU's purpose and mission, from lobbying the UN to playing an activist role in the grassroots trenches of voting rights and community organizing.

Back in New York, he purchased air tickets for London, with stops in Paris and Geneva, for what would be his final trip out of the country. He planned to attend the first Congress of the Council of African Organizations, held in London on February 6-8, and then to move on to Paris to work with Carlos Moore in consolidating the OAAU's presence there. Arriving in London, he gave interviews to the New China news agency and the
Ghanaian Times
. As had happened so many times before, the good rapport he had developed with movement activists in Selma and Tuskegee quickly disappeared in favor of more radical sentiments. He told the Chinese media that “the greatest event in 1964 was China’s explosion of an atom bomb, because this is a great contribution to the struggle of the oppressed people in the world.” He deplored the 1964 Civil Rights Act as “nothing but a device to deceive the African people,” and characterized U.S. racism as being “an inseparable part of the entire political and social system.” And his opposition to the Vietnam War was escalating: the basic choice America had was “to die there or pull out. . . . Time is against the U.S., and the American people do not support the U.S. war.”

In his interview with the
Ghanaian Times
, he promoted the call by Nkrumah for the establishment of an African union government. Those leaders who reject the creation of a union, he declared, “will be doing a greater service to the imperialists than Moise Tshombe.” Once again Malcolm the visionary anticipated the future contours of history, with the creation of the African Union a half century later. Addressing the conference on February 8, he encouraged the African press to challenge the racist stereotypes and distortions of Africans in the Western media. In the Western press, he noted, the African freedom fighter was made to look “like a criminal.”

On February 9 he flew on to Paris, yet at customs the authorities detained him and refused to allow him to enter the country. During a subsequent two-hour delay, he learned that the government of Charles de Gaulle had determined that his presence was “undesirable,” and that a talk he had scheduled with the Federation of African Students might “provoke demonstrations.” Returning to London, he quickly organized a press conference, challenging the French decision. “I did not even get as far as immigration control,” he complained. “I might as well have been locked up.”

A telephone interview was arranged in London that was audiotaped and later played on speakers for a crowd of three hundred in Paris. The incident seemed to have pulled him back for the moment, and he once again returned to the language of unity and racial harmony. “I do not advocate violence,” he explained. “In fact, the violence that exists in the United States is the violence that the Negro in America has been a victim of.” On the issues of black nationalism and the Southern civil rights movement, he once again channeled King. “I believe in taking an uncompromising stand against any forms of segregation and discrimination that are based on race. I myself do not judge a man by the color of his skin.”