Malcolm X

by Manning Marable

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1 - “Up, You Mighty Race!”

  CHAPTER 2 - The Legend of Detroit Red

  CHAPTER 3 - Becoming “X”

  CHAPTER 4 - “They Don’t Come Like the Minister”

  CHAPTER 5 - “Brother, a Minister Has to Be Married”

  CHAPTER 6 - “The Hate That Hate Produced”

  CHAPTER 7 - “As Sure As God Made Green Apples”

  CHAPTER 8 - From Prayer to Protest

  CHAPTER 9 - “He Was Developing Too Fast”

  CHAPTER 10 - “The Chickens Coming Home to Roost”

  CHAPTER 11 - An Epiphany in the Hajj

  CHAPTER 12 - “Do Something About Malcolm X”

  CHAPTER 13 - “In the Struggle for Dignity”

  CHAPTER 14 - “Such a Man Is Worthy of Death”

  CHAPTER 15 - Death Comes on Time

  CHAPTER 16 - Life After Death

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  NOTES

  A GLOSSARY OF TERMS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY MANNING MARABLE

  Barack Obama and African-American Empowerment (edited with Kristen Clarke)

  Let Nobody Turn Us Around: An African-American Anthology (edited with Leith Mullings)

  Transnational Blackness: Navigating the Global Color Line (edited with Vanessa Agard-Jones)

  Living Black History: How Reimagining the African-American Past Can Remake America’s Racial Future

  Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945–2006

  W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat

  Seeking Higher Ground: The Hurricane Katrina Crisis (edited with Kristen Clarke)

  The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in American Life

  Freedom: A Photographic History of the African-American Freedom Struggle (coauthored with Leith Mullings)

  Black Leadership

  Black Liberation in Conservative America

  Speaking Truth to Power: Essays on Race, Radicalism, and Resistance

  Racializing Justice, Disenfranchising Lives (edited with Keesha Middlemass and Ian Steinberg)

  Herbert Aptheker on Race and Democracy (edited with Eric Foner)

  The New Black Renaissance: The Souls Anthology (editor)

  Beyond Black and White: Transforming African-American Politics

  The Crisis of Color and Democracy

  African and Caribbean Politics

  Black American Politics

  How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society

  The Autobiography of Medgar Evers (edited with Myrlie Evers-Williams)

  Freedom on My Mind: The Columbia Documentary Experience of the African-American Experience (editor)

  Dispatches From the Ebony Tower: Intellectuals Confront the African-American Experience (editor)

  Blackwater: Historical Studies in Race,

  Class Consciousness, and Revolution

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R oRL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi- 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R oRL, England

  First published in 2011 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Manning Marable, 2011 All rights reserved

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley. Copyright © 1964 by Alex Haley and Malcolm X. Copyright © 1965 by Alex Haley and Betty Shabazz. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

  PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS

  Insert p. 2 (top): Eve Arnold / Magnum Photos • p. 2 (bottom): Frank Scherschel / Getty Images • pp. 5 (bottom), 15: © Bob Adelman / Corbis • p. 6: © Hulton-Deutsch Collection / Corbis • p. 8: Keystone / Getty Images • p. 10: Orlando Fernandez, New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Library of Congress • p. 12: New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Library of Congress • All other photographs: © Bettman / Corbis

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Marable, Manning, 1950–

  Malcolm X : a life of reinvention / Manning Marable. p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-44527-3

  1. X, Malcolm, 1925–1965. 2. Black Muslims—Biography. 3. African Americans—Biography. I. Title.

  BP223.Z8L57636 2011

  297.8’7092—dc22 2010025768

  [B]

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  No one has made more sacrifices to realize the completion of this

  work than Leith Mullings. For more than a decade, she has been

  my constant companion and intellectual compass as I have

  attempted to reconstruct the past.

  This work is hers.

  PROLOGUE

  Life Beyond the Legend

  In the early years of the last century, the neighborhood just north of Harlem, later to be named Washington Heights, was a sparsely settled suburb. Only the vision of a businessman, William Fox, led to the construction of an opulent entertainment center on Broadway between West 165th and 166th streets. Fox’s instruction to the architect, Thomas W. Lamb, was to design a building more splendid than any theater on Broadway. By the time all was finished, in 1912, an expensive terra-cotta facade adorned the front walls, marble columns stood guard at the entrance, while carvings of exotic birds graced the foyer: it was these colorful motifs, inspired by the great nineteenth-century artist John James Audubon, that prompted Fox to name his pleasure palace the Audubon. On the building’s first floor, Lamb designed a massive cinema, large enough to seat twenty-three hundred people. In subsequent years, the second floor was reserved for two spacious ballrooms: the Rose Ballroom, which could accommodate eight hundred patrons, and the larger Grand Ballroom, holding up to fifteen hundred.

  Within a few decades, the neighborhood around the Audubon began to change, becoming increasingly black and working class. The Audubon's management catered to this new clientele by booking the most celebrated swing bands of the era, including Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Chick Webb. The Audubon
also became the home for many of the city’s militant trade unionists, and from 1934 to 1937 the newly formed Transport Workers Union held its meetings there—accompanied by the occasional violent confrontation. One night in September 1929, for example, a four-hundredstrong party sponsored by the Lantern Athletic Club was disrupted by four gunshots. Two people were badly wounded.

  During World War II, the Audubon was rented out for weddings, bar mitzvahs, political meetings, and graduation parties. After 1945, however, the neighborhood changed yet again, as many white middle-class residents sold their properties and fled to the suburbs. Columbia University’s decision to expand its hospital at West 168th Street and Broadway into a major health sciences campus generated hundreds of new jobs for the black influx, while the Audubon adapted to economic realities by shutting down its cinema and subdividing the space it had occupied into rentals. However, both the Rose and Grand ballrooms remained.

  By the mid-1960s, the building had surrendered most of its original grandeur. The main entrance for the ballrooms was small and drab. Customers had to climb a steep flight of stairs to the second-floor foyer, then maneuver past the manager’s office and on into either the Rose, at the building’s left (east) side, or the Grand, which faced Broadway. The larger room was about 180 feet by 60 feet, its north, east, and west walls housing about sixty-five separate booths, each of which could hold up to twelve people. Farthest from the building’s main entrance, along the south wall, was a modest wooden stage, behind which was a cramped, poorly lit antechamber where musicians and speakers would muster before walking out to perform.

  On the winter afternoon of Sunday, February 21, 1965, the Grand Ballroom had been reserved by the controversial Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), a Harlem-based political group. For nearly a year, the Audubon's management had been renting the ballroom to the group, but it remained concerned about its leader, Malcolm X. About ten years before, he had arrived as the minister of Temple No. 7, the local headquarters for a militant Islamic sect, the Lost-Found Nation of Islam (NOI). Later commonly described in the press as Black Muslims, its members preached that whites were devils and that black Americans were the lost Asiatic tribe of Shabazz, forced into slavery in America’s racial wilderness. The road to salvation required converts to reject their slave surnames, replacing them with the letter X, the symbol that represented the unknown. Members were told that, after years of personal dedication and spiritual growth, they would be given “original” surnames, in harmony with their true Asiatic identities. As the Nation’s most public spokesman, Malcolm X gained notoriety for his provocative criticisms of both civil rights leaders and white politicians.

  The previous March, Malcolm X had announced his independence from the Nation of Islam. He quickly established his own spiritual group, Muslim Mosque, Inc. (MMI), largely for those NOI members who had left the Nation in sympathy with him. Despite his break, he continued to make highly controversial statements. “There will be more violence than ever this year,” he predicted to a New York Times reporter in March 1964, for instance. “The whites had better understand this while there is still time. The Negroes at the mass level are ready to act.” The New York City police commissioner responded to this prediction by labeling Malcolm “another self-proclaimed ‘leader’ [who] openly advocates bloodshed and armed revolt and sneers at the sincere efforts of reasonable men to resolve the problem of equal rights by proper, peaceful and legitimate means.” Malcolm was not intimidated by the attack. “The greatest compliment anyone can pay me,” he responded, “is to say I’m irresponsible, because by responsible they mean Negroes who are responsible to white authorities—Negro Uncle Toms.”

  Several weeks later, Malcolm X appeared to experience a spiritual epiphany. In April, he visited the holy city of Mecca on a spiritual hajj, and on returning to the United States declared that he had converted to orthodox Sunni Islam. Repudiating his links to both the Nation of Islam and its leader, Elijah Muhammad, he announced his opposition to all forms of bigotry. He was now eager to cooperate with civil rights groups, he said, and to work with any white who genuinely supported black Americans. But despite these avowals, he continued to make controversial statements—for example, urging blacks to start gun clubs to protect their families against racists, and condemning the presidential candidates of the major parties, Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, as providing no real choice for blacks.

  Most OAAU programs were choreographed as educational forums for the local community, encouraging audience participation. For the February 21 meeting, the featured speaker was Milton Galamison, a prominent Presbyterian minister who had organized protests against substandard schools in New York City’s black and Latino neighborhoods. The OAAU had not directly participated, but Malcolm had publicly praised the minister’s efforts, and his lieutenants may have desired an informal alliance.

  Although the afternoon’s program had been advertised to begin at two, by the starting time barely forty people had passed through the main entrance. The sparse early turnout may have been a reaction to fears of possible violence. For months, the Nation had been engaged in a well-publicized feud with its former national spokesman, and Malcolm’s followers in Harlem and other cities had been physically assaulted. Only a week earlier, his own home, located in the quiet neighborhood of Elmhurst, Queens, had been firebombed in the middle of the night. To guard against a public confrontation, the NYPD had assigned a detachment of up to two dozen officers at OAAU rallies whenever held at the Audubon. One or more policemen, usually including the day’s detail commander, would be stationed on the second floor in the business office, where they would have an uninterrupted view of everyone entering the main ballroom. Many of the others were prominently stationed at the main entrance, or located outside, directly across the street in a small playground area residents called Pigeon Park. On this particular afternoon, however, not a single officer was at the Audubon entrance, and only one, briefly, was stationed in the park. No one was seen inside the business office. In fact, just two uniformed patrolmen were placed inside the building, both having been ordered to remain in the smaller—and but for them unoccupied—Rose Ballroom, at a considerable distance from the featured event.

  The absence of a substantial police presence would prove critical, because earlier that morning five men who had been planning for months to assassinate Malcolm X met together one final time. Although the venue of that meeting was in Paterson, New Jersey, all five were members of the Newark mosque of the Nation of Islam. Only one conspirator was an official of the mosque; the others were NOI laborers and assumed that their actions had been approved by the Nation’s leadership. After meeting at the home of one of the conspirators, where they went over each man’s assignment one final time, the five men then got into a Cadillac and headed for the George Washington Bridge. They exited in upper Manhattan and found a parking spot close to the Audubon that would also provide quick access back to the bridge, and an easy escape to New Jersey.

  The sole security force inside the Grand Ballroom and at the main entrance was about twenty of Malcolm’s followers. The head of Malcolm’s security team was his personal bodyguard, Reuben X Francis, who earlier that afternoon had told William 64X George that the day’s team would be undermanned, and that he would need his help. Usually, the dependable William would stand next to the speaker’s podium (placed directly in the front center of the stage), where he could view the entire audience. On this particular day, however, Reuben instructed him to stand at the front entrance—about as far as he could have been from the stage.

  Reuben also delegated some decisions to the event’s security coordinator, John D. X, whose job was to supervise guards around the Grand Ballroom’s perimeter. The normal protocol was for security teams to stand for up to thirty minutes—a demanding assignment, especially for those with no prior experience in policing crowds. Usually the most important positions went to former NOI members, all of whom had both security experience and martial arts training. If a kn
own NOI sympathizer attempted to enter an event, he was to be questioned, quietly but firmly. Nation of Islam members who had personal histories of violence or were known for hostility toward Malcolm would be escorted from the building.

  One such man was Linwood X Cathcart, a former member of Malcolm’s Mosque No. 7 who had recently joined the Jersey City mosque. He had entered the Audubon at 1:45 and seated himself in the front row of wooden folding chairs that had been placed across the dance floor. Malcolm’s team spotted him at once, reckoning that his presence could mean trouble. Cathcart now brazenly wore an NOI pin on his suit lapel. Reuben persuaded him to go with him to the rear of the ballroom, where, after exchanging words, he insisted that he remove the offending button if he wished to remain. Cathcart complied and returned to his seat. Malcolm’s security people would later insist that he was the sole NOI loyalist they had spotted.

  Handling the necessary custodial duties that afternoon was Anas M. Luqman (Langston Hughes Savage), another NOI member who had severed ties with the Nation out of loyalty to Malcolm. In his subsequent grand jury testimony, Luqman placed his arrival time at around 1:20. He briefly talked with a few people and, as he had done many times before, arranged the chairs onstage, positioned the speaker’s podium, and removed some surplus equipment. He then “went out into the audience and just stood around until the meeting start[ed].” Sometime after two, he decided to recheck the doors, located at stage right, closest to the speaker's platform. For whatever reason, they were unlocked, which troubled him, but instead of notifying Malcolm’s security people, he returned to his seat.