Malcolm X

by Manning Marable

  Late that summer, Elijah Muhammad gave Malcolm permission to deliver a four-week series of lectures at Temple No. 1 in Detroit, by now relocated to significantly larger quarters at 5401 John C. Lodge Street. Interest in the series was so extensive that the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the country’s most prominent black newspapers, ran an interview with Malcolm in which he denounced the Eisenhower administration, particularly its failure to support the desegregation of public schools across the South. “The root of the trouble and center of the arena is in Washington, D.C.,” he declared, “where the modern-day ‘Pharaoh’s Magicians’ are putting on a great show, fooling most of the so-called Negroes by pretending to be divided against each other.” The worst offender was Eisenhower himself, “the ‘Master Magician’” who was “too busy playing golf to speak out—and with the expert timing of a master general, when he does speak out, he is always too late.” Unlike Elijah Muhammad, who after his spell in prison rarely criticized the government and almost never cited individual officials, Malcolm was both outspoken and named names.

  The Detroit public lectures were both a long-awaited homecoming and an announcement of what the future had in store for black militancy. Through family and friends, Malcolm’s remarkable story from criminality to public leadership was well known in black Detroit. The reporter for the Los Angeles Dispatch covering Malcolm’s talk on August 10, 1957, noted, “More than 4,000 Moslems and non-Moslems filled Muhammad’s Detroit Temple of Islam to capacity to hear young Malcolm X.” The paper quoted Malcolm describing the position of black Americans within the U.S. political system as both strategic and unique. For, although the Negroes are deprived of most of their voting powers yet their diluted vote will swing the balance of power in the Presidential or any other election in this country. What would the role and the position of the Negro be if he had a full voting voice? . . . No wonder, then, the freedom or equal rights struggle of the Negro people is so greatly feared. . . . If the present leaders of the so-called American Negro don’t unite soon, and take a firm stand with positive steps designed to eliminate immediately the brutal atrocities that are being committed daily against our people, and, if the so-called Negro intelligentsia, intellectuals and educators won’t unite to help alter this nasty and most degrading situation; then the little man in the street will henceforth begin to take matters into his own hands.

  This is an extraordinary passage on several levels. First, it anticipates the presidential election of 1960, which Kennedy narrowly won with 72 percent of the black vote. Years before the successful passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Malcolm appears to be linking the general empowerment of African Americans to the struggle for voter registration and education. Years before King, Malcolm understands the potential power of black bloc voting. Second, it proposes a broad-based coalition of civil rights organizations and other groups—presumably including the NOI—to address the collective problems of blacks. Third, the final sentence of the passage implies a stark warning to the Negro intelligentsia and middle class that the truly disadvantaged among the black masses might, out of impatience or despair, rise up violently. This theme would become the basis for Malcolm’s most famous address, his “Message to the Grassroots,” delivered in Detroit on November 10, 1963. The speech also anticipates his April 3, 1964, “Ballot or the Bullet” speech that envisioned a bloodless revolution led by blacks exercising their democratic voting rights.

  What was truly paradoxical about the August 10, 1957, address was that the NOI was at this time strictly opposed to its members becoming involved in electoral politics, or even registering to vote. What remained paradoxical about the Nation was that, despite being organized to achieve power, its core philosophy was apolitical. Temple members were never encouraged to register in civil rights demonstrations or disrupt public places by engaging in civil disobedience. They were hardly “revolutionaries.” Perhaps one explanation is Congressman Powell’s growing influence on Malcolm. Abyssinian’s fifteen-thousand-strong voting bloc illustrated just how powerful a single black institution could be in the context of New York City’s fractious politics. Malcolm may have floated these ideas as part of an attempt to change Elijah Muhammad’s rigid antipolitics position.

  Finally, the speech’s flowing construction displayed Malcolm’s growing rhetorical confidence. Although the talk was formally hosted by the Nation of Islam, its focus and style were profoundly secular: Malcolm no longer saw himself exclusively as an NOI minister, but someone who could speak to black politics.

  The FBI of course monitored this and later lectures. One of its spies advised the Bureau that in September Malcolm had been named acting minister of Detroit’s temple. The informant added that “Little is well liked in Detroit and the meetings at which he spoke were well attended.” Two months on, Wilfred X Little would become head minister of Temple No. 1. The Amsterdam News also followed Malcolm’s Midwest road tour, reporting back that he had “been a great hit with the general Detroit Public.” His speaking venues in that city were “packed to capacity,” and his evangelical drive, the paper noted, had produced major gains for the Nation.

  Malcolm’s high-impact speaking schedule kept members flowing in and media interest high, but it also battered his already weakened body. For a month after the Detroit lectures, he got by on only two to four hours of sleep each night, eating once daily, and keeping himself awake on coffee. Several days after a lecture on October 23, he began to feel severe pains in his chest and stomach. Fearing that he might have a coronary condition, he checked himself in to Harlem’s Sydenham Hospital. The physicians diagnosed heart palpitations and inflammation around the ribs, but attributed the problems to exhaustion and stress. They strongly advised that he take time off, but he adamantly refused.

  Checking out of Sydenham after a two-day stay, he rushed up to Boston to preside over the dedication of a new temple and to offer support for his protégé Louis X, the Boston temple minister. Introduced as “the founder of the Boston temple,” Malcolm reminded his audience about the inequality that existed throughout America. Blacks “have died for this country and yet we are not [full] citizens.” Even other discriminated-against groups, such as the Jews, received better treatment. “A Jew is in the White House, Jews in the State House, the Jews run the country. You and I can’t go into a white hotel down south,” he argued, “but a Jew can.”

  Malcolm continued his public criticisms of New York’s police department, writing a telegram to the police commissioner in which he demanded that the officers directly involved in the Hinton incident be suspended. In October, when a New York County grand jury opted not to indict those responsible, Malcolm condemned the decision. “Harlem is already a potential powder keg,” he warned. “If these ignorant white officers are allowed to remain in the Harlem area, their presence is not only a menace to society, but to world peace.” BOSS considered Malcolm’s words as a threat against the police and increased its surveillance by placing black undercover officers inside the Nation. On November 7, BOSS detective Walter A. Upshur visited William Traynham, the administrator of Sydenham Hospital in Harlem, to investigate Malcolm’s recent hospitalization. The detective learned that Malcolm’s “admitting diagnosis was coronary” and obtained the name and address of his private physician.

  By November 10, Malcolm was back in Detroit, and soon after departed on a nearly three-week-long tour of the West Coast with the goal of establishing a strong temple in Los Angeles. Following this, he made an unscheduled return stop in Detroit to tell a standing-room-only audience that Islam was “spreading like a flaming fire awakening and uniting Negroes where it is heard.” Although Malcolm usually spoke at Muslim temples, his audiences increasingly consisted of both Muslim and non-Muslim blacks. In his language and style, Malcolm reached out to recruit black Christians to his cause.

  His breakthrough as a national speaker generated a financial windfall for the Nation. Between five hundred and one thousand African Americans were joining almost every month. The demand for new te
mples must have seemed endless. Much of the new revenue went into commercial ventures overseen by Raymond Sharrieff, mostly in Chicago: a restaurant, a dry cleaning and laundry establishment, a bakery, a barbershop, a well-stocked grocery store. The Nation also purchased an apartment building on Chicago’s South Side, as well as a farm and a house in White Cloud, Michigan, valued at sixteen thousand dollars. The economic success of these ventures may have been responsible for Elijah Muhammad’s decision to stop mentioning some of the original tenets of Wallace D. Fard’s Islam—in particular the bizarre Yacub’s History—and to give greater emphasis to the Garveyite thesis that a self-sustainable, all-black capitalist economy was a viable strategy.

  Malcolm’s popularity gave him unprecedented leverage with Muhammad, allowing him to achieve major concessions, such as NOI ministers being permitted the surname Shabazz rather than the standard X. Since, according to NOI theology, Shabazz was the original tribal identity of the lost-founds, it could be claimed as a legitimate surname. Contrary to the perception that “Malcolm Shabazz” emerged only after Malcolm’s break with the Nation in 1964, he was using this name widely by 1957.

  Muhammad’s pride in Malcolm’s strategic judgments allowed the young minister to develop regional recruitment campaigns in areas where the NOI had never previously canvassed. The best, and in many ways the most problematic, example was in the South. Despite Malcolm’s establishment of the Atlanta temple in 1955, the NOI had virtually no presence below the Mason-Dixon line. Yet in the recent years of the Nation’s greatest growth, the region had become a racial powder keg. In Montgomery, Alabama, the successful bus boycott of 1955-56, initiated by Rosa Parks’s refusal to surrender her seat on a segregated bus, had brought to national attention the struggle to abolish legal Jim Crow. Since the Nation of Islam’s position favored racial separation, Malcolm thought it important that integrationist reformers like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., not be allowed to exercise too great an influence—Elijah Muhammad’s message of black solidarity, black capitalism, and racial separatism had to be carried into Dixie. These arguments made sense to Muhammad, who gave him permission to launch a Southern campaign. Though eager, Malcolm moved with some caution: when the press asked his opinions on the Montgomery boycott, he praised Rosa Parks’s courage, describing her as a “good, hard-working, Christian-believing black woman.” Rarely would he directly criticize the protests espoused by King.

  Malcolm already had some experience stumping for the Nation of Islam in the South. In August 1956, one year after establishing the Atlanta temple, he had been the featured speaker for the first Southern Goodwill Tour of the Brotherhood of Islam. The convention attracted hundreds of people across the region, but to ensure an impressive turnout NOI temples from as far away as Atlantic City and Lansing sent their members. By the conclusion of the tour, the Atlanta temple had doubled its membership. The next February, Malcolm was again called to the South, this time to Alabama. While en route to attend the Saviour's Day convention in Chicago that year, a group of NOI members tangled with police at a train station in the small town of Flomaton. Two Muslim women had violated an ordinance by sitting on a whites-only bench, and police moved to confront them. When two young Muslim men, Joe Allen and George R. White, sought to protect the women, the local police chief, “Red” Hemby, pulled his revolver. In the struggle, Allen and White disarmed and severely beat the officer. Minutes later they were arrested and charged with attempted murder. Arriving in Flomaton, Malcolm used his influence to secure their release with only minor fines.

  His second major Southern tour, the centerpiece of the campaign that Muhammad had approved, took place in September and October of 1958, beginning in Atlanta, which, with its flourishing temple, remained one of the few urban centers in the region to have a significant NOI presence. By September 29 he was in Florida, and over the next two weeks the state’s NOI members coordinated public lectures for him in Miami, Tampa, and Jacksonville. Apparently Malcolm did not modify his talks to address regional issues that were particularly relevant in the South. Nevertheless, his speeches did attract modest media coverage, and the tour enhanced the Nation’s profile, especially in Miami.

  The NOI never captured the following in the South that it achieved in the mostly urban industrial Midwest, on the East Coast, and in California. Its organizational weakness in the region was compounded by several critical errors it made in its response to newly emerging desegregation campaigns. Following Muhammad’s lead, NOI leaders believed that white Southerners were at least honest in their hatred of blacks. The NOI could not imagine a political future where Jim Crow segregation would ever become outlawed. Consequently, Malcolm concluded, “the advantage of this is the Southern black man never has been under any illusions about the opposition he is dealing with.” Since white supremacy would always be a reality, blacks were better off reaching a working relationship with racist whites rather than allying themselves with Northern liberals. This was a tragic replay of Garvey’s disastrous thesis that culminated in his overtures to white supremacist organizations. “You can say for many Southern white people that, individually, they have been paternalistically helpful to many individual Negroes,” Malcolm was to argue in Autobiography. “I know nothing about the South. I am a creation of the Northern white man.”

  Even though Malcolm’s Southern campaign ultimately scored limited gains, that effort paled in comparison to his remarkable success in growing the Nation of Islam across the country. Of the thousands of new converts he made in 1956-57, two would figure in his own life in ways he could not have imagined. One was James Warden, a New York City native and son of a labor organizer who may once have been a member of the Communist Party. After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, Warden attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and then served a two-year stint in the military, returning home to enroll in an M.A. program at Columbia University’s East Asian Institute. Sometime in 1957, when he was twenty-five, a black friend persuaded him to go to the NOI temple to hear Malcolm. He took some convincing: Warden disliked everything he had heard about this strange, racist cult. “I was convinced that these people were saying, ‘The white man is the devil,’” he recalled. “I figured, hey, it’s some crazy group, [but] America is full of them.” Upon entering the temple at West 116th Street and Lenox Avenue, he was offended to find he had to submit to a physical search. When the program began, he met with further frustration; the evening’s speaker was not Malcolm but Louis X Walcott. As Louis launched wildly into his sermon, a bewildered Warden asked himself, “Has this man lost his mind?” The concept of whites literally as devils seemed ridiculous. Warden vowed to himself, “If I get out of this place without being arrested, I will never come back.”

  But curiosity got the better of him. Five nights later he returned, but once again was disappointed when yet another minister addressed the congregation. Still, he persisted, and two nights later finally heard Malcolm. The experience was a revelation. On display was Malcolm’s great strength not merely as an orator, but as a teacher. For this sermon, as for many, he used a chalkboard as part of his presentation and employed evidence from academic sources to buttress his arguments. He also didn’t mind being challenged. When Warden left that night, he realized he wanted to return. For the next nine months, he continued to attend meetings regularly, though he stopped short of joining formally. What finally put him over was finding himself the target of racial insults from schoolmates at Columbia. When they ridiculed him as a “nigger,” he became infuriated. “I felt that I was in classrooms with people who because of our mutual interests had some kind of appreciation or respect for me as a person,” he said. “This was not the case.” Giving himself over to the Nation, Warden flourished, and by 1960 was named an FOI lieutenant. It was in this capacity that his friendship with Malcolm grew to dedication. Short, pugnacious, fluent in three foreign languages including Japanese, the workaholic Warden—renamed James 67X—would eventually become one of Malcolm’s most steadfast advisers.
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  Another significant recruit was Betty Sanders. Born on May 28, 1934, like Malcolm she had been raised in a household where race issues played a prominent role. Her foster parents, Lorenzo and Helen Malloy, had taken her in from a broken home as a young girl and provided her with a stable middle-class existence. Lorenzo Malloy was a graduate of Tuskegee Institute and a businessman who owned a shoe repair shop in Detroit. Helen Malloy was active in civil rights, serving as an officer in the National Housewives League, a group that initiated boycotts of white-owned businesses that refused to hire blacks or sell black products . She also belonged to the NAACP and to Mary McLeod Bethune’s National Council of Negro Women, two pillars of the black bourgeoisie. Betty attended Detroit’s Northern High School, and upon receiving her diploma in 1952 enrolled in the Tuskegee Institute, intent on studying education. After two years, she switched her major to nursing; against her parents’ advice she transferred to Brooklyn State College School of Nursing, where she earned her undergraduate degree in 1956, and soon began her clinical studies at the Bronx’s Montefiore Hospital.

  Betty’s discovery of the NOI was, like Warden’s, entirely fortuitous. One Friday night in mid-1956, an older nurse at Montefiore invited her to an NOI-sponsored dinner, followed by a temple sermon. Betty found the main lecturer “bewildering.” With serious reservations, she consented to go one more time, and on this occasion Malcolm spoke. As she noted his thin frame, her first impression was one of concern. “This man is totally malnourished!” she thought. Following the lecture, she was introduced to him, and as they conversed Betty was struck by Malcolm’s relaxed manner. Onstage, he had seemed soldierly and stern; in private, he was personable, even charming. Intrigued, she began attending Temple No. 7 sermons, at first hiding her fascination with the Muslims from her parents. By that fall, Betty Sanders officially joined, becoming Betty X, and serving as a health instructor in the MGT's General Civilization Class. Her friends outside the temple believed that her newfound dedication to the Nation had a lot to do with her feelings for Minister Malcolm.