Malcolm X

by Manning Marable

  Ideologically Lomax was an integrationist, yet he found much to admire in the self-sufficiency and racial pride exuded by Nation members. The NOI gave him permission to film Muhammad at a rally in Washington on May 31. After weeks compiling footage, Lomax delivered the reels to Wallace, who edited and narrated the series for maximum shock value. The confrontational title, The Hate That Hate Produced, was a covert appeal to white liberals, which reflected Wallace’s politics. After all, white America had tolerated slavery and racial segregation for centuries. Was it really so surprising that a minority of Negroes had become as racist as many whites?

  The Wallace/Lomax series appeared on New York City’s WNTA-TV in five half-hour installments, from July 13 to July 17. One week later, the channel aired a one-hour documentary hosted by Wallace on the black supremacy movement, comprising segments from the earlier broadcasts. It was probably fortunate that Malcolm was out of the country when the programs appeared, because they sparked a firestorm. Civil rights leaders, sensing a publicity disaster, could not move quickly enough to distance themselves. Arnold Forster, head of the Anti-Defamation League’s civil rights division, charged that Wallace had exaggerated the size of the NOI and given it an “importance that was not warranted.” Other critics took issue with the series itself. In the New York Times, Jack Gould declared: “The periodic tendency of Mike Wallace to pursue sensationalism as an end in itself backfired. . . . To transmit the wild statements of rabble-rousers without at least some pertinent facts in refutation is not conscientious or constructive reporting.” Malcolm himself thought the show had demonized the Nation, and likened its impact to “what happened back in the 1930s when Orson Welles frightened America with a radio program describing, as though it was actually happening, an invasion by ‘men from Mars.’ ” But part of Malcolm always believed that even negative publicity was better than none at all.

  Outcry notwithstanding, the show had effectively brought the NOI to a much wider audience. There was an “instant avalanche of public reaction,” recalled Malcolm. “Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, black and white, were exclaiming ‘Did you hear it? Did you see it? Preaching hate of white people!’ ” The controversy spread quickly. After the negative response from the New York press, the national weeklies followed, characterizing the NOI as “black racists,” “black fascists,” and even “possibly Communist-inspired.” Faced with heated criticism from the African-American community, Malcolm dismissed his black middle-class opponents as Uncle Toms.

  The intense publicity changed the lives of nearly everyone connected with the series. It gave Wallace the break he needed; the national exposure led to an offer from a group of Westinghouse-owned stations to cover the 1960 presidential campaign, and in three years he was hosting the national morning news for CBS. Later, he would turn down Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon’s offer to become his press secretary, instead accepting a new assignment as a reporter on CBS's 60 Minutes, which became the longest-running news feature program in television history. Lomax also achieved success, in 1960 publishing his first book, The Reluctant African, which won the Anisfield-Wolf award. His reports on civil rights issues were regularly featured on network television. Both Wallace and Lomax continued to exploit their connections with the NOI. On July 26, 1959, however, the NOI barred Wallace from a massive rally at New York’s St. Nicholas Arena, which featured Elijah Muhammad as keynote speaker. At this event Muhammad accused Wallace and other white journalists of attempting to divide the NOI into factions. “Does he classify the truth as Hate?” he asked. “No enemy wants to see the so-called American Negro free and united.”

  Inside the Nation, Malcolm’s critics blamed him for the negative publicity surrounding Hate. NOI ministers who were against media interviews now felt justified in banning members from talking to the press. The view from Chicago headquarters, however, was much less severe. When a young doctoral student, C. Eric Lincoln, asked for help with his dissertation about the NOI, Muhammad, Malcolm, and other Muslims consented. Lincoln’s study, published in 1961 under the title The Black Muslims in America, became the standard work for decades. As the dust settled, even Lomax found his way back into the Nation’s good graces. When he subsequently approached the NOI to write his own book about the sect, its leaders were generous with their time. Lomax’s 1963 study When the Word Is Given is perhaps the single best resource about the NOI's inner workings prior to Malcolm’s split from the sect. Despite his own commitment to racial integration, Lomax tried to present a balanced, objective critique of the NOI's strengths and weaknesses. He correctly identified the malaise among working-class blacks that several years later would feed the anger beneath Black Power. Lomax quoted the ever-eloquent James Baldwin: “Deep down in their hearts the black masses don’t believe in white people anymore. They don’t believe in Malcolm, either, except when he articulates their disbelief in white people. . . . The Negro masses neither join nor denounce the Black Muslims. They just sit at home in the ghetto amid the heat, the roaches, the rats, the vice, the disgrace, and rue the fact that come daylight they must meet the man—the white man—and work at a job that leads only to a dead end.”

  Within the Nation itself, the most lasting impact of the series was the recognition that the sect had to exert greater control over its image. This required, at a minimum, a regularly published magazine or newspaper. In the fall of 1959, Malcolm produced his first attempt, Messenger Magazine; he may have been drawing upon an older Harlem tradition, as a previous paper named the Messenger, edited by A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, had been published from 1917 to 1928. The Amsterdam News advertisement promoting the journal promised it would present “Mr. Muhammad’s aims and accomplishments” and “the truth about the amazing success of the Moslems’ economic, educational, and spiritual growth among the Negroes of America.” The magazine failed to gain an audience, however, as did several other publishing ventures, until in 1960 Malcolm started printing a monthly newspaper, Muhammad Speaks. Temples began receiving hundreds of copies, and the publication quickly attracted tens of thousands of regular readers, the vast majority of them non-Muslims. The keys to its success were twofold. First, the publication hired legitimate, well-qualified journalists, who were given some leeway to cover their interests. Over time, the newspaper developed a schizophrenic character, with some articles praising Muhammad and promoting the NOI and the rest of the paper providing detailed coverage of black American issues, Africa, and the Third World. But the second reason was that all temples were ordered to sell a certain number of copies per week; the papers were doled out to individual FOI laborers, who were expected to place Muhammad Speaks everywhere.

  Malcolm used the shake-up from Hate to recommend Temple No. 7’s secretary, John X Simmons, for the position of national secretary. Within a year Simmons would move to Chicago and be given an original name, John Ali, by Elijah Muhammad. The promotion pleased Malcolm, who believed he would have another strong ally in Chicago. He did not imagine that Ali would become one of his sharpest critics in the national headquarters.

  After the ordeal of Betty’s trial, Malcolm decided that she and Attallah needed to be sent temporarily to her parents’ home in Detroit. Betty was opposed to the move, but she bent to Malcolm’s will. Her feelings did not change upon settling in, however, and in late March 1959 she complained to her husband about the arrangement, though he had little sympathy. He encouraged her to think about her absence from New York as a vacation. Though Betty worried for him in her absence, he assured her that he would survive. He missed her cooking, writing her that he had been eating regularly at the Temple’s restaurant. He found it difficult to express romantic love, or even to give Betty a compliment without qualifying it with a statement related to the NOI. For instance, he praised Betty’s cooking, but then added, “What would we Brothers do without our wonderful MGT Sisters? (smile).”

  Betty’s involuntary “vacation” may have given Malcolm space, but it further taxed his already strained finances. On Ap
ril 1 he sent her a second letter, enclosing twenty dollars. Malcolm urged her to spend as little as possible, reminding her that he was experiencing a “great financial burden.” He then reminded her that the airfare to Detroit had been expensive and that staying in Detroit would also be costly. Malcolm went on to offer a statement that seems almost comically paradoxical. He urged her again to “enjoy yourself but don’t buy anything” except items that were absolutely essential. To save money he instructed her not to phone him, but instead write a letter. He even enclosed some stamps in the envelope he mailed to her. Feeling spurned and stranded, Betty once again fell into a depression and entertained thoughts about fleeing her marriage. By this time Malcolm viewed his wife largely as a nuisance—someone he was obliged to put up with—rather than as a loving life partner. The wounds from Betty’s sexual taunting were still too fresh. He focused his energies instead on the Nation and the major events it had planned for 1959.

  The largest public occasion involving Malcolm that year was a major rally and speech by Elijah Muhammad in July, at New York City’s St. Nicholas Arena. Muhammad declared that he and the Nation were “backed by 500 million people, who are lifting their voices to Allah five times a day.” In effect, he was laying claim to full membership within Islam’s global community, a notion that would have been vigorously rejected by the vast majority of orthodox Muslims in the United States. Within the small, mostly Sunni emigrant communities that traced their lineage to the Middle East, southern Asia, and northern Africa, Muslims understood the NOI to have little in common with their faith. “Let us fervently pray that the readers of The Courier will not confuse the sect of Mr. Muhammad with that of true Islam,” wrote Yasuf Ibrahim, an Algerian, in a letter to the Pittsburgh paper. “Believers in Allah recognize no such thing as race.”

  Perhaps to quell outside critics, the Nation took several measures to affirm its connections with the global Islamic community. Muhammad began his 1960 publication Message to the Blackman in America with a Qur'anic verse: “He it is who sent His Messenger with the guidance and the true religion, that He may make it overcome the religions, all of them, though the polytheists may be adverse.” One regular feature in Muhammad Speaks, Muslim Cookbook, provided recipes that adhered to halal criteria. Arabic-language instructors were hired in NOI schools, and ministers were encouraged to make references to the Qur’an during their sermons. The most prominent woman of Temple No. 7, Tynetta Deanar, started a column in Muhammad Speaks on the global achievements of Islamic women.

  It was in this spirit of confraternity that the NOI had cabled its congratulations to the Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference, held from December 26, 1957, to January 1, 1958, in Cairo, under the auspices of Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser. The sect had much to gain from recognition or even acknowledgment by major Muslim states, and Egypt. Nasser reciprocated the gesture the following year by sending greetings to Elijah Muhammad at the Saviour’s Day convention. This was followed by an invitation from Nasser's government to Muhammad to visit Egypt and to make the hajj to Mecca. Muhammad planned to visit the Middle East, but he encountered some difficulties from the U.S. government regarding overseas travel. The decision was made to send Malcolm first, as Muhammad’s emissary. Malcolm would establish the necessary contacts for Muhammad and members of his family to follow.

  Malcolm was undoubtedly thrilled to receive the assignment, but in proper NOI tradition he could not display excessive enthusiasm. He duly applied for a passport. His stated itinerary was to visit the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan, intending to depart on June 5 in order to attend “the annual sacred Moslem Pilgrimage Rites at the Holy City of Mecca,” scheduled from June 9 to June 16. For various reasons, however, his journey was delayed, so he continued carrying out his duties throughout June.

  When he finally arrived in Cairo on July 4, it marked the beginning of a transformative experience. Malcolm was now an international traveler, the welcome guest of heads of state, and a pilgrim in the lands of the faith that had pulled him up from despair. In Egypt, deputy premier Anwar el-Sadat met with him several times, and he was well received by religious leaders at Al-Azhar University. Nasser offered to meet him personally, but Malcolm politely demurred, explaining that “he was just the forerunner and humble servant of Elijah Muhammad.” He planned to stay briefly in Egypt before visiting Mecca and touring Saudi Arabia at length, but shortly after his arrival he fell ill with dysentery and ended up spending eleven days there. During his stay, a series of prominent Egyptians extended overnight accommodations in their homes to him. Having long practiced the NOI's peculiar version of Islam, Malcolm found himself embarrassed at times by his lack of formal knowledge of the Muslim religion. While in Egypt he was expected to participate in prayers with others five times daily, but confessed to an acquaintance that he didn’t understand the Arabic language, and had “only a sketchy notion of the [prayer] ritual.”

  When his dysentery finally abated, he traveled to Saudi Arabia, where enslavement of people of African descent had existed for more than fifteen hundred years. From the perspective of most black Americans, Saudi Arabia would have appeared to be a nonwhite society, with blacks relegated to the bottom. Writing from the Kandara Palace hotel in Jeddah, he described the physical appearance of the Saudi population as ranging “from regal black to rich brown, but none are white.” Most Arabs, he noted, “would be right at home in Harlem. And all of them refer warmly to our people in America as their ‘brothers of color.’ ” His own race, so long the prism of his self-definition, receded in importance. “Many Egyptians didn’t identify him as negroid because of his color until they saw him closer,” noted one of his fellow travelers. The episode taught Malcolm that racial identities were not fixed: what was “black” in one country could be white or mulatto in another. The absence of a rigid color line apparently suggested to Malcolm that “there is no color prejudice among Moslems, for Islam teaches that all mortals are equal and brothers.”

  Three weeks of mixing with commoners and statesmen in the Middle East also reinforced Malcolm’s commitment to Pan-Africanism. “Africa is the land of the future,” he wrote in a letter home that was eventually published by the Pittsburgh Courier.

  Only yesterday, America was the New World, a world with a future—but now, we suddenly realize Africa is the New World—the world with the brightest future—a future in which the so-called American Negroes are destined to play a key role.

  Throughout his trip, he kept listeners rapt with talk of the importance of the NOI, and of the cruel suppression American blacks faced at the hands of whites. Writing of their outraged reaction, he explained that “the increasing hordes of intelligent Africans find it difficult to understand” why black Americans continued to be oppressed, “without real freedom, without public school rights, and above all, relegated to slums. . . . The chief instrument by which East and West are being divided, day and night, is resentment in Africa and Asia for administrative jim-crow in the United States.” This insight underlined the need to broaden the international perspective within the Black Freedom Movement. By cultivating alliances with Third World nations, black Americans could gain leverage to achieve racial empowerment.

  There were several reasons to believe that such a strategy could produce results. First, a significant number of African leaders, like Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, either had attended U.S. universities or had visited the United States and were familiar with its system of racial oppression. Black churches, colleges, and civic associations since the mid-nineteenth century had contacts or exchanges with African institutions. This was especially the case in South Africa, where the parallels between apartheid and legal Jim Crow were obvious. Finally, a good number of revolutionary anticolonial movements, such as Algeria’s National Liberation Front, were noncommunist. Black Americans could work with representatives of such movements without being red-baited at home.

  Malcolm’s letter, filled with new ideas about Islam and
Afro-Asian solidarity, found him at a philosophical crossroads. The attitudes toward race expressed by Muslims he encountered on his trip had revealed to him fundamental contradictions within NOI theology. Islam was in theory color-blind; members of the ummah could be any nationality or race, so long as they practiced the five pillars and other essential traditions. Whites could not be categorically demonized. Malcolm came to realize during this trip that if the NOI were to continue growing, its sectarian concepts and practices, such as Yacub’s History, might have to be abandoned, and the assimilation of orthodox Islam would need to be accelerated. Pan-Africanism presented a different problem. Using Third World solidarity to leverage change in America came to seem increasingly viable, yet this premise contradicted the NOI's dogma that reforms were impossible to achieve under white rule and that peace required a separate black state. Most troublingly, there was the question of leadership. The shahada confirms that only Muhammad is the final prophet of God; to move closer to true Islam meant that Elijah’s claim to be “Allah’s Messenger” would inevitably have to be questioned.

  Perhaps because the trip marked the beginning of Malcolm’s private concerns with the NOI's organization, he was virtually silent about it in the Autobiography. He could obviously see the discrepancies between what he had been taught by Elijah Muhammad compared to the richly diverse cultures that he had observed. All Muslims clearly were not “black.” Malcolm’s letter to the Pittsburgh Courier, however, as well as stories he recalled of his experiences, conveyed how vividly the trip impressed itself on his mind. Its lessons continued to be heard in the developing philosophy that he expressed through his public speeches.

  Malcolm’s 1959 tour was widely publicized both within the NOI and by African-American newspapers. Yet after he returned on July 22, he spoke only briefly about his trip, focusing instead on the controversy created by The Hate That Hate Produced. He tried to convey what he had learned about the Islamic world to Temple No. 7 members, and even then he spoke carefully, perhaps trying to avoid presenting ideas that might seem at odds with the NOI's basic tenets. “Muslims in the Far East,” he said, “were intensely curious to learn how it was that he professed to be Muslim, yet spoke no Arabic.” He had explained to them that he had been “kidnapped 400 years ago, robbed of his language, of religion and robbed of his name and wisdom.”