Malcolm X

by Manning Marable

  Most members of the Fruit would never question authority. “Nobody would even think about making a move if there wasn’t a direct order from a lieutenant which comes down from the top,” explained Thomas 15X Johnson. By the early 1960s, Joseph was well aware that his mosque had been infiltrated by FBI informants, so when he gave an order to discipline an individual, he carefully limited his contact with the men carrying it out. “Captain Joseph never talked to us directly,” Johnson said. “He would talk to the first lieutenant,” who in turn would communicate that order to one or more second lieutenants, who could select his own group of Fruit for that particular assignment.

  Punishment ran from simple beatings for routine transgressions to far, far worse. Elijah Muhammad, Jr.’s stern reminder to the Fruit that “in the old days” brothers who stepped out of line had been killed was inaccurate only its suggestion that such punishment remained in the past. Johnson was involved in a number of extreme disciplinary actions, at least one of which exacted the ultimate price. “A brother got killed in the Bronx, okay?” he recounted in a calm, matter-of-fact voice. “He was a man worthy of death. I mean, there was no question about that, but he got killed.” In another incident, an NOI minister was discovered both with marijuana in his apartment and engaging in “fornication.” “They went up there and they damned near kicked his spleen out,” Johnson recalled. Still, like many who embraced the strictness of the Nation’s rules, he thought the beating was justified: “They kicked him out because, like I say, that’s unheard of, man, violating like that.”

  One incident involved a member who reportedly made threats against Muhammad’s life. “Because Elijah was coming [to speak at] the 369th Armory . . . [this man] put out the word that he was going to kill Elijah. So me and my crew were posted in the lobby there, because we knew who this guy was.” Finally, the man was spotted in the crowd, at the top of a staircase. According to Johnson, he and his men picked him up and we handed him down the ranks, because there was all soldiers on the staircase. . . . We got him down to the bottom, and we put [him in] a circle. We stomped him pretty bad. Making a threat like that on Elijah Muhammad—hey, as far as we were concerned, man, he should have gotten murdered right there. Police just stood around and waited. . . . They said, “Okay, well, y’all proved your point here.” I said, “Well, we’ll decide whether we’ve proved our point or not.” And after we were satisfied, we dispersed, and they called the ambulance and they took him away. But they wouldn’t intervene. . . . They [knew] that if they touched one of us they would have to touch all of us. Everybody knew it. This was a law. It was untouchable.

  The disciplining of an NOI minister was especially serious. Johnson explained, “A lieutenant cannot discipline a minister. The only one can do that is the captain, and that had to be done through the supreme captain [Raymond Sharrieff] in Chicago.”

  The mosque also continued to attract young people both who were dedicated to Elijah Muhammad and who did not challenge the chain of command. One outstanding example was Lawrence (Larry) Prescott, Jr. Born in the early 1940s in Hampton, Virginia, he moved to New York City when a child. As a teenager still in high school, Larry first went to hear Malcolm speak on February 13, 1960, but found that he had been replaced that evening by Wallace Muhammad. Sitting eagerly in the front row, Larry vividly remembered Wallace’s provocative statement that “Negroes are afraid of everything” at the same time that he dramatically threw a Bible to the floor. “Everybody, especially those first few rows where we were . . . jumped back,” Larry recalled. Wallace then shamed his audience, saying, “Look at you. You think a lightning bolt is going to come through and strike me?”

  Larry began attending Mosque No. 7 meetings, and by age eighteen was on the verge of dedicating himself to the NOI. Two enthusiasms stood in the way: his passion for jazz and a fondness for marijuana. But one Friday night, after listening to a fiery speech by Malcolm on the radio, he collected his entire marijuana stash—about one pound—went to a friend’s home, and after announcing his determination to become a Muslim, handed it over. Larry laughed, explaining, “So he put the word out in South Jamaica [Queens]. He said, ‘Larry has lost his mind. He’s messing with them Muslims!’ ”

  By 1962, Larry 4X was an assistant minister at Mosque No. 7, a proud junior member of Malcolm’s entourage. Unlike many at the mosque, he sensed the tensions developing between his mentor and Chicago. “Malcolm had more visibility than any minister in the Nation,” he recalled in 2006. “And his charisma added to that—people just hung on to Malcolm’s word.” After the police invasion of the Los Angeles mosque in 1962, “Malcolm handled it in his very strident way . . . saying that these devils that killed one of our brothers and Elijah will make them pay. And when that plane went down with all of them white folks from Georgia on it, he said, ‘Elijah answered our prayers.’ ”

  Larry developed a close friendship with Maceo X after learning that the mosque’s secretary had been a jazz piano player, and he also nurtured a deep respect for the strict disciplinarian Captain Joseph, but as far as he was concerned, Malcolm was the “boss of the bosses.” What he appreciated most was Malcolm’s approach in tutorials with the junior ministers. “It was a one-way street. He did the talking; we did the listening.” Malcolm always insisted that his students be thoroughly prepared before giving a lecture. Never shoot from the hip, he cautioned; always state the subject of a talk clearly at the beginning. “He would always talk about how you have to remember and do the loop in your subject and bring the people back.” By 1963 Larry was sometimes given the responsibility of introducing his mentor at events. “There [was] a joke in the ministry class that when Malcolm walked onto the rostrum—say, if I was opening up for him—he would say, ‘Make it plain.’ He would sit down, you know, and he would sit there for a minute and let you make your point; he’d smile and maybe applaud. Then he’d say, ‘Make it plain.’ That was the signal: close out and bring him on.”

  In May, Alex Haley’s Playboy interview with Malcolm hit the newsstands, further bolstering his national profile. On the one hand, the interview benefited from having been mostly conducted before Malcolm’s confrontation with Muhammad, yet the timing of its appearance hardly endeared him further to the Chicago headquarters. In the introduction, Haley presented Malcolm as standing “on the right hand of God’s Messenger” in the NOI, wielding “all but absolute authority over the movement and its membership as Muhammad’s business manager, trouble-shooter, prime minister and heir apparent.” Throughout the interview, however, Malcolm tried to express total devotion to Muhammad, explaining, “[T]o faithfully serve and follow the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is the guiding goal of every Muslim. Mr. Muhammad teaches us the knowledge of our own selves and of our own people.” One innovative argument Malcolm did advance was that the NOI had “the sympathy of ninety percent of the black people” in the United States. “A Muslim to us is somebody who is for the black man; I don’t care if he goes to the Baptist Church seven days a week.” This merger of religious, political, and ethnic identities empowered Malcolm to speak on behalf of millions of non-Islamic African Americans.

  Malcolm used the interview to make a number of arguments guaranteed to offend white middle America. When asked about his plane crash comments, he replied, “Sir, as I see the law of justice, it says as you sow, so shall you reap . . . We Muslims believe that the white race, which is guilty of having oppressed and exploited and enslaved our people here in America, should and will be the victims of God’s divine wrath.” The interview also contained several anti-Semitic slurs. “The Jew cries louder than anybody else if anybody criticizes him,” Malcolm complained. “The Jew is always anxious to advise the black man. But they never advise him how to solve his problem the way the Jews solved their problem.” Through their economic clout, he observed, Jews owned Atlantic City and Miami Beach, and not only these. “Who owns Hollywood? Who runs the garment industry, the largest industry in New York City? . . . When there’s something worth owning, the Jew’s go
t it.” He went on to argue that Jewish money controlled civil rights groups like the NAACP, pushing Negroes into adopting a strategy of integration that was doomed to failure. His comments would be deemed so controversial, he said, that Playboy would never print them in their entirety. Haley felt vindicated, however, when the magazine indeed printed the interview exactly as transcribed: “[Malcolm] was very much taken aback when Playboy kept its word.”

  That same month, following the publication of the interview, Haley contacted Malcolm with a new proposition—to tell his life story in a book. “It was one of the few times I have ever seen him uncertain,” Haley recalled. Malcolm asked for some time to consider the idea, but just two days later telephoned to say he would do the autobiography, on two conditions. All royalties to which he was entitled would go to the NOI. And second, Haley must personally request permission from Elijah Muhammad. Haley flew to see Muhammad at his home in Phoenix, but without knowing that only weeks before Malcolm and Elijah had discussed the charges of adultery. Muhammad felt that the scandal placed him at a disadvantage in considering Haley’s request. He interpreted the book project as evidence of Malcolm’s vanity, but believed it was probably in his own best interest, at least temporarily, to cater to this. “Allah approves,” Muhammad managed to say to Haley between bouts of coughing. “Malcolm is one of my most outstanding ministers.” Whether he meant it or not, he had almost completely misread Malcolm’s intentions for the project, which were nearly the opposite of what Muhammad thought. Concerned about his increasingly strained relations with his mentor, Malcolm hoped to use the book as a reconciliation tactic, presenting his life as a tribute to the genius and good works of the Messenger.

  Shortly after Haley had returned to New York City and secured a book contract with Doubleday for twenty thousand dollars, Malcolm presented him with a piece of paper containing a statement written in longhand. He told Haley, “This is the book’s dedication.” It read: “This book I dedicate to The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, who found me here in the muck and mire of the filthiest civilization and society on this earth, and pulled me out, cleaned me up, and stood me on my feet, and made me the man that I am today.” None of this language, of course, appeared in the final text of the Autobiography, a casualty to Malcolm’s spiritual and political transformation in the remaining years of his life.

  On May 27, 1963, a “Memorandum of Agreement” was signed between Malcolm X—also described as “sometimes called Malik Shabazz”—Alex Haley, and a representative of Doubleday. The work was described as “an untitled non-fiction book,” with a length of eighty thousand to one hundred thousand words. The royalty advance of twenty thousand dollars was to be split equally between Haley and Malcolm. Upon signing the contract, the two men each received twenty-five hundred dollars. In a second document sent to Malcolm from Haley, the key terms of the contract were restated, calling for a book manuscript of 224 pages. Haley acknowledged Malcolm’s request that his royalty share be granted directly to NOI Mosque No. 2 in Chicago. A deadline of October 1963 was set for the completion of the book. With the contracts secure, the Doubleday staff began calculating how much it stood to gain financially from publishing Malcolm’s autobiography. On June 6, 1963, Doubleday estimated that the Autobiography, priced at $3.95 in paperback and $4.95 in cloth cover, should sell fifteen thousand copies in its initial year of publication, with projected total sales of twenty thousand.

  Haley drafted clear ground rules for their collaboration. “It is understood,” he declared, “that nothing can be in the manuscript, whether a sentence, a paragraph, or a chapter, or more that you do not completely approve of. It is further understood that anything must be in the manuscript that you want in the manuscript.” Despite this reassurance, it took Malcolm at least a month to relax sufficiently to talk frankly about his personal life. The two men made an uneasy pair: the integrationist former coast guard man and the separatist preacher; each was skeptical of the other’s ideas, yet both could see what they stood to gain from their collaboration. From June until early October, they would usually meet at Haley’s Greenwich Village studio apartment, Malcolm arriving around nine p.m. and staying until midnight. Haley took detailed notes, but Malcolm would also scribble his own notes on scrap paper as he talked. After he had left, Haley would attempt to decipher the scrawls. By midsummer, the project was making progress, despite the reservations both men retained. “I had heard him bitterly attack other Negro writers as ‘Uncle Toms,’ ” Haley complained in the Autobiography’s epilogue. And Malcolm continually made it plain that Haley personified the do-nothing Negro petty bourgeoisie that he enjoyed ridiculing.

  As work on the Autobiography progressed, Haley peppered his agent, Paul Reynolds, and his editors at Doubleday with requests of all sorts. On August 5, Haley informed Reynolds’s assistant that he should replace the designation “Co-authored by Alex Haley” with “As told to Alex Haley.” He explained in a letter that he was “sometimes awed by [Malcolm’s] skill as a demagogue,” but wanted to assert a clear separation between Malcolm’s political perspectives and his own. “‘Co-authoring with Malcolm X' would, to me, imply sharing his views—when mine are almost a complete antithesis of his.” One month later, after an “18-hour” session with Malcolm, Haley asked Reynolds for a five-hundred-dollar advance to fly to Chicago for an interview with Elijah Muhammad. Despite his many requests, work progressed slowly, and on September 22 Haley forwarded to Reynolds the book’s first two chapters. He was optimistic that he could complete the entire work by the end of October 1963. Still, he was having trouble working through the early phases of Malcolm’s life, and near the end of September he pressed Malcolm, trying to break through the minister's reserve and lingering mistrust. Haley urged him “to make more gripping your catharsis of decision involving Reginald. I must build up your regard and respect for [him] when the two of you were earlier in Harlem.” He pleaded with Malcolm to give him three consecutive days that week to collaborate on the book, arguing that “night sessions here, such as we had, will be the most productive.”

  Malcolm also sought to present Elijah Muhammad’s views about black women in a positive light. This may explain the New York Herald Tribune’s feature story about Betty Shabazz, published on June 30, 1963. For her first press interview, Betty presented an impressive figure: She acknowledged us impressively, as a queen might greet a subject. She was wearing white gloves and a white veil over her hair, brushed smooth across her forehead. Her grey tweed two-piece cotton dress, buttoned to the neck, reached to the floor. Her manner was as formal as her dress, as neat and attractive as that of her husband.

  The reporter was informed that Muslim women avoided publicity. The primary tasks of NOI women were caring for their families and “obeying the moral tenets dictated to them by Elijah Muhammad.” Betty stated that MGT leader Ethel Sharrieff represented the standard by which Muslim women judged themselves. “All of us try in some ways to copy her,” Betty explained to the reporter. Betty was reticent to reveal basic facts about her own life, such as at which New York hospital she had been employed as a nurse. She admitted that she did not “know the Koran very well,” but said that she read “the history of black people” to her children. Both Betty and Malcolm presented themselves as loyal followers of Muhammad. But Malcolm added, “Elijah teaches us that no two people should stay together who can’t get along.”

  The idea of organizing a march on Washington, D.C., was born in the Harlem office of A. Philip Randolph sometime in December 1962, when Bayard Rustin visited Randolph there. The two old friends began talking about the Negro March on Washington Movement of 1941 that had pressured the Roosevelt administration into an executive order that outlawed hiring discrimination by defense plants. That mass mobilization never culminated in an actual event, but now Rustin conceived of a new march on a more ambitious scale, climaxing with two days of public activities. His draft proposal emphasized the acceleration of “integration in the fields of education, housing, transportation and public accomm
odations” and “broad national government action . . . to meet the problem of unemployment, especially as it related to minority groups.” At the outset, CORE's Norman Hill was appointed director of field staff, traveling the country to build support at local levels, while SNCC would send John Lewis, its national chair, to represent the organization.

  In the wake of his desegregation victory in Birmingham, Martin Luther King, Jr., also favored placing greater pressure on the Kennedy administration. For more than a year, he and the SCLC had pushed for a presidential order outlawing segregation. At first, King supported the tactics of simultaneous demonstrations to take place all over the country, but in the end was persuaded to support the Washington march. The more conservative wing of the black freedom struggle, the NAACP and National Urban League, was at best cool. Roy Wilkins demanded that Rustin be fired as coordinator because of his homosexuality and record of arrests. A compromise was reached, with Randolph accepting the public role of march chairman and Rustin, as vice chair, functioning essentially as executive director. The Kennedy administration was also deeply unhappy, fearing that the presence of several hundred thousand demonstrators on the National Mall might invite widespread violence. But Rustin recruited hundreds of out-of-uniform African-American police, who would be deployed as a barrier between the marchers and the mostly white D.C. police and National Park Service officers. As the project gathered momentum, some of the mobilization’s more radical demands were jettisoned to accommodate the support of organized labor and white liberal religious groups. The expanded presence of whites was just enough to convince a reluctant Kennedy administration to offer its endorsement.