Malcolm X

by Manning Marable

  The March on Washington is today largely remembered for King’s “I Have a Dream” address, which drew heavily upon public speeches he had given in Birmingham that April and in Detroit two months earlier. The democratic vision he evoked—“that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveholders will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood”—spoke to the possibility of transforming the nation’s political culture and making it fully inclusive for the first time in history. King’s speech was much more than a rhetorical achievement: it was a challenge to white America to break with its racist past, and to embrace a multiracial future. Not widely known is that King’s most memorable remarks that day were completely extemporaneous. However, as central as King’s role was, what Rustin did following the “I Have a Dream” address was nearly as important. Going to the podium, he reviewed the march’s objectives, which included passage of Kennedy’s civil rights bill, a federal initiative to address unemployment, the desegregation of schools, and an increase in the federal minimum hourly wage to two dollars. The vast audience gave its consent for every demand.

  From a distance, Malcolm witnessed it all. Roy Wilkins’s nephew Roger Wilkins, then a young attorney working in the Justice Department, spotted Malcolm’s unmistakable profile under a shady tree, looking out over the crowd. It is probable that several hundred NOI members participated in the march, defying Muhammad and the national leadership. Among their numbers was included Herbert Muhammad, who used his connections with Muhammad Speaks to be admitted as an “official photographer” to the grandstand at the speaker's platform. As Malcolm returned to New York, he must have realized that he had to present an action-oriented program of demands that would place the Nation of Islam on the side of black protest.

  The NOI's national leaders finally felt confident enough that the rumors of Muhammad’s sexual infidelities were sufficiently under control to schedule a major address by the Messenger in Philadelphia on September 29. At this rally, Muhammad voiced his direct opposition to the spirit of the March, which continued to dominate discussions a month later. In his judgment, it was “a waste of time for Negro leaders to go to Washington for justice.” American whites were “snakelike in nature” and “were created for the purpose of murdering black people.” Negroes had to choose complete racial separation, and if not, “they will die.” The 1963 Philadelphia rally was also significant because it was the final time that both Muhammad and Malcolm appeared on a public stage together. Throughout 1961-63, Malcolm had presented himself to the media as Muhammad’s national representative. But at the Philadelphia rally, Muhammad announced that Malcolm had been named national minister. The new appointment, which surely generated opposition from Muhammad’s inner circle and family members, elevated Malcolm above all other NOI ministers. “This is my most faithful, hard-working minister,” Muhammad told his audience. “He will follow me until he dies.”

  During these autumn weeks, Malcolm continued his sessions with Alex Haley, which he may have come to consider as a kind of therapy. In the writer's studio, telling his story, Malcolm discovered that he could relax a bit, and a looser, more casual side of his personality emerged. On one occasion, Haley recalled Malcolm’s playfulness as he discussed his Harlem exploits: “Incredibly, the fearsome black demagogue was scat-singing and popping his fingers, ‘re-bop-de-bop-blap-blam—’ and then grabbing a vertical pipe with one hand (as the girl partner) he went jubilantly lindy-hopping around . . .” In late September, Haley contacted Malcolm by letter, with words of praise: “I’ve never heard, when its full sweep is reflected upon, a more dramatic life account.” He promised Malcolm that “whatever professional techniques” he possessed, they would “be brought into the effort to do the material that you have given me full justice.” He asked assistance in “filling holes,” and once again gave as an example Malcolm’s complex relationship with Reginald. To make the break with his brother “gripping,” Haley explained, “I must build up your regard and respect for Reginald when the two of you were earlier in Harlem—and, as of now, I have nothing about him there.” Finally, Haley urged for as many hours as Malcolm could spare. “I badly need it. Justice to what the book can do for the Muslims needs it.”

  As the calendar turned to October, Reynolds and Doubleday became worried about the slow pace of Haley’s productivity on the autobiography. On the first of the month, Wolcott (Tony) Gibbs, Jr., an assistant editor at Doubleday, suggested that Haley come up with a more “realistic manuscript delivery date,” reminding him that it was crucial for the Autobiography to “have a publication date before the 1964 election is in full swing.” Inspired by his editors and assisted by Malcolm’s availability, Haley rapidly produced a series of draft chapters. On October 11, Haley forwarded Chapter 9, “The Negro,” and promised additional chapters to come. This new material, he told Gibbs, “will present the style of Malcolm, the demagogue, sometimes ragged at the edges, sometimes quasi-dulcet, sometimes pounding . . . without obvious intrusion by the 'as told to’ writer.”

  When compared to the final published version of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which appeared in late 1965, the October 1963 version of the book had similarities, but also striking differences. Both the 1963 manuscript and the 1965 published book included these chapters: “Nightmare,” “Mascot,” “Homeboy,” “Detroit Red,” “Caught,” “Satan,” “Saved,” “Savior,” and “Minister Malcolm X.ʺ The 1965 version additionally contains “Laura,” “Harlemite,” “Hustler,” “Trapped,” and “Black Muslims.” These chapters formed the core of the autobiographical narrative, and the majority of the book as a whole. Malcolm’s objective was to present to the general reader the transformative power of the apostle Elijah Muhammad, who had taken him from a life of criminality and drugs to one of sobriety and commitment. In his lengthy conversations with Haley, Malcolm deliberately exaggerated his gangster exploits—the number of his burglaries, the amount of marijuana he sold to musicians, and the like—to illustrate how depraved he had become. Malcolm told Haley stories about himself that were largely true, but frequently presented himself as being more illiterate and backward than he really was. Malcolm’s overriding mission was to show himself in the worst possible light, which would illustrate the power of Muhammad’s message in changing people’s lives. He also hoped that the narrative would stand as a testament to his continued devotion to and adoration of the Messenger. It might even quiet his growing chorus of critics in Muhammad’s family.

  In the 1963 version, Haley had planned a chapter, “The Messenger’s Advocate,” which he described as “the man today . . . speaking at Harvard Law School.” This was to be followed by three essays outlining Malcolm’s religious views and social philosophy. To an extent these three essays contained Malcolm’s response to the striking success of the March on Washington. With a civil rights bill then being debated in the U.S. Senate, Malcolm not only had to make a case for black separation; he also had to outline an affirmative strategy for African-American resistance that was as dynamic as the Freedom Rides and sit-in protests. Drawing upon his experiences working with Randolph in Harlem, Malcolm called for a black united front embracing virtually all Negroes around a program of self-respect, economic development, and group empowerment. He believed that the NOI could play a vanguard role in building such a coalition, working with black elected officials, businesspeople, labor leaders, intellectuals, and others. Malcolm was taking the experiences he’d had in Harlem with Mosque No. 7 organizing mass rallies in the streets, and advocating an alternative to the peaceful, nonviolent demonstrations of King.

  By the end of October, the Autobiography appeared to be taking shape. On October 27, Haley informed Gibbs that the book would be somewhat larger than originally planned, at roughly 120,000 words. The text would include ten chapters, three essays, and an afterword. The initial ten chapters were designed to tell “the unfolding, snowballing drama of this man’s life.” The final essays—“The Negro,” “The End of Chr
istianity,” and “Twenty Million Black Muslims”—were designed to be a summation of Malcolm’s religious and political point of view. In his afterword, Haley intended to write “as a Christian Negro,” describing “the demagogue as I see him.” Haley wanted to explain “what I critically feel about his life, and what he signifies, and represents, to Negroes, to white people, to America.” He also mentioned to Gibbs that Malcolm had given him thirty to forty photographs to use for the book, including one of a young Malcolm alongside singer Billie Holiday. Nearly three weeks later, Haley wrote to his agent, editors, and Malcolm. Contacting executive editor Kenneth McCormick, Gibbs, and Reynolds, Haley revealed he was at the point at which the process of writing the Autobiography was changing him: “when the material begins to direct you and command you into what must be done with it.” Writing separately to Malcolm the same day, Haley explained: “[I] am being careful, careful in developing the nuances as it unfolds, each stage, because viewed overall, your whole life is so incredible that no stage, especially in the early developing stages, may the reader be left with gaps, for if so it would strain the plausibility, believability of the truly fantastic ‘Detroit Red’—and, then, the galvanic, absolute conversion.”

  As Haley worked to finish the manuscript, Malcolm made what would be his last tour of the West Coast as an NOI leader. He opened by holding a press conference in San Francisco on October 10, followed the next day by a panel discussion at the University of California at Berkeley. His speech took less than thirty minutes, but contained nearly twenty specific references to “the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.” Yet in other respects its tone was profoundly secular and political. “It’s not my intention to discuss the Muslim religious group today nor the Muslim religion,” he explained. The nature of the crisis confronting America was “the increase of racial hostility, and the increase of outright racial hatred. We see masses of Black people who have lost all confidence in the false promises of the hypocritical white politicians.” The discrimination that blacks confronted in the liberal North “is even more cruel and more vicious” than Southern racism.

  Even more sharply than before, Malcolm pitted the Negro elite against the interests of the struggling black masses. “The wealthy, educated black bourgeoisie, those uppity Negroes who do escape, never reach back and pull the rest of our people out with them. The blacks remain trapped in the slum.” The solution was not “token integration.” When blacks tried to desegregate housing, whites fled these residential areas. “After the 1954 Supreme Court decision,” Malcolm explained, “the same thing happened when our people tried to integrate the schools. All the white students disappeared into the suburbs.” Now black leaders “are demanding a certain quota, a percentage, of white people’s jobs.” Such a demand would cause “violence and bloodshed.” This was another instance in which Malcolm’s imagined future led him to the wrong conclusion: only six years later a Republican president, Richard M. Nixon, with millions of whites sharply opposed, would implement affirmative action and programs such as minority economic set-asides. Such reforms were enacted without the “violence and bloodshed” Malcolm had predicted.

  During the question and answer period following his short lecture, Malcolm was asked about discrimination in Cuba. He observed that “Castro has made a great accomplishment and contribution” toward the achievement of greater equality for blacks. But the Cubans generally “don’t refer to themselves either as white people or Black,” just as people. The same thing held true for Muslims: “When you become a Muslim, you don’t look at a man as being black, brown, red, or white. You look upon him as being a man.” This interpretation directly contradicted NOI theology. On another issue, Malcolm was asked, “Why can’t a Negro infiltrate the political machine and use power politics to his own end?” His reply was again at odds with the NOI's position: “If he studies the science of politics, he probably would.” There were some African-American elected officials who effectively represented “the Black masses. . . . Adam Powell is one of the best examples.”

  For a week, he traveled throughout California. In Los Angeles, at the Embassy Auditorium, an audience of two thousand heard him deliver his blistering “Farce on Washington” speech. Malcolm accused the demonstration of being “instigated by the white liberals to stem the real revolution, the black revolution.” On October 18, Malcolm returned to New York, where he delivered a talk at Mosque No. 7 on “the condition of Negroes on the West Coast.” In mid-October, Lonnie X Cross, who had been an undergraduate classmate of James 67X while at Lincoln University, was appointed the new minister of Mosque No. 4 in Washington, D.C., allowing Malcolm to relinquish his responsibilities there. Lonnie had joined the Nation only eighteen months earlier, and in September had resigned his faculty position as chairman of the mathematics department at Atlanta University to give “full time to the truth of Mr. Elijah Muhammad.”

  On October 29, Malcolm traveled to Hartford, Connecticut, where student groups at the University of Hartford had invited him to speak. Interest expressed in the visit was so strong that his talk, which had originally been set for the two-hundred-seat Auerbach Auditorium, was moved to an open-air arena accommodating seven hundred people. Buffeted by cold winds, Malcolm addressed his audience, saying, “Maybe some of what I have to say will make you hot.” Much of what he said repeated his lecture at Berkeley. On November 5 he traveled to Philadelphia to address the local NOI mosque. Four days later, Malcolm engaged in a public dialogue with James Baldwin. Hardly a week went by without Malcolm making at least three public appearances, often more.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the success of the March on Washington generated great dissension inside the Black Freedom Movement. The suppression of John Lewis’s controversial speech highlighted the deeper issues that divided black activists, and as 1963 wore on, the split between the conservative old guard and the militants bubbled to the surface. Those increasingly influenced by Malcolm’s black nationalism included sections of CORE, progressives in several Christian denominations, and secular activists from colleges, labor unions, and in Northern inner-city communities. When Detroit’s Council for Human Rights began planning a Northern Negro Leadership Conference, many representatives of these independent, radical, and black nationalist groups were excluded from the program. In response, the charismatic minister the Reverend Albert B. Cleage, Jr., withdrew from the Northern Negro Leadership Conference and announced the holding of a second, more militant meeting that same weekend in Detroit. This insurgent gathering was largely put together by a Detroit network, the Group on Advanced Leadership (GOAL), which included two independent Marxists, James and Grace Lee Boggs. A former Trotskyist, Grace Lee Boggs had for years been an associate of the celebrated Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James, and was an astute Marxist theorist in her own right. Her husband, James Boggs, had extensive experience in labor organizing, and soon would become one of Black Power's most influential writers and social theorists.

  Another radical constituency in Detroit intensely interested in Malcolm was the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Its key figure, who would subsequently help shape Malcolm’s intellectual legacy through the publication of several books by and about him, was George Breitman. The editor of the SWP's newspaper, The Militant, Breitman also initiated the successful Friday Night Socialist Forum hosted at Wayne State University in the 1960s. The SWP also supported efforts to establish the Freedom Now Party, an independent black third party formed in Michigan. Consequently, when Malcolm accepted an invitation to address the Reverend Cleage’s Grassroots Conference, he may not have realized that thousands of his local supporters considered themselves more militant than he was. They, too, rejected the gradualism of the NAACP and SCLC and the nonviolent activism of Rustin and Farmer, and were sharply critical of the Negro bourgeoisie. With the collapse of McCarthyism and the most extreme forms of government harassment, American leftists and socialists were eager to participate in the national struggle for blacks’ rights. They looked to Malcolm X as a possible leader of that new
movement.

  When, on the evening of November 10, Malcolm walked up to the King Solomon Baptist Church’s pulpit, he saw a sea of two thousand mostly black faces. He probably had not intended to break new political ground. Certainly he had not planned to repudiate his allegiance to the NOI. Yet as he delivered his “Message to the Grassroots” address, his life was fundamentally changed—not unlike King’s, in the aftermath of “I Have a Dream.” In his address, Malcolm incorporated sections from recent speeches, especially “The Farce on Washington,” but he also drew parallels between the black freedom struggle in the United States, the Bandung Conference, and anti-colonial movements across Asia and Africa. He drew a sharp distinction between what he called a “Negro revolution” versus a black one. A true revolution, he declared, was represented by the Chinese communists—“There are no Uncle Toms” in China, he said—and by the Algerian revolution against French colonial rule. The “Negro revolution,” based on nonviolent direct action, was no revolution at all: Revolution is bloody, revolution is hostile, revolution knows no compromise, revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way. And you, sitting around here like a knot on a wall, saying, “I’m going to love these folks no matter how much they hate me.” No, you need a revolution. Whoever heard of a revolution where they lock arms, as Rev. Cleage was pointing out beautifully, singing “We Shall Overcome”? You don’t do that in a revolution. You don’t do any singing; you’re too busy swinging. It’s based on land. A revolutionary wants land so he can set up his own nation, an independent nation. . . . If you’re afraid of black nationalism you’re afraid of revolution. And if you love revolution, you love black nationalism.