Malcolm X

by Manning Marable

  A number of progressive African-American artists, playwrights, and writers also welcomed Malcolm’s departure from the Nation and anticipated his entry into civil rights causes. Actor and playwright Ossie Davis was one of the most prominent. Davis occupied a peculiar position within the Black Freedom Movement, not unlike that of James Baldwin—an artist who had credentials among integrationists and black separatists alike. Davis had served as master of ceremonies at the 1963 March on Washington, but in Malcolm he saw a proponent of the black class struggle, an advocate “for connecting with people out in the street, drug addicts, criminals, and hustlers—these were folks outside the middle class, people that Dr. King certainly couldn’t relate to.”

  I remember walking on the street with Malcolm, and people would come up to him and he’d respond to them, and I would respond to them in a different way. While some would be chastising him, Malcolm always had something positive to say. Malcolm was an expert on the damage that slavery and racism had done to the black man’s image of himself. He was equally expert in what had to be done to remedy that egregious lack of self-esteem. He knew it would take more than civil rights legislation, jobs, and education to really save the black man. And he knew that none of the traditional organizations that serviced black folk, such as black churches, colleges, sororities and fraternities, the NAACP, the Urban League, were capable of doing what needed to be done. He felt, as did some of us, that to ask a man who had already been beaten up and beaten down to be nonviolent was only to change black pathology into another religion.

  For his part, Malcolm had loved Davis’s 1960 play Purlie Victorious, which used comic stereotypes to make sharp criticisms of racism, and over the next few years the two men continued to run into each other at demonstrations. By 1964 Malcolm was on a first-name basis with Davis and his actor activist wife, Ruby Dee. Ruby’s brother, Tom Wallace, was so influenced by Malcolm that he joined the Nation of Islam, and later Muslim Mosque, Inc.

  Writers and journalists who knew Malcolm also generally welcomed his latest move. Peter Goldman continued to maintain close contact and came away impressed with the “complexity and sophistication of [his] political thought.” Like many observers during the months of Malcolm’s silencing, the writer had been unaware of any impending split. “I’d been hearing rumors about jealousy of Malcolm’s prominence,” Goldman recalled, “but I didn’t know it had come to any kind of crisis.” After the fact, though, he came to see the break as necessary to Malcolm’s intellectual evolution; leaving the Nation, combined with his excursions in Africa, had prompted him to think “black politically. I think his nationalism had been enriched by his travels.” The earlier Malcolm had preached a simplistic, “mom-and-pop . . . economic model.” By 1964, he had transformed himself, “moving, I think, probably closer to Pan-Africanism, certainly to a connection with the nonwhite majority of the world.”

  Malcolm’s departure from the Nation changed much about his life, but it also affected the Nation in interesting ways. For some key players, the departure of Malcolm and his supporters expanded opportunities. Twenty-six-year-old Norman Butler, a veteran of the navy, for example, had been an NOI member for barely a year, but during that brief tenure he had established a reputation as a tough security man. Mosque No. 7 normally ran two weekly training sessions, including martial arts, for the Fruit of Islam. When one of Malcolm’s men left, Butler assumed control of the Tuesday morning session, with dramatic results. From a modest group of three to five, word of mouth grew the group to “seventy to eighty brothers [who] were coming out, because of how we were doing.” Soon, Butler recalled, the Tuesday morning Fruit group “got to selling over five thousand papers” per week. Though Malcolm had promoted him to the rank of lieutenant, Butler made no bones about choosing sides during the split. “[Malcolm] made himself large,” he remembered years later with resentment. “He kept himself in front of the New York Times.” This, to Butler, was the crux of the problem that led to Malcolm’s expulsion. “He was trying to be bigger than all the other ministers” and was guilty of going “outside of or beyond the teaching that the Messenger wanted taught, say[ing] things that the Messenger didn’t want said. That’s what the rub was.”

  Yet for all those who developed negative opinions of Malcolm, many Nation members who had sided with Elijah Muhammad in the split nevertheless retained strong feelings of affection for their former national minister. “I was really a student of his,” said Larry 4X Prescott. “I loved him. I admired him. I wanted to be able to do what he was doing. And that’s what he encouraged.” Larry considered the silencing a kind of moral “test.” Both he and other assistant ministers “hoped and prayed that Malcolm would pass whatever trial that the leader had put on him.” It was only in late February when Malcolm returned from Florida and “talked about the fight and Muhammad Ali” that Larry realized that the minister had gone too far. His interview at JFK airport “was a violation of the silence imposed on him by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.” For Larry, the subsequent break was Malcolm’s fault.

  Larry vigorously contested the idea that Malcolm simply “outgrew” the Nation and that his departure was inevitable. As Larry recalled, the truly negative rumors began only in the days directly prior to Malcolm’s departure. Referring to young women Elijah Muhammad had bedded, Larry explained that Malcolm had known “about the wives” long before the silencing controversy. “Malcolm [could] see [that the NOI recruited] those dedicated young men, who came out of the streets of America, out of the prisons of America,” who benefited most from the Nation’s teachings. More educated converts, Larry conceded, may have “felt that the Nation was too confining, that they couldn’t make decisions for themselves.” When Malcolm formed Muslim Mosque but initially continued to praise Muhammad’s social program, Larry believed “that Malcolm felt he could direct people to the Nation . . . better from this [outside] position, because most people didn’t want some of the restrictions of the Nation. . . . That’s the way I saw it.”

  The great changes in Malcolm’s life also landed hard on Betty, who now found herself forced to negotiate Malcolm’s five-week absence overseas with lieutenants in Muslim Mosque for whom she had little love. Before his departure Malcolm had instructed the leaders of MMI to provide security for his wife and children, knowing that while the Nation had yet to hurt the families of dissidents, they could not be trusted at this point to leave them alone. Charles 37X Kenyatta was designated to guard Betty and the children in their house, and no one else was permitted inside the home. Kenyatta would later claim that, at first, Betty resented his constant presence. “She hated me with a passion,” he recalled. “She didn’t like the role I was playing.” Betty similarly disliked James 67X, yet she knew that he represented Malcolm’s most likely point of contact in MMI, and she phoned him nearly every night during the weeks her husband was out of the country. In her efforts to keep tabs on him, she canvassed anyone likely to hear from him. Almost on a daily basis she phoned Haley, Malcolm’s attorney, Percy Sutton, and others who might have received letters or telegrams. Malcolm himself made an earnest effort to keep Betty informed through letters about the locations he was visiting, and he periodically phoned her as well. At home, she taped a world map on the living room wall so the children could chart the countries Malcolm had visited. Betty correctly sensed that her husband’s extensive new contacts with Muslims and others in the Middle East and Africa might liberate him from the Nation’s powerful influence. Attallah, the eldest daughter, would later express this sentiment: “The more he traveled, the freer he became, the freer we all became.”

  Yet this freedom came at a cost, especially when Malcolm’s subsequent actions further fueled anger within the Nation’s ranks. On May 8, Muhammad Speaks featured the first of a two-part editorial attacking Malcolm by the “Minister Who Knew Him Best.” The editorial argued that the reasons Malcolm had given the white media for his “defection” were “filled with lies, slander and filth designed to cast aspersions upon Mr. Muhammad an
d his family.” Although Louis X was presented as the author of the polemic, the piece was likely ghostwritten by a Chicago NOI editor, a suggestion that gains credence from the misspelling of Louis’s name in the column as “Minister Lewis.”

  In late April James 67X received a letter Malcolm had written just after his hajj experience, outlining his new views about race. Given the trend in Malcolm’s recent statements, James 67X was scared to open the envelope, knowing that the revelations contained in Malcolm’s communication could pose major problems with the MMI rank and file. Even James himself was hardly ready to embrace such a radical change. “I had come out of an organization that says Mecca is the only place in the world where a white man can’t go . . . ,” he explained. Malcolm’s affirmation that whites also could be Muslims meant a wholesale rejection of the Nation’s theology, which may have fit his own emerging outlook but remained deeply problematic for a group that had only recently departed the Nation and still found much to speak for in its views on race. At first, James 67X didn’t know what to do. “I’m walking around with this letter, saying, how am I gonna tell this to [these] people? . . . What do you mean by ‘white’? What did Malcolm mean by ‘white’?” After several days, James 67X circulated the letter to the MMI. However, he refused to believe that Malcolm “had embraced Sunni Islam.”

  The ambiguity and confusion that surrounded the letter probably inadvertently helped keep Muslim Mosque together during Malcolm’s absence, as members were free to read their own interpretations of Malcolm’s feelings into the letter's message. Though Malcolm would go on to make his ideas more concrete upon his return, the question of his true, deep-seated beliefs continued to be debated by his followers. Herman Ferguson thought that Malcolm “had offered to white people the possibility of Islam correcting their sense of values,” but that, deep in his soul, he knew “they could never accept the teachings of Islam.” Even after Malcolm returned to the United States and personally spoke to MMI and OAAU members about his new views, Ferguson remained adamant that Malcolm’s inner politics were still race based. “Because if I had for a moment even suspected that Malcolm was changing his thinking,” Ferguson swore, “I would have walked away.” Over several decades, Betty gave inconsistent answers to questions about what impact the hajj, Islam, and travels to the Third World had on her husband’s racial views. In 1989, however, when Haley biographer Anne Romaine interviewed her and asked, “Do you think that your husband changed his views?” Betty curtly replied, “No.”

  Despite the intransigence of many of his followers, the notion that Malcolm was undergoing some sort of transformation began to spread in the mainstream and black presses. On May 8, the New York Times published an article by M. S. Handler with a surprising title: “Malcolm X Pleased by Whites’ Attitude on Trip to Mecca.” Quoting an April 25 letter Malcolm had written in Saudi Arabia, Handler wrote that the black leader would soon return to the United States “with new, positive insights on race relations.” Throughout his hajj, Malcolm wrote in words that would be much quoted in years to come: “I have eaten from the same plate, drank from the same glass, slept on the same bed or rug, while praying to the same God . . . with fellow Muslims whose skins was the whitest of white, whose eyes were the bluest of blue . . . [for] the first time in my life. . . . I didn’t see them as ‘white’ men.” What he had witnessed was so profound, Malcolm admitted, that it had “forced me to ‘rearrange’ much of my own thought-pattern, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions.” Yet if Malcolm expressed optimism that America could transform itself on racial matters, he also professed to see Islam as the key to that transformation. “I do believe,” Malcolm wrote, “that whites of the younger generation, in colleges and universities, through their own young, less hampered intellect, will see the ‘handwriting on the wall’ and turn for spiritual salvation to the religion of Islam, and force the older generation of American whites to turn with them.”

  Several weeks after the Times article, James Booker of the Amsterdam News posed the provocative question “Has the visit of Malcolm X, now El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, to Mecca and with Muslim leaders in Africa changed him to become soft in his anti-white feelings and to become more religious?” A clue to this apparent “change in his militant racial attitudes” was contained in a letter he had sent to the newspaper about one week earlier, in which he had written that the proponents of Islam were obligated “to take a firm stand on the side of anyone whose human rights are being violated, no matter what the religious persuasion of the victims may be.” Malcolm now understood that “Islam recognizes everyone as part of one human family.”

  The increasing difficulties and uncertainties in Malcolm’s life were mirrored in the progress of his autobiography. When Malcolm was silenced by Elijah Muhammad in December 1963, Alex Haley panicked. Without consulting with Malcolm, Haley contacted Chicago to secure a meeting with the Messenger, who assured him that the suspension “wasn’t permanent.” Haley reported to his agent, Paul Reynolds, that the “real purpose” of Muhammad’s action was to underscore his supremacy and authority over the sect. “I assured him that the publisher, you and I, were concerned not to incur his displeasure,” Haley wrote to Reynolds. Muhammad “was interested in hearing about the book, and I sketched its pattern, chapter by chapter, which pleased him.” Like Peter Goldman, Haley did not at first see how deep ran the fissure, and neither Malcolm nor Elijah Muhammad found it prudent to illuminate it for him. Haley’s first priority remained publishing a profitable book, which he still thought required the blessing of Elijah Muhammad.

  Haley finally had a lengthy working session with Malcolm just before Christmas 1963. Malcolm read the latest version of the chapter “Laura” and objected to the use of slang in the book, complaining that he no longer spoke that way. Haley consented but complained to his editors and agent, “Somebody said that becoming celebrated always will ruin a good demagogue.” And Malcolm was not the only one with money troubles during this time; Haley’s relocation to upstate New York left him strapped for cash. Doubleday agreed to give him additional advance payments of $750 upon the submission and approval of each of two new chapters. Deeply grateful, Haley stated, “I can write now for the first time not harassed by intermittent money pressures.” In early January, during a heavy snowstorm, Haley managed to drive down to the city to spend time with Malcolm, but found him distressed as his suspension unfolded. Reporting back to his agent and editors, Haley observed that his subject was “tense as the length of his inactivity grows.” Malcolm read several of Haley’s draft “strips,” or sections of narrative text that were the basis for each chapter. Haley was most excited, however, by the essays planned at the end of the book, which presented Malcolm’s social program and political agenda. “The most impact material of the book, some of it rather lava-like, is what I have from Malcolm for the three essay chapters, ‘The Negro,’ ‘The End of Christianity,’ and ‘Twenty Million Black Muslims,’ ” Haley observed. These three chapters represented a blueprint for where Malcolm at that moment believed black America should be moving, and his conviction that Muslims should take a leading role in the construction of a united front among all black people.

  Yet for all his work, Haley was still months away from submitting a finished manuscript, which displeased Wolcott Gibbs, Jr., and other Doubleday executives when they were informed of it. Gibbs asked Haley to “please bear in mind that the more rewriting you do, the further we are away from having a finished book.” He pressed for a best estimate of the final manuscript date. Even before Gibbs’s request, Haley shipped off yet another rewritten chapter, “Detroit Red,” on January 28, but Reynolds didn’t like this version and sent off suggestions for revision. On February 6, Haley agreed to “come back to 'Detroit Red’ and any other chapters and improve them in whatever ways you are good enough to point out to me.” He desperately wanted to finish a whole draft before revising and rearranging chapters, yet Reynolds’s displeasure with his recent work kept him busy fixing chapters he had alre
ady tweaked or rewritten. On February 7, Reynolds contacted Gibbs, explaining, “I’m worried about interfering with your function [as editor] but I do want to get a really good book on Malcolm X and I don’t believe you and Ken would quarrel with what I’m saying to him.”

  Even by February 1964, Haley remained confused over Malcolm’s problems with the Nation, believing that the suspension was only temporary and that he would soon rejoin the group. On February 11, in a letter to Gibbs, he suggested “that the ban will . . . be lifted” sometime that month. He still envisioned the book’s climax as revolving around Malcolm’s embrace of Elijah, the subject turning “his life . . . around and he becomes arch—‘puritan’ so to speak, and blasts everything that went before.” Haley was not above enhancing the material when discussing it with his editors, partly because of the story’s real commercial possibilities, but also probably to justify the many extensions he required to complete it. On February 18, as he submitted his latest chapter, “Hustler,” he wrote to his editors, “We have here the book that, when it gets to the public, is going to run away from everything else. Because it has so much. . . . Exciting as is Malcolm’s criminal life that we’re now seeing, I tell you that it’s nothing compared with the front seat. We are going to hear of his in-prison subjective turnabout.” Haley anticipated that the book would be done by late March, with a brief afterword, which he would write to represent his own reflections about Malcolm, to be submitted the next month. Because Malcolm had not yet rejected the separatist vision of Muhammad, Haley felt that he had to insert himself into the text, reassuring white readers that the mainstream Negro truly did desire integration. As he explained to his editor and agents, “I plan to hit very hard, speaking from the point of the Negro who has tried to do all of the things that are held up as the pathway to enjoy the American Dream, and who . . . so often gets disillusioned and disappointed. . . . I am going to give some courses that every American and every Christian needs to wrestle with.”