Malcolm X

by Manning Marable

  When Malcolm left the Nation, it soon became clear that the book could not remain as written, prompting further work from Haley and a necessary reevaluation of his timetable for finishing. On March 21, Haley forwarded a letter to Reynolds and Doubleday editor Kenneth McCormick, explaining why “there has been, over the past couple of weeks, more time-gap than usual between chapters,” due to Malcolm’s recent moves, which he emphasized would “add, add, add to the book’s drama.” Once again Haley followed up a request for more time with boasts about the potential of the Autobiography: “Gentlemen, not in a decade, and maybe longer, [has there been] a book that is going to sweep the market like wildfire to equal this one.” But his primary objective in the letter was to explain how Malcolm’s break with the Nation might affect the book’s reception. He now envisioned a new chapter, “Iconoclast,” in which Malcolm was suspended by “the man he had come to revere (and says he still does).” He would explain Malcolm’s new organization and examine his relationship with Cassius Clay. He related Captain Joseph’s plot to bomb Malcolm’s car and suggested that the recent death threats, and the uncertainty of where Malcolm might turn next, made the whole story a tabloid dream. “For this man is so hot, so HOT, a subject, I know you agree . . . this book is so pregnant with millions or more sales potential, including to make foreign rights hotly bid for!”

  At the end of March, Reynolds contacted Gibbs, informing him that Malcolm had asked for all future royalty payments to him to be paid to Muslim Mosque, Inc. Reynolds also enclosed a document signed by Malcolm approving of all chapters that had been completed. Malcolm pressed Doubleday for more money, asking for an advance of $2,500 on the outstanding $7,500 in advance payment he was to receive with the submission of the completed manuscript. McCormick approved Malcolm’s request, but it was not until mid-June, when Malcolm had again left the country, that Gibbs finally forwarded the check.

  When Malcolm finally returned to the United States on May 21, 1964, his first priority was to reinvent his public image—and urgently. The appearance of celebrating violence—whether through allusions to the likelihood of black unrest or through his urging blacks to arm themselves—alienated blacks and whites alike and undermined his efforts with the civil rights establishment. It was equally important to claim the support of leaders from the Middle East and Africa for his new cause. Newly energized, he resumed speaking and traveling at a breakneck pace. Accompanied by James 67X, on May 22 he flew to Chicago and held a press conference covering a broad range of topics, from Africa’s resources to U.S. police brutality. The next night, before an audience of fifteen hundred at Chicago’s Civic Opera House, he unveiled his new views in a debate with Louis Lomax. “Separation is not the goal of the Afro-American,” he told the crowd—an announcement that must have created a stir among his black nationalist followers—“nor is integration his goal. They are merely methods toward his real end—respect as a human being.”

  Lomax and others there that night recognized that they were hearing something new. But what were the political implications, especially as related to the Black Freedom Movement? Sounding remarkably like Martin Luther King, Malcolm appealed for a politics that explicitly rejected racial hatred. There was a “universal law of justice,” he declared, that was “sufficient to bring judgment upon those whites who are guilty of racism.” He insisted that “it is not necessary for the victims—the Afro-American—to be vengeful. . . . [We] will do better to spend our time removing the scars from our people.” Yet he also wanted to communicate the spirit of revolution he believed he had witnessed, especially in Cairo and Accra. According to the Los Angeles Times, the “greatest applause came when he said that ‘unless the race issue is quickly settled, the 22 million American Negroes could easily adopt the guerrilla tactics of other deprived revolutionaries.’”

  Malcolm’s dilemma was that virtually all his enemies—and friends—perceived him as the high priest of black social revolution, and despite his letters from Mecca and abroad, and his dramatic address in Chicago, he continued to be perceived as an antiwhite demagogue. While the exhaustion of the civil rights movement had brought many activists around to his old way of thinking, his new ideas made for if not quite a reversal, then a major shift that caught them off guard. As Malcolm made his race-neutral views clear in Chicago, comedian and social critic Dick Gregory characterized him in a newspaper interview as a “necessary evil.” Gregory’s own position reflected the leftward shift away from the tactics of King. “I’m committed to nonviolence, but I’m sort of embarrassed by it,” he said. Black militancy was growing, and if the struggle for civil rights “lasts six months longer, Malcolm X is the man you’re all going to have to deal with.” Gregory further warned Los Angeles Times columnist Drew Pearson, “This is a revolution and a good many Negroes have guns. . . . Out of 22 million Negroes, only one million are with Malcolm X. But a lot of them are saying, ‘I’m tired of King.’ ” In Gregory’s mind, “Malcolm X is getting to be about the only man who can stop a race riot.” Yet most striking about these remarks was that Gregory and Malcolm were already largely in agreement. They had worked together on civil rights issues, and both men, despite real or imaginary differences on nonviolence, were members of ACT, the civil rights network established earlier that year that also included leaders as diverse as Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and SNCC chairman John Lewis. If Malcolm’s allies still perceived him as Gregory did, it was not surprising that others doubted the sincerity of his new views.

  Malcolm’s struggle to establish where he stood also had internal consequences. By late May, Muslim Mosque, Inc.’s core membership was about 125 strong; to James’s dismay, however, the majority were not fresh from Mosque No. 7 but an eclectic bunch, most of whom had cut their ties to the Nation several years before. Malcolm’s discontent with the Nation was only one of many varieties, and many MMI members had departed the Nation for reasons that had little to do with his new agenda. Some, remembered James, “were brothers who wanted to go and set things right about Ronald Stokes,” in Los Angeles. They had quit the Nation back in 1962 “based upon Captain Joseph’s throwing cold water on their aspirations” to punish Los Angeles police. Others had fallen away due to the Nation of Islam’s rigor: “People who thought of [the NOI] as a good idea said, ‘Yeah, but I can’t make these moral adjustments in my life.’ Some former Muslims could not go back to Mosque No. 7 because they were living, as we say down South, common law. And they were supposed to get married.”

  These MMI members would require a clear vision to direct their energies, but Malcolm had not fully defined the group’s purpose. James assumed that hostilities with the Nation would be inevitable because it would view Muslim Mosque as a competitive sect, but he himself was not so clear on what exactly MMI was as a religious organization, “because Brother Malcolm wasn’t specific.” Despite the regular meetings, things were so disorganized that he was already tempted to resign as MMI coordinator. Worse yet, many of the lapsed Muslims flocking to the MMI still believed in the Nation’s old theology. At a May 20 meeting, one questioner asked Malcolm whether “he had seen W. D. Fard” during his hajj to Mecca—receiving the reply that MMI members must reject “the old notions” of what constituted the Islamic faith and must embrace “reality.”

  One of the few newspaper articles that presented Malcolm’s conversion in a positive light had appeared in the Washington Post on May 18. Dr. Mahmoud Shawarbi, by this time the director of the Islamic Center in New York City, was credited with being the “man who tamed Malcolm.” He informed the Post that some Arab Muslims living in the United States had voiced “opposition to his tutelage of Malcolm Xʺ stemming “from fears that [he] is not sincere and may use the religion and pilgrimage as a device to improve his public image.” Shawarbi gave a full-throated defense. “I have no doubt of his sincerity,” he said, recalling of Malcolm that “sometimes he would even cry while passages of the Holy Koran were being read.” He accurately predicted that Malcolm would soon disavow his c
all for Negroes to form rifle clubs, and that his political efforts would reach beyond blacks. “If he admits all people . . . and goes about things quietly and Islamically, I am sure it will be a very big movement,” he declared. The Post story noted, however, that the majority of civil rights observers in New York City were “adopting a wait and see attitude.”

  The FBI had also not forgotten Malcolm. Early on May 29, Malcolm received a call from its New York office, requesting an interview at his home. He consented, but before the FBI agents arrived he set up a tape recorder hidden under his couch. The agents were investigating a federal case based in Rochester, in which a man awaiting trial had given an incriminating statement about Malcolm. The agents wanted to know if Malcolm had attended an evening meeting of Muslims in that city on January 14 to plan the assassination of President Johnson. Fortunately, he could prove that on that date and time he was with Alex Haley, working on his autobiography; the statement given to the FBI was “so ridiculous,” he later wrote, “that it sounds like to me that it was something that was invented even though it would be denied, it would still serve as a propaganda thing.” The FBI agents asked him to provide “any information you want to give us about the Muslims.” Yet the most curious part of the interview came when the agents questioned him on his current status in the NOI. Malcolm replied that he was still under the suspension ordered by Elijah Muhammad. “He is the only one who can give out any information. I couldn’t say nothing behind what he would say.” Far from revealing his break from the Nation, he instead vigorously defended its efforts in “cleaning up crime,” and said, “I frankly believe that what Mr. Muhammad teaches is 1,000 percent true. . . . I believe it more strongly today than I did ten years ago.” Why he should present himself as a faithful follower is puzzling, as he might have already guessed, or anticipated, that the Bureau would have infiltrated Muslim Mosque, Inc., and by this time would know something about the split. The most likely reason for his obfuscation is simpler. By going on record in support of the Nation, he may have been trying to lay the groundwork for his upcoming court case over the ownership of his home. Since Percy Sutton had contested legality of the Nation’s attempt at forcing Malcolm out of his East Elmhurst, Queens, parsonage, Malcolm’s legal strategy was to argue that the NOI had only suspended him; he was still the minister of Mosque No. 7 as well as the NOI's national minister. If he could establish a working relationship with the sect, then they might have success in arguing the right to the house in Queens.

  Later that same day, Malcolm spoke at a public panel sponsored by the Trotskyist Militant Labor Forum. The forum was prompted by a series of newspaper articles about the supposed existence of a Harlem-based “hate gang” of young blacks who had been organized to kill whites. Malcolm took the opportunity to draw parallels between the legacies of European colonial rule he had seen in Africa with the system of institutional racism in the United States. Algeria under French colonial rule, he said, “was a police state; and this is what Harlem is. . . . The police in Harlem, their presence is like occupation forces, like an occupying army.” He also linked the African-American struggle to the Chinese and Cuban revolutions. “The people of China grew tired of their oppressors and . . . rose up. They didn’t rise up nonviolently. When Castro was up in the mountains in Cuba, they told him the odds were against him. Today he’s sitting in Havana and all the power this country has can’t remove him.”

  Of even greater significance was the way in which the speech indicated a profound change in Malcolm’s economic program. For years, he had preached the Garvey-endorsed virtues of entrepreneurial capitalism, but here, when asked what kind of political and economic system he wanted, he observed that “all of the countries that are emerging today from under colonialism are turning toward socialism. I don’t think it’s an accident.” For the first time, he publicly made the connection between racial oppression and capitalism, saying, “It’s impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism.” Conversely, he noted, those who had a strong personal commitment to racial equality were usually “socialist or their political philosophy is socialism.” What Malcolm seemed to be saying was that the Black Freedom Movement, which up to that point had focused on legal rights and legislative reforms, would ultimately have to take aim at America’s private enterprise system. He drew an analogy to farm fowls to make his point: “It’s impossible for the chicken to produce a duck egg—even though they both belong to the same family of fowl. . . . The system in this country cannot produce freedom for an Afro-American. . . . And if ever a chicken did produce a duck egg, I’m quite sure you would say it was certainly a revolutionary chicken!”

  The pro-socialist remarks were strikingly different from anything Malcolm had said before. While traveling through Africa, he had mentioned nothing about socialism and little about economic development. However, Nkrumah’s authoritarian regime in Ghana, the country that had most impressed him, was then embracing an economic alliance with the Soviet Union, and both Algeria and Egypt were already committed to versions of Arab socialism. These factors influenced his thinking, but perhaps weighing even more heavily was the Socialist Workers Party’s enthusiastic support for Malcolm himself. The Trotskyists perceived him as potentially the leader of an entirely new movement among Negroes, one that would ultimately radicalize the entire American working class. Malcolm must have been aware of this, and would have seen the value of moving toward embracing parts of a socialist perspective. Besides, there were elements of the Trotskyist agenda, such as opposition to both the Democratic and Republican parties, with which he agreed. So while this new economic direction seemed to contradict his previous views, more accurately it represented a gradual evolution and not a sharp rejection. He remained a black nationalist and continued to emphasize the development of black-owned businesses in black communities.

  He also recognized that while Muslim Mosque, Inc., needed to be expanded to other cities to consolidate his followers among Muslims, his priority had to be the secular political organization that Lynne Shifflett and Peter Bailey had been quietly working to build for him. “Within the next eight days,” he promised in a May 30 interview, he would “launch an organization which will be open for the participation of all Negroes, and we will be willing to accept the support of people of all races.” The first goal of this new group would be to submit “the case of the American Negro before the United Nations.” What Malcolm envisioned with the United Nations was a strategic shift in civil rights activism within the United States. Instead of passing legislation reforms through Congress, he sought to present blacks’ grievances to international bodies in hopes of global intervention. Under the banner of human rights, issues that had long been perceived as domestic or parochial would be presented on a world stage.

  He also appeared to offer an olive branch to the Nation of Islam over the issue of his Elmhurst home. A hearing on the case had been scheduled in Queens Civil Court for June 3, but now he told the Amsterdam News that if the officers of Mosque No. 7 allowed him to address their members and to defend himself against the charges, he was prepared to abide by the sentiments of the majority. If the NOI members asked him to move, “I’ll give the house up,” he vowed. “I want to settle this situation quietly, privately, and peacefully, not in the white man’s court, whom the Muslims preach is the devil.” But better than anyone else, he knew that the Nation was not a debating society with democratic procedures. He issued the appeal not because he expected reconciliation, but for public relations purposes: to illustrate a reasonable position to blacks outside the Nation of Islam.

  Several days later, the Queens Civil Court postponed his eviction trial, and Malcolm once again complained to a reporter that this “should be brought before a Muslim court. . . . They are deviating from our religious principles by bringing me here.” Malcolm surely knew that the NOI, viewing him as a “heretic,” would never consent to resolve the dispute in a Muslim court. The fact alone that Malcolm had not purchased the property
with his own funds made it extremely unlikely that he would prevail in court.

  Meanwhile he continued to mobilize supporters for his new secular organization. Several weeks after returning from Africa, he assigned the task of drafting a founding document, the “Statement of Basic Aims and Objectives,” to a coterie of political activists, intellectuals, and celebrities, including novelist John Oliver Killens and historian John Henrik Clarke. Some of the working sessions of the group were held at a motel on West 153rd Street and Eighth Avenue, the northern boundary of Harlem. On June 4, Malcolm traveled to Philadelphia with Benjamin 2X Goodman, a guard named Lafayette Burton, and one other individual—probably James 67X—to attend several meetings, including one at a private home with seven other people, and another at a Philadelphia barbershop. His primary purpose was to consolidate his supporters in the city, with the immediate goal of starting a Muslim Mosque, Inc., branch there. But he also launched what could later be seen as the first salvo in a battle with the Nation of Islam that would soon grow into an all-out war. During these meetings he voiced for the first time his suspicion that NOI national secretary John Ali was an FBI informant; he said the same of prominent minister Lonnie X Cross.