Malcolm X

by Manning Marable

  In the meantime, Malcolm was besieged—by writers, by other activists seeking favors and alliances, and by people who just wanted to have a piece of history. Most met him only once or twice but were changed by these encounters; some were transformed by his rhetoric or writings, still others by his message.

  Robert Penn Warren, one of America’s most respected Southern writers in the sixties, met Malcolm at the Hotel Theresa on June 2, where they engaged in a mutually revealing conversation. Warren was at first surprised at how animated Malcolm was: “I discovered that the pale, dull yellowish face that had seemed so veiled, so stony, as though beyond all feeling, had flashed into its merciless, leering life—the sudden wolfish grin, the pale pink lips drawn hard back to show the strong teeth.” Both intimidated and fascinated, Warren presented Malcolm with a series of scenarios in which white liberals had provided assistance to blacks. When Warren mentioned that “the white man” had been willing to go to jail to oppose segregation, Malcolm retorted, “My personal attitude is that he has done nothing to solve the problem.” Malcolm went on to emphasize the necessity to transform institutional arrangements in the U.S. political economy, if blacks were ever to exercise power. Stunned, Warren asked for another chance for liberalism: “You don’t see in the American system the possibility of self-regeneration?” “No,” Malcolm replied.

  Malcolm was clearly toying with Warren—it was several weeks later that he would affirm precisely Warren’s point, in his appeal to the country’s founding documents at the opening conference of the OAAU, a claim on democracy he could not have advanced had he judged U.S. political institutions incapable of reform. Warren nervously went on to inquire about the new movement’s political objectives. In practical terms, what Malcolm sought was not fundamentally different from what waves of European immigrants—the Irish, Italians, and Jews—fought to achieve: equitable representation of their ethnic groups within all levels of government. “Once the black man becomes the political master of his own community, it means the politicians will also be black, which means that he will be sending black representatives even at the federal level.” Malcolm’s strategy was hardly a Leninist recipe for social revolution, but Warren, a guilty white liberal, could not understand his objectives. He gave far too much weight to Malcolm’s incendiary rhetoric and insufficient commentary on the social program he was advancing. At one tense moment Warren inquired if Malcolm believed in political assassination, “and [he] turns the hard, impassive face and veiled eyes upon me, and says, ‘I wouldn’t know anything about that.’ ”

  At the other end of the political spectrum was a series of meetings between Malcolm and the political activist Max Stanford (later known as Muhammad Ahmed). The two had first met in 1962, when Stanford, then twenty-one, had sought out Malcolm to ask if he should join the Nation of Islam. Malcolm had shocked him by replying, “You can do more for the Honorable Elijah Muhammad by working on the outside.” The young man had taken Malcolm’s words to heart, and that same year he and Cleveland activist Donald Freeman created a small, militant nationalist group, the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM). Based originally at Central State University in Ohio, the network developed a presence in Philadelphia in the 1960s and soon had relationships with CORE chapters in Brooklyn and Cleveland. Ideologically, they were influenced by black militants like the exiled Robert Williams and the independent Marxists Grace Lee and James Boggs. The Revolutionary Action Movement perceived itself as an underground organization, “a third force,” Stanford later explained, “between the Nation of Islam and SNCC.ʺ In late May 1964, Stanford arrived in Harlem asking to see Malcolm. The two met at the Harlem restaurant 22 West, Malcolm’s favorite, where Stanford made an outrageously bold request: Would Malcolm consent to be RAM's international spokesman? Robert Williams had already agreed to be their international chairman.

  At that time, the proposal likely appealed to Malcolm. For some time he had felt that the absence of clear objectives and a united front within the Black Freedom Movement was attributable, in part, to organizational deficiencies. The NAACP, CORE, SCLC, and other groups were like feuding factions at the national level; worse, the parochialism and personal jealousies of their leaders frequently disrupted cooperation at the grassroots level. Stanford argued that what was required was a more clandestine, cadrelike structure that could operate beyond the gaze of the media. ʺRAM would be the underground cadre organization,” Stanford explained, while “the OAAU would be the public front, united front.” At 22 West, Malcolm looked over RAM's organizational chart and said, “I see that you have studied the Nation of Islam’s structure.ʺ He was correct: the model did draw from the Nation of Islam, as well as from the Communist Party.

  Stanford remained in New York City for several months, and at OAAU meetings he was struck by Malcolm’s finely honed ethnographic skills and powers of observation. He recalled: It would be at times twenty to thirty people in our apartment, and Malcolm and John Henrik [Clarke] would be there. Malcolm would not chair the meeting. It would be somebody else chairing. And the discussion on the issue would go around the room. And people would be arguing different points of view. Malcolm would be the last person to say anything. He’d let people air out what they had to say. And then he’d say, “Can I say something?” You could hear a pin drop. And he said, “Sister so-and-so has a good point, and she thinks she’s in opposition to Brother so-and-so. And Brother so-and-so has a good argument. But—” And he would synthesize the whole argument. He would show everybody their strong points and everybody their weak points and how everything interrelated. . . . It was amazing. Here’s a man with an international reputation. [Yet he also] could have that [relationship] with brothers on the street [and] had that relation with sisters and brothers who graduated from college.

  Stanford was also keenly tuned to Malcolm’s emotional state at the time. “The only time I ever saw Malcolm emotional, and in a sense irrational,” the younger man recalled, “was in his public actions against the NOI in June-July 1964.” These moves threatened to destroy a potential relationship with Stanford’s group. When Malcolm “accused Elijah of fornicating with his secretaries, [and] put it out in the street that he had illegitimate children,” RAM sharply dissented with his tactics. “Malcolm was very disturbed,” Stanford said, because, spiritually and personally, “he had not only misled people, but he had physically abused people for their violation of what he thought was Elijah’s policy. So he felt like the biggest fool on planet earth.”

  Stanford claims that Malcolm finally agreed to some kind of association with RAM, and he ordered James 67X to serve as his liaison. However, Stanford was less successful in convincing him to relocate the OAAU. Malcolm was determined to “build a base” in New York, even though James and Grace Lee Boggs were urging him to relocate to Detroit, a city where he had thousands of enthusiastic supporters and where there was “more of the radical base.” RAM, Stanford explained, “wanted him to expand the OAAU all over the country because we felt that they couldn’t attack him if he had a national base.” But Malcolm would not budge. Perhaps he feared that if he moved his operations out of Harlem, the thousands of loyal Mosque No. 7 members would never allow him to reestablish a foothold there. By the 1960s Malcolm no longer lived in the Harlem community, yet Harlem remained the central metaphor for black urban America, and he understood that this sometimes magical, often tragic neighborhood’s fortunes were intertwined with his own.

  By now, Malcolm had spent years under surveillance by both federal and local officials, but in the summer of 1964 the man listening on the other end of his wiretapped telephone would come to play an important, if hidden, role in Malcolm’s life. Gerry Fulcher had graduated from the city police academy less than two years earlier, and as a young Harlem-born cop he had internalized many of the racist, conservative views his father had held about blacks. “I was going to stop all crime in New York City . . . ,” he remembered about his attitude in the days fresh out of the academy. “I was going to be the supercop.�
�� On his first day as a rookie officer, Fulcher and his partner were confronted by an African American who seriously injured Fulcher's fellow officer when the man hurled a chair at him. Fulcher managed to handcuff the suspect, and when his sergeant arrived at the scene, he gave a clear order: “I don’t want that nigger walking by the time you get back to the station house.” Fulcher may have been raw, but he wasn’t about to disobey. “So I, with the guy handcuffed, with his arms around his back, I beat the crap out of him,” he said. “And I was a hero.”

  After one year on the streets, Fulcher advanced to detective and was transferred into the BOSS unit. By early 1964, he was given his first important assignment, the covert surveillance of Malcolm X. Fulcher had already decided that Malcolm was “one of the bad guys,” an opinion shared by many of his fellow cops. “The whole civil rights movement,” he would say later, “was considered a brand of communism in the cops’ mind back in those days.” Fulcher had Malcolm down as a “former junkie and a pusher, when he was called Big Red . . . we knew all that.” With his break from the Nation, Malcolm had become an even greater threat, the possible leader of civil unrest and black protest. From BOSS's perspective, all of Malcolm’s activities had to be closely monitored, which included the recruitment of black cops to join both Malcolm’s group and Mosque No. 7. Fulcher's assignment was no less invasive. A small room had been set up in the 28th Precinct station house with tape recording equipment connected to the bugs that operatives had placed in Malcolm’s phone at the Hotel Theresa. The listening devices could pick up any conversations in the room where the telephone was. Fulcher's task was twofold: to wiretap Malcolm, hand-delivering the tapes to police authorities on a daily basis; and to attend OAAU events, doing general surveillance.

  Fulcher soon learned that wiretapping required diligence and an attention to detail that made the job difficult. “You had to listen to the bug all the time, and the minute you heard the phone ring you almost had to time with him picking it up,” Fulcher recalled. “And then I had to record, decide what I was putting on the [tape] reels.” At first, he proudly carried out his duties, believing that Malcolm hated whites and wanted to overthrow the U.S. government. “They are the enemies of police,” Fulcher stated, recalling his views in 1964 and 1965. “They [the police] would kill them every chance they have.” As far as the cops were concerned, Malcolm and his followers should be targeted.

  Within a few weeks, as he listened to Malcolm’s telephone conversations, office meetings, and public speeches, “what I heard was nothing like I expected.” The officer was impressed by his subject’s political analysis and arguments. “I remember saying to myself, ‘Let’s see, he’s right about that. . . . He wants [blacks] to get jobs. He wants them to get education. Wants them to get into the system. What’s wrong with that?’ ” Fulcher soon concluded that Malcolm was not “the enemy of white people in general” after all, which led him to the further realization that the NYPD's entire approach to Malcolm, and more broadly the Black Freedom Movement, required rethinking. He raised his concerns with his superior officers but got nowhere. Inside BOSS, “all black organizations were suspect.” From then on, he kept his opinions to himself, while continuing his wiretaps and tape recordings. BOSS even placed a recording device under the stage at the Audubon, to ensure that law enforcement could transcribe and analyze Malcolm’s speeches.

  The day after the OAAU's founding rally, Malcolm met with some members to take stock of the event and to begin planning for his second excursion abroad that year. That Sunday about ninety individuals filled out forms to join the OAAU, far fewer than anticipated. The New York Times had estimated the rally’s attendance at only six hundred. Malcolm was quick to attribute the low number of new members to the fact that most Harlemites did not have the initial two-dollar membership fee.

  If the OAAU lacked for early members, it was not on account of any lull in the charge for civil rights. For the two weeks prior to the rally, news of the disappearance of three volunteers in Mississippi on the first day of the Freedom Summer project had gripped the nation, as activists across the country demanded a full investigation. King himself was still in Saint Augustine, in and out of jail and under tremendous strain. Early on the morning of June 30 Malcolm sent King a telegram expressing his concern about racist attacks against civil rights demonstrators in Saint Augustine. He indicated that if federal authorities were not willing to protect civil rights workers, then he was prepared to deploy his people in the South to organize self-defense units capable of fighting the Klan. To reporters, he characterized these groups as “guerilla squads. . . . The Klan elements in the South are well known. We believe that whenever they strike against the Negro, the Negro has a chance to strike back.”

  Later that day he flew to Omaha, Nebraska, upon the invitation of the city’s Citizens Coordinating Committee for Civil Liberties. Upon arrival, he kept up his provocative banter, charging that “in Omaha, as in other places, the Ku Klux Klan has just changed its bedsheets for policemen’s uniforms.” After addressing a local audience at Omaha’s City Auditorium, he checked out of his hotel, at three a.m., and later that morning was in downtown Chicago. He was a call-in guest on a local radio program, which alerted thousands of angry NOI members that he was in the city. Although he’d confirmed he would appear on the Chicago television show Off the Cuff, he never made it to the station; threats on his life, now openly expressed on the streets, forced him to return immediately to New York.

  At the beginning of July, Malcolm’s former fiancée, Evelyn Williams, and Lucille Rosary filed paternity suits against Elijah Muhammad. The formal legal charge brought the fighting in the Black Muslim world to a boil, with death threats against Malcolm now seeming to come from everywhere. That same day, James 3X Shabazz, the powerful minister of Newark’s mosque and active leader of Mosque No. 7, released a broadside against Malcolm, describing him as “the number one hypocrite of all time” and “a dog returning to his own vomit.” One night in early July, either the third or fourth, Malcolm contacted the NYPD, alerting them that he was returning alone to his home at eleven thirty p.m. and that their presence might be necessary. When he pulled up in front of his home, he saw no NYPD officers present, but what he could see was two unfamiliar black men approach his car on foot. He quickly accelerated, driving around the block and waiting before going home. Malcolm complained to the police and an officer was eventually placed in front of the residence, but only for twenty-four hours.

  Despite this intimidation, Malcolm was not about to become a political fugitive in his own city. The next evening, the OAAU sponsored its second public rally, again at the Audubon. Although most MMI members did not belong to the OAAU, Benjamin 2X Goodman was handed the assignment of introducing Malcolm to the audience. Malcolm informed his audience, “Right now, things are pretty hot for me, you know. Oh, yes, I may sound like I’m cracking, but I’m facting.”

  On July 8 Malcolm appeared again on the Barry Gray Show in New York. On July 9 he carried on correspondence with Hassan Sharrieff, the dissident son of Ethel and Raymond Sharrieff, who had recently broken with and denounced the Nation. Malcolm wrote to him saying he was unable to send Sharrieff funds, but pledged he would assist him in organizing “the believers” in Philadelphia, Chicago, and other cities “behind Brother Wallace” Muhammad.

  Malcolm had reached a point where his own physical safety was secondary to the realization of his political objectives. Chief among them were, first, forging a Pan-Africanist alliance between the newly independent African states and black America; and, next, consolidating the MMI's relationships with officials in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the entire Muslim world—both goals requiring him to head overseas. This second trip abroad that year would also remove him from the Nation’s direct line of fire. Perhaps, he figured, the vicious jihad the Nation had waged against him might abate after a long absence outside the United States.

  On the evening of July 9, traveling as Malik el-Shabazz, Malcolm boarded TWA Flight 700 for Lond
on. Arriving the next morning, Malcolm held an impromptu press conference in which he charged that the U.S. government “is violating the UN charter by violating our basic human rights.” He also predicted that in the summer of 1964 America “will see a bloodbath.”

  Malcolm deeply believed in the power of prophecy, and only days after his departure from New York, the violence he had long warned of in his speeches finally erupted on the streets of Harlem. On July 18 the police shooting of a black fifteen-year-old sparked an angry march that ended with the crowd surrounding the 123rd Street NYPD station, the same station where Malcolm had led the Johnson Hinton protest in 1957. Only this time, when the police started making arrests, the people fought back; others ran through Harlem’s business district, smashing windows and stealing everything they could carry.

  In London, though, ready for a momentous trip, he could not have imagined such particulars. After renting a hotel room for the night, Malcolm rang one of his contacts, who provided him with telephone numbers and other contact information for some African leaders. In his hotel lobby, Malcolm managed to attract three British journalists to do a twenty-minute interview. The next day, July 11, he was off to Cairo.

  Malcolm’s great strength was his ability to speak on behalf of those to whom society and state had denied a voice due to racial prejudice. He understood their yearnings and anticipated their actions. He could now see the possibility of a future without racism for his people, but what he could not anticipate were the terrible dangers closest to him, in the forms of both betrayal and death. Just days prior to Malcolm’s return to Africa, Max Stanford recalled forty-five years later, Malcolm had introduced Max to Charles 37X Kenyatta, a member of his inner circle, at a private reception. Stanford quickly explained that Charles “had been in the penitentiary, and in the Nation, and that he trusted Charles more than any man in the world.” Malcolm assured both men “that the three of us would meet when he came back from Africa,” Stanford remembered. “And the last thing he said to Charles was ‘Take care of Betty for me.’ ”