Malcolm X

by Manning Marable

  Throughout Malcolm’s long absence in the summer and fall, the Nation had waged what might be called a one-sided jihad against him. On July 15, John Ali informed a meeting of Mosque No. 7 that the X had been stripped from Malcolm’s name. He reminded the faithful that Malcolm had after all been a “thief, dope addict, and a pimp.” Such vitriolic speeches found their complement in the slanderous campaign unfolding in the pages of Muhammad Speaks. On September 25, Captain Joseph and Atlanta leader Jeremiah X published an article entitled “Biography of a Hypocrite,” aimed at characterizing Malcolm’s entire career within the Nation as a record of opportunism. Since Malcolm had personally opened or had a hand in developing nearly every NOI mosque between 1953 and 1962, their task was difficult. Nevertheless, they constantly denigrated Malcom and managed to identify scores of transgressions that supposedly had undermined the Nation of Islam. In the same issue, Minister Carl of Wilmington, Delaware, described Malcolm as a “shift-with-the-wind WEATHERCOCK.ʺ Captain Clarence 2X Gill of Boston also denounced Malcolm and all other hypocrites, adding, “May Allah burn them in hell.” On Malcolm’s return to the United States he was met with another Muhammad Speaks broadside, dated November 26, by Edwina X of the Newark mosque. For Edwina X, the struggle to defeat everything Malcolm represented was vital: “As in all great struggles for truth and freedom, there are the envious, the insincere and the hypocritical who will attempt to smear and wreck the work of a Divine leader. We have had such a hypocrite in the NOI in the form of one Malcolm X Little.” She then warned, “For one who has heard the truth and still wants to go astray—there is nothing but total destruction for such a defector.” Probably the single most influential attack appeared in Muhammad Speaks under the name Louis X on December 4. “The die is set, and Malcolm shall not escape, especially after such evil, foolish talk,” Farrakhan declared. “Such a man as Malcolm is worthy of death.” This code phrase was a call to arms within the sect.

  On the street, safety soon proved elusive for Malcolm’s people in the MMI. In late October, Kenneth Morton, who had quit the mosque at the time of Malcolm’s departure, was ambushed by members of the Fruit in front of his Bronx home. He was so severely beaten in the head that he subsequently died from his wounds. Captain Joseph denied that Mosque No. 7 and its officers had had any involvement in Morton’s death, but no one in the MMI needed proof to convince them to keep a low profile. Benjamin 2X narrowly escaped a beating or worse at the hands of Malcolm’s former driver Thomas 15X Johnson and a group of Nation thugs who chased him for several blocks. Almost as much a target as Malcolm himself, James 67X avoided sleeping in the same place for more than a night, rotating between four apartments, including one kept by his former roommate Anas Luqman.

  Despite this gathering storm, Malcolm did not curtail his public activities. In mid-December he took off several days to speak at Harvard Law School. His talk, “The African Revolution and Its Impact on the American Negro,” explained his ideas about Islam, drawing connections with Judaism and Christianity. He embraced the “brotherhood of all men,” he said, “but I don’t believe in wasting brotherhood on anyone who doesn’t want to practice it with me.” He drew again on a theme developed by Frantz Fanon, suggesting a link between the self-reinvention of black identity with the dismantling of racism. “Victims of racism are created in the image of the racists,” Malcolm argued. “When the victims struggle vigorously to protect themselves from violence of others, they are made to appear in the image of criminals, as the criminal image is projected onto the victim.” Liberation, he implied, was not simply political but cultural. His central point, however, was the necessity for blacks to transform their struggle from “civil rights” to “human rights,” redefining racism as “a problem for all humanity.” The OAAU favored getting “our problem before the United Nations,” but it also supported black voting and voter education.

  As Christmas drew near, Malcolm was invited to appear at the Williams Institutional Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in Harlem, where the principal speaker was the Mississippi freedom fighter Fannie Lou Hamer. The crowd at the Williams was somewhat small, about 175 people, but Malcolm gave a spirited and provocative presentation. His explorations in the philosophy of social movements in recent months had brought him face-to-face with an old debate within the Western left over how human beings come to perceive themselves as social actors, asking whether an external force, such as a tightly organized party, is necessary to bring oppressed people to full political consciousness, or if the oppressed by themselves have the ability to transform their own situations. Addressing this question, Malcolm came down strongly on the side of what has often been called spontaneity. “I, for one, believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what it is that confronts them, and the basic causes that produce it, they’ll create their own program,” he remarked. “And when the people create a program, you get action.” In effect, Malcolm’s remarks implicitly rejected the Marxist-Leninist theory of a cadre-style revolutionary party and embraced C. L. R. James’s belief that the oppressed possessed the power to transform their own existence.

  If ordinary people possess the intelligence and potential for changing their conditions, around what economic principles should that take place? Here again Malcolm returned to socialism, but explained it in a new, geopolitical context. In his judgment, the basic geopolitical division of the world was not between the United States and the Soviet Union, but America versus communist China. “Among Asian countries, whether they are communist, socialist . . . almost every one . . . that has gotten independence has devised some kind of socialistic system, and this is no accident.” Although Malcolm had visited neither China nor Cuba, it was clear that the socialist societies he admired most drew from the models of Mao and Castro.

  That he should have looked to Asia, and specifically China, for examples made sense given the direction of his recent investigations into the history of global politics, and could also be placed in a much older context of black interest in China as a model for the struggle of oppressed peoples. As early as the turn of the century, W. E. B. Du Bois had made reference to the “color line” in The Souls of Black Folk, with the implication that “colored” people included Africans, Asians, Jews, and other minorities around the world engaged in a struggle against Western imperialism. Based on this argument, some blacks had entertained great sympathy for the Japanese empire in the 1930s. A generation later, many black leftists saw Mao Zedong as a triumphant leader of nonwhite people. The idea of black identification with Asia had even been reflected in the ideology of the Nation of Islam, which had viewed African Americans as genealogically “Asiatic,” a classification that Malcolm had abandoned before eventually coming to see the connection differently, in global-political terms. He was encouraged in this direction by his relationship with Shirley Graham Du Bois and her son, David, who enthusiastically picked up the torch their patriarch had long carried. Indeed, by the end of his life, W. E. B. Du Bois had come to be a revered figure in Asia, celebrated both by the Chinese and by Nehru in India. He had perceived revolutionary China as a triumph for all colored people.

  In the Williams church speech, Malcolm drew on the triumph of Asian socialism to return to the notion that capitalism as an economic system was inherently exploitative: “You can’t operate a capitalistic system unless you are vulturistic; you have to have someone else’s blood to suck to be a capitalist.” The tide of history for people of African descent was moving inextricably toward the East: “When we look at the African continent, when we look at the trouble that’s going on between East and West, we find that the nations in Africa are developing socialistic systems to solve their problems.”

  At the event, Malcolm invited Fannie Lou Hamer and the SNCC Freedom Singers, traveling with her, to attend the OAAU's rally at the Audubon that evening. The successful rally with Hamer opened for Malcolm and the OAAU a long-desired conduit for political work with a progressive organization in the South. Attention in the civil rights mov
ement was directed at this moment at Selma, Alabama, where various groups hoped to launch a major voting rights initiative in the new year. Malcolm found Selma intriguing, and continued his efforts to redefine his image within the civil rights community. On Christmas Eve, accompanied by James 67X, he visited the home of James Farmer. Malcolm had learned that the CORE leader was soon embarking on a six-week tour of Africa, and he wanted to suggest local contacts. Farmer was oddly offended by James’s presence. “Why did you bring the bodyguard?” he asked. “Do you think I’m going to kill you?”

  Malcolm explained that James’s presence was necessary because “there are a lot of people after me . . . they’re bound to get me.” During the visit, Farmer retrieved two postcards he had received from Malcolm when he was in Mecca, and he asked if Malcolm’s inscriptions on the cards reflected a new racial outlook. Malcolm confirmed that his thinking had profoundly changed and that the distance between the two leaders, while still considerable, had been narrowed.

  Yet Malcolm’s progress on so many fronts was increasingly impeded by the Nation of Islam, which had begun to draw tight the net around him. By year's end, he was not safe in any city with an NOI presence, and when he traveled he was subjected to direct physical intimidation and threats. On December 23, when he appeared on the Joe Rainey program in Philadelphia, the station received a message that an attempt on his life would be made; Philadelphia police were called to protect Malcolm as he left the station. Two days later, on Christmas, the Nation sent Malcolm a clear message, brutal in its particulars, when four Boston Fruit led by mosque captain Clarence Gill ambushed Malcolm associate Leon 4X Ameer in the lobby of Boston’s Sherry Biltmore hotel. Ameer, a former NOI officer who had been assigned to be a press representative of Muhammad Ali, had fallen from Ali’s favor after Malcolm’s split with the Nation, and took to laying low at the Biltmore. He suffered mightily at the hands of Gill and his men until the beating was broken up at gunpoint by a police officer. Yet this was not the worst of it. Later that night, after Gill had retreated to his hotel room to recover, a second Nation pipe squad broke into his room to finish what their brothers had started. Ameer was so severely injured that he was hospitalized for more than two weeks, yet Gill and his men, arrested after the first incident, were fined a mere hundred dollars each.

  The day after Ameer's beatings, Malcolm returned to Philadelphia to be a guest on WPEN's Red Benson show. The program was broadcast from an auditorium open to the general public, and it soon became clear that without the presence of MMI security personnel and on a public stage or podium, Malcolm would be completely vulnerable. At least four NOI members were in the audience throughout the program. Returning to Philadelphia four days later, at two p.m. on December 30, Malcolm held a press conference at the Sheraton hotel, criticizing both black and white newspapers on their distorted coverage of the Congo crisis, and of Africa generally. Five hours later he attended the International Muslim Brotherhood dinner, where he delivered a talk of thirty to forty minutes. A significant number, perhaps more than thirty of those in attendance, were anti-Malcolm NOI members from Philadelphia. By nine p.m. Malcolm and a cordon of MMI security and MMI and OAAU supporters had returned to the Sheraton. An hour and a half later, approximately fifteen NOI members entered the hotel and began a frontal assault of MMI members. The brawling stopped when a police officer appeared. Malcolm immediately phoned Betty, instructing her not to let anyone into their house. One of his final acts of 1964 was to write to Akbar Muhammad, warning him that NOI leaders were trying “to destroy your image in the sight of the Black Muslims in the same way they did mine.” He urged him to hold a press conference denouncing “these vicious people.” Recent events had made him understand that international religious bodies of the Islamic world did not consider the Nation of Islam “as authentical [sic] . . . it is time [for them] to speak out and verify what I am saying. I am going to send letters to religious officials there in the Muslim world, enclosing your father's statements against you, claiming himself to be the Messenger of Allah and I am going to insist that they take a stand on your side.” Malcolm’s intervention was probably too manipulative, getting in the middle of the long-standing conflict between Akbar and his father. However, his basic threat—mobilizing international Islamic organizations to boycott the Nation of Islam—was no bluff. Nation headquarters genuinely feared that Malcolm could lead an international campaign that could effectively exclude it from being part of the ummah. Akbar and Wallace had been petulant in their criticisms of Elijah Muhammad, and little they had said actually threatened to damage the Nation. That was not true for Malcolm. The fatwa, or death warrant, may or may not have been signed by Elijah Muhammad; there is no way of knowing. It is far more likely that Muhammad, like the fabled King Henry II, announced no decision but made his feelings all too clear, allowing his underlings to take their own murderous initiative.

  Despite his many other obligations, Malcolm continued to make time available for Alex Haley. The journalist now understood the importance of Malcolm’s most recent reinvention, and it required him to expand the length of the Autobiography. In an October 1964 letter to Paul Reynolds, Haley had estimated that the book would be ready to hand over to Doubleday by late January 1965. “I am a little put-out,” Haley pouted, that Malcolm “has rather crossed up the project by, one, staying away so long and, two, his new conversion.” But Haley recognized that Malcolm’s embrace of Islamic orthodoxy might, after all, be beneficial to increased book sales and “intense interest in the Moslem countries where he is viewed as the most famous Orthodox Brother in America.” On November 19, Haley contacted Reynolds again, “happy to report” that Malcolm would be returning to the United States within the week. “So I am going to be on a plane Monday, to be awaiting him, to get the information I’ll need to write new final chapters.” Haley thus met with Malcolm several times in December 1964 and January 1965, incorporating his new views into the final chapters of the Autobiography. Surprisingly little about the OAAU was mentioned in the new material, however. On February 14, Haley reported to Reynolds that he was “deep into winding up Malcolm X's book. . . . You’ll have it prior [to] March . . . it’s a powerful book.”

  Malcolm was increasingly a magnet for representatives of the freedom struggle, who no longer viewed him as a racial separatist. The end of 1964 marked a moment of convergence, when Malcolm’s move away from stark separatism brought him into alignment with elements of the civil rights movement that were growing increasingly radicalized. Had Malcolm continued to mainstream his views, it is unclear how he would have negotiated relations a few years later with the Black Panthers, a group born of much of the intellectual framework Malcolm had assembled in the early to mid-1960s. Yet in this moment, Malcolm found himself able to straddle both the most leftist elements of the struggle and the mainstream. Early in 1965, the Malcolm-minded Floyd McKissick took control of CORE from James Farmer, continuing the group’s decisive shift away from King’s nonviolent integrationist model. And in the months after Freedom Summer, SNCC, too, had splintered along similar lines, with the pacifist Bob Moses set against the increasingly radicalized Stokely Carmichael, who would subsequently join the Black Panthers and later form the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party. Near the end of 1964, a letter and attached money order had arrived at the OAAU's offices from future Panthers cofounder Bobby Seale, requesting a subscription to Blacklash.

  Yet this period also saw Malcolm’s most concerted and successful effort to court the civil rights mainstream. Just before the new year, he received a delegation of thirty-seven teenagers from McComb, Mississippi, who had traveled to New York City on the sponsorship of the SNCC. Greeting the young people at his Hotel Theresa office, Malcolm urged them to think for themselves, applauding those who were committed to nonviolence but also insisting that “if black people alone are going to be the ones who are nonviolent, then it’s not fair.” He presented the OAAU as “a new approach,” rejecting traditional integrationist and separatist strategie
s in favor of “making our problem a world problem.” The plight of Mississippi could not be overcome by focusing narrowly just on its problems. “It is important for you to know that when you’re in Mississippi, you’re not alone. . . . You’ve got as much power on your side as the Ku Klux Klan has on its side.” Malcolm promised to send some of his militant followers to aid the freedom fighters. “We will organize brothers here in New York who know how to handle these kind of affairs,” he vowed, “and they’ll slip into Mississippi like Jesus slipped into Jerusalem.”

  On Sunday, January 3, the OAAU's evening program at the Audubon Ballroom featured color films taken by Malcolm during his travels. Despite freezing weather, the program attracted a crowd of seven hundred. Two days later Malcolm visited Montreal for an unusual reason: he was to appear on the CBC television program Front Page Challenge. With a format similar to the 1950s U.S. television show What’s My Line?, guests answered questions from masked panelists, who attempted to guess their identities. Malcolm’s panelists were Gordon Sinclair, Betty Kennedy, and Charles Templeton. Why would he go on a television game show? Perhaps it was another means to generate funds for his family. Or perhaps it was a way to display his softer personality to a mass audience.

  He also continued to expand his rhetoric on the internationalist connections between Asia, Africa, and black America. As the featured speaker at the Militant Labor Forum at Palm Gardens on January 7, he noted that Vietnamese rice farmers had successfully fought “against all the highly mechanized weapons of warfare” of the United States. China’s explosion of a nuclear bomb, he declared, “was a scientific breakthrough for the oppressed people of China.” The communist Chinese displayed “their advanced knowledge of science to the point where a country which is as backward as this country keeps saying China is, and so behind everybody, and so poor, could come up with an atomic bomb. I had to marvel at that.” He tied these developments to the legacies of imperialism and colonialism. Moise Tshombe, Malcolm explained, was an “agent of Western imperialism” in Africa, and he pointed out that in 1964 both Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, after years of effort, had successfully overthrown colonial powers, becoming independent Zambia and Malawi respectively. Taken together, these international events were all driven by the same global political forces, and African Americans’ issues had to be addressed within that same dynamic context.