Malcolm X

by Manning Marable

  BOSS—Bureau of Special Services

  UTLSC—University of Tennessee Library Special Collection

  KMC—The Ken McCormick Collection of the Records of Doubleday and Company

  Prologue: Life Beyond The Legend

  1 larger Grand Ballroom, holding up to fifteen hundred. See Eric William Allison, “Audubon Theatre and Ballroom,” in Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 66.

  1 accompanied by the occasional violent confrontation. Letter to the editor, Shirley G. Quill, New York Times, April 1, 1990. Quill observed that “long before the gruesome assassination of Malcolm X, the Audubon Ballroom was known as the cradle of the T.W.U., the first union of municipal transit workers in modern labor history.”

  1 Two people were badly wounded. “Girl and Man Shot in Dance Hall,” New York Times, September 22, 1929.

  3 “The Negroes at the mass level are ready to act.” M. S. Handler, “Malcolm X Splits with Muhammad,” New York Times, March 9, 1964; and M. S. Handler, “Malcolm X Sees Rise in Violence,” New York Times, March 13, 1964.

  3 “who are responsible to white authorities—Negro Uncle Toms.” Emanuel Perlmutter, “Murphy Says City Will Not Permit Rights Violence,” New York Times, March 16, 1964.

  4 and only one, briefly, was stationed. Herman Ferguson interview, OAAU member and eyewitness to Malcolm X’s assassination, June 27, 2003.

  4 at a considerable distance from the featured event. Peter Goldman, The Death and Life of Malcolm X, revised edition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), pp. 269, 274.

  4 an easy escape to New Jersey. Ibid., pp. 416-19.

  4 about as far as he could have been from the stage. William 64X George statement with New York County District Attorney’s office, March 18, 1965. The police interviews related to the Malcolm X murder investigation are available in Case File 871-65, Series I, New York Department of Records and Information Services, Municipal Archives in the City of New York (MANY). The district attorney’s case file on the assassination of Malcolm X is divided into three series, according to chronological periods corresponding with the murder case. Series I includes materials from the police investigation and indictment; Series II includes the 1966 murder trial; Series III encompasses the appeals of the convicted assailants, Norman Butler, Thomas Johnson, and Talmadge Hayer (aka Thomas Hagan). Of great significance is the availability of unredacted FBI internal documents and a copy of the full grand jury transcript of the Malcolm X murder trial, in Series I. The district attorney’s files were closed to the public until 1993, at which point they were transferred to the New York City Municipal Archives. For a comprehensive analysis of the case file, see Elizabeth Mazucci, “St. Malcolm’s Relics: A Study of the Artifacts Shaped by the Assassination of Malcolm X,” M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 2005.

  5 Cathcart complied and returned to his seat. In his NYPD interview, Linwood X Cathcart was shown photographs of Norman Butler and Thomas Johnson, two NOI members who by then had been arrested for Malcolm X’s murder. Linwood X denied knowing the identities of Johnson and Butler from their photographs. He stated that neither man was in attendance at the Audubon Ballroom rally. Then, provocatively, according to police records, “Mr. Cathcart went on to say that Malcolm X could be compared to Benedict Arnold as he was also a traitor and that Allah takes care of us all.” See Augurs Linwood C. Cathcart interview with NYPD, March 22, 1965. Case File 871-65, Series I, MANY.

  5 security people, he returned to his seat. Langston Savage grand jury testimony and NYPD interview with Langston Savage, March 22, 1965. Case File 871-65, Series I, MANY.

  5 “We’re dealing with an entirely different group.” James 67X Warden (also known as Abdullah Abdur Razzaq and James Shabazz) interview, July 21, 2003.

  5 to pay the manager that afternoon’s $150 fee. Officer William E. Confrey, “Interview of Mr. William Fogel, Manager of Audubon Ballroom, February 21, 1965.” Case File 871-65, Series I, MANY.

  6 one of them was going to ignite a smoke bomb. Goldman, The Death and Life of Malcolm X, pp. 418-19.

  6 podium immediately following Benjamin’s introductions. Transcript of address by Benjamin 2X Goodman (also known as Benjamin Karim), delivered at the Audubon Ballroom, February 21, 1965. Copy and audiotape recording in possession of author.

  6 Benjamin stepped down and returned to the backstage room. Ibid. Also see Goldman, The Death and Life of Malcolm X, pp. 271-73.

  6 Malcolm yelled out, “Hold it! Hold it!” Transcript of address by Benjamin 2X Goodman. Malcolm X’s initial remarks can be heard on the tape recording.

  8 “our manhood, our living, black manhood.” Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine, 1999), p. 462.

  8 formed a Malcolm X Democrat Club. Goldman, The Death and Life of Malcolm X, p. 378.

  8 “any black cat in this curious place and time.” See James Baldwin, One Day, When I Was Lost: A Scenario Based on Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Dell, 1972); David Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), pp. 297-99; and Brian Norman, “Reading a Closet Screenplay: Hollywood, James Baldwin’s Malcolm X and the Threat of Historical Irrelevance,” African American Review, vol. 39, no. 2 (Spring 2005), pp. 103-18.

  8 promoting the reelection of Richard Nixon. Paul Deloney, “Black Parlays in Capital Hail Nixon and Thurmond,” New York Times, June 12, 1972.

  8 a portrait of Malcolm on the cover of one of its CDs. William T. Strickland and Cheryll Y. Greene, eds., Malcolm X: Make It Plain (New York: Viking, 1994), p. 225.

  8 “Quayle should think he’s talking about him.” Sam Roberts, “Dan Quayle, Malcolm X and American Values,” New York Times, June 15, 1992.

  8 “a hero for black Americans today.” “Will the Real Malcolm X Please Stand Up?” Los Angeles Sentinel, January 7, 1993.

  8 “undergirded his bond with blacks.” Gerald Horne, “‘Myth’ and the Making of ‘Malcolm X,’” American Historical Review, vol. 98, no. 2 (April 1993), p. 448.

  8 “integrationist solution to racial problems.” Manning Marable, Living Black History: How Reimagining the African-American Past Can Remake America’s Racial Future (New York: Basic Civitas, 2006), p. 147.

  10 “to the cause of liberating the black man.” Malcolm X and Haley, Autobiography, p. xxv.

  10 “cellblock had a name for me: ‘Satan.’” Ibid., p. 256.

  11 “it was like having tea with a black panther.” Ibid., p. xxv.

  11 his autobiography is highly exaggerated. See the analysis of Detroit Red’s criminal career in Rodnell P. Collins and Peter Bailey, Seventh Child: A Family Memoir of Malcolm X (New York: Kensington, 1998).

  Chapter 1: “Up, You Mighty Race!”

  15 on July 29, 1890. Early (Earl) Little’s death certificate, March 30, 1931, Michigan Department of Community Health, Division of Vital Statistics, State Official Number 1338243. Copy in possession of author. There is some uncertainty about the precise birth date of Earl Little. According to the 1930 census, E. Little was born in 1891-92. However, in his 1959 passport application Malcolm placed the birth of his father, “J. Early Little,” in 1889. See MX FBI, Memorandum, July 27, 1959; and MX FBI, Summary Report, New York Office, November 17, 1959, p. 31.

  15 eight thousand bales each year. “Reynolds,” The Butler Herald (Georgia), June 20, 191 1.

  15 second only to Mississippi in lynching deaths. Walter White, Rope and Faggot (New York: Arno, 1969), pp. 254-56.

  15 especially in masonry, carpentry, and the mechanical trades. Sarah A. Soule, “Populism and Black Lynching in Georgia, 1890-1900,” Social Forces, vol. 71, no. 2 (December 1992), pp. 431-49.

  16 before finally settling in Montreal. Ira Berlin, The Making of African America (New York: Viking, 2010), p. 172.

  16 He did not bother to get a legal divorce. The early years of Earl Little, Sr., and Louise Norton are described in Strickland and Greene, eds., Malcolm X: Make It Pl
ain. A literary treatment of the complex and often tense relationship between Malcolm’s parents is provided in Jan Carew, Ghosts in Our Blood: With Malcolm X in Africa, England, and the Caribbean (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1994). Also see Mary G. Rolinson, Grassroots Garveyism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), pp. 193-94.

  16 small island homeland could provide. Louis A. DeCaro, Jr., On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X (New York: New York University Press, 1996), pp. 41-42. The 1930 census places Louise Little’s birth in 1898-99. On his 1959 passport application Malcolm states that his mother was born in 1896. See MX FBI, Summary Report, New York Office, November 17, 1959.

  16 even sending delegations to international conventions. See Leo W. Bertley, “The Universal Negro Improvement Association of Montreal, 1917-1974,” Ph.D. dissertation, Concordia University, California, 1980.

  17 advanced the national leadership of the reformers over their conservative rivals. There is a substantial body of scholarship on the conflict between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. The place to begin is with August Meier’s Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963). Other sources on Washington and Du Bois include Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Michael Rudolph West, The Education of Booker T. Washington (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Raymond Walters, W. E. B. Du Bois and His Rivals (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), and Manning Marable, W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat, second edition (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2005).

  17 religious and cultural institutions that nurtured black families. DeCaro, On the Side of My People, pp. 13-15.

  17 naming their building Liberty Hall. Robert A. Hill and Barbara Blair, eds., Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. lxiv.

  17 “is liberty, is real human rights.” Black Man, vol. 1 (July 1935), p. 5.

  18 movement’s growing list of businesses. Marcus Garvey, “Autobiography,” in Hill and Blair, eds., Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons, pp. 92-93.

  18 “the backward tribes of Africa.” Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 81.

  19 “Of the red, the black, and the green.” Garvey, “Autobiography,” in Hill and Blair, eds., Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons, pp. 49-50.

  19 “Order of Ethiopia and Dukes of Niger and of Uganda.” Kelly Miller, “After Marcus Garvey—What of the Negro?” Contemporary Review, vol. 131 (April 1927), pp. 492-500.

  19 “religion to the Negroes of the world.” DeCaro, On the Side of My People, p. 15.

  19 “is fundamentally a religious institution.” Hill and Blair, eds., Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons, p. xxxvii. There are numerous studies on Garvey and Garveyism. Several important works are: Robert A. Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983-present); Rupert Lewis, Marcus Garvey: Anti-Colonial Champion (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1988); Claudrena N. Harold, The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South, 19 18-1942 (London: Routledge, 2007); and Emory J. Tolbert, The UNIA and Black Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California Press, 1980).

  20 putting Philadelphia behind only New York City in total membership. Peter Cole, Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007), pp. 138-39.

  20 presidential candidate in the 1920 elections. Robert Gregg, Sparks from the Anvil of Oppression: Philadelphia’s African Methodists and Southern Migrants, 1840-1940 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), pp. 189-90; and Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 1, 1826-August 1919, p. 515. Eason’s sale of his church building backfired, as congregants filed a civil suit against him. The majority of church members subsequently moved to replace Eason with the Reverend B. J. Bolding. In the wake of the controversy Eason relocated most of his activities for Garvey to Harlem, where he remained wildly popular. See Gregg, Sparks from the Anvil of Oppression, p. 190.

  20 “French Negro . . . we represent all Negroes.” James Walker Hood Eason, “Declaration of Aims,” in Robert A. Hill, ed., Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 2, August 1919-August 31, 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 502-7.

  20 in more than eight hundred branch organizations or chapters. Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience, p. 80.

  20 one of the largest mass movements in black history. See Tony Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Strategies of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (New York: Dover, 1976); and E. U. Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism: A Search for an Identity in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

  21 and by 1923 membership totaled forty-five thousand. See Michael W. Schuyler, “The Ku Klux Klan in Nebraska, 1920-1930,” Nebraska History, vol. 66, no. 3 (1985), pp. 234- 56 ; and Eldora F. Hess, “The Negro in Nebraska,” M.A. thesis, University of Nebraska at Lincoln, 1932.

  21 “frequently carrying American flags; others rode horses.” Schuyler, “The Ku Klux Klan in Nebraska, 1920-1930,” pp. 235-36.

  21 “will drive the common allies together.” Ibid., p. 247.

  21 where Klan supporters ensured its failure. Ibid., pp. 247-48.

  22 and it had become a force in national politics. Hugo Black formally joined the Ku Klux Klan in Birmingham in 1923. His induction was in front of seventeen hundred Klansmen in the Robert E. Lee chapter. See Howard Ball, Hugo Black: Cold Steel Warrior (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 61. Robert Byrd joined the KKK in 1942, when he was twenty-four years old. See Eric Pianin, “A Senator ’s Shame,” Washington Post, June 19, 2005.

  22 “the feelings of every real white American.” “Hon. Marcus Garvey Tells of Interview with the Ku Klux Klan,” in The Negro World, July 15, 1922, from Robert A. Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 4, September 1921-September 1922 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 707-15.

  22 were far more ruthless than their leader. Colin Grant, Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 360-61; and Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 1, p. 515.

  22 led local blacks to fear KKK reprisals. According to Rodnell P. Collins, the son of Malcolm X’s paternal half sister Ella Collins, Omaha’s black population feared that Little’s activities would “bring down the white folks on us.” See Collins, Seventh Child, p. 15. Collins’s book contains much valuable information about the relationship between Ella and Malcolm. However, Collins and his ghostwriter, Peter Bailey, embellished the narrative with their own speculations.

  23 “as suddenly as they had come.” Malcolm X and Haley, Autobiography, p. 1.

  23 and a public picnic drew twenty-five thousand followers. Schuyler, “The Ku Klux Klan in Nebraska, 1920-1930,” pp. 236, 237-39.

  23 The boy, Earl’s seventh child, was christened Malcolm. Goldman, The Death and Life of Malcolm X, p. 26. Malcolm later recalled, “I was born in a segregated hospital of a segregated mother and a segregated father.”

  23 “much alive to its part in carrying on the great work.” Negro World, March 27, 1926. Louise Little’s report in the Negro World of July 3, 1926, noted that the Omaha division of the UNIA’s meeting of that day featured a poetry reading, prayer, a musical selection, and a discussion “about matters of the organization.” See Louise Little, “Omaha, Neb. Report,” Negro World, July 3, 192
6.

  23 Black Star Line and given a five-year sentence. Hill and Blair, eds., Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons, p. lxv.

  24 to reverse Garvey’s conviction. Rolinson, Grassroots Garveyism, p. 158.

  24 higher than in many other cities. Joe William Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45, second edition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), p. 60.

  24 “black city within the city.” Ibid., pp. 87, 90, 93.

  24 preventing racial strife between striking workers. Ibid., p. 57.

  24 to elevate African Americans to elective office. Ibid., pp. 125, 135-36. Also see “News of Divisions,” Negro World, January 29, 1927, February 5, 1927, and February 19, 1927.

  24 June 8, 1927, asking for Garvey to be released. Earl Little, W. M. Townsend, and Robert Finney, Officers, International Industrial Club of Milwaukee, to President Calvin Coolidge, June 8, 1927, in Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 6, September 1924-December 1927 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 561-62. Two years earlier, on April 27, 1925, the Milwaukee UNIA Division No. 207 had appealed to President Coolidge to grant executive clemency to Garvey. The UNIA branch’s appeal noted that “Mr. Garvey is suffering, and has for some years been suffering, from chronic bronchial asthma and is subject to attacks of vertigo.” In ibid., p. 204.

  24 delayed only by the birth of yet another son, Reginald. Actually, the Little family may have moved from Milwaukee earlier. According to the Negro World issue of May 27, 1927, Earl Little is reported to have been the leader of the Indiana Harbor (East Chicago, Indiana) UNIA branch organization.

  25 a lawyer, who filed an appeal. DeCaro, On the Side of My People, pp. 44-45.

  25 “and they knew where the baby was.” Wilfred Little (Wilfred Shabazz) interview, in Strickland and Greene, eds., Malcolm X: Make It Plain, p. 21.

  25 “away from the house,” Wilfred recalled. Ibid.