Voices in Our Blood

by Jon Meacham

  PLAYBOY: Do you feel that the Administration’s successful stand on the integration of James Meredith into the University of Mississippi has demonstrated that the Government—far from being hypocritical—is sympathetic with the Negro’s aspirations for equality?

  MALCOLM X: What was accomplished? It took 15,000 troops to put Meredith in the University of Mississippi. Those troops and $3,000,000—that’s what was spent—to get one Negro in. That $3,000,000 could have been used much more wisely by the Federal Government to elevate the living standards of all the Negroes in Mississippi.

  PLAYBOY: Then in your view, the principle involved was not worth the expense. Yet it is a matter of record that President Kennedy, in the face of Southern opposition, championed the appointment of Dr. Robert Weaver as the first Negro Cabinet member. Doesn’t this indicate to you, as it does to many Negro leaders, that the Administration is determined to combat white supremacy?

  MALCOLM X: Kennedy doesn’t have to fight; he’s the President. He didn’t have any fight replacing [successive Secretary(s) of Health, Education, and Welfare] Ribicoff with Celebrezze. He didn’t have any trouble putting Goldberg on the Supreme Court. He hasn’t had any trouble getting anybody in but Weaver and Thurgood Marshall. He wasn’t worried about Congressional objection when he challenged U.S. Steel. He wasn’t worried about either Congressional reaction or Russian reaction or even world reaction when he blockaded Cuba. But when it comes to the rights of the Negro, who helped to put him in office, then he’s afraid of little pockets of white resistance.

  PLAYBOY: Has any American President, in your opinion—Lincoln, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy—accomplished anything for the Negro?

  MALCOLM X: None of them have ever done anything for Negroes. All of them have tricked the Negro, and made false promises to him at election times which they never fulfilled. Lincoln’s concern wasn’t freedom for the blacks but to save the Union.

  PLAYBOY: Wasn’t the Civil War fought to decide whether this nation could, in the words of Lincoln, “endure permanently half slave and half free”?

  MALCOLM X: Sir, many, many people are completely misinformed about Lincoln and the Negro. That war involved two thieves, the North and the South, fighting over the spoils. The further we get away from the actual incident, the more they are trying to make it sound as though the battle was over the black man. Lincoln said that if he could save the Union without freeing the slaves, he would. But after two years of killing and carnage he found out he would have to free the slaves. He wasn’t interested in the slaves but in the Union. As for the Emancipation Proclamation, sir, it was an empty document. If it freed the slaves, why, a century later, are we still battling for civil rights?

  PLAYBOY: Despite the fact that the goal of racial equality is not yet realized, many sociologists—and many Negro commentators—agree that no minority group on earth has made as much social, civil and economic progress as the American Negro in the past 100 years. What is your reaction to this view?

  MALCOLM X: Sir, I hear that everywhere almost exactly as you state it. This is one of the biggest myths that the American black man himself believes in. Every immigrant ethnic group that has come to this country is now a genuinely first-class citizen group—every one of them but the black man, who was here when they came. While everybody else is sharing the fruit, the black man is just now starting to be thrown some seeds. It is our hope that through the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, we will at last get the soil to plant the seeds in. You talk about the progress of the Negro—I’ll tell you, mister, it’s just because the Negro has been in America while America has gone forward that the Negro appears to have gone forward. The Negro is like a man on a luxury commuter train doing 90 miles an hour. He looks out of the window, along with all the white passengers in their Pullman chairs, and he thinks he’s doing 90, too. Then he gets to the men’s room and looks in the mirror—and he sees he’s not really getting anywhere at all. His reflection shows a black man standing there in the white uniform of a dining-car steward. He may get on the 5:10, all right, but he sure won’t be getting off at Westport.

  PLAYBOY: Is there anything then, in your opinion, that could be done—by either whites or blacks—to expedite the social and economic progress of the Negro in America?

  MALCOLM X: First of all, the white man must finally realize that he’s the one who has committed the crimes that have produced the miserable condition that our people are in. He can’t hide this guilt by reviling us today because we answer his criminal acts—past and present—with extreme and uncompromising resentment. He cannot hide his guilt by accusing us, his victims, of being racists, extremists and black supremacists. The white man must realize that the sins of the fathers are about to be visited upon the heads of the children who have continued those sins, only in more sophisticated ways. Mr. Elijah Muhammad is warning this generation of white people that they, too, are also facing a time of harvest in which they will have to pay for the crime committed when their grandfathers made slaves out of us.

  But there is something the white man can do to avert this fate. He must atone—and this can only be done by allowing black men, those who choose, to leave this land of bondage and go to a land of our own. But if he doesn’t want a mass movement of our people away from this house of bondage, then he should separate this country. He should give us several states here on American soil, where those of us who wish to can go and set up our own government, our own economic system, our own civilization. Since we have given over 300 years of our slave labor to the white man’s America, helped to build it up for him, it’s only right that white America should give us everything we need in finance and materials for the next 25 years, until our own nation is able to stand on its feet. Then, if the Western Hemisphere is attacked by outside enemies, we would have both the capability and the motivation to join in defending the hemisphere, in which we would then have a sovereign stake.

  The Honorable Elijah Muhammad says that the black man has served under the rule of all the other peoples of the earth at one time or another in the past. He teaches that it is now God’s intention to put the black man back at the top of civilization, where he was in the beginning—before Adam, the white man, was created. The world since Adam has been white—and corrupt. The world of tomorrow will be black—and righteous. In the white world there has been nothing but slavery, suffering, death and colonialism. In the black world of tomorrow, there will be true freedom, justice and equality for all. And that day is coming—sooner than you think.

  PLAYBOY: If Muslims ultimately gain control as you predict, do you plan to bestow “true freedom” on white people?

  MALCOLM X: It’s not a case of what would we do, it’s a case of what would God do with whites. What does a judge do with the guilty? Either the guilty atone, or God executes judgment.

  Wallace

  1968

  MARSHALL FRADY

  On a cold, rain-flicked night in 1967 a rickety twin-engine Convair 240 began a blind and uncertain descent through low clouds, abruptly breaking out over the scattered watery lights of Concord, New Hampshire. It came in headlong, less by instruments and calculation than with a precipitous lurching optimism.

  A damp huddle of greeters was waiting in the dark, and they waggled dime-store Confederate flags when he emerged from the plane—a stumpy little man with heavy black eyebrows and bright black darting eyes and a puglike bulb of a nose who looked as if he might have stepped out of an eighteenth-century London street scene by Hogarth. Wrapped in a black raincoat, he bobbed spryly down the steps as flashbulbs stammered in the rain. Someone held an umbrella over his head while he said a few words to the newsmen. Asked if he were offended because no local officials were there to welcome him, he answered jauntily, “Naw”—his voice rising just a bit—“Naw, ’cause it’s the workin’ folks all over this country who’re gettin’ fed up and are gonna turn this country around, and a whole heap of politicians are gonna get run over when they do.” With that, he was bundled into a car at the he
ad of the waiting cavalcade, and, with a swift surge, everyone—he, his entourage, the reporters, his local supporters—vanished into the night. One had the peculiar fleeting impression that a squad of commandos or guerrillas, irregulars at any rate, had just landed in the dark and was now loose in the New England countryside.

  At a press conference that evening in a crammed smoke-hazed motel room on the outskirts of Concord, he seemed—peering over a thicket of microphones that came up almost to his chin, perspiring and a little haggard in the harsh glare of television lights—an improbable apparition. His baggy dark suit was buttoned tightly over his paunch, with a tab-collar shirt hugging the bulky knot of an inexpensive tie. His breast pocket was bulging with plastic-tip White Owl cigars and scraps of paper on which were scribbled random notes, addresses, telephone numbers. He looked somewhat like a traveling novelty salesman. But what this chunky little man was occupied with, what had brought him out of the night from distant Alabama all the way to this New Hampshire motel room, was the election of the next President of the United States—an event now only a year away. He carefully affected, out of deference to this unfamiliar assembly, a subdued and amiable manner, with much congenial winking, and his grammar and enunciation were studiously precise, faintly stilted. (On the flight up, he had mused, “Them New Hampshire folks, you know, they a little more restrained and genteel than Alabama folks. They gotten kind of overbred up there.”) At one point, he announced, “Well, I’m mighty happy to be among all you very intelligent-lookin’ folks.” But later, when he interrupted a woman reporter, “What’s that, honey? Could you say that again? I don’t hear too good,” turning his head with his hand cupped behind his ear so that he had to look at her out of the corner of his eye, he seemed solemnly impervious to the ripple of titters in the room.

  Morning revealed a landscape that had the tidy miniature quality of a model train set, with a trivial city skyline under washed drab skies. It was alien country. Though the month was April, the weather was wintry—not his kind of weather—as if the South and North described not so much regions as perpetual weathers, summerland and winterland. Syracuse, into which he had ventured the week before, had had a profoundly remote look about it, cold and wan under bare bleak trees, with junkyards, power lines, and oil tanks set out in wide weedy fields and cement trucks moving through a rubble of construction. All the towns in the North where he was appearing seemed generations older than those in Alabama, and over Concord’s streets there was a kind of static quiescence, a worn and antique quality. When he spoke that afternoon in the square downtown, he was regarded from the capitol lawn by an incredulously scowling statue of Daniel Webster, and his grits-and-gravy voice blared down a main street that was a turn-of-the-century tintype of stark brick buildings crested with Yankee brass eagles.

  But it could have been a rally on a musky spring afternoon in Suggsville, Alabama. His finger stabbing downward, his eyes crackling, the microphone ringing under the impetuous barrage of his voice, he barked, “If one of these two national parties don’t wake up and get straight, well, I can promise that you and me, we gonna stir something up all over this country. . . .” Afterward he greeted people along the sidewalks with an instant, easy intimacy: “Honey, I ’preciate yawl comin’ on out here today in this cold, heunh? Tell yo folks hello for me, heunh?” When a small girl suddenly kissed him square on the mouth, he looked around him for a moment—at all the pleasant faces, at the moil of reporters, at the candy-green capitol lawn, the thin exquisite sunshine, the vast benign blue sky—and grinned almost blissfully.

  Driving on to Dartmouth later for an evening speech, through Devil-and-Daniel Webster country—weathervanes atop white wooden farmhouses, stone fences and apple orchards, birches and dark cedars sheltering small secret ponds the color of graphite—he removed his wetly chewed cigar to remark, “This sho does look like North Alabama, don’t it?” He found the thought cheering. “Yes, sir,” he murmured happily, “you go up there around Gurley, New Hope, Grays Chapel—country up there looks just like this,” and he leaned back in his seat and returned his cigar to his mouth, satisfied.

  Two hours later, after nightfall, over the still, shadowed campus at Dartmouth, there pulsed a dull, steady roar from the auditorium where he was speaking. Scattered groups of students were hurrying toward the sound under the dark trees, but people were already milling under the windows and around the front steps. Inside, students were standing along the walls and sitting on windowsills and in the aisles, and the noise they were making was like a single continuous howl existing independent and disembodied above their open mouths. On the stage, while a student tried to read questions submitted by the audience, he paced restlessly, exhilarated by the violence heavy in the air. Occasionally he spat into his handkerchief and then plunged it back into his hip pocket. When he pounced to the microphone to answer a question, it was as if he were deliberately lobbing incendiary pronouncements into the crowd. He would crouch, looking up, his left arm gripping the lectern and his right swinging and whipping with pointed finger, as if he were furiously cranking himself up: “I’m not against dissent now, but I believe anybody that stands up like this professor in New Jersey and says they long for a victory by the Vietcong over the American imperialist troops, and anybody that goes out raising bluhd and money for the Vietcong against American servicemen, they oughtta be drug by the hair of their heads before a grand jury and indicted for treason, ’cause that’s what they guilty of, and I promise you if I—” And then he would step back and spit into his handkerchief again, shooting it back into his hip pocket as the roar rose around him.

  At one point there was a charge by students down the center aisle, led by a young professor with fine-spun hair and a freshly scrubbed cherubic complexion—but his mild face was now flushed, his tie askew, his eyes manic and glaring as he tried to flail his way through campus police and plainclothesmen, bellowing with a crack in his voice, “Get out of here! Get out of here! You are an outrage!” That berserk charge—anarchic and hopeless, an abandonment of fairness, proprieties, all civilized approaches, a retreat to simple brute action—testified not only to despair and fury over the fact that this man could be speaking there at all, but to a sinking of the heart over the absurdly serious import of that figure’s audacious aspirations, a dread that something sinister and implacable was afoot in the land. As he was hustled offstage during the short melee, he glanced quickly back over his shoulder at the furor with a curious, bemused, almost awed expression.

  Outside, after his speech, his car was engulfed. White and Negro students kicked the fenders and hammered on the hood, and one policeman was hauled back into the maw of the crowd and disappeared into it, his crumpled cap reappearing a moment later in the hand of a student, who waved it high in the air in triumph. And it seemed as if he, too, this stubby little man, might be on the point of vanishing, consumed whole by the kind of popular violence he so savors. As the crowd seethed around his car, there were glimpses of him sitting in the back seat, his face not worried, but just empty whenever the reeling TV lights washed over it, huddling behind the rolled-up windows with his cigar, all of him as small and still and inert as a rabbit in a burrow while hounds swirl and bay in the grass around it. The car began to ease forward, slowly nosing through the mob—he still not moving, looking to neither the right nor the left—and then, rapidly, it was gone.

  At the least, he is a simple primitive natural phenomenon, like weeds or heat-lightning. He is a mixture of innocence and malevolence, humor and horror. “He’s simply more alive than all the others,” declared a woman reporter after the Dartmouth fray. “These professors like Galbraith, Schlesinger, the politicians and bureaucrats in Washington—God knows, I’ve been around all of them, and they don’t really know what’s going on. You saw those people in that auditorium while he was speaking—you saw their eyes. He made those people feel something real for once in their lives. You can’t help but respond to him. Me—my heart was pounding, I couldn’t take my eyes off him,
there were all those people screaming. You almost love him, though you know what a little gremlin he actually is.”

  Many still find it hard to regard George Corley Wallace as anything other than merely the most resourceful, durable, and unabashed of the Southern segregationist governors. But the fact is, he passed that point long ago, and has intruded himself now into the history of the nation. He has become, at the least, a dark poltergeist whose capacity for mischief in the land is formidable. The havoc he seems sure to cause in the procedure of electing the next President of the United States has already raised substantial doubts about the system: he has materialized as the grim joker in the deck. More soberingly, the significance of his candidacy invokes certain questions about the basic health of the American society, both at this time and in the future.

  To many he portends the eventual arrival of a final racist psychology into American politics. It seems certain that his candidacy can only increase the racial alienation in the country. A moderate Alabama politician declares, “What he’s trying to do in the nation is what he’s managed to do in Alabama. When you draw the line the way he does, the whites go with the white, and the blacks with the black, and when that happens, you’re in for warfare.” A former Alabama senator echoes, “It’s conceivable that he could win a state like Illinois or even California when he puts the hay down where the goats can get at it. He can use all the other issues—law and order, running your own schools, protecting property rights—and never mention race. But people will know he’s telling them, ‘A nigger’s trying to get your job, trying to move into your neighborhood.’ What Wallace is doing is talking to them in a kind of shorthand, a kind of code.”