Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  The white city fathers threw up an opposing wall of indignation. Mayor Sam Yorty, who had won his office the previous year partly on the strength of Negro votes, after campaigning against Chief Parker’s segregated, “Gestapo organization,” endorsed his former antagonist “one hundred per cent” over the shootings at the Muslim mosque. He publicly accused the NAACP leaders of consorting with Muslims of known criminal records, such as Malcolm X, and of following a “Communist-inspired” program of “wild and exaggerated charges of police brutality.” Together with Chief Parker, Yorty flew to Washington for a publicized conference with Attorney General Robert Kennedy. They described the LAPD’s ongoing intelligence operation against the Muslims, and obtained Kennedy’s promise of a federal investigation. These consolidating moves sealed off most citizens behind warlike news stories such as appeared in the Los Angeles Times: “Muslim Hatred Called Threat to Community—Fanatical Cult Said to Direct Venom at All Whites and Negroes Trying to Oppose It.”

  At least one political career rose on the recoil of sentiment among minorities. Mervyn Dymally, a schoolteacher from Trinidad and fringe candidate for the California Assembly, complained to the local Muslims that he had been excluded from the mass meeting at Second Baptist, obliged to stand outside in the rain with the overflow crowd while his heavily favored opponent served as emcee. By the next Sunday’s mass meeting, Malcolm X had gained not only a position on the podium but considerable influence over the program. He brought on an American Indian speaker and a Mexican-American, urging the more respectable ethnic leaders to “work together with us, and if we Muslims get the white men off our backs, they’ll never get on yours.” Then he introduced Dymally, whose first words to the crowd—the traditional Muslim greeting in Arabic, “As-Salaamu—Alaikum” (“Peace be upon you”)—produced a sharp breath of surprise and then thunderous applause on the swelling inclusion of outcasts.

  Dymally explained that although he was a Christian through his mother, he had learned the greeting from his Muslim father in the Indies, and that what spanned these religious differences among them was a reasonable but degrading fear of the Los Angeles police, which the new candidate said he had experienced himself many times on being stopped for interrogation in spite of his middle-class dress and his college degrees. An explosion of wounded sentiment, which allowed the starchiest Negroes to express at least some identification with previously alien Muslims, stretched the narrow bounds of acceptable civic leaders to include newcomers such as Dymally, who, long after reaching the U.S. Congress, traced his miracle victory as the first foreign-born minority member of the California legislature to the emotional chemistry of the second mass meeting.

  THE STOKES CASE marked a turning point in the hidden odyssey that surfaced Malcolm X as an enduring phenomenon of race. He saw the shootings as a fundamental crisis in several respects—first as a test of Muhammad’s teachings on manhood and truth. Ever since the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56, Malcolm had criticized Martin Luther King as a “traitor to the Negro people,” disparaging his nonviolence as “this little passive resistance or wait-until-you-change-your mind-and-then-let-me-up philosophy,” and he did not hesitate to ridicule a national movement built on sit-ins and Freedom Rides. “Anybody can sit,” said Malcolm. “An old woman can sit. A coward can sit…. It takes a man to stand.” Always there was an element of swagger in Malcolm’s appeal, and at times a bristling, military posture: “…You might see these Negroes who believe in nonviolence and mistake us for one of them and put your hands on us thinking that we’re going to turn the other cheek—and we’ll put you to death just like that.”

  Before his first emergency flight to Los Angeles, Malcolm confided to associates that the moment demanded an honest Muslim response and that they should expect to hear of blood flowing. His exacting investigations were conducted as prime research toward the Nation’s independent justice in which, at a minimum, sanctioned Muslims would strike one of the most guilty of the LAPD officers. Malcolm carried forward his plans by stealth until strict orders intervened through National Secretary John Ali: no retribution. “Play dead on everything…,” instructed Elijah Muhammad. “Just tell Malcolm to cool his heels.”

  Malcolm obeyed, but he chafed. When an all-white coroner’s jury on May 14 required less than thirty minutes to deliver a ruling of justifiable homicide in the Stokes case, even though Officer Weese bluntly testified that he had shot an unarmed man whose arms were raised because he felt menaced, reporters asked the new public figure in Los Angeles whether he really despaired of getting justice in the courts, and if so, what would he do? “I can only say that I am thankful there is a God in Heaven to give real justice to our people when necessary,” Malcolm replied. Pressed to reconcile this otherworldliness with his icy realism, he would only say, “God gives justice in his own way.”

  Back in New York, the editor of Harlem’s Amsterdam News observed that Malcolm had lost face by looking passively to the Almighty. The internal strain caused a brief public stir in early June of 1962, when an Air France jetliner crashed near Paris, killing more than one hundred leading white citizens of Atlanta, Georgia. “I got a wire from God today…,” Malcolm announced at a Los Angeles rally protesting the first criminal indictments handed down against Muslims in the Stokes case. “Many people have been asking, ‘Well, what are you going to do?’ And since we know that the man is tracking us down day by day to try and find out what we are going to do, so he’ll have some excuse to put us behind his bars, we call on our God. He gets rid of 120 of them in one whop…and we hope that every day another plane falls out of the sky.” To cheers and applause, he offered tortured consolation. “God knows you are cowards,” he said. “God knows you are afraid. God knows that the white man has got you shaking in your boots. So God doesn’t leave it up to you to defend yourself.”

  Mayor Yorty played a police agent’s recording of Malcolm’s remarks at a press conference. “This shows the distorted type of mind this fiend has,” he announced, and the resulting stories—“Warn on ‘Mouthing’ of Muslim”—became the first news item about Malcolm X to draw national press attention. In Atlanta, where Martin Luther King and Harry Belafonte had just canceled sit-ins against downtown segregation as a conciliatory gesture to the grieving city, reporters asked King what it meant that Malcolm could express joy over the random deaths of white strangers. “If the Muslim leader said that,” King carefully replied, “I would certainly disagree with him.”

  “The Messenger should have done more,” Malcolm told a few trusted associates in his own Temple No. 7. “People in the civil rights movement have been brutalized, and we haven’t done anything to help them. Now we have our own brothers killed and maimed, and we still haven’t done anything.” Even this tiny, private glimpse of frustration was startling to Muslims trained by Malcolm himself for unswerving homage to Muhammad’s edicts. The Nation’s quasi-military apparatus under captains and lieutenants, which guarded doctrines against heresy or even “slack talk,” also collected revenue by an exacting system of investigations, trials, and sanctions ranging from reprimands to “slap-gantlets,” communal shunning, and excommunication. Muhammad required all males to meet a streethawking sales quota of his newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, and to guarantee performance by prepaying allotments of each issue in cash. “Credit will ruin them,” he told his officials. “They are just out of the jungles.” Sales of the new paper rose nationwide on spectacular coverage of the Stokes case. By the summer of 1962, Muhammad remarked in wonder that $15,000 was now “merely pocket change,” and he agreed to pay the astronomical blanket fee of $120,000 to defend his members in Los Angeles.

  Late that year, on being introduced for trial preparation at Elijah Muhammad’s second home in Phoenix (bought from the estate of bluesman Louis Jordan), Earl Broady and his co-counsel, Loren Miller, confronted a wizened, wheezy old man of sixty-four years—to them a field hand in a fez, plainly ignorant and inarticulate * as he mumbled thanks for helping “my mens.” Utterly astonished t
hat Muhammad held any authority over someone of Malcolm X’s polished commitment, the lawyers avoided each other’s eyes to keep from laughing impolitely at the attendants who constantly uttered obeisance to the “Holy Apostle.” To others, however, the humble manner of Elijah Muhammad only confirmed his miracle power to transform thousands of primitive, decayed “lost souls” into Muslims of permanent zeal. Even the gruff, fearsome Captain Joseph, enforcer of discipline at Malcolm’s Temple No. 7 in New York, barely managed to keep his teeth from chattering in the Messenger’s presence. Joseph automatically found truth in every twist of Muhammad’s reaction to the Los Angeles shooting: surely it was suicidal to risk a war of retaliation when the Nation was so weak.

  In December of 1962, at preliminary hearings for the Stokes case defendants—Arthur X Coleman, Fred X Jingles, Minister John X Morris, Roosevelt X Walker, Charles X Zeno, and eight other Muslims—Malcolm X sat erectly in the back of the courtroom and then regularly castigated white reporters at sidewalk press conferences for “writing only the prosecution’s side of the story.” By then, wiretap clerks in Chicago and Phoenix reported hints of Muslim friction to the FBI, which had been maintaining microphone bugs and telephone wiretaps on Elijah Muhammad since 1957. They heard Muhammad fret with lieutenants about “who’s to control Malcolm.” While still flattering Malcolm in their direct talks as “a modern Paul” with a genius for gaining public notice, Muhammad occasionally signed off abruptly with an edge of warning: “I hope Allah will keep you wise.”

  Malcolm’s one kindred ally within the Muslim hierarchy—destined to succeed where he failed, as quietly as Malcolm’s notoriety would be loud—missed the early Stokes ordeal because he had been locked away in the federal prison at Sandstone, Minnesota, since his twenty-eighth birthday in 1961. This was Wallace D. Muhammad, who, since being named by and for the founder of the Nation of Islam, W. D. Fard, had been marked as the seventh and most religious of Elijah Muhammad’s eight children. Wallace had been born just before Fard, the mysterious silk peddler, disappeared, having fashioned a revolutionary cosmology for thousands of Negro sharecroppers who migrated north for the paved gold of jobs only to crash into the Depression. Elijah Poole of Georgia, humiliated into alcoholism by relief lines, was one of Fard’s most enthusiastic aides in a sectarian movement that swept up eight thousand members and registered as a tribal curiosity among a few whites, including one scholar who published in The American Journal of Sociology a 1938 article entitled “The Voodoo Cult Among Negro Migrants in Detroit.” Though plainly bemused by some of the sectarian peculiarities, sociologist Erdmann Beynon was impressed that “there is no known case of unemployment among these people.” He reported that new members applied to Fard for new Arabic names as a first step toward the recovery of lost culture. “They bathed at least once a day and kept their houses scrupulously clean,” wrote Beynon, “so that they might put away all marks of the slavery from which the restoration of the original name had set them free.”

  In the 1950s, when federal prosecutors denied Wallace Muhammad the military draft deferment due legitimate clergy, Chicago lawyers William Ming and Chauncey Eskridge * arranged for him to serve medical duty as a conscientious objector, but Elijah Poole (now Muhammad) unexpectedly rejected the plea bargain with white law. Much against his will, thinking that his father meant to keep him cloistered and useless, Wallace dutifully entered Sandstone, where he taught Islam to inmates in the prison laundry room or on nice days in the baseball bleachers. For the first time he felt responsible for his own thoughts, and although he attracted a large following of Muslim converts, which excited the fears of most prison authorities, the Sandstone warden became so convinced of salutary effects on inmate rehabilitation that he invited Wallace to write an article on the Islamic concept of sacrifice for the 1962 Christmas issue of the prison journal. Muhammad sent the published magazine home to his mother, Clara, who, in spite of her role as the maternal rock of the Nation of Islam, hummed hymns from her Holiness Church upbringing in Georgia. She was proud that he had gained the balance to draw upon the merit in other religions, and Wallace reluctantly thanked his father for the paradoxical, unseen wisdom to build in him the independent strength to contest Muhammad’s concocted version of Islam.

  This fight was precisely Wallace Muhammad’s purpose at the Sandstone release gate on January 10, 1963, but his brother Elijah Jr. upstaged him on the long drive home to Chicago with a shocking report on impending crises within the Nation—threats, thefts, scandals, plots, betrayals, and rampant fears that Malcolm X might usurp the entire structure if the sickly old man died soon, as appeared likely. The continuing aftermath of the Ronald Stokes violence in Los Angeles kept pushing the stakes higher in revenue, publicity, and prestige, and the family members were disappointed to hear that prison made Wallace less rather than more tolerant of material ambition. “The corrupt hypocrites high in the organization would throw people out for smoking a cigarette while they themselves were drinking champagne every night and going to orgies,” he later recorded. When it proved difficult to obtain parole permission to visit Phoenix, he wrote his father two long letters of criticism buttressed with citations from the Q’uran.

  Turmoil threw Wallace Muhammad together with Malcolm X late in February, when some four thousand Muslims gathered by bus and motorcade for the annual Savior’s Day convention in Chicago. As always, speakers chanted the words “the Honorable Elijah Muhammad” as a practiced mantra, but apprehension ran through the submissive crowd because Muhammad himself was absent for the first time, wheezing from asthma at his retreat in Phoenix. Although not a few Muslims believed Muhammad to be immortal, anxiety for him was so intense that cries went up for reassurance from the chosen son, who was observed and hailed upon his return from prison. Wallace refused to speak. Having received no response to his letters of criticism, he was half convinced that his father was avoiding or testing him. Besides, he considered Savior’s Day the embodiment of his father’s most egregious blasphemy from the 1930s: proclaiming founder W. D. Fard as the Savior Allah incarnate, much as Jesus was called the incarnation of the Christian god. More than once, Wallace had asked how his father could demand worship of a human being—Fard—in light of the Q’uran’s clear definition of “one God, the everlasting refuge, who begets not nor is he begotten,” and Elijah Muhammad said he would not understand.

  Malcolm X, who presided in Muhammad’s absence, made excuses for Wallace by prearrangement. Very privately, the two men met during the convention as the two most likely successors—friends but possibly rivals—each of whom threatened the top officials at headquarters. When Wallace disclosed his determination to resist his father’s bizarre, unorthodox religious teachings, Malcolm defended Elijah’s adaptations such as the assertion that white people were devils by creation, saying they fit the experience of black people closely enough to gain their attention, and Elijah could correct come-on doctrines once the “lost-found” people were ready. In a related complaint, Wallace confessed that several of his own relatives prospered off the Nation without knowing the first thing about Islam. His stories about power struggles over jewelry and real estate touched a nerve, and the two men fell into collusion.

  Malcolm X convened a meeting of Elijah Muhammad’s family during the February convention in Chicago, at which he carefully announced his intention to mediate solutions for festering problems before they injured the Nation. They were delicate, he said, and included everything from petty personal disputes to gross personal misconduct and disrespect for doctrine. Privately, he told one family member that he just wanted to help—that he had known of shortcomings in Chicago for some time but had been afraid Allah would punish him if he investigated. Family members boycotted a second meeting, however, and the phone wires burned with indignant calls to Phoenix. Wallace’s sister Ethel Sharrieff told her father that Malcolm was insinuating there was something wrong with them and “smart” Malcolm must act as parent. Others warned Elijah that Malcolm was maneuvering to divide them, promote
himself, and take over the Nation. It was subversive on its face that he called such a meeting without clearance from Elijah. They said Malcolm was using Elijah’s Cadillac and making speeches all over the Midwest to promote himself. From Phoenix in mid-March, Elijah told officials to seize the keys to his Cadillac, cancel Malcolm’s lectures, and order him back to New York.

  Only then did Malcolm broach to Wallace a fourth issue of corruption beyond money, religious distortion, and dishonest exploitation of the Stokes shootings. At Elijah Muhammad’s home before Savior’s Day, he said, two former secretaries appeared on the lawn with their babies and shouted that they were going to stand there in the cold until Mr. Muhammad comforted his abandoned children. The household had reacted strangely, said Malcolm, who told Wallace he had rebuffed such rumors until the two frightened and shunned women petitioned in person for help. Wallace replied uncomfortably that he would seek out the secretaries, whom he knew personally, and he soon confirmed to Malcolm that he believed their confessions. Elijah had told them that his wife, Clara, was dead to him, like Khadijah, the wife of the original Prophet Muhammad, and likewise Elijah felt divinely sanctioned to seek out virgins to produce good seed.

  Wallace Muhammad felt the revelations as a cruel injustice to his spurned mother, and raged against Elijah as an imposing but distant icon. Wallace scarcely knew his father, who had vanished into hiding for seven years after rival heirs to Fard offered a $500 bounty for his death in the 1930s. Although disciples arrived with daily tributes and breathless word of the aspiring Messenger, Wallace saw Elijah only a few times throughout his childhood—most notably in 1942 when he watched his mother and brothers roll the newly arrived fugitive under the bed in a rug, in a vain attempt to evade arresting police officers. Now, as a young man just out of prison, desperate to hang on to something from the bizarre omens of his past, Wallace interpreted the enormity of his father’s sins as the price of strength that was implanting a new religion on the continent, allowing people of African descent first to define themselves by their own deity. He steeled himself to face facts, and to recognize that religious births in history tend to spread unseemly trauma over many decades. This became his anthem to Malcolm.