At the Slave Market on Saturday, Stoner raised very little enthusiasm for a second march into Lincolnville, while Andrew Young found only fifteen jail volunteers, including eight local juveniles and three visiting whites from the North. In bigger news, Florida Senator George Smathers made public his offer to raise the necessary bail money if Martin Luther King would promise to leave Florida. “I respect you as a man working in behalf of your race,” Smathers wired King at the Duval County jail, “but willful violation of laws, no matter how unjust they may seem to each of us at the time…does serious harm to our form of government and the image of the United States of America.” King declined the offer, but he did post his own bond late Saturday. From Washington, Lee White told King’s staff that the White House had no record of Johnson’s trip to St. Augustine the previous year, nor of promises by the former vice president to secure a “dialogue” between the races.
Just before the Sunday commencement service at Springfield College in Massachusetts, where King delivered his Rip Van Winkle sermon about how too many Americans were sleeping through a great social revolution, two churches in St. Augustine summoned police to arrest a Yale student from Little Rock along with six other aspiring worshippers in mixed groups. On Monday, Yale President Kingman Brewster introduced King, saying, “The gratitude of people everywhere and of generations of Americans yet unborn will echo our admiration,” and ten thousand people determined the headlines for Yale’s 263rd commencement with two prolonged, standing ovations when King received his honorary Doctor of Laws.
IN NEW YORK, Clarence Jones decided not to tell King about the evening of his secret introduction to Malcolm X. Harry Belafonte declined to attend, saying he thought some of the invited celebrities were too hotheaded to trust with such an explosive, newsworthy encounter, but Jones, holding himself out with slight exaggeration as King’s authorized spokesman, ventured with novelist John Killens to actor Sidney Poitier’s home. Malcolm captivated Jones with his vision of a worldwide human rights campaign to make U.S. racial practices a test case at the United Nations, like South African apartheid and persecution of Soviet Jews, but Jones was obliged to conceal his excitement from colleagues in the Southern movement. He knew that King—stretched to the breaking point by the demands of nonviolence—would be pained to learn that his New York lawyer was drawn to a nascent alternative behind a Black Muslim.
Like King, Malcolm X was tumbling through his own extremes between punishment and acclaim, glamour and despair. He arrived at Poitier’s from a weekend recruiting trip among disaffected Muslims from Muhammad’s Temple No. 11 in Boston, where he had made his pitch for six hours on Friday over the airwaves of two radio talk shows. Afternoon host Paul Benzaquin announced that his guest arrived at station WEEI under police escort, following an anonymous warning to police dispatchers that Malcolm would be “bumped off” if he appeared. Malcolm told listeners of the “real reasons” for his split with the Nation of Islam, reciting his accusations about Elijah Muhammad’s bastard children. Among the on-air callers was a confused Muslim who asked whether Malcolm still considered Elijah Muhammad the Messenger of Allah. Malcolm said no, citing Wallace Muhammad and officials in Mecca, adding that the Nation was guilty of idolatry under Islam for deifying Elijah Muhammad. Late that night, Malcolm amplified his charges. He had discovered, he told host Jerry Williams over station WMEX, that Minister Louis X of Boston had learned of Muhammad’s infidelities long before he did.
On Saturday, June 13, Malcolm interrupted his Boston trip to attend the Poitier rendezvous in suburban New York. He called the tentative coalition of black luminaries his “brain trust,” through which he would develop a new national agenda somewhere beyond civil rights. To them he displayed only a residual buzz of danger from the Nation’s intrigues, but alone again, shortly after midnight, Malcolm tuned in Boston’s WMEX to hear guest Louis X denying all his accusations from the previous night. Malcolm dialed into busy signals until he got through to the Jerry Williams show, then challenged Minister Louis to meet him at the station and hear the facts repeated “to your face.” Louis X replied that he would need the permission of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
Malcolm still saw Louis X as his devoted protégé who had closely studied his mannerisms at the lectern, down to the smallest hand gestures. (“Tell Minister Louis to stop imitating me!” he had ordered some months earlier.”) While appreciating the pressures that bound Louis X tightly to the Nation against him, Malcolm retained some confidence that he could win him back. He did not know that Elijah Muhammad had summoned Louis across the country that week to hear only “a few words, but it should be done in person.” Returning swiftly from Phoenix to Boston, Louis reported to Muhammad that Malcolm was still in town “going right after the whole thing.” The FBI wiretap in Phoenix recorded Louis’s cryptic question—asking whether it was “wise to go after it with the body”—and Muhammad’s reply that he was not in a position to answer because he did not fully understand all the circumstances. With an air of disinterest, Muhammad told Louis X that while he cared nothing about a dog barking, the dog was “very silly to bark in everyone’s house.”
On Sunday afternoon in the Roxbury section of Boston, jammed into a room of her home that Malcolm’s half-sister Ella Collins had converted into a kindergarten, more than a hundred people turned crestfallen when Benjamin 2X arrived as the substitute speaker. They had come to hear Malcolm, drawn by his electric revelations and his promotional announcements on radio. Benjamin could offer only a few definitive statements about Malcolm’s evolving public stance—that he no longer advocated a return to Africa, and now favored a leadership congress of black organizations rather than the Nation of Islam’s “monarchy” structure. Every other idea and detail was in flux.
Although many disaffected Muslims in the room still admired Malcolm X as the minister who had converted them, bitter experience left them wary of blind commitment a second time. Most were rebels against the Nation’s bareknuckled debt collections. Not long after Temple No. 11 members battered one delinquent member in Franklin Park, and placed a warning noose around another’s neck at the edge of the Charles River, a number of members had signed a letter vowing to retaliate against Louis X if there was further violence. Captain Clarence X promptly announced that the temple would answer the slightest harm to the minister by killing the signers of the letter along with their children and “some of their parents.” Some frightened Muslims traced corruption to Chicago and the hoodlum past of Captain Clarence X; others blamed Minister Louis himself for sermons that ignited holy wrath by contrasting the infinite gifts of the Dear Holy Apostle Elijah Muhammad with the skulking ingratitude of the slackers listed by name on a temple blackboard.
Since Malcolm’s suspension, the Nation had relied more than ever on fear. Temple investigators, still authorized to enter Muslim homes at any hour to confiscate cigarette butts and forbidden pork, now prowled also for heretical complaints and suspicious friends. They lumped dissenters together with deadbeats as “hypocrites,” the Nation’s term for traitors to Elijah. Against all this, a dozen leading defectors—including Aubrey Barnette, a graduate of Boston University and cousin of the slain Los Angeles secretary, Ronald Stokes—looked to Malcolm X for a “positive program” to redeem the sacrifice of their youth to Islam. In the kindergarten room, they waited stoically for many more specific answers about discipline and purpose than Benjamin 2X could provide.
THE CHASE BEGAN as Benjamin 2X rode back to the Boston airport in a Cadillac late Sunday afternoon, reminiscing with Goulbourne X Busby about Army service in Korea and Japan. A white Lincoln pulled alongside, tried to run them off Massachusetts Avenue in tandem with a 1955 Chevrolet, then commenced high-speed pursuit on and off expressways and even sidewalks. The Chevrolet managed to get ahead of the Cadillac and skidded to a stop across both lanes inside the Callahan Tunnel. The Lincoln did likewise from behind, and as traffic piled up in each direction, Temple No. 11 Muslims, led by one of its lieutenants, jumped out of the c
hase cars with pistols, shouting, “You ain’t leaving here!” Some inside the trapped Cadillac shouted hysterically that Malcolm X was not among them. Goulbourne X grabbed a shotgun from beneath the seat to hold attackers at bay. A passenger screamed as Malcolm’s nephew Rodnell Collins lurched the Cadillac backward and forward into the blockading cars until he rammed the Chevrolet far enough aside to squeeze by. The mangled cars resumed the chase all the way to Logan Airport, where Benjamin’s frantic party—despite honking the horn and abandoning the Cadillac in the taxi lane—failed to attract any police notice until they ran through the Mohawk Airlines concourse out onto the airstrip and back inside to another ticket counter, waving the shotgun. “It was here the Massachusetts State Police arrested them,” an investigative report dryly noted, “for which they all thanked Allah.”
On Monday, when Martin Luther King was at Yale, Benjamin 2X returned with his tale and his bail bond papers to find Malcolm X under siege by New York Muslims, having delivered his bastardy speech again the previous night to four hundred listeners at Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom. Wiretappers overheard Malcolm challenge one threatening caller to bring his rifle around to the house “and talk some stuff.” New York police received so many corroborating reports that thirty-two officers escorted Malcolm and his eight Muslim bodyguards into Queens that morning for Malcolm’s hearing on the eviction petition brought by Temple No. 7. Testifying for the plaintiffs, Captain Joseph defined the Fruit of Islam as an organization “just like the Boy Scouts.” He smiled from the witness stand as he broke courtroom tension with one of Malcolm’s own laugh lines, deflecting suggestions by Malcolm’s lawyer that the Nation was built on intimidation.
That night from Boston, Minister Louis X reported to Elijah Muhammad that he would not sink so low as to debate Malcolm in person, having “cut him to pieces” on the radio. He said he had rebuffed Malcolm’s private pleas for help by answering that if Malcolm’s life was on the line, he had put it there himself. Louis X assured Muhammad that newspapers would not print Malcolm’s “inside story of the Nation” without proof in court, and Malcolm tacitly accepted the point when he testified the next morning in Queens. He approached what he called a “very private” complaint several times but backed away in favor of his technical defenses—that Muhammad had promised him the house, that in any case he was being removed improperly from the ministry. Finally, after Judge Maurice Wahl showed little interest in the Nation’s internal arrangements, Malcolm blurted, “I found out that he had nine children by six different girls.”
To Malcolm’s disappointment, the imprimatur of courtroom testimony gained little public notice for his allegations. White newspapers ignored what for them were hearsay sex charges from a squalid and inscrutable race schism, and instead found plenty of news in predictions of boomerang violence. “There is no people in the United States more able to carry out this threat than the Black Muslims,” reported the New York Herald Tribune, quoting Malcolm: “I know. I taught them myself.” Leading Negro papers headlined the gangland hostility—“Muslim Factions at War”—while reporting merely that Malcolm attacked Elijah Muhammad’s character. A few, such as the Philadelphia Tribune, did break the sex barrier—“Says Muhammad Brought Stork to Six Teens/Claims Two Local Lasses from Gtn. [Germantown] Are Among Them”—but the voltage from Malcolm’s revelations surged mostly within the Muslim world. Before nightfall in Chicago, Wallace Muhammad ventured out of hiding to see his mother, Clara, who confessed that she had learned of what she called her husband’s “troubles.” Lonely and distraught, she begged her favorite son to stop associating with Malcolm’s terrible poison and confide in “the big man,” Elijah. Wallace tried to comfort her while insisting that he was not afraid to have his money cut off again, and would not shrink from the next threat. In New York, meanwhile, police made six arrests to stop a street rumble between Muslims carrying rifles, and Malcolm X found the telephone dead at the house he had lost that day in court. (Judge Wahl allowed him a grace period of several months to vacate.) An impostor had ordered the phone company to disconnect the line, saying Malcolm would be going away for a long time.
KING WAS BACK in St. Augustine. Former baseball star Jackie Robinson had received a tumultuous response the night before in King’s absence, and had been moved to invite several of the youngest movement heroes to be guests at his summer camp in Connecticut. Of fifty-one demonstrators who went to jail from restaurant sit-ins that Tuesday, June 16, the majority were visitors from the Williamston, North Carolina, movement, led by Sarah Small and Golden Frinks. King’s staff, running short on bail money and volunteers, labored to sustain morale on celebrity appearances and low-budget sacrifice in the hope of reaching at least a minimal settlement with city officials. A camera crew from Miami caught glimpses of busy preparations in and around the Elk’s Rest Lodge: working the telephones, C. T. Vivian excitedly confirmed the pending arrival of the rabbis from Atlantic City, and checked on the besieged church in Tuscaloosa. “How is Bevel?” he asked. “How long has he been out of jail?” Nearby, drilling sit-in volunteers in groups of four and five, Andrew Young worried about whether the rabbis would need to return north to their synagogues for Friday night services. Willie Bolden gave a workshop lecture on the need for “jail discipline,” saying catfights and quarrels hurt the movement. Robert Hayling—just back from a mission to Washington with Henry Twine, where they petitioned Burke Marshall and others for federal assistance—asked a Yale journalism major whether he had remembered to recruit local help for the daily movement newsletter.
“No, but I’m working on that,” the student replied.
“Have you even tried to have some of the young people write an article or two?” Hayling pressed.
“Yeah, I have,” said the Yale student, busy over his papers, “but actually they just aren’t experienced enough to handle this sort of thing, and that’s why I’m doing it myself now.”
King himself kept apart for small meetings. Having abandoned the rented beach cottage, he was staying at the Lincolnville home of a registered nurse named Janie Jones, teasing her about why she and the other “high Negro Catholics” from the segregated parish of St. Benedict the Moor could not bring themselves to go to jail. With Bernard Lee sleeping on the couch, King shared the guest room with Ralph Abernathy, who occupied himself during daytime lulls by eating figs off a tree in the yard. In the afternoon, calling as one of the journalists who carried feelers back and forth across the racial divide, ABC correspondent Paul Good sat on the screened porch to discuss King’s minimum truce condition of a biracial committee, which prominent white businessmen tentatively favored and Mayor Joseph Shelley adamantly opposed. When Good suggested that whites would be more inclined to accept biracial dialogue if Negroes agreed in advance to exclude movement activists—especially Hayling—King’s disgust cut through his forbearance. “This is the old story we find every place,” he said. “They never want to deal with the local man who began the movement, because invariably he is a true leader and a dynamic force in the community. What it really means is that they don’t want to deal with anybody they can’t control. We went through this in Birmingham with Fred Shuttlesworth.”
That evening, Chaplain Will England told a cheering crowd at First Baptist that he had lost twenty pounds fasting in jail since his arrest the previous Thursday with King. From the pulpit, King walked a fine line between disengagement and commitment in St. Augustine. He prepared the audience for a settlement within a few days, saying his attention was required elsewhere, but he embraced their purpose. “Thank you very kindly my dear friends and fellow jail mates,” he said. “For I do see some of my fellow jail mates here tonight.” He told them their goal of a democratic St. Augustine was both theirs and universal, then preached on the tension between nobility and lonely submission. “Jesus has made it clear that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant,” he declared. (Yes sir!) “And we have been servants to a great theory and a great idea. We have allowed the idea of nonviolence to work
through us (Yes!), and to move out into the community and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. This is greatness. Greatness is found in the power of one soul. So with your soul force, you have done something for the community, and you have done something for the nation…that can serve as I have said as a purifying prelude for this hot, sweltering summer that we face ahead.”After the meeting, three hundred Negroes and seven whites marched behind Fred Shuttlesworth to the Slave Market and back.
In Washington, President Johnson buzzed an assistant to ask, “How is St. Augustine?” Lee White answered that “Governor Bryant said he was going to maintain law and order,” that a settlement was possible, and that “at the moment, it seems to be in perfect control.”
“Is King satisfied with our reply, and our talking to the governor?” asked Johnson. “His man [Wyatt Walker] I noticed is over…raising hell with Burke Marshall.”
White explained that Walker was lobbying about unfulfilled promises of biracial negotiations allegedly made during Johnson’s visit in 1963, which neither Marshall nor White knew about. Johnson then briefed White from memory, saying everything had been settled. The St. Augustine leaders “didn’t agree to integrate the town, or to change a thing, or to sweeping reform,” he told White. “They just agreed that they’d let Negroes come for the first time to the hotel to eat at the dinner I spoke to, and that they would talk to ’em about what their demands were.”
“And both those things took place?” said White.
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