Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  Under general orders approved February 13, long-range bombers and carrier supports were converging upon the South China Sea. On Friday the nineteenth, one day before the regimen of sustained reprisals was scheduled to begin, South Vietnamese army units arrested General Nguyen Khanh in another coup. The unwelcome news and giant headlines (“Khanh Is Deposed”) intruded upon a White House ceremony at which Johnson announced that Head Start, a preschool experiment, would begin hurriedly that summer as the first initiative of his War on Poverty. He swiftly approved Ambassador Taylor’s cabled recommendation that airstrikes be postponed “in view of the disturbed situation in Saigon.” Saigon plots and counterplots carried into the next week what Taylor secretly called a “condition of virtual non-government,” rendering impossible any concurring go-ahead from South Vietnamese allies. On Thursday, February 25, Ambassador Taylor put Khanh on an airplane into exile, securing replacement leaders who would last until June. Final bomb clearance began promptly the next day under the code name ROLLING THUNDER, taken from the theme hymn of the Billy Graham revival crusades. By the time the air war ended after eight years, divided almost evenly between Presidents Johnson and Nixon, “the United States had dropped on North Vietnam, an area the size of Texas, triple the bomb tonnage dropped on Europe, Asia and Africa during World War II,” according to Vietnam historian Stanley Karnow.

  Also, on Friday, February 26, the President ordered the first two American combat battalions to South Vietnam. The military request for ground protection around the Danang air base had been pending four days. On the Monday it arrived, at the height of reported pandemonium in Saigon, Johnson dictated aboard the White House helicopter a candid draft response to questions about his spiritual life: “Now I pray several times a day, but I don’t seem to get any answer.”

  “THE AIR was heavy,” Captain Joseph said later. One of his soldiers said the Harlem temple felt the fury of the Chicago hierarchy over its prolonged failure to get rid of the hypocrite. One of his lieutenants said many distant captains and security officials rolled into New York over the last weekend before the Nation’s annual Chicago convention. National Secretary John Ali checked into the Americana Hotel on Friday the nineteenth. Ranking ministers added presence. Minister Louis X of Boston presided at the Newark Mosque No. 25, and Newark Minister James Shabazz anchored No. 7 in Harlem.

  Malcolm X knew of the pressures to expunge all blemishes before the convention. He made and canceled trips, applied for a gun permit, called a Thursday press conference to decry a blurred circle of enemies, including the French government. He laughed when a friend advised him to call the police. On a Thursday evening radio show, Malcolm complained that “when I jump out and say that somebody is trying to kill me, the implication is given that I’m trying to do some publicity seeking, or that I’m just making these stories up.” On Friday, Malcolm told Life photographer Gordon Parks that he had been a “zombie” in the Nation. “It’s a time for martyrs now,” he told Parks, “and if I’m to be one, it will be in the cause of brotherhood.”

  On Saturday night, a secretary and four members from the Newark Temple No. 25 bought tickets to a dance at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, paying special attention this time to the windows and exits. They returned together in a Cadillac across the George Washington Bridge for Malcolm’s announced Sunday afternoon rally, and, being from Newark, passed unrecognized by the ushers and bodyguards who had defected with Malcolm out of Temple No. 7 in New York. All five counted their lives as nothing beside the saving power of Elijah Muhammad. The driver sat toward the rear of the four hundred folding chairs, which were more than half filled. The secretary sat in the front near his three gunmen.

  Malcolm X paced backstage. He had changed his mind and asked Betty to hasten from temporary lodgings on Staten Island with their daughters. He berated associates for allowing order to slip away. The guest speakers were not there. The promised platform was not ready. He rejected the comforting touch of his aged Islamic tutor, Sheik Hassoun, and angrily threw everyone out of the dressing room. Benjamin 2X managed a warm-up speech about mischarted history, telling how Columbus thought his voyage landed in China, then brought Malcolm on stage to prolonged applause.

  As the crowd answered the Islamic greeting, the Newark driver tossed a smoke bomb and jumped up to accost a pretended thief. “Get your hand out of my pocket!” he shouted. Heads turned to the diversion. “Hold it!” said Malcolm. The three gunmen crouched forward within fifteen feet of the stage. “Hold it!” shouted Malcolm. One of two deafening shotgun blasts ended his life, and extra pistol shots were lost in shock that turned to guttural screams and the crash of chairs thrown at the escapees. Witnesses seized only one of the five assassins, Talmadge X Hayer, in a doorway leading out to 166th Street.

  KING ISSUED a statement from Atlanta: “I am deeply saddened and appalled to learn of the brutal assassination of Malcolm X.” On Monday in Selma, he and L. L. Anderson joined arms with seventy-two-year-old Elizabeth Hill to lead a march of the elderly that added 205 names to some two thousand already on the appearance book. He visited Jimmy Lee Jackson at Good Samaritan, drove to address the stalwarts at Mount Zion in Marion, and returned to find the mass meeting at Brown Chapel surrounded by state troopers. Twenty of them circled King’s car, asking why their colleagues were unwelcome in the church sanctuary. King replied that movement meetings were open to everyone—he would look into it. The confrontation attracted reporters on the run. State investigator Bob Godwin demanded to know why King was critical of troopers and Alabama law. “That is another matter,” said King. “I intend to be critical of the troopers and the Alabama laws.”

  Attorney General Katzenbach called King personally that night to warn against night marches or trips to Marion. He disclosed that the Justice Department considered authentic a report that two men still intended to kill him, after failing to get a clear shot during his visit to Marion the previous Monday. King told reporters that the call, but not the threat, was highly unusual. At a Citizens Council rally in Selma that night, former Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi shouted that white people faced “absolute extinction of all we hold dear unless we are victorious.” Over the private objection of city officials, local citizens welcomed the uninvited but dramatic arrival of the state troopers. Their blood was up, as the onslaught at Marion aroused rather than shamed prevailing white sentiment. Selma’s newspaper embraced the news from distant Harlem with warlike headlines that dwarfed those ever applied to local demonstrations: “Followers of Malcolm X Said Planning Revenge.”

  Colonel Al Lingo, head of the Alabama state troopers, served an arrest warrant upon Jimmy Lee Jackson in his hospital bed Tuesday, and the Alabama Senate formally denounced “baseless and irresponsible” charges of dereliction by his men in the Marion incident. Lingo, scourge of the Alabama civil rights movement since Birmingham in 1963, deployed seventy-five troopers in Selma with the announced purpose of enforcing a new edict from Governor Wallace that banned night demonstrations throughout Alabama. The New York Times reported as front-page news the tense scene in which Wilson Baker turned back a “twilight march” before it reached troopers and bystanders massed at the courthouse. King announced that lawyers would contest the ban on night marches, as in St. Augustine, and that the movement planned a “motorcade” to petition Governor Wallace directly. Some staff members fanned out to seek support in new counties, and King flew west for four days of fund-raising.

  He walked into a press conference Wednesday morning at the Los Angeles airport. Was Elijah Muhammad’s life in danger? What exactly did Attorney General Katzenbach say about death threats on King? Were they from Black Muslims or white segregationists? Did he suspect an international conspiracy? Was King encouraged that thirty-one Republicans jointly chided the Johnson administration for stalling on a voting rights proposal? What would become of nonviolence if “something should happen” to him? Representatives of the city and county proclaimed successive Martin Luther King days, and there were huge police esc
orts because of FBI reports that the Christian Nationalist State Army vowed to kill him that night at the Hollywood Palladium. The next day, on confirmation of dynamite thefts by fugitives affiliated with the group, bomb squads joined one hundred LAPD officers guarding a theater on Sunset Boulevard, where King attended a fund-raiser screening of The Greatest Story Ever Told.

  Under close examination on a television interview show, King said that nonviolence was generally a leadership discipline for conduct on public issues, and that he would defend his family from attack in their home. For this comment, the front page of the local Negro newspaper excoriated him as “the biggest hypocrite alive,” saying King only half accepted the “manhood” of Malcolm X and “excluded his loved ones from dangers that he constantly imposes upon his followers.” By contrast, the New York Times dismissed Malcolm’s life as “pitifully wasted” because of his “ruthless and fanatical belief in violence,” and declared from a survey of correspondents that the world was indifferent to his murder. (“In Poland there was no noticeable reaction of any kind.”) In Los Angeles, King preached against the contagion of violence to crowds that swamped Temple Israel and spilled in thousands from Liberty Baptist Church through the parking lot and out among PA speakers strung along McKinley Avenue.

  James Bevel returned to Selma from Lowndes County late Thursday. He had made tiny inroads in the rural areas—and found a place that would host King there on Monday—but the fear was thick. Three days later, Rev. Lorenzo Harrison would burst into Brown Chapel, sobbing that his own deacons had run him out of Lowndes County on orders from the local Klan. At home, Bevel learned from his wife that stomach infections had reduced Jimmy Lee Jackson’s condition to grave, a week after the shooting in Marion, but this night Diane Bevel was wound also to the breaking point over Bevel’s philandering. He hit her in the face. Their marriage cracked toward its end four years later, and Bevel wound up evicted to the streets outside their rented room at the Torch Motel.

  Jackson died at 8:10 A.M. Friday morning, February 26. Among the mourners in the afternoon, Bevel walked with Bernard Lafayette to a wood-frame house by a creek in a wooded field outside Marion. The two of them sat in the kitchen with the immediate survivors—grandfather Cager Lee, mother Viola, and Jackson’s sister, Emma. They were pitiful sights, all three still bandaged from the rampage at Mack’s Cafe. On behalf of the movement, Bevel forced himself to ask what they thought should be done about the marches. The family said they should keep going. When Bevel asked whether they could stand to go on the next one, Cager Lee replied, “Oh, yeah.”

  Bevel left dissolved in tears, asking if Lafayette could walk with him the fifty-four miles to Montgomery. He said he had a lot on his mind, and the long walk would give the movement time to develop a message. Back at Brown Chapel in Selma, Bevel took the pulpit that night in the mass meeting. “I tell you, the death of that man is pushing me kind of hard,” he said, to a response of moans. He pulled up two texts from the Bible. The first was Acts 12:2-3, in which King Herod, after killing James the brother of John and seeing a positive effect, arrested Peter also. “I’m not worried about James anymore!” Bevel shouted. James was Jimmy Lee, who had found release, but Bevel worried out loud about all the Peters remaining to be “cowed and coerced and beaten and even murdered.”

  He expounded on Esther 4:8, in which Mordecai warned Esther of an order to destroy the Jews, and charged her to go to the king and “make request before him for her people.” He preached that the king now was Governor Wallace, who ran the state troopers and kept Negroes from voting. “I must go see the king!” he cried, and soon brought the whole church to its feet vowing to go on foot as in the Bible. “Be prepared to walk to Montgomery! shouted Bevel.” Be prepared to sleep on the highway!“

  Diane Nash threw herself behind the plan. Bevel called her his Esther. Beyond the strains of their tempestuous marriage, they retained their life’s pledge to honor the four girls killed in Birmingham. There were 500,000 nonregistered Negro voters in Alabama, nearly 80 percent of the state’s voting-age population. Five million across the South.

  From Los Angeles, Martin Luther King sent a telegram of condolence to Saturday’s Malcolm X funeral. He flew to Alabama on Monday to lead a tiny march of twelve at the Lowndes County courthouse—the first Negroes to seek registration in sixty years—then on Tuesday to Howard University in Washington, where he revised his Nobel Prize sermon to oppose the escalating war in Vietnam.

  On Wednesday, March 3, King returned to preach the funeral in Marion, making handwritten insertions about Jimmy Lee Jackson on the text of his eulogy from the Birmingham church bombing. Once again he summoned up conviction that “love will conquer hate” through justice. He approved the march on Montgomery to begin on Sunday. He said from Brown Chapel, “We will bring a voting bill into being on the streets of Selma.”

  Epilogue 1965-97

  ON FRIDAY, February 26, 1965, Wallace Muhammad appeared in dramatic submission before the Nation of Islam’s Chicago convention. He did not justify or endorse Malcolm’s death, as Malcolm’s own brothers were required to do publicly. He did not repeat vows of holy war upon heretics who doubted the infallibility of Elijah Muhammad, as did the presiding minister, Louis X of Boston, who incited loyal attackers from the crowd of two thousand upon a “spy” journalist he discerned from the rostrum (“Put the light on him!”). Wallace Muhammad in a short speech begged reinstatement—“I judged my father when I should have let God do it.” The convention cheered him as the prodigal, anointed son. He was obedient. But because he considered the Nation to be blasphemous and corrupt, and refused to teach its concoction of Islam, Elijah Muhammad consigned him to unpaid obscurity. Wallace worked as a baker, welder, painter, and rug cleaner, and labored with nephew Hassan Sharrieff in a Campbell Soup factory.

  In death, Malcolm X disappeared briefly. Doubleday canceled the forthcoming autobiography, and roughly a dozen New York firms declined the project before it landed at Grove Press, to be published in October 1965. New York Times critic Eliot Fremont-Smith praised it as eloquent testament that Malcolm “understood, perhaps more profoundly than any other Negro leader, the full, shocking extent of America’s psychological destruction of its Negroes.” The book, published just after the Watts riots of August, spoke to puzzlement about why Negroes outside the South might be so angry. On college campuses, where the Vietnam War was inspiring replicas of the civil rights movement, Malcolm presented a life that did not flinch from martyrdom. By glossing over his consuming struggles with the Nation of Islam,* the book’s account of Malcolm’s last two years magnified the allure of an unfinished myth. Trotskyites, pan-Africans, and urban guerrillas rushed to claim him. The Autobiography would be translated into fifteen languages and sell three million copies by 1992, when a Hollywood film helped seal Malcolm’s “X” as an international symbol of race, youth, and fearless passage.

  Police seized two New York Muslims as accomplices of Talmadge X Hayer. Other than suitable profiles as intimidating “enforcer” types—Norman 3X Butler was already awaiting trial for the January 6 shooting of a “defector” from the Nation—their most salient contribution to the official version of the conspiracy was numerical. The arrested trio matched the number of reported gunmen at the scene, which calmed public fears of loose killers and insurrectionary warfare.

  At the trial, Hayer admitted guilt and swore that the other two had nothing to do with the crime, but prosecutors discredited his statement by noting that all three defendants also denied being Muslims (which foreclosed any chain of inquiry that might implicate Elijah Muhammad). Judge Charles Marks sentenced the three to life terms on April 14, 1966, and while the outside world lapsed into conspiracy theories or disinterest, Muslim factions spent decades in mutual recrimination over the transparent frame-up. Malcolm’s people acknowledged complicity in convicting the two “stand-in” assassins, who, both being lieutenants under Captain Joseph, were as familiar to them as deadly movie stars and never could have gone unchallenged to
the Audubon front rows. Benjamin 2X and others countered that the Nation could free them by coming forward with the true killers.

  Unchecked, sectarian enforcements for the Nation of Islam evolved into freelance gangsterism. The same Muslim soldiers who collected dues payments and newspaper quotas for Chicago also fled into mosques after bank robberies. Police wrecked the Newark Temple No. 25 after a chase. In 1968, FBI propagandists mailed anonymous warnings that the members of New York No. 7 alone were being “swindled” annually of some $800,000. The Nation acquired among other holdings a bank, a Learjet, five mansions for the “royal family,” and a $100,000 jeweled fez for Elijah Muhammad. In his final years, Nation officials battled renegade enforcers as well as dissidents. Intruders filched $23,000 cash off the person of Supreme Captain Raymond Sharrieff, and bushwhackers winged him on Chicago streets in 1971. The next year four gunmen from what Boston police called a “Black Muslim execution squad” killed Hakim Jamal, a critic of Elijah Muhammad and director of the Malcolm X Foundation. In January of 1973, assassins from the Nation’s Philadelphia mosque entered a Washington home in the absence of breakaway Muslim leader Hamaas Abdul-Khaalis and shot his wife and daughter in the head, executed two sons and a follower, and drowned three infants in a tub and sink.