Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  James X Price, one of those assassins, turned state’s evidence and secretly agreed to testify against seven others who would be convicted. On the eve of his trial testimony, Minister Louis X—now transferred from Boston and renamed Farrakhan by Elijah Muhammad—delivered a fiery radio broadcast from his post at New York’s flagship Temple No. 7: “Let this be a warning to those of you who would be used as an instrument of a wicked government against our rise…. Though Elijah Muhammad is a merciful man…there are younger men and women who have no forgiveness in them for traitors and stool pigeons. And they will execute you, as soon as your identity is known.” Price refused to testify the next day, and hanged himself instead. Later in 1973, after the murder of Minister James Shabazz during a bloody war among factions out of Newark Temple No. 25, Farrakhan broadcast a similar pronouncement. “Cut off their heads,” he said. “Roll it down the street and make the world know that the murderer of a Muslim must be murdered.”

  In 1974, after a hiatus of nine years, Elijah Muhammad allowed his son Wallace to resume teaching. His adversaries within the Chicago headquarters confiscated tapes of his sermons, eager to prove he was deviating again from the Nation’s dogma into Islamic scripture, but the old man said inexplicably, “My son’s got it right.” When Elijah died in 1975, delegations arrived in limousines to find Wallace, the chosen heir, living like a hermit, with a rope tying shut his broken refrigerator door. The next day, February 26, 1975, the ministers swore fealty to the new Supreme Minister on the first day of the national convention, as did Muhammad Ali. “I was born for this mission,” declared Wallace Muhammad.

  Wallace cloaked himself in the authority of his father, who many Muslims still believed could never die, and suspended the onerous weekly sales quota of three hundred newspaper copies per male. He dismissed Supreme Captain Raymond Sharrieff, capped ministers’ salaries at $300 per week, and abolished the Fruit of Islam altogether as a “punch your teeth out” abomination. He survived plots by entrenched officials who accused him of crying “crocodile tears” over his father. Within a year he renamed New York No. 7 for his former ally, Malcolm, saying, “What we should see in Malcolm is a turn for the Nation of Islam from fear and isolation to openness, courage.” By 1977, Wallace Muhammad dismantled the Nation’s corporate empire, confessed the scandals that Malcolm was killed to hide, and openly renounced his father’s claim to divinity. He extracted some purpose from every error and ordeal. “If he hadn’t hurt me,” Wallace said of his father, “I don’t know if I really would have come to Allah like I did.”

  In Los Angeles, Assistant Minister Randolph X Sidle stalked out of Temple No. 27 “with fire in my ears.” He had long since served his prison time from the chaos of the Ronald Stokes shooting,* but he and many veteran Muslims could not abide Wallace’s changes, especially the required acceptance of whites in the mosque and the recognition of Elijah’s flaws. Sidle was among the first to join when Louis Farrakhan broke away to reconstruct the Nation of Islam by placing himself in Elijah Muhammad’s deified seat—living in Elijah’s former home, reviving his sectarian doctrines along with the martial arts Fruit of Islam, who hawked bean pies and a Farrakhan-era newspaper, The Final Call. To fuse the new Nation with the old one, Farrakhan went so far as to hire several of the deceased Messenger’s extra “wives,” along with some of the thirteen offspring by these former secretaries. Their lawsuits entangled probate on the Muhammad estate for twelve years, until 1987.

  Among the old guard, Captain Joseph could not accept Farrakhan’s Nation. He steeled himself to set aside his antipathy for Malcolm X, gave up his powers as a captain for a regular job, and studied Islam under Wallace Muhammad. So did the former Arthur X Coleman, who walked with a cane from wounds in the Stokes shooting, as well as all three men who were in prison for the murder of Malcolm. In 1977, with the support of Muhammad, the former Talmadge Hayer filed affidavits naming his four Muslim accomplices from the Newark mosque, but New York authorities declined to revisit the slipshod case. The two stand-ins served another decade with Hayer.

  With Farrakhan defending the memory of Elijah Muhammad, divided partisans briefly threatened to revive the heresy wars of 1964. This time each side claimed the mantle of the previous victim. Beginning in 1984, Farrakhan aggressively insulted American Jews and accused white America of gaping racism, earning for himself public outrage greater than Malcolm ever had, along with mirror notoriety for the ability to provoke it. Comparisons with Malcolm, however, reminded some that Farrakhan had called Malcolm a traitor as well as a mentor. By 1992, he publicly denied involvement in the murder, though he stood by his invectives that preceded it. “Nothing that I wrote or said yesterday do I disagree with today,” he declared. In January of 1995, Malcolm’s daughter Qubilah was charged with trying to have Farrakhan killed in revenge. Farrakhan and Malcolm’s widow declared a truce on the stage of Harlem’s Apollo Theater in May.Two years later, Qubilah’s young son Malcolm Shabazz set a home fire that killed the widow, his grandmother Betty Shabazz.

  Twenty years before, when his rival broke ominously away in 1977, Wallace Muhammad said the word “Farrakhan” came from Arabic roots meaning “one who bares his teeth,” and advised followers not to become excited or hostile over the display. He predicted that the new Nation would be forever crippled by supremacist ideas suitable only for bait. “They shut themselves out by their own philosophy,” said Muhammad, “and the racists know and encourage it.” And most Americans were afraid to study the causes of racial injustice, he preached later, “because they know it leads to religion.” The soul of Islam forbids racial images of the divine, he said wryly, and “not even the Muslims have tried it.”

  Wallace Muhammad was often vague and disorganized. He taught in rambling aphorisms (“The person wrapped up in himself makes a nasty little bundle”), and was forever changing names. He dropped Wallace for the Islamic Warith, changed the spelling of his surname from Muhammad to Mohammed, and called his decentralized community the Muslim American Society. Nevertheless, by the early 1990s, published estimates of Muslims in the United States ranged from five to eight million. Slightly more than half of these—at least three million—were immigrants from Pakistan, Indonesia, Arab countries, and Europe, and the remainder were nearly all black Americans affiliated with his Sunni Islam. Farrakhan’s sectarian Nation, like Elijah’s in the 1960s, stabilized at ten thousand members, which represented a declining speck of American-born Muslims, roughly one of every two hundred.

  Away from the glare on Farrakhan, Imam Warith Deen Mohammed represented American Muslims in Mecca at the council that debated the 1990 Gulf War. At home, his precarious ministry stretched from prisons and fledgling mosques to universities, still menaced by the stigmas of race and foreign novelty. His goal was to win a foothold for Islam with African-Americans as full founding partners, which would lead historians eventually to recognize Malcolm for his most overlooked quality: religion. Beyond that, Mohammed preached an ecumenical “line of purity” among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and dreamed that American Muslims could begin to rescue Islam’s democratic spirit from its autocratic history, just as the earliest Americans helped reform an Old World of kings and inquisitions. Into his sixties, the former Wallace Muhammad’s life already spanned a “voodoo” cult, fantastic legends, bloodcurdling zealotry, enduring devotion, and potboiling dynastic strife—what he called a typical religious birth in history. “All of us,” said Captain Joseph, shortly before his death in 1993, “paid a price to establish Islam in America.”

  CAGER LEE OF MARION, ALABAMA, stepped up to one of the federal voting registrars who opened doors in nine counties on August 20, 1965, and Justice Department officials asked movement photographers to share their pictures of Jimmy Lee Jackson’s frail grandfather, holding up his voting card. All 1,144 applicants that Friday were successful under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which President Johnson had signed in the Capitol exactly two weeks earlier. Its Section 4 suspended all discretionary voting restrictions in seve
n Southern states. The powerful new law broke decades of impediment and heartache. In Mississippi, black registration jumped from 7 to 60 percent within two years.

  Hollis Watkins drove from Greenwood to Hattiesburg to visit the Dahmer family in the fall. Less than four years earlier, when he and Curtis Hayes had been dispatched there as student emissaries from Bob Moses, churches had been afraid even to allow talk of voting rights, and now the Dahmer farm was a beehive of movement people. Negroes everywhere in Forrest County were getting voting cards. Vernon Dahmer himself secured his first one, saying it was all right now that everyone else could. Four Dahmer sons were away in military service, but Bettie, the ten-year-old tractor driver, and Dennis, thirteen, were old enough to tease Watkins about chasing down the yearling calf.

  At year’s end, Vernon Dahmer and J. C. Fairley went to see Sheriff Bud Gray about one remaining obstacle. Dahmer was so busy with it that there were unopened Christmas presents stacked in his room on Saturday night, January 8, when he placed a notice on local radio that Sheriff Gray had signed out one of the poll-tax receipt books to him, as the county regularly did for the Jaycees and downtown stores during citizenship drives. Although the poll tax was on the verge of being voided nationwide as unconstitutional, registered Mississippians would need a poll-tax receipt to obtain a ballot through the 1966 elections, and Dahmer encouraged citizens to stop by his general store in Kelly Settlement. He could collect their poll taxes for the county, sparing them a trip to the courthouse, and he offered to pay the $2 fee for hardship cases so they could vote.

  Preachers repeated his announcement from Negro pulpits Sunday morning, and shortly after two o’clock that night, shotguns and pistols blew out windows along the front of the farmhouse. As the Dahmers ran from their bed to scoop up Bettie from her nearby room, some attackers threw torches and open bottles of gasoline inside, while others kept up the fusillade. Inside, the Dahmers ran into walls of flame at every door. “Jewel!” shouted Dahmer to his wife. “Get the children out while I hold them off!” He grabbed his shotgun from the closet. Firing from window to window through the smoke, he aimed at masked figures behind trees and at a Pontiac in the front yard, beyond which he could see his general store also in flames. Harold, an older son on Army leave, retrieved Dennis and pushed the family out a back window where the ground sloped downward a story below. Dahmer kept shooting in retreat from the fire, then jumped himself. He and young Bettie were badly burned about the hands and face. As cars roared off in the front, Harold helped the family stumble through the woods for help. The house and store burned to the ground, leaving two chimneys.

  FBI Agent J. L. Martin arrived at Forrest General Hospital an hour later to interview the five Dahmers. He knew the family, having arranged transfer to Hattiesburg in 1965 to escape twelve years of bureaucratic torment under John Malone in the New York office. Martin went before dawn to the charred crime scene, where officers discovered a pistol that had been dropped in the chaos, and a Ford on the road nearby with two tires flattened by shotgun pellets. The Ford was registered to a Klansman from Laurel, Mississippi, in neighboring Jones County. Its abandonment led to an argument among the White Knights about whether it was more humiliating to have been disabled by Dahmer or by friendly fire between attack groups.

  J. C. Fairley reached the hospital before daybreak. Reverend Robert Beech, still with the Ministers Project two years after Hattiesburg Freedom Day, arrived later in the morning from out of town. Vernon Dahmer described the attack from his hospital bed, his bandaged arms raised by pulleys. “They finally got me,” he told Fairley, and said he was worried about his daughter Bettie, heavily sedated in the same room with skin burns more severe than his. “I think I made a mistake,” Dahmer told Beech, reminding him that he had always said it was unwise to be too far out front. The visitors departed. Dahmer went to sleep, then swiftly into cardiac crisis and death at 3:45 P.M. Doctors explained that he suffocated because hot smoke and acrid fumes had seared too much lung tissue.

  Hattiesburg Negroes nearly rioted at the courthouse. Some local whites banded to rebuild the family properties, but one woman advised the newspaper that charity should be reserved for needier families. “Since the Negroes have equal rights now,” wrote Mrs. J. V. Sanford, “it’s about time they started looking out for their own.” Some of Dahmer’s white siblings were moved to break the color line for the funeral; others stayed away. Roy Wilkins claimed Dahmer’s memory for a fundraising drive, which revived family and movement quarrels over the NAACP’s fidelity to Dahmer. (“There has been no effort by NAACP to exploit the Dahmers in any way,” Director of Branches Gloster Current would write to Reverend Beech.) Attorney General Katzenbach announced on the Monday that many officials in the Justice Department had known Dahmer personally and admired his work in “the highest kind of citizenship.” President Johnson sent a telegram. That week in Jackson, the all-white Mississippi legislature continued debate on emergency bills designed to neutralize the Voting Rights Act. Floor speeches analyzed the potential vote of “a certain group” by euphemism, wary of new federal sanctions against racial gerrymandering, but some members from safe districts breeched the understanding to protest sacrificial adjustments. “We all know the Negro situation was the main factor,” a Chicasaw County representative declared on Thursday, January 13, 1966.*

  The Dahmer criminal investigation folded into the two protracted murder cases from the 1964 Freedom Summer: the Chaney-Goodman-Schwerner murders and the Lemuel Penn highway ambush in Georgia. Roy Moore, the FBI’s SAC for Mississippi, summoned agents to occupy a block of Hattiesburg motel rooms beginning the night of January 10. They swarmed over Klansmen of the White Knights, who were believed to be active even while under indictment in the Neshoba County murders, concentrating on a Jones County klavern in nearby Laurel, hometown of Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers. By February, suspects were threatening each other as likely informants, and issuing public manifestos of innocence. (“I am very sorry about the bombing of the Damer [sic] nigger”), which protested “the brutality of these men with the FBI.” A klavern official confessed the plot on March 2, stating in part that he was troubled because Imperial Wizard Bowers had violated an agreement not to send Jones County men elsewhere without his sign-off. This confesson led to a second, which was withdrawn under Klan duress, then to a third.

  On the afternoon of March 28, 1966, the Justice Department authorized SAC Moore to arrest and file federal charges against Imperial Wizard Bowers and thirteen members of the Jones County White Knights. The timing was significant. That morning, the Supreme Court had reinstated federal indictments in the Lemuel Penn and Neshoba County murders, a year after U.S. district judges William Bootle and Harold Cox had vacated them as unconstitutional applications of powers reserved to the states. An FBI memo recorded that John Doar was “quite enthusiastic” about the decision, which rehabilitated the civil rights statute for the Dahmer prosecution as well as the two earlier ones.

  The Penn case reached trial first, after further delays. Lawyers separated defendant James Lackey on grounds that he had repudiated his 1964 confession, then removed defendant Herbert Guest on arguments related to the lack of federal registration for his shotgun. Both defendants won acquittal at a trial apart from the alleged shooters, Howard Sims and Cecil Myers. In the interim, family violence produced an urgent FBI cable on May 5: “Sims went to Athens hospital where wife employed in nursery and shot her in the face with a pistol. Preliminary report indicates wife will survive. Athens PD presently attempting to apprehend Sims, said to have departed hospital in his car containing a number of firearms.” In July, nearly two years after the random ambush of Lt. Colonel Penn on a Georgia highway, a federal jury in Athens convicted Sims and Myers of civil rights conspiracy. They began serving the maximum ten-year sentence upon the exhaustion of appeals in 1968.

  In Mississippi, the Dahmer and Neshoba County cases languished into 1967, largely on new defense claims that the indictments were legally invalid for lack of black people on
federal grand juries in Mississippi. Prosecutors managed to obtain proper indictments by February. Meanwhile, the White Knights expanded the targets of violence. A bomb destroyed Jackson’s Temple Beth Israel synagogue in September. Weeks later, beginning on October 9, Justice Department lawyers at long last prosecuted seventeen alleged conspirators for the Neshoba County murders of 1964.

  Cecil Price was confident enough of the outcome to be running for sheriff against one of his fellow defendants, but the mood of the Meridian courtroom tightened dramatically on first sight of prosecution witness Delmar Dennis, Province Titan of the White Knights, who testified that he had spent the past three years working both for Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers and for the FBI. Doar admitted in his closing argument on October 18 that he had tried very few criminal cases and was there because of his commitment and the office he held, “to speak directly and frankly to you about the reason for the extraordinary effort the federal government undertook to solve this crime….” In the end, Doar adapted words from the Gettysburg Address. “What I say, what the other lawyers say here today…will soon be forgotten,” he told the jurors, “but what you twelve people do here today will long be remembered.”