Blood Brothers (43 page)

After his meeting with Gladys Root and the two secretaries, Malcolm returned to the Statler Hilton. Surrounded by the Fruit's soldiers, he darted through the lobby, their angry stares piercing his body like daggers. He safely made it to his suite, but he hardly slept. His phone rang constantly throughout the night. One caller in particular rattled him. “You are dead,” an unfamiliar voice whispered. “You are a dead nigger.”
¹⁸

Malcolm dreaded leaving the hotel in the morning, knowing that the Fruit was camped outside. Holed up in his room, he waited for
sunrise like a prisoner on death row. Around nine thirty a.m. Edmund Bradley arrived to take him to the airport. Driving down the Hollywood Freeway, two cars chased them. Accelerating to seventy miles per hour, Bradley zigzagged through traffic, shaking one of the pursuing vehicles. When the other car inched closer, Malcolm reached into the backseat and pulled out an old walking cane. Aiming it like a rifle, he pointed the cane out the window, scaring the other driver enough to hit the brakes, allowing Bradley to race away.
¹⁹

Eventually, after the Los Angeles police intercepted two more Muslim men at the airport, Malcolm boarded TWA Flight 26 for Chicago. For three days, the Chicago police guarded him. Somehow, he orchestrated a surreptitious meeting with Wallace Muhammad. Malcolm told Elijah's son that he had also met with the Illinois attorney general's office, offering his testimony in a case involving a Black Muslim prisoner who was suing the state for denying him the right to practice Islam behind bars. In exchange for protection, Malcolm had said that he would testify that the Nation of Islam was not a legitimate religious group and therefore Black Muslim ministers should not receive access to state prisons. More importantly, if he testified, he could cost the Nation its tax-exempt status and, potentially, millions of dollars.
²⁰

On Saturday, January 30, Malcolm taped a television interview with
Chicago Sun-Times
columnist and popular television personality Irv Kupcinet. Noticing that he had arrived under heavy police detail and with personal bodyguards, Kupcinet asked if his life was in danger. “
They
are trying to kill me,” Malcolm said. “Who?” the writer asked. “You know who,” he answered vaguely.
²¹

After the interview, he left the television studio in an unmarked police car with two detectives and two state attorneys. Driving toward his hotel, a van swerved in front of them, cutting off the police car. About a dozen Muslims swarmed them. Malcolm must have thought that this was it. There was no way two policeman could protect him from this mob. They were clearly outnumbered until six more officers who had tailed behind them rushed to their rescue. Later, when the police escorted him to his hotel room, Malcolm recognized about fifteen Black Muslims loitering in the lobby. He told a detective, “It's only going to be a matter of time before they catch up with me.”
²²

T
HE TIME HAD
come for Malcolm to head south and join forces with grassroots civil rights activists. On Thursday, February 4, a day after he lectured at the Tuskegee Institute, he traveled to Selma, Alabama, where Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had organized a voting rights campaign. Facing a court injunction against demonstrations and relentless harassment from police, King led a march, landing himself in jail with more than seven hundred other protestors.
²³

While King sat behind bars, student activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee invited Malcolm to join a rally at the Brown Chapel American Methodist Episcopal Church. From the Christian pulpit, he exhorted the audience “to use whatever means are necessary to gain the vote.” He praised King's commitment to peace, but he reminded the congregation that he did not believe in nonviolence. “The white man should thank God that Dr. King is holding his people in check, because there are other ways to obtain their ends.” When he finished speaking, he visited with King's wife, Coretta. He regretted that he did not visit Martin in jail, but he wanted her to know that he came to Selma to help him. “If the white people realize what the alternative is,” he said, “perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King.”
²⁴

A day after returning home from Alabama, he flew to London for the first Congress of the Council of African Organizations. Three days later, on February 9, he traveled to Paris, but when he stepped off the plane customs agents detained him. The ministry of the interior claimed that he threatened to disturb “the public order,” and therefore his presence was “undesirable in France.” Malcolm could not understand why he was being sent back to London. Three months earlier, he had been welcomed in France. What had changed? Some writers have suggested that the French had learned that the CIA intended to kill Malcolm, and the government “didn't want his blood spilled on its soil.” Although there is no substantiated evidence supporting this theory, the episode in Paris made Malcolm reconsider who it was that truly wanted him dead.
²⁵

M
ALCOLM COULD NO
longer rest comfortably at home. On February 13, hours after he returned to the United States, he took a sleeping pill and dozed off. At two forty-five a.m. he woke to a startling
sound:
Whoom!
A Molotov cocktail smashed through his living room window, torching the floor and the furniture.
Whoom!
A second firebomb shattered another window, scattering glass everywhere. Malcolm shook Betty awake, leapt from the bed, and darted across the hallway to grab his four daughters from their smoking bedrooms. Blinded by the smoke, Betty winced as she stumbled into the hallway.
Bam!
Another firebomb bounced off the back door, landing in the frosty yard, where it died. Rushing the screaming children and Betty through the kitchen, Malcolm swung open the back door and yelled at Betty, “Stay here!”
²⁶

Frightened, she and the children shivered outside, watching the brick bungalow burn. Malcolm hurried back into the five-room house to retrieve a few belongings, some coats, and a .25 caliber pistol. Quickly, he reemerged, coughing, in a singed topcoat. Five minutes later, the Queens fire department arrived, sirens blaring. Incensed, he paced barefoot, holding the gun at his side, while firefighters extinguished the flames. He could not believe that the Muslims would bomb a house containing four little girls, ages seven months to six years. His assassins had sent a clear message. They would kill him by any means necessary, even if it meant murdering his wife and children. Malcolm increasingly sensed his murder was inescapable. “I won't burn to death,” he said to the fire inspector. “I'll probably be shot to death in the street one day. Or maybe while I'm speaking.”
²⁷

The following day, the press reported that the fire department had found a whiskey bottle filled with gasoline on his daughters' dresser. Harlem minister James 3X suggested that Malcolm planted the jug on his own, staging the fire for publicity. Why, James asked, would the Muslims torch a house that they owned? “He is obsessed with the idea that we're after him,” he told the
New York Daily News
. Later, Malcolm secretly met with a fireman who said that he had seen “a man wearing a police uniform” walk into the house carrying the jug. He had no doubt that someone was trying to frame him.
²⁸

In the days after the bombing, the Black Muslims dismissed claims that they were trying to kill Malcolm. Muhammad Ali joined the campaign, discrediting the minister on the Irv Kupcinet show. Malcolm was no better than a criminal, he charged, “a jail bird who could neither read nor write until Muhammad educated him.” No one should trust anything Malcolm said, he maintained.
²⁹

Shortly thereafter, in the Hotel Theresa lobby, Ali ran into Betty. Scolding him, she said, “You see what you're doing to my husband, don't you?” Raising his hands in the air, Ali pleaded innocence, “I haven't done anything. I'm not doing anything to him.” Yet Ali was not innocent. He had joined the chorus of violent ringleaders who raged about punishing Malcolm. As the most visible figure in the Nation, his malicious attacks echoed throughout the country, further convincing Elijah's followers that they had to silence Malcolm. Without throwing a punch or raising a hand, Ali managed to hound the man he had once called his brother.
³⁰

Under siege, Malcolm threw a bomb of his own. On Monday evening, February 15, he held a meeting at the Audubon Ballroom. More than five hundred people gathered to hear him talk about his political agenda. Instead, he revealed another secret of Elijah Muhammad's, one that threatened to ruin his reputation as a defender of black citizens. In December 1960, Elijah had dispatched him to Atlanta along with Minister Jeremiah X to negotiate an agreement with the Ku Klux Klan. At the time, Muhammad had wanted to purchase farmland in the South, but he'd needed assurances that if the Nation organized there, the Klan would let them live peacefully. As Muhammad's emissary, Malcolm had made it clear that the Nation and the Klan both wanted the same thing: complete separation between blacks and whites. Malcolm regretted meeting with the Klansmen, he said, but the public had to know why it was that Muhammad never criticized or challenged the white supremacists.
³¹

It was a risky revelation, but no more so than the insufficient security measures that he'd imposed. Earlier, Malcolm had instructed his security to cease frisking people who attended his rallies. He realized that he could not build a movement if people were too scared to attend his meetings. His lieutenants argued that he was risking his life, but he overruled them. “We don't want people feeling uneasy,” he said. “We must create an image that makes people feel at home.”
³²

During his speech, a commotion between two men in the audience drew Malcolm's security away from the rostrum, leaving him vulnerable to an attack. “Get your hand out of my pocket!” a man shouted. “Just sit down and be cool,” Malcolm implored the brothers. When a young man wearing a blue suit, white shirt, and red bow tie got up and
started walking down the middle aisle, Gene Roberts, one of Malcolm's chief security guards, approached the stranger until the man ducked into a second-row seat. Everything seemed fine, so Malcolm continued speaking, but the incident made Roberts nervous. Certain that he had witnessed “a dry run on Malcolm's life,” he went home and wrote a description of the events. The details were essential if his real supervisors were going to do anything to protect Malcolm.
³³

In 1964, officials from the NYPD's intelligence agency, the Bureau of Special Services (BOSS), had directed Roberts, a twenty-five-year-old detective, to infiltrate Malcolm's organization and get as close to the minister as possible. Gradually, he gained Malcolm's confidence and became one of his most trusted bodyguards. As soon as he thought that he saw the rehearsal of Malcolm's murder, he called his superiors. In response to the growing threats against Malcolm, the police offered the minister twenty-four-hour protection, but he turned it down, insisting that his men were security enough.
³⁴

But Malcolm never had enough security. For more than a year, the Black Muslims had stalked him, following his every move. In his private moments, he could not help replaying all the times that they had tried to kill him. Morbidly, he imagined how his life would end. He had dodged death too often to live much longer. When a friend called him to meet the following Tuesday, Malcolm somberly replied, “I'll be
dead
by Tuesday.”
³⁵

O
N
F
RIDAY
, F
EBRUARY
19, Malcolm met with
Life
magazine photographer Gordon Parks. The photographer asked Malcolm if he really believed that his life was in danger. “It's as true as we are standing here,” he answered. “They've tried it twice in the last two weeks.” Perhaps, Parks suggested, the police would protect him. “Brother,” Malcolm chuckled, “nobody can protect you from a Muslim but a Muslim—or someone trained in Muslim tactics. I know. I invented many of those tactics.” Did Malcolm have any protection? He laughed again. “Oh, there are hunters and there are those who hunt the hunters. But the odds are certainly with those who are most skilled at the game.”
³⁶

That same afternoon, John Ali checked into the Americana Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. In recent weeks, the official from Chicago had demonstrated an uncanny ability for being in the same city as Malcolm.
The following evening in Harlem, Talmadge X and his accomplices attended a dance at the Audubon Ballroom, inspecting the windows and exits one last time. According to one witness, later that night, Talmadge met with Ali, finalizing their plans. Everything was set. They were ready to kill for the Messenger.
³⁷

Two blocks away from the Americana, Malcolm checked into a room on the twelfth floor of the Hilton Hotel at Rockefeller Center. Soon, a group of black men began asking the bellmen about Malcolm, probing for his room number. Someone notified the head of security, a former policeman who knew that Malcolm had received numerous death threats. After escorting the men out of the hotel, the security chief added extra protection on the twelfth floor. The next morning, February 21, at eight a.m., Malcolm's phone rang. An unfamiliar voice—a voice that sounded like it belonged to a white man—said, “Wake up, brother.”
³⁸

Before he could even think of a response the caller hung up. Hardly a moment passed when he was not reminded that someone wanted him dead. And yet, despite the constant danger, he called Betty about an hour later, inviting her and the children to his afternoon rally at the Audubon Ballroom. Initially, he had told her that it was unsafe for her to attend his public meetings. For some reason, this time he changed his mind.
³⁹