Malcolm X (24 page)

Given Malcolm’s legendary strictness, the NOI's highly punitive culture, and tension that may have rippled beneath the surface of his relationship with Joseph over issues of credit and control, it seems surprising that the two men took so long to find themselves at odds. But in 1956 their productive partnership was finally ruptured. The specific reasons for the break remain contested. Some believe that Malcolm had blocked Joseph’s advancement as the Nation’s supreme captain. Others blame Joseph for the break, accusing him of failing to report to Malcolm a damaging rumor about Elijah Muhammad that had been circulating. But within months their fraternal association soured and Joseph grew to hate Malcolm for what transpired next.

In September 1956, Joseph stood accused of beating his wife, and Malcolm, as judge and jury, conducted the trial before the entire membership of the temple. Prior to bringing up the case, Malcolm had addressed several others. Brother Adam and Sister Naomi, who’d admitted to the sin of fornication, were banished for five years. Sister Eunice, who had joined the Nation of Islam as a child, was charged with adultery. Malcolm observed that Eunice’s husband was a “registered” Muslim, a man “who was in prison. How do you think he feels?” After listening to her responses, Malcolm coldly meted out his version of justice: “Sister, I have no alternative other than to give you five years out of the Nation of Islam, during which I would advise you to fast and pray to Allah, ask him for forgiveness, ask your husband for forgiveness. . . . In no way can I show you any sympathy, pity, or anything, because you should know better.”

When Joseph stepped up, Malcolm sternly announced, “This is the day of manifestation of defects.” He then addressed Joseph: “You are charged with putting your hands on your wife. Guilty or not guilty?” Joseph curtly replied, “Guilty.” Malcolm ruled that Joseph had been convicted of a “class F” judgment, meaning that he was no longer considered in good standing. For the next ninety days, he was stripped of his FOI rank and banned from temple functions and even from speaking with other members except officials. Malcolm used Joseph’s shame as an opportunity to instruct his congregation about the standards that were expected:

Joseph was asked if he had anything to say in his own defense; he declined to speak, and was told to leave the room. Malcolm informed temple members that the original charge of spousal abuse had been filed eight months before—implying that the case had been considered by the Messenger himself, so delaying the final decision. Then he launched into a vigorous defense of Joseph’s character. “Many of you may not like him. Many of you may have grievances against him . . . But also, many of you won’t make the sacrifice that he would make.” Without question, Joseph was a “good brother,” but for the next three months he was to be treated as an outcast. “And all of those Muslims that follow him are outcasts.”

The FBI watched these internal conflicts with interest. On October 23 its New York office reported to the director that Gravitt had been removed as Temple No. 7’s FOI captain, but that he had been allowed to hold a job as a night cook at the temple’s restaurant. A second report, dated December 12, indicated that Gravitt still remained under suspension; if accurate, this was beyond the ninety-day period that Malcolm had mandated. By the celebration of Saviour's Day in Chicago in late February 1957, Joseph had been fully restored to his rank. Yet the experience of becoming a temple “outcast” likely left him feeling a profound sense of humiliation and a loss of status. He was no longer, at least within the confines of the temple, Malcolm’s partner and equal; he was his subordinate, a hardworking but flawed lieutenant who had proven incapable of adhering to Malcolm’s high moral standards.

While Joseph grew angrier, Malcolm continued to be unhappy with the slow growth of Harlem’s Temple No. 7. He had begun making overtures to the Abyssinian Baptist Church, and also recruited several members from Powell’s powerful Baptist church. The most productive fishing grounds by far had been the tiny Pentecostal churches, whose members were working-class blacks. But Malcolm must have seen that the most well-attended institutions in Harlem were those involved in civil rights advocacy, electoral politics, and social reform. The NOI’s culture was designed to look inward, to reject the “devil” and all his works. However, if neither heaven nor hell existed, as Elijah Muhammad taught, and the Negro’s “hell” was here, in the United States, did not Muslims have an obligation to wage jihad?

Despite the absence of legal Jim Crow, New York City in the mid-1950s remained highly segregated. As the
New York Times
observed, “There is gross discrimination against Negroes here, and in many respects they are the oppressed class of the city.” Blacks as a rule were barred from most private housing, and were shepherded into ghettos like Harlem. The zoning of public schools confined most of their children to a substandard education, and there were frequent examples of police brutality toward blacks. For the NOI to break through to a mass audience, Malcolm would have to speak directly to these issues. Like Powell and other political ministers, he would have to leave his sanctuary and shift his focus beyond simply recruiting congregants for the Nation. He would have to address the real-world conditions of African Americans.

Though he did not realize it at the time, Malcolm’s career as a national civil rights leader began late on the afternoon of April 26, 1957, near the corner of Lenox Avenue and 125th Street, in the heart of Harlem. Two police officers were attempting to arrest a black man, Reese V. Poe, of 120 West 126th Street, following a street altercation. They were working over Poe with their nightsticks when three black men attempted to intervene: Frankie Lee Potts, twenty-three, as well as two members of Temple No. 7, Lypsie Tall, twenty-eight, and Johnson Hinton, thirty-two. The men yelled, “You’re not in Alabama. This is New York.” One of the patrolmen, interpreting this as a provocation, attempted to arrest Hinton, on the grounds of failure to move and resisting arrest. He delivered several powerful blows to Hinton’s face and skull, which surgeons later diagnosed as causing lacerations of the scalp, a brain contusion, and subdural hemorrhaging. The three Muslims were then arrested along with Poe and hauled to the 28th Precinct station house.

A woman who had observed the assault rushed to the NOI’s restaurant several blocks away with the news. Captain Joseph promptly mobilized members by telephone. At sundown, Malcolm and a small group of Muslims went to the station house and demanded to see brother Johnson. At first, the duty officer denied that any Muslims were there, but as a crowd of angry Harlemites swelled to about five hundred, the police changed their minds and Malcolm was allowed to speak briefly with him. Despite his pain and disorientation, Hinton explained that when they had arrived at the station house and he attempted to fall down on his knees to pray, an officer struck him across the mouth and shins with his nightstick. Malcolm quickly took in Hinton’s physical condition and demanded that he be properly treated. The police relented; Hinton was transported in an ambulance to Harlem Hospital—followed by about a hundred Muslims who walked in formation north up Lenox Avenue. Malcolm knew exactly what effect this march would have down the busiest thoroughfare in Harlem. While Hinton received treatment, the crowd outside swelled to two thousand. Alarmed, the NYPD called “all available cops” to provide backup. Then, amazingly, they released Johnson X Hinton from the hospital—back to the 28th Precinct jail. The protesters marched back to the station house angrier than before, returning this time down West 125th Street, Harlem’s central business corridor. Within an hour, at least four thousand people were jammed in front of the station house. A confrontation appeared inevitable.

When Malcolm finally walked into the station house, it was well past midnight. Escorting him was Harlem attorney Charles J. Beavers, who made bail arrangements for Potts and Tall and asked to see Hinton. The police allowed this but adamantly refused to return Hinton to the hospital, insisting that he had to be incarcerated overnight to appear in court the next day. At about two thirty a.m., with thousands of angry Harlemites still gathered outside, Malcolm sensed a stalemate. As if to underscore his authority in front of the police, he walked outside and gave a hand signal to his FOI phalanx. Silently and immediately, the FOI marched away, with orders to regroup at the NOI restaurant at four a.m. Following their lead, the protesting Harlemites also dispersed in minutes.

The police had never seen anything like it. One stunned officer, groping for an explanation, admitted to the New York
Amsterdam News
editor James Hicks, “No one man should have that much power.”

The next morning, bail of $2,500 was paid by the NOI, but the police still refused to deliver Hinton to his attorney or to Malcolm. Still bleeding and disoriented, he was dumped out into the street outside the city’s felony courthouse. Malcolm’s men subsequently drove him to Harlem’s Sydenham Hospital, where doctors estimated that he had a fifty-fifty chance of surviving. The next day, a crowd of more than four hundred Muslims and Harlemites gathered for a vigil at a small park facing the hospital; NOI members from Boston, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Hartford, and other cities had driven in to take part. In a private meeting with a delegation of police administrators, Malcolm made the Nation’s position clear: “We do not look for trouble . . . we do not carry knives or guns. But we are also taught that when one finds something that is worthwhile getting into trouble about, he should be ready to die, then and there, for that particular thing.” As James Hicks observed, “Though they were stern in their protest they were as orderly as a battalion of Marines.”

All three men who had been arrested were subsequently acquitted. Johnson X Hinton and the Muslims filed a successful lawsuit against the NYPD, receiving more than seventy thousand dollars, the largest police brutality judgment that a New York jury had ever awarded. But the incident had also set in motion the forces culminating in Malcolm’s inevitable rupture with the Nation of Islam. Elijah Muhammad could maintain his personal authority only by forcing his followers away from the outside world; Malcolm knew that the Nation’s future growth depended on its being immersed in the black community’s struggles of daily existence. His evangelism had expanded the NOI’s membership, giving it greater impact, but it was also forcing him to address the problems of non-Muslim black Americans in new ways. Eventually, he would have to choose: whether to remain loyal to Elijah Muhammad, or to be “on the side of my people.”

CHAPTER 5

May 1957-March 1959

 

 

 

T
he Johnson Hinton controversy introduced the Nation of Islam to hundreds of thousands of blacks, and Malcolm was quick to take advantage. He had already begun publishing a regular column outlining the NOI’s views, “God’s Angry Men,” in the
Amsterdam News
, and now he worked to broaden the group’s appeal. Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm argued in one column, was “a modern-day Moses who . . . would ask God . . . to destroy this wicked race and their slave empire with plagues of cancer, polio, [and] heart disease.”

Hundreds of new blacks, both those who had been inspired by the Hinton incident and those who were simply curious, started attending temple lectures. Instead of preaching to the converted, Malcolm now gave more attention to crafting a popular message, and he rarely failed to deliver a command performance. Slowly, he began to incorporate into his talks his growing awareness of global events, merging the situations and goals of repressed peoples around the world with those of blacks in America. At his June 21 sermon at Temple No. 7, for example, he linked Bandung’s theme of Third World solidarity with Elijah Muhammad’s apocalyptic vision:

The summer of 1957 was one of tremendous growth for Malcolm, as he continued to make inroads to building greater legitimacy for the Nation while keeping up a demanding speaking schedule. In July, Temple No. 7 hosted an extravagant event, the Feast of the Followers of Messenger Muhammad, at Harlem’s Park Palace dance club. More than two thousand attended, including Rafik Asha, leader of the Syrian mission to the UN, and Ahmad Zaki el-Barail, the Egyptian attaché. The presence of the Muslim diplomats was an indication that Elijah Muhammad’s long-standing efforts to acquire greater legitimacy in the Islamic world were producing results. The featured speaker was not Malcolm but twenty-four-year-old Wallace Muhammad, born on October 30, 1933, and seventh among the children of Clara and Elijah. Wallace was an assistant minister in the Chicago temple, and his participation in New York City was significant. He had been tutored in Arabic as a teenager, and by the mid-1950s, troubled by the inconsistencies between his father’s teachings and the classical tenets of Islam, he relished the opportunity to make overtures to officials of Muslim nations. He may have expressed his doubts to Malcolm; what is certain is that this event initiated a closer relationship between the two young men.