Malcolm X (32 page)

“1960 may well prove to be a year of decision for the American Negro.” Thus spoke radical attorney William Kunstler, opening a debate between Malcolm and the Reverend William M. James on New York City’s WMCA radio early that year. Across the South sit-ins and protests had been multiplying, with Negro students refusing to vacate their seats at lunch counters that would not serve them and standing firm in stores that asked them to leave. The mixed experience Malcolm had had with
The Hate That Hate Produced
reinforced the value of presenting the NOI's views in a favorable light, so when early in 1960 New York local radio station WMCA proposed a debate between him and James, the liberal pastor of Metropolitan Community United Methodist Church in Harlem, he accepted the invitation.

Kunstler pressed Malcolm right away. “Roy Wilkins, the executive director of the NAACP, has described your Temple of Islam as being no better than the Ku Klux Klan. You think this is an adequate comment?” Malcolm at once characterized Wilkins’s comment as ignorant: “I very much doubt, if Mr. Wilkins was familiar with Mr. Muhammad and his program, that he would make such charges.” When Kunstler grew agitated and cited press accounts of NOI members calling whites “inhuman devils,” Malcolm defended the cause of “racial extremism” by framing it as a form of exceptionalism common to religious groups. Catholics and Baptists, he pointed out, both claimed the only way to get to heaven was through membership in their respective churches. “And Jews themselves for thousands of years have been taught that they alone are God’s chosen people . . . I find it difficult for Catholics and Christians to accuse us of teaching or advancing any kind of racial supremacy or racial hatred, because their history and their own teachings are filled with it.”

Whether or not 1960 proved to be the year of the American Negro, it saw Malcolm finding an audience beyond the black community, and his fame growing. He tried hard to maintain a regular presence at Mosque No. 7, but his speaking engagements continued at a rapid clip. In March, he lectured to students from Harvard, Boston, and MIT at a seminar hosted at Boston University. His formal remarks lasted barely ten minutes; the question and answer exchange went on for more than two hours. He also delivered a lecture at an NAACP-sponsored event at Queens College in May, significant because it marked the first time that the civil rights organization had provided a platform to a black leader who so sharply opposed its policies.

However, the most important address he gave that year was on May 28 at the Harlem Freedom Rally, which the NOI organized with more than a dozen other local black groups. The rally was held at the intersection of Harlem’s West 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, where an estimated four thousand people attending the five-hour-long program were packed in shoulder to shoulder in the streets and along the sidewalks. Before the rally started, loudspeakers blared out Louis X's calypso song “A White Man’s Heaven Is a Black Man’s Hell.” When Malcolm took to the stage, he delivered a speech that departed from his typical remarks of the time. He made a consciously broad appeal, focusing not on the NOI but on “the black people of Harlem, the black people of America, and the black people all over this earth.” At times, he even sounded King-like: “We are not here at this rally because we have already gained freedom. No! We are gathered here rallying for the freedom which we have long been promised, but have as yet not received.” Throughout his remarks, he used the racially inclusive language of the civil rights cause—“freedom,” “equality,” and “justice”—as the framework for building an all-black militant coalition based in the Harlem ghetto. Negroes aligned with the NAACP and National Urban League would find it difficult to argue against such rhetoric, which had neatly appropriated their own.

A central purpose of the rally, Malcolm told his audience, was to listen to a variety of African-American leaders, including some “who have been acting as our spokesmen, and representing us to the white man downtown.” He offered no criticism of moderates, instead emphasizing the necessity for Harlem’s blacks to overcome the divisions in their community. His emphasis on the need for a united front projected an image of pragmatism and moderation, a remarkable turn for a man who only months earlier had attacked integrationist leaders as Uncle Toms. The speech met with tremendous success and was largely responsible for transforming Malcolm into a respected political leader in Harlem’s civic life. Whether the NYPD's BOSS division knew ahead of time about his intentions, it assigned six detectives to attend the rally. One, a black officer named Ernest B. Latty, was apparently so disturbed by the song “A White Man’s Heaven” that he purchased the record and attached it to his report. Reactions among the detectives in general raised enough concern to result in a significant increase in BOSS's surveillance.

As Malcolm’s schedule of media appearances, college lectures, and speeches grew throughout 1960, so did criticism of him within the NOI. To demonstrate his loyalty, he attended many of Muhammad’s public talks, while keeping track of local mosques and devoting himself to Mosque No. 7 at all hours. He also promoted a cult around Muhammad, suggesting that the “apostle” could commit no sins or errors of judgment. “If you look at the development of the Nation of Islam,” Louis Farrakhan explained, “it was Brother Malcolm who started referring to Elijah as ‘the Honorable’ Elijah, and who started making us say—over and over again—‘Messenger Elijah Muhammad taught me’ or ‘Messenger Elijah Muhammad teaches us.’ He was driving the point home that Elijah Muhammad was a messenger of God.”

Malcolm’s high profile continued to generate speaking invitations at major universities, which introduced him to a significantly larger—and whiter—audience than any of his coworkers inside the Nation. FBI informants even reported that Malcolm might run for public office. On October 20, at Yale Law School auditorium, he was matched with Herbert Wright, the NAACP's national youth secretary. Before a standing-room-only crowd, Wright predictably promoted the cause of racial integration, calling for the use of “litigation, education, and legislation” to achieve reforms. Malcolm rejected this in favor of the total separation of the races. At the end of the debate, NOI members circulated among the throng of white students, selling records featuring “A White Man’s Heaven Is a Black Man’s Hell.” The debate with Wright represented, on balance, a retreat from the positions favoring civil rights that Malcolm had expressed at the Harlem rally only months before. The emphasis on strict racial separation probably was prompted by Malcolm’s desire to make a clear distinction with the NAACP in front of a mostly white audience.

The brutal pace of travel continued throughout the second half of 1960. Although NOI-related business consumed most of his energies, Malcolm continued to look for ways to reach a wider public. The radio interviews and debates reached a largely intellectual and middle-class audience. What he was looking for was a way to establish himself on a par with other national and international leaders.

As fate would have it, an opportunity to crash international headlines came gift wrapped from the Cuban Revolution. In September 1960, Cuban prime minister Fidel Castro traveled to New York City to attend the United Nations General Assembly. Across Harlem, news of his impending trip set off great excitement among leaders of the local black left. They quickly arranged a welcoming committee, which Malcolm joined. When the Cuban delegation arrived, it checked in to the well-appointed Shelburne Hotel on Lexington Avenue at 37th Street. Tensions soon ran high: the Cubans already felt insulted by the State Department, which had confined the eighty-five-member delegation’s freedom of travel to Manhattan Island. Then a dispute arose over the bill at the Shelburne, with an outraged Castro accusing the hotel of making “unacceptable cash demands.” At first, he threatened to move his entourage to Central Park. “We are mountain people,” he explained proudly. “We are used to sleeping in the open air.” United Nations secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld scrambled to secure lodgings for them at the midtown Commodore Hotel, but he was too late: Malcolm and the Harlem welcoming committee had swooped in and invited the Cubans to stay at the Hotel Theresa, at Seventh Avenue and 125th Street. The eleven-story hotel had three hundred guest rooms; the new guests reserved forty of them, in addition to two suites, one of which was for Fidel.

A
Washington Post
writer speculated that “Castro, who has made overtures to U.S. Negro leaders to support his left-leaning revolution, apparently was trying to get as much propaganda as possible out of his move.” The Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, who was attending the same UN session, immediately sensed an opportunity, and within hours drove uptown and met with Castro for the first time. Meanwhile, thousands of Harlemites thronged the hotel to witness the comings and goings of the delegation and the various visits by international dignitaries. It wasn’t long before a mix of political groups entered the crowd, pushing their own agendas: black nationalists who promoted the cause of deposed Congolese premier Patrice Lumumba, civil rights activists favoring desegregation, pro-Castro demonstrators, and even some beatniks from Greenwich Village. One placard read: “Man, like us cats dig Fidel the most. He knows what’s hip and bugs the squares.”

Malcolm’s membership on the welcoming committee put him in a prime position to turn the visit into an opportunity. Late in the evening of September 19, he and a few NOI lieutenants were granted an hour with Castro. Details of their conversation are at best sketchy; Benjamin 2X Goodman later claimed that Malcolm attempted to “fish” Castro, inviting him to join the NOI. Yet Malcolm surely sensed that any official relationship, while useful, would create great difficulties for him with the authorities. One report suggests that, after the meeting, Malcolm was repeatedly invited to visit Cuba, but made no commitments. Whatever transpired, he was clearly impressed by Castro personally and viewed this new connection as a diplomatic resource that the NOI could exploit. On September 21, speaking at Mosque No. 7, Malcolm instructed all FOI members to stand on “twenty-four-hour alert” so long as Castro remained in Harlem. He added that Castro was “friendly” to the Muslims. An FBI informant reported that “the FOI was being alerted to assist Castro in the event of any anti-Castro demonstrations.”

Though
Muhammad Speaks
eventually became a staunch defender of the Cuban Revolution, at the time Elijah Muhammad was extremely unhappy about the meeting between Malcolm and Castro. Since his return from the Middle East, his chronic pulmonary illness had worsened, and for all Malcolm’s efforts to venerate Muhammad, speculation remained rife throughout the Nation over whether Malcolm or Wallace Muhammad might soon assume the role of national leader. Since speaking together at the Feast of the Followers in 1957, Malcolm and Wallace had grown closer, despite Wallace’s increasing rejection of his father's theology and his disgust with what he saw as graft on the part of advisers like Raymond and Ethel Sharrieff. Malcolm’s militant attitude rubbed off on Wallace to the point that some NOI leaders worried about the potency of a potential alliance. Mosque No. 4 minister Lucius X Brown complained that the duo might “talk Elijah Muhammad into marching on the White House.” Even if Muhammad did not want to, Lucius suggested, “Malcolm and Wallace were after Muhammad’s job and Muhammad might do it to save face.”

The possibility of this power pairing appeared to be dashed on March 23, 1960, when Wallace Muhammad was convicted in federal court for refusing to be drafted into the military. In June of that same year, he was sentenced to three years’ incarceration. Wallace’s attorney appealed the decision, claiming him as a conscientious objector. While the appeal crawled through the system, Wallace continued his activities building the Philadelphia mosque, and he was a frequent visitor to Harlem Mosque No. 7. For example, on January 29, 1961, when Malcolm was away on an extended lecture tour, Wallace was advertised as the featured speaker at Mosque No. 7 in the
Amsterdam News
. At an October 1961 hearing, Wallace’s appeal was finally denied, and he was ordered to turn himself in for incarceration in a federal prison. On October 30, Wallace began serving a three-year term at the Federal Correctional Institution in Sandstone, Minnesota. Wallace Muhammad was paroled on January 10, 1963, and he immediately returned to resume his minister's appointment at Mosque No. 12 in Philadelphia.

Wallace’s absence from NOI organizational life tended to increase paranoid rumors and fears about Malcolm, especially among Elijah Muhammad’s other children. Some of the hostility directed at Malcolm grew from his organizational function. As a national overseer, his responsibilities included resolving local feuds between members of various mosques. The role of troubleshooter was an unenviable one, because Malcolm was frequently forced to impose the authority of Chicago headquarters over local leaders who sought the semiautonomy and flexibility that he himself enjoyed.

Facing growing strife, Malcolm was concerned about protecting his allies within the NOI. No one was more important to him than Louis X Walcott. Louis had worked directly under Malcolm in New York City from October 1955 to July 1956, enough time for him to incorporate Malcolm’s oratorical style into his own. But when he had become Boston’s minister in 1957, he had considerable difficulty handling the job. He feared that he was unqualified, with the mosque having attracted a number of professionals far more experienced in business and civic affairs than he was. Farrakhan recalled: “[Malcolm] would come and look after his little brother and give me pointers. And Malcolm would go out in the street, man, and listen to the people, go in barbershops—‘What do you think about the mosque?’ And he would get the outside view of me and us. And he would come back and tell me what the people were saying and correct me.”