Malcolm X (33 page)

Malcolm was determined that his protégé become a national figure in his own right, and encouraged him to write two plays,
Orgena
and
The Trial
, both of which became wildly popular when performed before Muslim audiences. But before long Louis needed a different kind of help. Ella Collins, newly converted to the NOI, had quickly become leader of those who wanted Louis deposed. Years later he would describe her as a “genius woman,” then adding, “But in my weakness in administrative skill, she saw that weakness and raised a group in opposition to me.” With the same boundless energy with which she had established educational programs within the temple, she threw herself into battle. As tensions mounted, a fire broke out in Louis’s home; no one was injured, but most NOI members believed that Collins was responsible.

Both sides appealed to Elijah Muhammad. Louis argued that Ella continued to undermine his authority and should be disciplined, if not expelled. Ella urged Muhammad to name her captain of Mosque No. 11 and to fire Louis. Muhammad first offered a compromise: Louis would remain the minister, but none of the programs Ella had initiated at the mosque would be canceled. Ella tried to adhere to this plan, but her dislike for Louis was too strong, and she soon stopped attending the mosque. But the matter did not end there. Malcolm was invited to Boston as a mediator, where he explained to Louis that Ella was an extremely dangerous person. “Ella is the type of woman that—brother, she’ll kill you.” Malcolm had little choice but to back Louis’s decision to expel her, making her the second of his siblings, after Reginald, that Malcolm would sacrifice to his loyalty to the Nation.

By 1960, the black activist Bayard Rustin was almost fifty years old. Though his tireless civil rights work brought him into association with younger men like King, his agitation on behalf of African Americans had begun decades earlier. Rustin had briefly joined the Communist Party in the late 1930s, then in 1941 worked with A. Philip Randolph’s Negro March on Washington Movement, which forced President Roosevelt to outlaw racial discrimination in the defense industry. Like Malcolm, he had opposed black involvement in World War II, and his refusal to join the military landed him a three-year prison sentence. After his release, he participated in nonviolent demonstrations, challenging Jim Crow laws on public buses in the upper South; by the mid-1950s he had become an invaluable adviser and fund-raiser to King.

However, as the decade turned and the bitter taste of McCarthyism lingered in the mouths of the left, Rustin found himself suddenly marginalized. It was not only on account of his brief communist membership, but also his sexuality: Rustin was gay, and in 1953 had been jailed in California for public sexual activity. In April 1960, he had become involved with a new organization initiated by Ella Baker, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which would become the radical wing of the desegregationist struggle. Throughout that summer, he had assisted SNCC's new president, Marion Barry, in planning what was to be a major conference on nonviolence in October. Rustin’s name was even listed on the conference program. But when the AFL-CIO's executive council, which was funding the conference, expressed opposition to his participation based on his sexual orientation and brief communist past, Barry and other student coordinators caved in and “disinvited” him. Rustin’s public banning was not unusual for African-American leftists, however. In academic year 1961-62, communist Benjamin Davis, Jr., was banned from speaking on many college campuses, sparking student protests at City University of New York.

Rustin’s isolation from the Black Freedom Movement and his desire to use the publicity surrounding Malcolm to reestablish his own credentials may help to explain his growing interest in the Nation of Islam. On November 7, 1960, the two men debated each other on New York City’s WBAI radio, the beginning of a friendship that would endure despite their divergent agendas. Malcolm, speaking first, began by distinguishing the NOI's approach from that of black nationalism. A nationalist, Malcolm explained, shared the same aim of a Muslim. “But the difference is in method. We say the only solution is the religious approach; this is why we stress the importance of a moral reformation.” He denied any commitment to practical politics, asserting Elijah Muhammad was “not a politician.”

Malcolm had by this time garnered much experience as a debater, but Rustin had more, and he worked over his younger opponent; it didn’t help that the holes in Malcolm’s argument were easy to spot. Rustin attacked Malcolm’s separatist position as conservative, even passive. The vast majority of blacks, he said, were “seeking to become full-fledged citizens,” and the purpose of civil rights protests was to further this cause. Malcolm denied the possibility that “full-fledged” citizenship was attainable. “We feel that if a hundred years after the so-called Emancipation Proclamation the black man is still not free, then we don’t feel that what Lincoln did set them free in the first place.” Rustin quickly pointed out that Malcolm was avoiding the question.

The older man’s superior debating skills kept his opponent on the defensive. At one point, Malcolm denied that integration was ever going to happen, but admitted that “if the white man were to accept us, without laws being passed, then we would go for it.” This alone was a significant concession, except Rustin wanted to force Malcolm to the logical end point of this argument: that if change was impossible to achieve in America, blacks would have to set up a separate state elsewhere. When Malcolm finally admitted as much, Rustin closed the trap. It was relatively easy for him to recount the major reforms that had taken place, and the practical impossibility of a black state. “The great majority of Negroes [are] feeling that things can improve here. Until you have some place to go, they’re going to want to stay.”

In a matter of minutes, the essential weakness of the Nation of Islam had been exposed. It presented itself as a religious movement, with no direct interest in politics. Yet, as King had shown, when it came to driving change, religion and politics did not need to be mutually exclusive. Hundreds of black Christian ministers were already using their churches as centers for mobilizing civil disobedience and voter registration efforts. The Nation saw the white government as the enemy; Elijah Muhammad often claimed in speeches that the government had failed black Americans. But with John F. Kennedy’s election in November 1960, largely on the wings of significant support by blacks, reforms seemed to be on the horizon. And even if those reforms were limited, the Garveyite notion of one or more separate black states was never a realizable alternative.

Most devastating for Malcolm was that he knew Rustin was right. For all the strides the Nation had made in promoting self-improvement in the lives of its members, its political isolation had left it powerless to change the external conditions that bounded their freedoms. Malcolm himself had already embraced the necessity of direct political action when he marched down Harlem’s busiest thoroughfares and blockaded a police station to secure the safety of Johnson X Hinton. And the Third World movements he embraced—from the postcolonial struggles inspired by Pan-Africanism to his identification with Castro—were driven fundamentally by a commitment to politics. Rustin showed that Malcolm was defending a conservative, apolitical program that, by his own actions, he did not endorse.

Had Malcolm been quicker to grasp the practical implications of Rustin’s logic, he might have avoided one of the great disasters of his career. Soon after the debate, he was charged with leading the NOI's mobilization in Dixie. By the late 1950s, most civil rights organizations were devoting their resources to support campaigns across the South, and the NOI did not want to be caught out. In 1960 in Jackson, Mississippi, thousands of blacks had participated in an economic boycott of segregationist white merchants that proved to be 90 to 95 percent effective. That August NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers investigated and publicized police brutality cases in the state. CORE was also poised for growth, when in December 1960 the Supreme Court ruled in
Boynton v. Virginia
that racial segregation was outlawed in all interstate transportation terminals, much as the earlier
Morgan v. Virginia
had done for interstate bus travel itself. In early 1961, under new director James Farmer, CORE would initiate “Freedom Rides” of desegregationist protesters into the Deep South.

Unlike these civil rights groups, however, the Nation’s Southern strategy would be anchored to its program of black separatism. Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm had together constructed an anti-integrationist strategy that they hoped would find a receptive audience among Southern blacks. A key element of their approach was to brand African-American Christian clergy, especially those involved in nonviolent protests, as “Toms”—even though such an ugly attack directly contradicted Malcolm’s public commitment to the building of a black united front. The plan also called for the construction of new NOI mosques across the region.

In December, Malcolm traveled to Atlanta, announcing his presence there in an interview on that city’s WERD radio. He attended meetings and gave lectures at Atlanta’s Mosque No. 15 on at least five occasions, before moving on to an interdenominational ministers’ conference in Alabama and other meetings in Tampa, Miami, and Jacksonville.

Malcolm returned home for the Christmas Day birth of his second daughter, Qubilah, named in honor of Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, but by late January he was back in Atlanta, ostensibly to participate in local NOI meetings. The main purpose of this trip, however, was to establish an understanding with the Ku Klux Klan.

No single incident in Malcolm’s entire career has generated more controversy than his private caucus with the Klan in January 1961. Most of the details about the planning and logistics of this meeting are still sketchy. What is established is that, despite a previous exchange of hostile letters between KKK leader J. B. Stoner and Elijah Muhammad, both the Klan and the NOI saw advantages to crafting a secret alliance. On January 28, Malcolm and Atlanta NOI leader Jeremiah X met in Atlanta with KKK representatives. Apparently, the Nation was interested in purchasing tracts of farmland and other properties in the South and, as Malcolm explained, wanted to solicit “the aid of the Klan to obtain the land.” According to FBI surveillance, Malcolm assured the white racists that “his people wanted complete segregation from the white race.” If sufficient territory were obtainable, blacks could establish their own racially separate businesses and even government. Explaining that the Nation exercised strict discipline over its members, he urged white racists in Georgia to do likewise: to eliminate those white “traitors who assisted integration leaders.”

Malcolm himself seems to have viewed the entire affair with distaste, as he complained about it afterward to Elijah Muhammad and did not publicly admit his role until years later. Even then, he worked to distance himself, claiming that he had no knowledge about NOI-Klan contacts after January 1961, though this seems highly unlikely. Jeremiah X, who was actively involved in the Klan negotiations, participated in a daylight Klan rally in Atlanta in 1964, receiving the public praise of Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard Robert M. Shelton.

To sit down with white supremacists to negotiate common interests, at a moment in black history when the KKK was harassing, victimizing, and even killing civil rights workers and ordinary black citizens, was despicable. Malcolm’s apologetics about negotiating with white racists were insufficient. He had also told the Klansmen that “the Jew is behind the integration movement, using the Negro as a tool.” He had to know that this overture would be used to undermine the struggle for blacks’ equal rights, that Klansmen and white supremacists were committed to murdering civil rights leaders in the region. Malcolm’s uncritical adoption of Elijah Muhammad’s conservative, black separatist policies had led him to an ugly dead end.

CHAPTER 7

“As Sure As God Made Green Apples”

January 1961-May 1962

 

 

 

B
etty was suffering. For the three weeks prior to the birth of Qubilah, Malcolm had been traveling. On the day of her birth itself, he had devoted most of his time to the mass trial of members from Mosque No. 7. Now her husband was once again away. Within weeks, she would pack up Attallah and Qubilah and journey south to North Philadelphia, this time seeking temporary refuge at the home of her birth father, Shelman Sandlin.

As Malcolm waited in Atlanta to negotiate with the Ku Klux Klan, he worried that relations with Betty might have reached a point of no return. On January 25, 1961, they spoke by phone, but their conversation only troubled him further. Later that day he decided to write to her. Malcolm observed that his wife had undergone a meaningful change of character during recent weeks. Perhaps expressing his appreciation for the strength and sacrifices Betty had made, especially during her pregnancy and Qubilah’s birth, Malcolm conveyed his love for her. In an act of uncharacteristic generosity—for him—he even stuffed forty dollars into the envelope with the love letter.