Malcolm X (39 page)

As he made plans to bring his killers to Los Angeles, Malcolm sought the approval of Elijah Muhammad, in what he assumed would be a formality. The time had come for action, and surely Muhammad would see the necessity in summoning the Nation’s strength for the battle. But the Messenger denied him. “Brother, you don’t go to war over a provocation,” he told Malcolm. “They could kill a few of my followers, but I’m not going to go out and do something silly.” He ordered the entire FOI to stand down. Malcolm was stunned; he acquiesced, but with bitter disappointment. Farrakhan believes Malcolm concluded that Muhammad was trying “to protect the wealth that he had acquired, rather than go out with the struggle of our people.”

A few days later Malcolm flew to Los Angeles, and on May 4 he held a press conference about the shootings at the Statler Hilton. The next day he presided over Stokes’s funeral. More than two thousand people attended the service, and an estimated one thousand joined in the automobile procession to the cemetery. Yet the matter was far from resolved. If Malcolm could not kill the officers involved, he was determined that both the police and the political establishment in Los Angeles should be forced to acknowledge their responsibility. The only way to accomplish this, he believed, was for the NOI to work with civil rights organizations, local black politicians, and religious groups. On May 20, Malcolm participated in a major rally against police brutality that attracted the support of many white liberals, as well as communists. “You’re brutalized because you’re black,” he declared at the demonstration. “And when they lay a club on the side of your head, they do not ask your religion. You’re black—that’s enough.”

He threw himself into organizing a black united front against the police in Southern California, but once more Elijah Muhammad stepped in, ordering his stubborn lieutenant to halt all efforts. “Brother, stay where I put you,” ran his edict, “because they [civil rights organizations] have no place to go. Hold your position.” Muhammad was convinced that integration could not be achieved; the civil rights groups would ultimately gravitate toward the Nation of Islam. When desegregation failed, he explained to Malcolm (and later to Farrakhan), “they will have no place to go but what you and I represent.” Consequently, he vetoed any cooperation with civil rights groups even on a matter as contentious as Stokes’s murder. Louis X saw this as an important turning point in the deteriorating relationship between Malcolm and Muhammad. By 1962, Malcolm was “speaking less and less about the teachings [of Muhammad],” recalled Farrakhan. “And he was fascinated by the civil rights movement, the action of the civil rights participants, and the lack of action of the followers of the Honorable Elijah.”

At heart, the disagreement between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad went deeper than the practical question of how to respond to the Los Angeles police assault. Almost from the moment Muhammad had been informed about the raid and Stokes’s death, he viewed the tragedy as stemming from a lack of courage by Mosque No. 27’s members. “Every one of the Muslims should have died,” he was reported to have said, “before they allowed an aggressor to come into their mosque.” Muhammad believed Stokes had died from weakness, because he had attempted to surrender to the police. Malcolm could hardly stomach such an idea, but having submitted to the Messenger's authority, he repeated the arguments as his own inside Mosque No. 7. James 67X listened as Malcolm told the congregation, “We are not Christian(s). We are not to turn the other cheek, but the laborers [NOI members] have gotten so comfortable that in dealing with the devil they will submit to him. . . . If a blow is struck against you, fight back.” The brothers in the Los Angeles mosque who resisted had lived. Roland Stokes submitted and was killed.

Some of Malcolm’s closest associates were persuaded that Elijah Muhammad had made the correct decision, at least on the issue of retaliation. Benjamin 2X Goodman, for one, would later declare, “Mr. Muhammad said, ‘All in good time’ . . . and he was right. The police were ready. It would have been a trap.” But Malcolm himself was humiliated by the NOI's failure to defend its own members. Everything that he had experienced over the previous years—from mobilizing thousands in the streets around Hinton’s beating in 1957 to working with Philip Randolph to build a local black united front in 1961-62—told him that the Nation could protect its members only through joint action with civil rights organizations and other religious groups. One could not simply leave everything to Allah.

The Stokes murder brought to a close the first phase of Malcolm’s career within the NOI. He had become convinced that Elijah Muhammad’s passive position could not be justified. Malcolm had spent almost a decade in the Nation, and for all his speeches, he could point to no progress on the creation of a separate black state. Meanwhile, in the state that existed, the black men and women who looked to him for leadership were suffering and dying. Political agitation and public protests, along the lines of CORE and SNCC, were essential to challenging institutional racism. Malcolm hoped that, at least within the confines of Mosque No. 7, he would be allowed to pursue a more aggressive strategy, in concert with independent black leaders like Powell and Randolph. In doing so, he speculated, perhaps the entire Nation of Islam could be reborn.

CHAPTER 8

From Prayer to Protest

May 1962-March 1963

 

 

 

W
ithin days of his return from Los Angeles, Malcolm began to quietly pursue a strategy of limited political engagement. His muzzling by Elijah Muhammad continued to rankle, as did Muhammad’s belittling theory about Ronald X Stokes’s death resulting from his submission to the authorities. Before leaving Los Angeles on May 22, Malcolm had told an electrified crowd that Stokes “displayed the highest form of morals of any black person anywhere on this earth,” and he arrived in New York a few days later feeling charged with purpose. Though Muhammad had restrained him from coalition building with non-Muslim moderates in Los Angeles, on Malcolm’s home turf he held much greater latitude. On May 26, Mosque No. 7 organized a rally in front of the Hotel Theresa. The press release advertising this event linked the “cold-blooded murder of Ronald T. Stokes and the shooting of seven other innocent, unarmed Negroes” in Los Angeles with the Freedom Riders in Alabama and the then current mass desegregation campaign led by King in Georgia. Malcolm invited the two candidates competing for Harlem’s congressional seat to attend, Powell and attorney Paul Zuber, and he called for all Harlem leaders to support a coalition against police brutality. He was challenging Elijah Muhammad and his Chicago superiors by carrying out in New York the civil rights approach he had planned for Southern California.

Malcolm’s critics in the Nation of Islam took this as proof that he had become mesmerized by the media, diverting his attention from religious matters into the dangerous realm of politics. Even Los Angeles minister John Shabazz, whose mosque stood at the center of the political maelstrom and who was presently a defendant in the LAPD's criminal suit against the Muslims, kept to the party line. In a June 1962 letter addressed to “Brother Minister” and copied to Malcolm, Shabazz argued that excessive force by the police could not be ended primarily through politics: The letter declared that “a
religious
solution will fit the problem of Police Brutality.”

Undaunted, Malcolm’s frustration pushed him forward, yet it soon led him to make a misstep that put him sharply on the defensive. On June 3 an airplane crashed in Paris, killing 121 well-to-do white citizens of Atlanta; given its timing, Malcolm found the tragedy too tempting a target. Before an audience of fifteen hundred in Los Angeles, he described the disaster as “a very beautiful thing,” proof that God answers prayers. “We call on our God—He gets rid of 120 of them.” The following month, the press picked up the statement, and many prominent Negroes wasted little time in denouncing both Malcolm and the NOI. Dr. Rufus Clement, president of Atlanta’s University Center, described Malcolm’s remarks as “unchristian and inhuman,” while NAACP leader Roy Wilkins referred to the crash as “a mass tragedy,” adding in bewilderment, “Even when Negroes had their most violent [white] enemies against them, they did not descend to any glad feelings over death.” But the most eloquent—and damning—statement came from Martin Luther King, Jr., who sought to reassure white Americans “that the hatred expressed toward whites by Malcolm X [was not] shared by the vast majority of Negroes in the United States. While there is a great deal of legitimate discontent and righteous indignation in the Negro community, it has never developed into a large-scale hatred of whites.” Above all, Malcolm’s statement was a public relations disaster. It made it much easier for Negro moderates in groups like the NAACP and National Urban League to refuse to cooperate with the NOI, and it almost certainly increased the level of FBI infiltration. It was probably even what prompted the Bureau to discredit him in France; shortly thereafter, J. Edgar Hoover contacted the French government’s legal attaché in Paris, warning that a French film director, Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau, had recently been in contact with Malcolm, leader of a “fanatical” and “anti-white organization.”

Even more than the 1959 television series
The Hate That Hate Produced
, Malcolm’s comments on the crash reinforced his reputation as a demagogue. He may have considered his remark as part of a polemical jihad of words, designed to place Christian whites on the defensive, but it reinforced the Lomax-Wallace thesis that the NOI was the product of black hate. For Malcolm’s critics in the civil rights movement, the statement, and others like it, marked him as representative of white society’s failure to integrate. Yet in retrospect, many of Malcolm’s most outrageous statements about the necessity of extremism in the achievement of political freedom and liberty were not unlike the views expressed by the 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who declared that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Nearly two years before, in 1962, Malcolm argued, “Death is the price of liberty. If you’re not ready to die for it, put the word ‘freedom’ out of your vocabulary.”

For a few weeks Malcolm avoided speaking to the press while attempting to smooth things over within the NOI. On June 9 he attended a two-day rally featuring Elijah Muhammad at Detroit’s Olympia Stadium. After the end of the second public event, all NOI members were ordered to stay. Malcolm had the unpleasant responsibility of reading to the crowd a letter from Raymond Sharrieff that had already been sent to all FOI captains, ordering “every Muslim to begin obtaining no less than two new subscriptions to
Muhammad Speaks
per day.” The subscription drive would continue for three months. The letter ended noting that “those who failed to comply would be eliminated from the mosque.” This new edict showed Chicago’s determination to turn the budding success of its newspaper into a cash cow. Members were already tithing from their wages to their mosques as well as voluntarily donating funds to Muhammad and his family; now they were expected to generate even more money.

The Nation’s craven financial squeeze began to cause unrest at mosques throughout the country, and tensions in Boston rattled the organization. By 1962, Louis X was earning about $110 weekly serving as minister, yet as former Boston NOI official Aubrey Barnette would later note, “Each member was supposed to donate $2.95 a week toward Louis’s upkeep, which means that if 100 members were contributing regularly he was receiving another $15,000 a year in expense money.” Technically, none of the other mosque officials drew salaries, but in practice the FOI captain received eighty-five dollars weekly and the mosque secretary another thirty-five dollars each week, plus “frequent contributions from the membership.” During the three-year period that Barnette and his wife, Ruth, belonged to the mosque, they donated one thousand dollars, about one-fifth of Barnette’s income, which was itself slightly above average for NOI members at the time. Moreover, a cult of violence and intimidation began to grow around FOI captain Clarence 2X Gill. Barnette recalled Captain Clarence as “a stocky man of medium height” who looked “like an ex-middleweight boxer . . . and is arrogant, suspicious, dictatorial.” Members could not speak to Clarence directly, but were forced instead to communicate through intermediaries. At his Monday night FOI sessions, he put Fruit members through a two-hour-long “mishmash of drill, hygiene lectures, current events briefings, pep talks, physical exercise and miscellaneous instruction.” His legendary paranoia infected the ranks, as members were constantly instructed to look out for possible FBI informants. When Barnette urged him to dial down the rants, Clarence immediately accused him of being an “FBI spy.”

The push to increase sales of
Muhammad Speaks
sparked an already disgruntled Boston membership to open revolt. About fifty black businessmen—small merchants and entrepreneurs mostly—had joined the mosque in part for their enthusiasm for Louis X. They didn’t mind the weekly payments to sustain officials’ salaries and to cover administrative costs. But they balked when told they were each to sell two hundred copies of
Muhammad Speaks
at fifteen cents per issue, and that they’d be responsible for a full financial account whether or not the papers were sold. Elijah Muhammad, Jr., by then the FOI's assistant supreme captain, flew to Boston to quell potential dissent, warning Boston’s Fruit that “if you don’t want to sell the paper, then don’t even bother to come in here. I’m the judge tonight, and you are guilty.” He even reminded members “that in the old days recalcitrant brothers were killed.”

The threats and physical intimidation backfired. Within days, forty-two men, all businessmen, resigned from the mosque. Faced with shrinking membership and commensurately shrinking income, Louis X announced a “general amnesty” and invited all those who had left the mosque to attend a meeting. He promised them that the newspaper quotas would no longer be enforced, and that Clarence was out. But when the Chicago headquarters learned about Louis’s leniency, he was overruled. Two days later, Louis spoke to the entire mosque: “Some of you seem to have misunderstood me.” Upon learning that nothing had changed, Barnette immediately walked out, never to return to the mosque. But matters weren’t finished as far as Captain Clarence was concerned. Months later, as Barnette and another ex-Muslim drove past the mosque on a busy Roxbury street, a pink Cadillac pulled from the curb and cut in front of Barnette’s car. Six or more Muslims rushed both sides of Barnette’s blocked automobile, pulling the two men out. In plain daylight and in public, Barnette and the second man, John Thomas, were punched, kicked, and stomped repeatedly. Barnette suffered a broken ankle, a fractured vertebra, fractured ribs, damaged kidneys, and internal bleeding, placing him in the hospital for a week. “I believe we were beaten as punishment for quitting and also as a warning to keep our mouths shut,” he said.