Malcolm X (46 page)

As work on the
Autobiography
progressed, Haley peppered his agent, Paul Reynolds, and his editors at Doubleday with requests of all sorts. On August 5, Haley informed Reynolds’s assistant that he should replace the designation “Co-authored by Alex Haley” with “As told to Alex Haley.” He explained in a letter that he was “sometimes awed by [Malcolm’s] skill as a demagogue,” but wanted to assert a clear separation between Malcolm’s political perspectives and his own. “‘Co-authoring with Malcolm X' would, to me, imply sharing his views—when mine are almost a complete antithesis of his.” One month later, after an “18-hour” session with Malcolm, Haley asked Reynolds for a five-hundred-dollar advance to fly to Chicago for an interview with Elijah Muhammad. Despite his many requests, work progressed slowly, and on September 22 Haley forwarded to Reynolds the book’s first two chapters. He was optimistic that he could complete the entire work by the end of October 1963. Still, he was having trouble working through the early phases of Malcolm’s life, and near the end of September he pressed Malcolm, trying to break through the minister's reserve and lingering mistrust. Haley urged him “to make more gripping your catharsis of decision involving Reginald. I must build up your regard and respect for [him] when the two of you were earlier in Harlem.” He pleaded with Malcolm to give him three consecutive days that week to collaborate on the book, arguing that “night sessions here, such as we had, will be the most productive.”

Malcolm also sought to present Elijah Muhammad’s views about black women in a positive light. This may explain the
New York Herald Tribune’
s feature story about Betty Shabazz, published on June 30, 1963. For her first press interview, Betty presented an impressive figure:

The reporter was informed that Muslim women avoided publicity. The primary tasks of NOI women were caring for their families and “obeying the moral tenets dictated to them by Elijah Muhammad.” Betty stated that MGT leader Ethel Sharrieff represented the standard by which Muslim women judged themselves. “All of us try in some ways to copy her,” Betty explained to the reporter. Betty was reticent to reveal basic facts about her own life, such as at which New York hospital she had been employed as a nurse. She admitted that she did not “know the Koran very well,” but said that she read “the history of black people” to her children. Both Betty and Malcolm presented themselves as loyal followers of Muhammad. But Malcolm added, “Elijah teaches us that no two people should stay together who can’t get along.”

The idea of organizing a march on Washington, D.C., was born in the Harlem office of A. Philip Randolph sometime in December 1962, when Bayard Rustin visited Randolph there. The two old friends began talking about the Negro March on Washington Movement of 1941 that had pressured the Roosevelt administration into an executive order that outlawed hiring discrimination by defense plants. That mass mobilization never culminated in an actual event, but now Rustin conceived of a new march on a more ambitious scale, climaxing with two days of public activities. His draft proposal emphasized the acceleration of “integration in the fields of education, housing, transportation and public accommodations” and “broad national government action . . . to meet the problem of unemployment, especially as it related to minority groups.” At the outset, CORE's Norman Hill was appointed director of field staff, traveling the country to build support at local levels, while SNCC would send John Lewis, its national chair, to represent the organization.

In the wake of his desegregation victory in Birmingham, Martin Luther King, Jr., also favored placing greater pressure on the Kennedy administration. For more than a year, he and the SCLC had pushed for a presidential order outlawing segregation. At first, King supported the tactics of simultaneous demonstrations to take place all over the country, but in the end was persuaded to support the Washington march. The more conservative wing of the black freedom struggle, the NAACP and National Urban League, was at best cool. Roy Wilkins demanded that Rustin be fired as coordinator because of his homosexuality and record of arrests. A compromise was reached, with Randolph accepting the public role of march chairman and Rustin, as vice chair, functioning essentially as executive director. The Kennedy administration was also deeply unhappy, fearing that the presence of several hundred thousand demonstrators on the National Mall might invite widespread violence. But Rustin recruited hundreds of out-of-uniform African-American police, who would be deployed as a barrier between the marchers and the mostly white D.C. police and National Park Service officers. As the project gathered momentum, some of the mobilization’s more radical demands were jettisoned to accommodate the support of organized labor and white liberal religious groups. The expanded presence of whites was just enough to convince a reluctant Kennedy administration to offer its endorsement.

Although the Nation of Islam was firmly opposed to the march’s integrationist goals, it would have been impossible for Malcolm not to have been affected by such an unprecedented mobilization. For one thing, Rustin’s headquarters was in Harlem—on West 130th Street. Throughout the summer, the black press speculated on whether the march would be successful, both in terms of turnout and in its ability to change Washington priorities. Despite the NOI's ban on participation in such demonstrations, Mosque No. 7 continued to be involved in similar activities. On June 29 it sponsored another major street rally, at the corner of Lenox Avenue and West 115th Street. The NOI's press release targeted “the Uncle-Tom Negro leaders” for doing little to halt “the dope traffic, alcoholism, gambling, prostitution, and other forms of organized crime . . . destroying the very moral fiber of the Black Community.” Despite such strident attacks, Malcolm extended speaking invitations to NAACP head Roy Wilkins, National Urban League director Whitney Young, CORE's James Farmer, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Only Powell seems to have responded, indicating that business commitments made it impossible for him to address the rally. The program brought out about two thousand people. The attitude of the NYPD was that of mild harassment, and FOI members were dispatched to the rooftops to observe both crowd and cops.

On July 13, Mosque No. 7 threw a large banquet to celebrate a formal visit from the youngest son of Elijah Muhammad, Akbar Muhammad, and his wife, Harriet. The couple was in the process of returning home after a two-year stay in Cairo, where the twenty-five-year-old Akbar had been a student of Islamic jurisprudence. His arrival pleased Malcolm. After Wallace, Akbar had come to be counted first among Malcolm’s allies in Muhammad’s family. The youngest of the Messenger's children, he found that his time in the Middle East had accomplished for him what prison had done for Wallace: basically, completely disabuse him of any belief in his father's peculiar brand of Islam. Two days after his arrival in New York, the NOI held another public rally, drawing a crowd of four thousand, and Akbar was invited to speak. His talk had been advertised as a “Special Report on Africa for the People of Harlem, but once on his feet he called for a comprehensive united front of African Americans.” “We must have unity among Negroes,” he told the crowd. “It is time for all of us—CORE, the NAACP, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Black Muslims—to sit down together. . . . We must stop calling Dr. King names, and he must stop talking about us before the enemy.” For Akbar, the distinction between black separatism, symbolized by his father, and racial integration was secondary to the need to force coalitions. If such unity could be achieved, leaders of independent African states were “ready to help us win our freedom.”

Akbar then made an extraordinary comment, sending murmurs through the crowd and certainly drawing Malcolm’s complete attention. “I don’t hate any man because of the color of his skin,” he declared. “I look at a man’s heart, I watch his actions, and I make my conclusions on the basis of what he does, rather than how he looks.” Listening to the speech, Louis Lomax recalled that Malcolm had preached a similar approach several years earlier, but he had also continued to denigrate King and other civil rights leaders. Akbar Muhammad’s address marked a potential schism. Here was a son of the Messenger, the one who had most thoroughly immersed himself in the world of orthodox Islam, offering a clear refutation of the very foundation of the Nation’s theology. Akbar’s position, said Lomax, “reflects the Arabs’ involvement with black unity throughout the world. . . . Malcolm X is closer to Elijah Muhammad, in terms of just what the American Negro should do, than is Elijah’s own son.” Akbar's emergence meant that “the Black Muslims will become more 'Islamic' and more ‘political’ in the days just ahead.”

Though Akbar's speech challenged Nation of Islam orthodoxy far more directly than Malcolm had ever dared, Malcolm was well aware that the NOI's pace of Islamization had to be accelerated. He had been forced to continue his public defense of the Nation’s religious legitimacy, as more and more orthodox Muslims came forward to challenge the sect’s racial exclusivity. On July 15, the
Chicago Defender
published a story on Egypt’s powerful Muslim League, which “flatly disagrees with the anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-Jew, and anti-integration preachments of America’s Black Muslims.” The story also cited complaints from the Jami’at al-Islam Humanitarian Foundation of the United States, whose director, Ahmad Kamal, characterized Elijah Muhammad’s views as “anti-Muslim.” To this, Elijah Muhammad responded personally and forcefully: “Neither Jeddah nor Mecca have sent me! I am sent from Allah and not from the Secretary General of the Muslim League. There is no Muslim in Arabia that has authority to stop me from delivering this message that I have been assigned to.”

As the summer progressed, Malcolm stepped up his involvement with on-the-ground demonstrations in support of civil rights. On July 22 he attended the picketing of a Brooklyn hospital construction site by more than a thousand workers who charged racial discrimination in the building industry. Hundreds of picketers began blocking huge construction trucks beginning at seven a.m. and the demonstration continued for nine hours; although the protesters observed nonviolent tactics, three hundred of them were dragged away by police. Malcolm carefully stood across the street, but he shook hands and expressed his support with participants. When asked by journalists why he wasn’t directly involved, he evaded the issue: “It would not be fair. You would see a different situation here. We would never let these policemen put us into those paddy wagons.” Joining him at a second demonstration was playwright/actor Ossie Davis, who briefly blocked the access of one construction truck. Malcolm brought along a 35-millimeter camera and busied himself taking photographs. “If there were no captions for these pictures, you’d think this was Mississippi or Nazi Germany,” he informed one
New York Times
reporter. “Only difference between the Gestapo and the New York police is that this is 1963.” Five days later, he turned up at a civil rights rally in Brooklyn that brought out more than three hundred people. Addressing the crowd, Malcolm emphasized the need for “unity” and said that there were “no real differences” between the various civil rights groups.

The March on Washington was scheduled for August 28, and as it approached, Malcolm’s increased involvement in the business of pickets and protests began to expose yet another weakness in the Nation’s ideology. For years, mainstream civil rights leaders like Rustin and Farmer had criticized the NOI for having no real political plan. Now, as black activists increasingly found themselves facing the business end of billy clubs and fire hoses, the Nation risked further revealing itself as unable to live up to its militant rhetoric. For years, Malcolm had warned listeners not to underestimate the Muslims; he consistently told anyone who would listen that while his people were to be cooperative with police, if a Muslim was physically assaulted or attacked, it would bring down a rain of retributive violence. At an FOI meeting at the end of July that summer, he talked about the problem of police brutality. “When the NOI demonstrates, it demonstrates all the way.” He told the Fruit that while he did not publicly say so, he believed in violence to defend his rights, even claiming that he was prepared to “use his teeth” if he had to protect himself. Yet for all his talk of willingness to use violence, the only real damage the Nation had inflicted in the past half decade had targeted its own misbehaving members. It was a contradiction that increasingly troubled Malcolm.

Still, he could point to some progress, certainly in terms of his increased recognition. His many media appearances and his public activities in the D.C. area even caught the attention of President Kennedy, who, referring to a controversy over the TFX fighter plane in early June, quipped, “We have had an interesting six months . . . with TFX and now we are going to have his brother Malcolm for the next six.” Muhammad continued to monitor these public addresses by his star lieutenant. It was now difficult for him to restrain Malcolm from tackling political issues, given Akbar's speech, which had been widely covered. But he continued to be troubled by Malcolm’s frequent criticisms of Kennedy, who despite his administration’s sluggish record on civil rights remained popular among blacks. In a letter to Malcolm dated August 1, Muhammad advised, “Be careful about mentioning Kennedy in your talks and printed matters by name; use U.S.A. or the American Government.”