Malcolm X (74 page)

Despite his many other obligations, Malcolm continued to make time available for Alex Haley. The journalist now understood the importance of Malcolm’s most recent reinvention, and it required him to expand the length of the
Autobiography
. In an October 1964 letter to Paul Reynolds, Haley had estimated that the book would be ready to hand over to Doubleday by late January 1965. “I am a little put-out,” Haley pouted, that Malcolm “has rather crossed up the project by, one, staying away so long and, two, his new conversion.” But Haley recognized that Malcolm’s embrace of Islamic orthodoxy might, after all, be beneficial to increased book sales and “intense interest in the Moslem countries where he is viewed as the most famous Orthodox Brother in America.” On November 19, Haley contacted Reynolds again, “happy to report” that Malcolm would be returning to the United States within the week. “So I am going to be on a plane Monday, to be awaiting him, to get the information I’ll need to write new final chapters.” Haley thus met with Malcolm several times in December 1964 and January 1965, incorporating his new views into the final chapters of the
Autobiography
. Surprisingly little about the OAAU was mentioned in the new material, however. On February 14, Haley reported to Reynolds that he was “deep into winding up Malcolm X's book. . . . You’ll have it prior [to] March . . . it’s a powerful book.”

Malcolm was increasingly a magnet for representatives of the freedom struggle, who no longer viewed him as a racial separatist. The end of 1964 marked a moment of convergence, when Malcolm’s move away from stark separatism brought him into alignment with elements of the civil rights movement that were growing increasingly radicalized. Had Malcolm continued to mainstream his views, it is unclear how he would have negotiated relations a few years later with the Black Panthers, a group born of much of the intellectual framework Malcolm had assembled in the early to mid-1960s. Yet in this moment, Malcolm found himself able to straddle both the most leftist elements of the struggle and the mainstream. Early in 1965, the Malcolm-minded Floyd McKissick took control of CORE from James Farmer, continuing the group’s decisive shift away from King’s nonviolent integrationist model. And in the months after Freedom Summer, SNCC, too, had splintered along similar lines, with the pacifist Bob Moses set against the increasingly radicalized Stokely Carmichael, who would subsequently join the Black Panthers and later form the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party. Near the end of 1964, a letter and attached money order had arrived at the OAAU's offices from future Panthers cofounder Bobby Seale, requesting a subscription to
Blacklash
.

Yet this period also saw Malcolm’s most concerted and successful effort to court the civil rights mainstream. Just before the new year, he received a delegation of thirty-seven teenagers from McComb, Mississippi, who had traveled to New York City on the sponsorship of the SNCC. Greeting the young people at his Hotel Theresa office, Malcolm urged them to think for themselves, applauding those who were committed to nonviolence but also insisting that “if black people alone are going to be the ones who are nonviolent, then it’s not fair.” He presented the OAAU as “a new approach,” rejecting traditional integrationist and separatist strategies in favor of “making our problem a world problem.” The plight of Mississippi could not be overcome by focusing narrowly just on its problems. “It is important for you to know that when you’re in Mississippi, you’re not alone. . . . You’ve got as much power on your side as the Ku Klux Klan has on its side.” Malcolm promised to send some of his militant followers to aid the freedom fighters. “We will organize brothers here in New York who know how to handle these kind of affairs,” he vowed, “and they’ll slip into Mississippi like Jesus slipped into Jerusalem.”

On Sunday, January 3, the OAAU's evening program at the Audubon Ballroom featured color films taken by Malcolm during his travels. Despite freezing weather, the program attracted a crowd of seven hundred. Two days later Malcolm visited Montreal for an unusual reason: he was to appear on the CBC television program
Front Page Challenge
. With a format similar to the 1950s U.S. television show
What’s My Line?
, guests answered questions from masked panelists, who attempted to guess their identities. Malcolm’s panelists were Gordon Sinclair, Betty Kennedy, and Charles Templeton. Why would he go on a television game show? Perhaps it was another means to generate funds for his family. Or perhaps it was a way to display his softer personality to a mass audience.

He also continued to expand his rhetoric on the internationalist connections between Asia, Africa, and black America. As the featured speaker at the Militant Labor Forum at Palm Gardens on January 7, he noted that Vietnamese rice farmers had successfully fought “against all the highly mechanized weapons of warfare” of the United States. China’s explosion of a nuclear bomb, he declared, “was a scientific breakthrough for the oppressed people of China.” The communist Chinese displayed “their advanced knowledge of science to the point where a country which is as backward as
this
country keeps saying China is, and so behind everybody, and so poor, could come up with an atomic bomb. I had to marvel at that.” He tied these developments to the legacies of imperialism and colonialism. Moise Tshombe, Malcolm explained, was an “agent of Western imperialism” in Africa, and he pointed out that in 1964 both Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, after years of effort, had successfully overthrown colonial powers, becoming independent Zambia and Malawi respectively. Taken together, these international events were all driven by the same global political forces, and African Americans’ issues had to be addressed within that same dynamic context.

Over the next few days, Malcolm wrote a series of letters to consolidate the OAAU as an international movement. From Carlos Moore, an anti-Castro black Cuban who had nevertheless assisted Malcolm during the week he was in Paris, Malcolm solicited help in starting an office there. In a friendly letter to Maya Angelou, Malcolm praised her critique against talking “over the head of the masses,” telling her that she was able to communicate with “plenty of [soul] and you always keep your feet firmly on the ground. This is what makes you,
you
.ʺ Without overt appeals, Malcolm’s letter so flattered Angelou that it accelerated her decision to give up her teaching position in Ghana immediately to join this man in whom she had placed her faith and hopes.

On January 17, Malcolm showed up at a Harlem public vigil of one thousand people, standing in heavy snow, demanding school desegregation. Though he was constantly on the watch for NOI attacks, he seems to have decided that significantly large crowds presented a stronger deterrent to violence. In this case, he may have also been persuaded by the fact that most of the protesters were white, which made an attack even more unlikely. Organized by EQUAL, a parents group, the protest began at four p.m. on Saturday afternoon and ended twenty-four hours later. Among those participating were the Reverend Milton Galamison and Dr. Arthur Logan of the advocacy group HARYOU (Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited), two black liberals whose favor Malcolm sought.

Yet although he had braved the cold and potential threats to be there, Malcolm’s comments about the effort reported by the
Times
were neither supportive nor encouraging. “Whites should spend more time influencing whites,” he advised. “These people have good intentions, but they are misdirected.” His complaint—that “Harlem doesn’t need to be told about integration”—largely missed the point.

Malcolm frequently ran into trouble like this in his speeches and remarks in early 1965, partly because he was trying to appeal to so many different constituencies. He took different tones and attitudes depending on which group he was speaking to, and often presented contradictory opinions only days apart. That he was not caught up in these contradictions more often owed to the fact that news traveled slowly across the country, that black politics were underreported, and that speeches were not regularly recorded. In his later speeches outside the United States, he was at his most revolutionary. There the Malcolm who sometimes advocated armed violence would appear, generating significant controversy, as would soon be the case in England. At home, he was more subdued, more conciliatory, yet on many occasions he would alternately praise King and other civil rights leaders one day and ridicule them and liberal Democrats the next. He also counted on the support of the Trotskyists, making overt appeals to them in speeches that seemed to be in support of a socialist system, often at the expense of building alliances to his ideological right. But Malcolm could not restrain himself, because he sincerely believed that blacks and other oppressed Americans had to break from the existing two-party system.

This balancing act partly explains his contradictions, but when it came to his ambivalence about King and movement liberals, Malcolm’s political beliefs may have led him to misunderstand the fundamental importance of the mainstream civil rights struggle to the large majority of black Americans. Whereas he, along with an increasingly large faction of the black left, criticized the flaws in the nonviolent approach, they did not acknowledge how rewarding even incremental progress was. In several speeches, Malcolm explained away Lyndon Johnson’s massive electoral mandate from millions of black voters by claiming that African Americans had been duped and “controlled by Uncle Tom leaders.” It apparently did not occur to him that great social change usually occurs through small transformations in individual behavior; that for blacks who had been denied voting rights for three generations, casting their ballots for reformist candidates wasn’t betraying the cause or being “held on the plantation by overseers.” To them, King was an emancipating figure, not an Uncle Tom.

He similarly misread the sentiment behind the EQUAL school desegregation rally. By 1965, the masses of black parents and children were fed up with substandard schools and the racial tracking of black and Latino children into remedial education. The vigil was part of a citywide struggle for educational reform. Social change that matters to most people occurs around practical issues they see every day, yet Malcolm still failed to appreciate the necessary connection between gradual reforms and revolutionary change.

That same weekend, Jack Barnes and Barry Sheppard of the Trotskyist Young Socialist Alliance interviewed Malcolm for the group’s publication,
Young Socialist
. In the resulting article, Malcolm explained why in recent months he had dropped the phrase “black nationalism” to describe his politics. During his first visit to Ghana the previous May, he had been impressed by the Algerian ambassador, “a revolutionary in the true sense of the word.” When told that Malcolm’s philosophy was “black nationalism,” the Algerian asked, “Where does that leave him? Where does that leave the revolutionaries of Morocco, Egypt, Iraq, Mauritania?” The phrase “black nationalism” was highly problematic in a global context, because it excluded too many “true revolutionaries.” This was the main reason that Malcolm increasingly sought refuge under the political rubric of Pan-Africanism. But he may also have recognized that there were enormous difficulties with this theoretical category as well, which ranged from the anticommunism of George Padmore to the angry Marxism-Leninism of Nkrumah in exile after 1966.

Despite his newfound reluctance at being described as a black nationalist, Malcolm still perceived political action in distinctly racial categories, which may further explain why he made no moves to integrate his groups. For example, when Barnes and Sheppard asked what contributions antiracist young whites and especially students could make, he urged them not to join Negro organizations. “Whites who are sincere should organize among themselves and figure out some strategy to break down the prejudice that exists in white communities.” In the year ahead, Malcolm predicted more blood in the streets, as white liberals and Negro moderates would fail to divert the social unrest brewing. “Negro leaders have lost their control over the people. So that when the people begin to explode—and their explosion is fully justified, not unjustified—the Negro leaders can’t contain it.”

The next day Malcolm flew to Toronto, to be the guest on the
Pierre Berton Show
on CFTO television. He resisted discussing Muhammad’s out-of-wedlock children, but still managed to castigate him as a false prophet. “When I ceased to respect him as a man,” he told Berton, “I could see that he was also not divine. There was no God with him at all.” Malcolm now claimed that God embraced Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike—“We all believe in the same God”—and denied that whites were “devils,” insisting “this is what Elijah Muhammad teaches. . . . A man should not be judged by the color of his skin but rather by his conscious behavior, by his actions.” Malcolm explicitly rejected the separatist political demand for a black state or nation, stating, “I believe in a society in which people can live like human beings on the basis of equality.” When Berton asked whether his guest still believed in the Nation of Islam’s eschatology of “an Armageddon,” Malcolm artfully turned this NOI theory into the language of revolution and Marxist class struggle: