Malcolm X (85 page)

The prosecution’s star witness was Cary 2X Thomas (also known as Abdul Malik). Born in New York City in 1930, by his mid-twenties he had become a heroin addict and narcotics dealer. For years he was in and out of jail on drug charges, and in early 1963 was assigned to Bellevue Hospital after a nervous breakdown. In December of that year he joined Mosque No. 7, but soon left, siding with Malcolm in the split. Thomas’s extremely short tenure in the Nation meant that he knew relatively little about the organization, or the reasons for Malcolm’s separation. After detectives interviewed him, the district attorney’s office decided to arrest him as a material witness. For almost a year he was held in protective custody. On one occasion, highly disturbed, he set fire to his jail mattress.

In his original testimony to the grand jury, Thomas was one of the few OAAU members who claimed to have seen all three men—Hayer, Butler, and Johnson—at the murder. He explained that Butler and Johnson were the two who had tussled with each other while Hayer attacked Malcolm with the sawed-off shotgun. Since Hayer bore absolutely no physical resemblance to the shooter, the prosecutors and police persuaded Thomas to revise his testimony. At the 1966 trial, he was better prepared, insisting that Johnson, not Hayer, had wielded the shotgun; Hayer and Butler were the two handgun attackers. But he continued to make minor mistakes that undermined his testimony, for example, identifying Hayer as a member of Mosque No. 7; he also admitted to the jury that he had not actually seen guns in the hands of Butler or Hayer.

Butler struggled to understand how the assassination had actually occurred, and why he ended up being tried for the murder. He didn’t know Hayer, indeed had never met him. After his arrest, Butler sadly discovered that the Nation’s promises to him were empty. “Nobody took care of my children, nobody looked after my wife,” he complained. “I think that the people—the city, the state, the feds, whoever—they wanted this case closed, and they got somebody to say I was there and that I did it.” Butler, now out of prison, having served his sentence, insists “everybody know[s] there was four or five people involved. They didn’t go look for nobody else.”

As Johnson and Butler listened to the prosecution’s weak case being presented, they were brimming with confidence. There was no way, they believed, that the jury would convict them. Indeed, as the trial progressed, Hayer informed the court that Johnson and Butler were not involved in the assassination; he and three other men had committed the crime. Hayer even provided some accurate details. But Johnson correctly feared that these last-minute confessions would be used against him and Butler. Dermody effectively argued that Hayer was merely under orders by NOI bosses to sacrifice himself, in order to free his coassassins. Johnson’s attorneys also made things worse by putting up Charles Kenyatta as a defense witness. Johnson had extreme misgivings: “When they wanted to put Kenyatta on the stand to testify for me, I was against it. I never trusted Kenyatta—never.” Kenyatta had agreed to tell the jury that it would have been impossible for Butler and Johnson to enter the Grand Ballroom that afternoon, because both were well known as militant NOI members. Kenyatta also wanted to get into the public record his belief that an “internal left plot” was possibly responsible for Malcolm’s murder. However, under Dermody’s cross-examination, he also identified both Johnson and Butler as members of an NOI “hundred-man enforcing squad.”

Any chance for Johnson and Butler to be acquitted disintegrated with the appearance of Betty Shabazz. Betty had only briefly witnessed the actual shooting, so her testimony added only limited information. She described the chaos: “Everyone had fallen to the floor, chairs were on the floor, people were crawling around . . .” She’d pushed all her children under a bench and covered it with her body until things appeared to have settled down. A few minutes later she found Malcolm on his back on the stage. Dermody asked only a few questions, and the defense attorneys passed on cross-examining her. But as she walked slowly away from the witness stand, anger overwhelmed her and she clenched her fists in rage. Standing near the defense table, Betty cried out, “They killed my husband! They killed him!” As two court attendants quickly escorted the widow out, she continued murmuring her charges. Defense attorneys demanded a mistrial, but Judge Marks blandly instructed the jury to disregard Betty’s off-stand statements. As Johnson remembered the scene, Betty halted in front of the defense table “and started screaming and pointing at me: ‘They killed my husband!’ And that’s when the jury convicted me.”

Johnson was right. Hayer, Butler, and Johnson were all convicted of first-degree murder. On April 14, Judge Marks told each man that he would be incarcerated in a New York state prison for the remainder of his natural life. Peter L. F. Sabbatino, one of the defense attorneys, responded prophetically, “I don’t think that you have a solution here that history will support.”

The initial remaking of Malcolm’s posthumous image began, interestingly enough, with jazz musicians. John Coltrane, the most influential saxophone artist of the 1960s, was deeply influenced by Malcolm’s style of rhetoric and by his political philosophy of black nationalism. The new breed of musicians, emerging a generation after bebop, rejected political moderation and nonviolence; the anger and militancy identified with Malcolm captured their mood. For musician Archie Shepp, Malcolm inspired “innovations” in African-American music, making jazz an “extension of the black nationalist movement.” Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), recognizing the connections between black art and political protest, described Coltrane as the “Malcolm in the New Super Bop Fire.” Malcolm’s effective public presentations, his use of timing and the cadence of his speaking voice, were strikingly like jazz. As John Oliver Killens explained, “I have always thought of Malcolm X as an artist . . . but an artist of the spoken word.”

Malcolm’s popularity among millions of white Americans, however, began only with the publication, in late 1965, of
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
. After Doubleday’s cancellation of the book, Paul Reynolds had shopped the manuscript to other publishers, eventually securing a contract for Haley with the radical house Grove Press. The reviews of the narrative of Malcolm’s life were overwhelmingly positive. Eliot Fremont-Smith of the
New York Times
praised the
Autobiography
as a “brilliant, painful, important book. . . . As a document for our time, its insights may be crucial; its relevance cannot be doubted.” In the
Nation
, Truman Nelson declared, “its dead-level honesty, its passion, its exalted purpose, even its manifold unsolved ambiguities will make it stand as a monument to the most painful of truths.” But the most insightful commentary on Malcolm’s memoir was written by his former debating partner, Bayard Rustin. In the
Washington Post
, Rustin powerfully characterized the book as “the odyssey of an American Negro in search of his identity and place in society.” Rustin sharply disputed the notion that Malcolm was simply the product of the “Harlem ghetto”; the book’s initial chapters on Malcolm’s Midwestern childhood “are essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the plight of the American Negro.” There was much to criticize in Malcolm’s politics, and Rustin did not mince words. The black nationalism of groups like the Nation of Islam, he said, offers “an arena for struggle, for power and status-denied lower-class Negroes in the outside world.” It was here that Malcolm brought his intelligence and “his burning ambition to succeed.”

Rustin remained sharply critical of Malcolm’s “anti-Semitic comments” and former black nationalist views, but acknowledged that he was attempting to “turn a corner,” to assimilate into the civil rights mainstream. Had he been successful, Rustin observed, “he would have made an enormous contribution to the struggle for equal rights. As it was, his contribution was substantial. He brought hope and a measure of dignity to thousands of despairing ghetto Negroes.” Rustin, like Alex Haley, discounted the effectiveness of black nationalism as a potential force in challenging racial inequality. Both men misinterpreted Malcolm’s last frenetic year as an effort to gain respectability as an integrationist and liberal reformer, which was not an accurate or complete reading of him. Rustin’s characterization of Malcolm was designed to deny the militancy and radical potential of “field Negroes,” the black ghetto masses. Rustin wanted to make the point that Malcolm would have inevitably turned his back to the ghetto. “Malcolm’s life was tragic on a heroic scale. He had choices, but never took the easy or comfortable ones,” Rustin observed. Malcolm could have been “a successful lawyer, sipping cocktails with other members of the black bourgeoisie.” Rustin’s image of a transformed Malcolm was that of a pragmatic liberal, not a revolutionary. It was a vision that Haley shared, which is why the
Autobiography
does not read like a manifesto for black insurrection, but much more in the tradition of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. This may help to explain the enormous popularity of the
Autobiography
and its adoption into the curricula in hundreds of colleges and thousands of high schools. Between 1965 and 1977, the number of copies of the
Autobiography
sold worldwide exceeded six million.

During the next few years, the FBI would continue its surveillance of Charles Kenyatta, believing him to be a security risk. BOSS and the NYPD, however, considered him a reliable informant and developed a close working relationship with him. By late April 1965, Kenyatta was observed giving rambling speeches along 125th Street. And by early 1966 he had rejoined the Nation of Islam, probably to provide inside information about the sect to the police. In the late 1960s he started his own organization in Harlem, which proclaimed identification with Kenya’s Mau Mau revolt and the necessity to bring that level of black revolution to the United States. Simultaneously, Kenyatta continued to work closely and cordially as a BOSS informant. In fact, Kenyatta was so highly prized by the police that the NYPD urged the FBI to back off from its continuing surveillance of him. Kenyatta’s strength was in manipulating his own image as Malcolm’s right-hand man while collecting damaging information about other black groups. His true role as a disrupter became evident only with the availability of his FBI file in 2007. Financially, he also cashed in on his political kinship with Malcolm X for decades.

Benjamin 2X Goodman’s response to the assassination was, oddly, to blame the largely secular black audience for panicking, so allowing the killers to escape. “A Muslim audience,” he believed, “would not have panicked. It would have responded to the situation with military discipline, not like a herd of cattle in a thunderstorm.” He was convinced that, without the “stampede,” the “Muslim brothers . . . [would] probably have taken all five assassins.” He decided to retreat from political life, getting work with children’s educational programs through HARYOU, the Harlem-based federally funded advocacy program. Agreeing to meet with FBI agents on April 22, 1966, Goodman indicated that “on many occasions individuals [in NOI Mosque No. 7] have invited [him] to return to the faith as a teacher.” Benjamin admitted that he “truthfully has given it much consideration.” Rewriting history, he denied that Muslim Mosque, Inc., had ever opposed “the basic aims and objectives” of the Nation of Islam. During the interview, he promised naively that he would always be “a brother” to one FBI agent, but that he would not exchange information for money. New York’s FBI special agent in charge, reporting to Hoover, observed, “This indicates that Goodman, if properly and delicately handled, can be influenced to return to the NOI, assuming his Assistant Ministership and possibly move up to the minister capacity and be of extremely valuable assistance to the Bureau.” Unfortunately for the FBI, Benjamin never rejoined the Nation, and he eventually, like Malcolm, embraced orthodox Islam.

It did not take many days of hiding out in the Mexican desert for Reuben Francis and Anas Luqman to become intensely suspicious of the two ex-NOI members with whom they had gone south to escape police attention after the assassination. Yet Luqman was deliberately vague about what actually happened next, when tensions spiraled out of control and violence flared. Luqman admitted only that when the group decided to split up, things fell apart. There was an altercation and the dead body of an ex-NOI member was left in the desert. One ex-NOI member named John, according to Luqman, “went off, got broke, and couldn’t handle it.” Luqman said he subsequently purchased a fishing boat, and he and Reuben managed to live for a time from the proceeds from their catches. Eventually they parted company; Luqman believes Reuben eventually went back to New York City. The story is a strange one from the start, as Francis’s denunciations of James 67X were well known, and Luqman was James’s best friend and roommate. Was Francis the man who was murdered in the Mexican desert? Since 1965, rumors of his appearance have popped up occasionally, but no credible evidence placing him in the United States—or anywhere else—has emerged.