Pillar of Fire (17 page)

In consciously repackaging himself, Powell aimed toward the black nationalist themes of the Nation of Islam. Powell and Malcolm X began appearing together more frequently, muting their differences to exhort a chorus of racial pride in their respective styles—Powell more saucy and confident, befitting his established fame, Malcolm more biting and original, drawing waves of applause. An edge of competition crept beneath their mutual exchanges of compliments. The notion that a Muslim might unseat the mighty fixture of Abyssinian in Congress was yet too preposterous even for Harlem gossip columns, but Powell's sharp antennae for opposition detected just such a possibility. Malcolm X, who did nurse ambitions in spite of the official Muslim disdain for electoral politics, dared to criticize Powell as a changeling. “It's hard to tell which direction Congressman Powell moves in,” he said. “He moves in one direction one minute and another direction another minute.” For his part, Powell announced that Malcolm was superfluous to his own leadership in New York. When Elijah Muhammad briefly transferred Malcolm from Harlem to Washington in May, Powell said Malcolm might fill a leadership vacuum among Washington's Negroes whereas Harlem was amply supplied.

Elijah Muhammad himself stirred the Powell-Malcolm rivalry through his control of the Muslim newspaper,
Muhammad Speaks
. Beginning that spring, Muhammad regularly lionized Powell in its pages as the one Negro politician Muslims could trust. Suddenly overlooked were Powell's former deficiencies as a lifelong Christian integrationist and vicemonger who openly flouted Baptist rules of conduct, much less the stricter Muslim regimen. Muhammad put Powell in
Muhammad Speaks
as a black nationalist hero just as he made Malcolm X slowly disappear.

 

L
ATE IN
A
PRIL
, the
New York Times
declared that the “new assertive mood” of the Black Muslims “lies behind” the prolonged jail campaigns in Greenwood, Mississippi, and Birmingham. This questionable interpretation stretched or even reversed the truth, but the nonviolent uprisings in the South were little more than a news pretext for a groundbreaking exploration into the rumblings of Negro politics in the North. M. S. “Mike” Handler, a senior but low-ranking obituary writer on the city desk, had built a maverick fascination with Malcolm X into a specialty that no other
Times
reporter coveted. Finally, Handler managed to squeeze a profile of black nationalism onto a back page of the
Times
. With gingerly, sober purpose, he introduced the notion that sophisticated Negro thinkers might resent rather than admire whites, and pricked the assumption of superior white values with the anecdote of a well-dressed Negro who thanked a white man for giving him a ride home, saying, “‘It was mighty black of you.'” Handler, like most observers outside the Nation of Islam, responded to Malcolm as a charismatic performer. His article dismissed Elijah Muhammad for lack of interest, accomplishing in print what neither conspiracy nor rumors of death had achieved inside the Nation: “Malcolm X, who is of impressive bearing and is endowed with a shrewd mind, today overshadows Elijah Muhammed [sic].”

Malcolm X called Phoenix to apologize for the
Times
article. He tried to excuse the reference to his overshadowing Elijah Muhammad as the divisive work of white devils, and almost supinely, he vowed to make amends by telling reporters henceforth that he submitted to orders not only from Elijah Muhammad but also from Elijah's family. The sheer cultural weight of the
Times
made its coverage important to Negroes and whites alike, opening up a huge potential audience outside the walls of Muhammad's temples. The media audience was Malcolm's—instant, volatile, and thus utterly different from the small membership that had accepted slow indoctrination into the mystique of Elijah Muhammad.

In May, seeking a quick Muslim reponse to the national trauma from Birmingham,
Life
magazine photographer Gordon Parks attended a karate class inside Malcolm's Temple No. 7 in New York. His most dramatic shot recorded what first appeared to be a blurry canine walking lightly on air around a Fred Astaire-like pirouette, but actually was a formally attired Muslim instructor who “shows how to deal with a live police dog like those used against demonstrating Negroes in Birmingham: grasp its leash, whirl it around in air, and the dog will surely strangle.” This image, mixed with homely scenes of Muslim families at prayer, would take most
Life
readers into disorienting new territory, and it was no less a strain for the leadership of the insular racial sect. On May 13, just after King and Shuttlesworth announced the breakthrough settlement, the FBI's Phoenix wiretap picked up Malcolm calling again in panicky apology to say he was doing his best to delay the article until
Life
could include more material on Elijah Muhammad. He promised Elijah to keep knocking down rumors of his retirement, but the Messenger was far from mollified. Word went out of Phoenix that the Nation wanted nothing to do with the
Life
article because it was “being built around Malcolm.”

 

T
HROUGH
L
IFE
and the
Times
, Birmingham helped deliver Malcolm X to greater attention at an awkward moment. He spent May shuttling between New York and the Stokes trial in Los Angeles—one foot sliding toward a future that was dangerous among his own people, the other anchored in the grim realities that had made him a Muslim. On May 20, when President Kennedy was complaining privately in the White House that Martin Luther King was as “hot” as Karl Marx, Malcolm found himself staring into the drawn revolvers of police officers when he arrived at the Los Angeles temple to address a defense rally for the ongoing Stokes trial. A police spokesman blandly explained the incident the next day as a mix-up growing out of an armed robbery investigation in the temple neighborhood. In fact, the Los Angeles Police Department was locked into a war of nerves. Commanders had instituted a special radio call—“Code 6-M”—to fortify police responses at any scene where Muslims were expected, and intelligence reports painted an alarming picture of Malcolm X as a guerrilla general whose nod at any moment could activate fanatics trained to attack police with their bare hands. Police vigilance followed Malcolm to his usual seat in the courtroom for the opening summation. The tense crowd remained silent until a rhetorical flourish late in the day, when prosecutor Kippen declared, “There is nothing about this case which has, in my opinion at least, racial overtones.” Laughter exploded in the courtroom. As Judge Coleman banged his gavel repeatedly for order, the prosecutor said he meant that the case was not racial like “the racial trouble that is going on at this time” elsewhere, meaning the South.

Two days later, senior prosecutor Evan Lewis opened his final argument by telling the jurors they would remember their part in “the Black Muslim Riot Case” if they lived to be a hundred. “And I think you have never heard of such a case as this in your reading of the newspapers in North America since the end of these Indian wars that they have on television all the time…. You actually expect to hear it somewhere in a clearing in the jungle in South America.” To answer the snickering that had greeted his partner's comment about race, Lewis waded into the subject explicity for the first time. If any defendants had ever been prosecuted because of race or religion, he said, “they ought to take the American flags out of the courtroom. It just can't be.” Any lingering racial trouble was not a matter of hatred or fear but “a matter of communication, actually,” and to say otherwise was to malign the city and distort the meaning of the trial. “I don't say that this represents our fine colored community,” said Lewis. “And we have a fine one here in Los Angeles.” If there were criminals disproportionately among them, “it is not the colored people that live here, that were raised up and grown in Los Angeles. It is probably some people from out of the South, who had had no opportunity, no chance at all….”

By afternoon, prosecutor Lewis addressed a messy flaw in the state's case against its chief target, the local Muslim minister John X Morris. Against the unanimous testimony of both Muslim and police witnesses that Morris remained in or near the Muslim temple on the night of the violence, the indictment charged that Morris not only joined several fights but actually went down the street to shoot Officer Tomlinson. These counts rested on the evidence of William Tribble, the well-meaning motorist who had stopped to fire the first gunshots in a hapless effort to quell the brawl. On the stand, Tribble had misidentified or misdescribed Morris numerous times and otherwise impeached himself as an overly cooperative, confused witness, but prosecutor Lewis rolled out a theory to support what was left of the central charges. “Now, without going into this matter of race at all again,” he told the jury, “it is obvious it is easier for a person that is Japanese, for example, to recognize Japanese people, or a Chinaman to recognize Chinese, or a colored person to recognize a colored person…. I can't tell generally a Chinaman from a Japanese. I can't tell one colored person from another. But if you are used to dealing with colored people, it is different.” From there, Lewis made his immediate point that an identification based on common race could make up for glaring deficiencies in evidence. “Mr. Tribble was colored and he said he had seen Mr. Morris before,” he declared. “He positively said that Mr. Morris is the man.”

Once loosed, racial observations slipped from the prosecutor's tongue with wildly erratic implications. He forthrightly rebutted defense claims that white policemen were routinely abusive to Negroes, for instance, on the ground that such conduct would be too dangerous. “I can't see an officer in that area saying nigger,” Lewis told the jury. “He would be beaten up within the first twenty-four hours he was on the job—and I wouldn't blame them—if he called somebody a name like that.” As an alternative to this perspective, which brushed close to defense theories of the entire case, Lewis asserted that racial epithets were extinct, anyway. “So many people were so fine in the war, and so many got to know each other, that we just dropped those words,” he said. “They were dropped out of the vocabulary.” More traditionally, Lewis said that apparent misconduct was extraneous to the case and not racially motivated, coming from “pure meanness” on the part of “one or two officers who were pretty sour.” Returning to frontier imagery, he told the jurors that the officers' only alternative that night was to have “thrown their guns down and surrendered and pleaded for mercy.”

On May 24, when the Kennedy-Baldwin meeting fell to social disaster in New York and the Stokes case went to the jury, Malcolm X sent a careful letter of concession to Elijah Muhammad in Phoenix, with veiled reminders of his charges. On May 28, Muhammad replied that he had received Malcolm's letter and was pleased that Malcolm had “admitted certain things.” He said they should not allow themselves to be divided, and signed off enigmatically by advising Malcolm to “concentrate on the spiritual side.” Muhammad's power reversed the burden of Malcom's corruption allegations for an uneasy truce that paralleled the tensions of an astonishingly long Stokes deliberation of nearly three weeks, during which one juror collapsed of a heart attack. The final verdict acquitted three defendants, including Minister John X Morris, which contradicted Muhammad's doctrine that there could be no justice from “the white man's court.” Criminal convictions for the other eleven Muslims mocked his passive response, and the subsequent conduct of jurors was as startling as the defendants' posture of saintly nonviolence during the trial. Nearly half the jury mounted a campaign against their own verdict. Female dissenters—white, mostly suburban—complained to both sets of attorneys that L.A. officials had browbeaten them in the jury room. Six jurors eventually gave Judge Coleman a joint letter of recantation, saying “we do not think justice was done.”

The saga of the renegade jurors never caught on as a story in the press or legal issue in the courts of appeal. More than a year after the shootings, the Stokes case remained the leading story in
Muhammad Speaks
and a principal engine of the Nation's financial growth, but Muslims themselves slanted or avoided interpretation. Malcolm X covered his private vexation with blistering rhetoric. “It will take fire to straighten out the white man!” he cried out at a rally protesting the convictions. “Fire from God!” He soon discarded as a lecture prop his giant photograph of the grisly Los Angeles shooting scene, and with few exceptions phased out the Stokes case from his public speeches, as later from his autobiography. The entire episode was at once too vivid and too muddled.

 

M
ARTIN
L
UTHER
K
ING
needed no coaching to avoid the subject when he passed through Los Angeles during the last week of the trial. For the most part, he sailed high above the derelict stigma of that courtroom. His national tour earned the movement the astronomical sum of $150,000 in a week—including so much from a single Beverly Hills fund-raiser that a friend said movie stars kept the $45,000 figure out of the newspapers to protect the film industry. Privately, King did welcome what he called “a feeling of nationalism” everywhere, including Los Angeles, where the Stokes case and the amazing church rallies of Malcolm X were too risky to explain across cultural lines. “The Negro element is really aroused,” he said.