The autobiography of Malcolm X (63 page)

Deputy Police Commissioner Walter Arm stressed that the department had made efforts to protect Malcolm X. Twenty different times the department had offered protection to Malcolm X or to some of his assistants, and the protection was refused, said Commissioner Arm, and seventeen times uniformed police guards had been offered for the OAAU meetings at the Audubon Ballroom, the most recent time being “last Sunday.” Asked about the pistol permit that Malcolm X had said publicly he planned to request, Commissioner Arm said that as far as he knew, Malcolm X had never actually filed a request.

A number of questions have been raised. The “suspect” arrested by Patrolman Hoy as he was being chased from the meeting has, at present writing, not been identified publicly. Deputy Police Commissioner Walter Arm's statement that Malcolm X refused police protection conflicts directly with the statements of many of his associates that during the week preceding his assassination Malcolm X complained repeatedly that the police would not take his requests for protection seriously. Finally, although police sources said that a special detail of twenty men had been assigned to the meeting and that it had even been attended by agents of the Bureau of Special Services, these men were nowherein evidence during or after the assassination, and Talmadge Hayer, rescued from the crowd and arrested as a suspect immediately after the assassination, was picked up by two patrolmen in a squad car cruising by.

On long-distance telephones, reporters reached the Chicago mansion headquarters of Elijah Muhammad. He would not come to the telephone, but a spokesman of his said that Muhammad “has no comment today, but he might have something to say tomorrow.” No statement could be obtained either from Malcolm X's oldest brother, Wilfred X, the Black Muslim minister of Mosque Number 1 in Detroit. At his home, a woman told reporters that Minister Wilfred X was not there, that he had not gone to New York, and she didn't believe he had any plans to do so. (Minister Wilfred X, reached later, said that he anticipated attending the Black Muslim convention in Chicago on the following Sunday, and regarding his brother, “My brother is dead and there is nothing we can do to bring him back.”)

As dark fell, many Negro men and women assembled before Louis Michaux's bookstore, where most of Harlem's Black Nationalist public activity centered. A small group of OAAU members

opened their Hotel Theresa headquarters and sat in the room and would not make any statements to reporters.

The New York _Daily News_ came onto the newsstands with its cover page devoted to “Malcolm X Murdered” over the photograph of him being borne away on the stretcher, and a sub-caption, “Gunned Down at Rally.” In Long Island, where she had been taken just after her father's murder, six-year-old At-tallah carefully wrote a letter to him, “Dear Daddy, I love you so. O dear, O dear, I wish you wasn't dead.”

***

The body-still listed as “John Doe” because it had not yet been formally identified-had been moved late Sunday to the New York City Medical Examiner's office at 520 First Avenue. The autopsy confirmed that shotgun pellet wounds in the heart had killed Malcolm X. Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Milton Helpern said that death followed the first sawed-off shotgun blast which caused thirteen wounds in the heart and chest, and he said that .38 and .45 caliber bullet wounds in the thighs and legs evidenced that Malcolm X had been shot at after he had fallen. Monday morning the official identification was made at the Medical Examiner's office by Sister Betty, who was accompanied by Percy Sutton, Malcolm X's Boston half-sister Mrs. Ella Collins, and Joseph E. Hall, General Manager of the large Unity Funeral Home in Harlem. Leaving the Medical Examiner's office at about noon to go and complete funeral arrangements, Sister Betty told reporters, “No one believed what he said. They never took him seriously, even after the bombing of our home they said he did it himself!”

At the Unity Funeral Home on the east side of Eighth Avenue between 126th and 127th Streets, Sister Betty chose a six-foot-nine-inch bronze casket lined with egg-shell velvet. At her request, the funeral would be delayed until the following Saturday, five days away. The funeral home's manager Hall announced to the press that the body would be dressed in a business suit, and it would be put on view under a glass shield from Tuesday through Friday, then the Saturday services would be at a Harlem church.

Soon posted on the funeral home's directory was “El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.” In Brooklyn, orthodox Moslem Sheik Al-Hajh Daoud Ahmed Faisal of the Islamic Mission of America said that the delayed funeral services violated a Moslem practice that the sun should not set twice on a believer's body, that the Koran prescribed burial inside twenty-four hours if possible, and Moslems believed that when a body grows cold the soul leaves it and when the body is put into the earth it comes alive again.In Chicago, where policemen were watching all bus depots, railways, terminals, O'Hare Airport and highway entrances, Elijah Muhammad, under heavy guard in his three-story mansion, said, “Malcolm died according to his preaching. He seems to have taken weapons as his god. Therefore, we couldn't tolerate a man like that. He preached war. We preach peace. We are permitted to fight if we are attacked-that's the Scripture, the Koran, and the Bible, too. But we will never be the aggressor. I don't have the right to be frightened, because I was chosen by Allah. If Allah gives me up to the hands of the wicked, I am satisfied. My life is in the hands of Allah.” The grounds outside the mansion were patrolled by both Chicago police and Fruit of Islam bodyguards. More of both patrolled before the University of Islam high school, and the offices of the newspaper _Muhammad Speaks_.

Malcolm X's lawyer, Assemblyman Percy Sutton, said that the police now had the names of those whom Malcolm X had said planned to kill him. All over Harlem, reporters were interviewing people, and microphones were being put before the mouths of the man-in-the-street. At police precinct station houses, people being questioned were leaving by side entrances. Said Assistant Chief Inspector Joseph Coyle, in charge of Manhattan North detectives, “. . . . a well-planned conspiracy. We're doing a screening process of the four hundred people who were in the hall at the time.” Fifty detectives were on the case, he said, and he had been in touch with police in other cities.

Harlem was mostly asleep when around the Black Muslim Mosque Number 7, on the top floor of a four-story building at 116th Street and Lenox Avenue, an explosive sound at 2:15 A.M. ripped the night. Firemen were instantly summoned by the four policemen who had been guarding the sidewalk entrance to the mosque. Within a few minutes flames burst through the building's roof and leaped thirty feet into the air. For the next seven hours firemen would pour water into the building. On an adjacent roof they found an empty five-gallongasoline can, a brown, gasoline- stained shopping bag, and oily rags. Southbound IRT subway service was re-routed for a while, also three bus lines. At the spectacular five-alarm fire's height, a wall of the building collapsed; it smashed two fire engines at the curb and injured five firemen, one seriously, and also a pedestrian who had been across the street buying a newspaper. By daybreak, when the fire was declared “under control,” the Black Muslim mosque and the Gethsemane Church of God in Christ on the floor beneath it were gutted, and seven street-level stores, including the Black Muslim restaurant, were “total losses.” Fire Department sources said that replacing the ruined equipment would cost “around $50,000.” Joseph X of the Black Muslims, who once had been the immediate assistant of Malcolm X, said that Elijah Muhammad's followers had two alternative mosques to meet in, one in Brooklyn and the other in Queens, Long Island. Both these mosques were under continuous police guard.

Across the nation in San Francisco on Tuesday afternoon two policemen discovered a fire beginning in the San Francisco Black Muslim Mosque, and quickly extinguished it. Kerosene had been splashed on the sidewalk and door and set afire.

The body of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz originally had been scheduled to go on public view at 2:30 P.M. Tuesday. Crowds stood in line behind police barricades waiting to be admitted and the policemen wherever one looked included numerous patrol cars and even sharpshooters on the roofs around the Unity Funeral Home. But the telephoned bomb-threats which had begun shortly after noon made necessary two evacuations of the funeral home for bornb-squad searches, which proved futile. A search was conducted even in the 43rd Street offices of the _New York Times_ after a man telephoned complaining of an editorial about Malcolm X and said, “Your plant will be destroyed at four o'clock.”

At the funeral home in Harlem, policemen inspected all packages and floral pieces being delivered, as well as the large handbags of women mourners. It was 6:15 P.M. when a cordon of policemen arrived flanking Sister Betty and four close relatives and friends who entered the funeral home in a glare of flashbulbs. “She's a black Jacqueline Kennedy,” observed a white reporter. “She has class, she knows what to do and when, she handles herself beautifully.”

It was 7:10 P.M. when the family party emerged and left. After ten minutes, the first of the waiting public was admitted. Between then and an hour before midnight, two thousand people, including scores of whites, had filed past the open coffin in which the body lay dressed in a dark business suit, a white shirt and dark tie, with a small, oblong brass plate above it inscribed,

“El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz-May 19, 1925-Feb. 21, 1965.” ***

Malcolm X followers had been canvassing with growing anxiety for a Harlem church that would accept the Saturday funeral. Officials of several churches had refused, including a spokesman for the community's largest church, Abyssinian Baptist, of which Congressman-Reverend Adam Clayton Powell is the pastor; others which turned down requests, according to the _Amsterdam News_, included the Williams C.M.E. Church and The Refuge Temple of The Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Then the funeral was accepted by Bishop Alvin A. Childs for the Faith Temple, Church of God in Christ located at 147th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. The Faith Temple, a former movie theater which had been converted fifteen years previously, could seat a thousand in its auditorium and another seven hundred in its basement. Bishop Childs, who in 1964 had been elected as Harlem's “locality mayor,” told the press that it was “as a humanitarian gesture” that he

made his church available, and of Malcolm X,he said, “. . .a militant and vocal person. I did not agree with all of his philosophy, but this did not affect our friendship.” Shortly after the news became known, Bishop Childs and his wife began to receive the first of a succession of bomb threats telephoned both to the church and to their home.

Prominent Negro figures were being quoted by the various press media. The famed psychologist Dr. Kenneth B. Clark told _Jet_ magazine, “I had a deep respect for this man. I believe that he was sincerely groping to find a place in the fight for Civil Rights, on a level where he would be respected and understood fully. I looked forward to his growth along those lines. It doesn't matter so much about his past. It is tragic that he was cut down at the point when he seemed on the verge of achieving the position of respectability he sought.” A _New York Times_ correspondent in a London press conference quoted the author and dramatist James Baldwin, who thought the death of Malcolm X was “a major setback for the Negro movement.” Pointing at white reporters, Baldwin accused, “You did it. . . whoever did it was formed in the crucible of the Western world, of the American Republic!” European “rape” of Africa began racial problems and was therefore the beginning of the end for Malcolm X, Baldwin said.

The bookstore owner in Harlem, Louis Michaux, a major voice in the community, told the _Amsterdam News_, “It's things like the murder of Malcolm X that drive the masses closer together. He died in the same manner that Patrice Lumumba met his death in the Congo. . . . We must unite, not fight.”

“Malcolm X caused many young Negroes to take a new vision of themselves,” said Bayard Rustin, a main figure in organizing the March on Washington in 1963. A “third party” was suspected of killing Malcolm X by CORE'S National Director James Farmer, who said, “Malcolm's murder was calculated to produce more violence and murder and vengeance killings.” A few days later, asked for his opinion of a rumor circulating about that a “Red Chinese” plot broughtabout the murder, Farmer said, “I would not say it is impossible.”

“For the Negroes in America, the death of Malcolm X is the most portentous event since the deportation of Marcus Garvey in the 1920's,” said Dr. C. Eric Lincoln, author of _The Black Muslims in America_, who talked to the press at Brown University in Providence, R.I., where he was a visiting professor and research fellow. “I doubt there are 'international implications' in the slaying. The answer is closer to home. The answer is in the local struggle among contending rivals for leadership of the black masses, which are potentially the most volatile sub-group in America.” Said Roy Wilkins, Executive Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, “Master spell-binder that he was, Malcolm X in death cast a spell more far- flung and more disturbing than any he cast in life.”

The New York City police investigators who were pursuing the case were unhappy that Malcolm's followers had “not come forward” to aid the investigation. At police request, the press printed a telephone number, SW 5-8117, for “strictly confidential” information that anyone might offer concerning the slaying. The police had picked up and were holding Reuben Francis, described as a Malcolm X “bodyguard,” who was believed to be the person who had shot the suspected assassin Talmadge Hayer during the melee the previous Sunday at the Audubon Ballroom. Hayer remained in the Bellevue Prison Ward, awaiting surgery.