At Canaan's Edge (51 page)

Race propelled family issues to the forefront of national politics. Gender terms sprang into headlines from Moynihan's opening section that identified matriarchy as the lead indicator of a ghetto deprivation he called pathological. “The very essence of the male animal, from the bantam rooster to the four-star general, is to strut,” declared the report. “Indeed, in 19th century America, a particular type of exaggerated male boastfulness became almost a national style. Not for the Negro male. The ‘sassy nigger' was lynched.”

Pauli Murray of Yale, still working on the federal lawsuit to overturn Alabama's blanket exclusion of women from jury service, raised an isolated howl against suggestions that women were hogging the few positions of relative advantage. It was “bitterly ironic,” she wrote
Newsweek,
“that Negro women should be impliedly censured for their efforts to overcome a handicap not of their own making.” Those women who did push past double discrimination by race and sex into middle-class prospects faced a chronically severe deficit of comparably situated Negro marriage partners, which to Murray made the female-headed household a desperate, heroic adaptation rather than a preference or sickness. Bayard Rustin objected more generally that for two centuries black families had been denied human status, let alone recognition or protection under state laws, in order to safeguard the property rights and breeding prerogatives of slave owners. “It is amazing to me that Negro families exist at all,” he said bluntly. King tried to salvage hope from a past he called too “ghastly” for words. “No one in all history had to fight against so many psychological and physical horrors to have a family life,” he said in a New York speech, recalling reproachful questions about why he allowed small children to suffer the trauma of jail-bound demonstrations: “The answer is simple: Our children and our families are maimed a little every day of their lives.”

Articles about Moynihan poured that autumn from opinion journals—
Commonweal, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, Christianity and Crisis.
It made news that many Negroes felt insulted, which itself was new, and news again that Moynihan was nonplussed by the reaction. Few of the contending public voices were Negro or female. Most, including Moynihan, traced the high indices of broken Negro families to historical oppression, but the ambiguous drumbeat of social science spurred inferences of deviant character to run free of analysis: “22.9 per cent of the city-dwelling Negro women who have ever been married are now divorced, separated, or deserted…explosive cycle of poverty…one Negro family in four is fatherless…welfare dependency…birth rate for Negroes is 40 per cent higher than for whites.” A pathology model subliminally reduced civil rights forces from intrepid agents of change to quarantined patients, while reasserting full diagnostic privilege for mainstream opinion makers. “Moynihan's facts were undisputed,” William Manchester later reflected in a survey history that captured an incoming mood, “but such was the Negro agony that year, and so shattering the impact of events on Negro pride, that blacks could not face them.”

FBI
BUGS MISSED
King in New York on the second weekend of November. John Malone, the New York special agent in charge, advised headquarters that functional devices were planted well ahead in the reserved rooms at the Astor when the target unaccountably checked in elsewhere, too late to plant substitutes. To dodge bureaucratic blame, Malone assured Hoover that he had scolded the New York Hilton for accepting King without a reservation, but the pinched hotel manager chose the government lecture over publicity for turning him away. By “physical surveillance” (snoopers) and subsequent collections, the Bureau sampled the range of worry yanking at the Hilton strategy sessions: King's just published commitment to a Chicago campaign (“Next Stop: The North,”
Saturday Review
); orders for the SCLC accountant to cooperate with an FBI audit of car purchases; fantasy speculation that Harry Belafonte might stave off the financial crisis with a benefit gala featuring remarried film stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton; multiple anxieties for the White House conference beginning Tuesday. “The government thinks the Moynihan report is priceless,” Stanley Levison remarked, adding that King must counter its misperceptions. Another wiretap caught the warning synopsis of a new runaway phenomenon. “Malcolm X wrote this book out of compulsion,” said Levison.

Consigned to nine months of oblivion in death, Malcolm's name just then achieved sudden and miraculous rebirth. Publisher Nelson Doubleday had pulled the finished autobiography from the presses within days of the grisly February assassination, announcing that he must forgo publication to spare company employees from terror and retribution from the inscrutable Black Muslim factions. A dozen major publishing firms subsequently spurned the orphaned manuscript, just as major organs of American culture buried Malcolm himself with a barbed shortage of funeral charity. The
Washington Post
bid riddance to “the spokesman of bitter racism.”
Newsweek
derided him for “blazing racist attacks on the ‘white devils' and his calls for an armed American Mau Mau.” Columnist Walter Winchell labeled him “a petty punk,” and the liberal
Nation
magazine faintly eulogized the “courageous leader of one segment of the Negro lunatic fringe.” Such disrepute drove Malcolm's posthumous project at last resort to the feisty Grove Press, known for defying obscenity restrictions to publish works by Henry Miller and the Marquis de Sade. Having survived a “banned in Boston” censorship drive against the 1964 edition of the D. H. Lawrence novel
Lady Chatterley's Lover,
Grove executives prepared
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
for the autumn of 1965 with special security precautions and private trepidation, standing ready to defend First Amendment rights. Editors at
The Saturday Evening Post
introduced their preview excerpt with a memorably backhanded promotion for the late author: “We shall be lucky if Malcolm X is not succeeded by even weirder and more virulent extremists.”

Then came the reviews. The
New York Times,
which had appraised Malcolm's “pitifully wasted life” in February—dusting away a “twisted man” marked by “ruthless and fanatical belief in violence”—hailed the autobiography on November 5 as “a brilliant, painful, important book.” Eliot Fremont-Smith declared in the bellwether notice that “with his death American Negroes lost their most able, articulate and compelling spokesman,” and reviewers elsewhere struck a similar tone of whiplash wonder. “The important word here is conversion,” wrote I. F. Stone for the November 11
New York Review of Books.
Malcolm's unsparing tale of his own serial conversions—“I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life,” began one of them—bowled over skeptics into a contagion of sustained sales that approached three million copies by the thirty-third printing of the Ballantine paperback in 1992, with translations into more than a dozen foreign languages.
Time
magazine scorned Malcolm at death as “an unashamed demagogue” whose “gospel was hatred,” but came to list his
Autobiography
in 1999 among the ten best nonfiction books of the twentieth century.

Like the Moynihan report, which omitted policy recommendations to concentrate on its thesis of family pathology, the
Autobiography
disregarded goals and ideas for reform. “It tells what happens to an intelligent Negro who discovers that he has, within American society, no future,” observed the
Times
review. “And it tells in the most powerful and precise terms what this really means—the systematized destruction of Negro self-esteem as an almost automatic function of white society.” Malcolm scorched the promise of American democracy. “I am not interested in becoming American,” he said, “because America is not interested in me.” Above any political ideology, he clung to the belief that only one force could dissolve racial hatred at the root—purified, nonsectarian Islam—but the
Autobiography
minimized this notion because ghostwriter Alex Haley and the Grove Press editors knew it would leave Americans cold.

The book's spirited struggle with doom seized an audience of classic breadth. Secularist reviewers, wearied by the pious mainstream of the civil rights movement, applauded the unflinching realism. “Here one may read, in the agony of this brilliant Negro's self-creation,” wrote I. F. Stone, “the agony of an entire people in their search for identity.” Yet theologian James Cone came to adopt Malcolm's honesty as a depth indicator of Christian faith. “As much as I am persuaded by the truth of the gospel of Jesus,” resolved Cone, soon to be the first black professor at Union Seminary in New York, “I am equally persuaded that living and preaching Jesus' gospel in America require the exacting test of Malcolm's nationalist critique.” Generations of young readers reacted more to the book's raw journey from pimp to martyr, embracing in Malcolm a passage of daring authenticity.

A
Newsweek
poll in the 1990s found that 82 percent of black Americans considered Malcolm X a quintessential “strong black male,” lifting him to approval numbers ten times his peak in life, and legions of young whites made him a crossover icon. The
Autobiography
charmed them with humble directness: “I became a bus boy at the Parker House in Boston.” White readers and “integration-hungry Negroes” braved merciless, edifying indictments safely on the page. “The white man is in no moral position to accuse anyone else of hate!” Malcolm wrote. “Yes, I will pull off that liberal's halo that he spends such efforts cultivating,” he added later. “I know nothing of the South. I am the creation of the northern white man and of his hypocritical attitude toward the Negro.” An underlying pleasure in urgent communication, which had driven Malcolm to lecture often at white colleges, softened the raging prose. The book, while contemptuous of nonviolent strategy, presented violence not as an instrument of progress or condition of manhood but as a melancholy fact of life, subordinate to the power of words. “I have never felt that I would live to become an old man,” wrote Malcolm. “Even before I was a Muslim—when I was a hustler in the ghetto jungle, then a criminal in prison—it always stayed on my mind that I would die a violent death.”

No one could have foreseen that the year of the Voting Rights Act would conclude in lasting effusions over “Negro matriarchy” and Malcolm X. Both aimed to penetrate the broken heart of race without suggesting salves or remedies. Both discarded in passing the nonviolent methods of the civil rights movement. One mingled the wobbliest and sharpest tools of social science to redefine the issue from a presumption that Americans “have gone beyond equal opportunity.” The other insisted flatly from the grave that race scarcely had budged, and that the benevolent white liberal was a fraud. “I don't care how nice one is to you,” wrote Malcolm X, “…almost never does he see you as he sees himself, as he sees his own kind.”

S
PLIT IMAGES
hovered over a changing landscape. Even sports remained white at Southern colleges until a lone basketball player made the Maryland roster in November. The first two Negro high school students were signing scholarships for Southeastern Conference football at Kentucky, though neither would ever play a game. (One quit after the other died of a broken back suffered in practice, which obliged the university to resolve suspicions of violent discrimination by teammates.) Shortsighted experts debated which Negroes and colleges might dare to step forward, while professional teams rushed ahead into newly integrated markets. By December, hastening to Atlanta behind the Milwaukee Braves, a new football franchise presold its 1966 tickets before receiving any players or even choosing its Falcons nickname. Comedian Danny Thomas helped organize a team called the Miami Dolphins.

Two drama series,
The F.B.I.
and
I Spy,
premiered in the fall television season to long-running popularity. One, under J. Edgar Hoover's detailed supervision, banned a list of unmanly sponsors such as deodorants and cleaning products, and featured agents who were never unbuttoned, surreptitious, ethnic, wrong, or lethal on the screen, nearly always winging suspects with a clean first shot. The other introduced young Bill Cosby as the first actor of color ever to star alongside whites, playing a Rhodes Scholar CIA officer disguised as the tennis trainer for Robert Culp while both chased down enemy spies. The
Los Angeles Times
praised Cosby's character as a “non-threatening Negro,” and only a few Southern cities refused the network feed.

Print observers noticed a fundamental shift in attitude toward urban areas. “No other nation hates its own cities,” wrote columnist TRB for
The New Republic.
“Only in the USA are suburbs afraid of their parents.” The editors of
Life
magazine prepared for December a double issue called “The U.S. City.” Half the spreads displayed dazzling lights, sophisticated people, and futuristic designs with matching headlines—“The Proud Shapes,” “Trains That Need No Wheels,” “Satellites, Megastructures, Platforms,” “Homework Done by Computer.” The other half showcased grim tenements and hungry children—“A Bitter and Insistent Plague,” “Racial Trap,” “Torn Family.” Scholar Herbert Gans observed more than a decade later that the
Life
issue marked an abrupt end to media celebrations of urban vitality, which traditionally overlooked or romanticized desperado street wars among the poor. Connotations of the word “city,” whose Greek root supplied the ancient concept and name for politics itself, sagged under impressions suffused with race.