Pillar of Fire (41 page)

Hoover, professing to be sickened by what headquarters called “vilification of the late President and his wife,” safely skewered three nemeses at once. Using King's unguarded rage,
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which pierced his own reputation along with the national reverence for the dead Kennedy, Hoover aimed a dart for the eye of the surviving brother, the Attorney General, who returned the memo to Evans with a terse, vacant comment that it was very helpful. Kennedy sent King a standard letter of “deep personal appreciation” for his candid oral history about President Kennedy's life.

M
ALCOLM
X bolted upright in his car when he heard Elijah Muhammad's raspy voice say on Harlem radio station WWRL that the name Clay lacked “divine meaning.” Over a nationwide hookup of Negro stations, the Messenger announced: “Muhammad Ali is what I will give to him, as long as he believes in Allah and follows me.”

“That's political!” exclaimed Malcolm. “That's a political move! He did it to prevent him from coming with me.” Only that afternoon, Malcolm had taken liberties with the Nation's formal admission procedure to introduce the new heavyweight champion as Cassius X Clay, explaining to a U.N. press conference that the “X” stood for an identity lost to slavery. Now Elijah trumped Malcolm by exercising his prerogative to choose and bestow a “completed” Islamic holy name. To aspirants within the Nation of Islam, the award signified life's supreme achievement, reached so far by few of the most steadfastly devout pioneer Muslims from the 1930s. Malcolm's passengers knew that their troubled mentor was under punishment, and as insiders they were realistic enough to accept that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad could make a celebrity exception for the boxer. Still, the open disrespect in Malcolm's outburst was disorienting, and reduced them to awkward silence.

This was late evening on March 6—the Friday when Robert Hayling drove across Florida to appeal for Martin Luther King's help in St. Augustine. Malcolm wheeled around on St. Nicholas Avenue and headed back toward his home in Queens, hoping in vain to reach the champion before the news swept him off his feet. (“I am honored,” the new Muhammad Ali told reporters who found him at his New York hotel.) When a police car intercepted Malcolm on the Triborough Bridge, he pointed confidently to a Bible as proof that he was in a hurry to preach a religious message. Malcolm and each of his assistant ministers always traveled with a Judeo-Christian Bible on the dashboard for just such emergencies, but for once neither the prop nor Malcolm's impressive ministerial diction staved off a speeding ticket.

Ten days earlier, Malcolm had retreated overnight from Miami to placate the frightened, irascible boxing promoter Bill MacDonald, who, rightly fearing that Clay's mismatched, half-sold title fight stood to lose money, confronted the challenger with rumors of his connections to unpatriotic, anti-white Muslims. “Don't start hitting me with the Constitution!” MacDonald shouted at Clay's representatives. “This is the South.” With hints of the truth already seeping into the news, MacDonald briefly canceled the fight for fear that Clay's open association with the notorious Malcolm X would ruin him. To revive the bout in crisis, Malcolm left town on MacDonald's reluctant agreement that he could return for the actual event on February 25.

In a straw poll, all but three of fifty-eight ringside reporters anticipated a swift knockout by the ferocious champion, Sonny Listen, who had flattened his previous three opponents in the first round. Mindful of the weak box office and lackluster competition, editors of the
New York Times
sent a feature writer rather than a sports reporter to Miami, with instructions to learn in advance where Clay might be sent for hospital repairs. Instead, Clay's jubilant leaps and his manic, trademark shouts that he was the greatest and prettiest clashed with stony disbelief—even charges of fraud—when Liston did not answer the bell for the seventh round, and shock soon spilled beyond the world of boxing. The new champion spurned a lavish victory party at the Fontainebleau Hotel to disappear that night across Biscayne Bay into Negro Miami, telling confidants he wanted to spare reporters the “heart attack” of discovering that his idea of celebration was to retreat into Malcolm X's motel room for vanilla ice cream and Muslim prayer. (Informants soon told the FBI that Malcolm hosted singer Sam Cooke and pro football star Jim Brown, too, stirring fears that the Muslims were infiltrating black entertainment as a whole.) The next morning, after stuffing cotton into his doorbell to ward off those who had tracked him there by daybreak, Clay did appear for a tumultuous press conference, newly subdued and accompanied by Malcolm X. As he made his way through the crowd to leave, someone blurted out the accusing question: “Are you a card-carrying member of the Black Muslims?”

“Card-carrying? What does that mean?” Clay replied. His comments, while generally friendly to world Islam (“Followers of Allah are the sweetest people in the world. They don't carry knives”), were evasive enough to contain the story another day (“Muslim Story Irks Cassius”).

Outside the Chicago Coliseum that afternoon, a long line of Muslims and a few white reporters stretched along South Wabash Avenue for the strict security search to gain entry to the annual Savior's Day convention. Malcolm X, who had presided the previous year, was conspicuously absent and unmentioned under edict of silence. In his place, Louis X of Boston introduced a procession of ministers for speeches of tribute to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad: James X of Newark gave thanks for being lifted from the gutter, Lonnie X of Washington for lessons of congruity between life, Islam, and mathematics. Minister Louis “whipped the crowd of 4,000 into hysteria in preparation for Mr. Muhammad's speech,” according to Mike Handler's eyewitness account in the back pages of the
New York Times
, and the appearance of the frail Muhammad in his velvet fez touched off bedlam. “I have been given the keys to heaven,” he declared in an asthmatic wheeze, and he electrified his audience by announcing that Cassius Clay indeed was his follower. Together with Allah, said Muhammad, he had caused the young boxer to win the world crown because of his Muslim faith.

Muhammad's statement was on the news wires before reporters in Miami found champion Clay at breakfast with Malcolm X on Thursday, two mornings after the fight. Flushed into the open, Clay used one of Malcolm's animal metaphors to speak glowingly of his conversion. “A rooster crows only when it sees the light,” he said. “Put him in the dark and he'll never crow. I have seen the light and I'm crowing.” All day long, his words stunned the sportswriters like blows to the solar plexus, knocking them from traditional pugilist banter on bums and heroes. Malcolm X interrupted to defend Clay,
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and the champion himself tried to deflect indignant questions about anti-white religion by stressing his preference for racial separation and his deep personal fear of the civil rights movement. “I don't want to be blown up,” he said. “I don't want to be washed down sewers. I just want to be happy with my own kind.” Flustered sportswriters insisted that Clay was ruining himself, and predicted correctly that boxing would move to revoke his title.

Malcolm returned to New York on the wave of Clay's triumph, only to collide with Captain Joseph on his homecoming from the Chicago convention. On the last day of February, the two old colleagues were careful to discuss their differences privately in a car. Joseph objected to a fresh story in the
New York Times
, “Malcolm X's Role Dividing Muslims,” saying that Malcolm could not hope for reinstatement while he expressed disloyalty to Elijah Muhammad. They argued over motivation and responsibility. Joseph did not contest Malcolm's facts, conceding that the minister of meticulous “homework” might be correct in his charges of corruption, but, as a soldier, Joseph demanded that Malcolm sacrifice to help their leader. “Now's the time to stand with the man,” he said, insisting that the Nation was nothing without Muhammad.

“Aw, man, the Nation is finished,” Malcolm replied. “You can forget about it.”

Captain Joseph glared at his former teacher, but said politely, “I don't agree with you.”

Within a day or two, Lukman X, a distraught member of Malcolm's Temple No. 7 came to him with news that Captain Joseph had ordered him to wire Malcolm's car with a bomb. Lukman confessed the plot instead. Malcolm knew that Lukman, who claimed to have fought with Fidel Castro in the Cuban revolution, had the background in demolitions for the assignment, but he also knew that it made him suspect as a possible police agent. If Malcolm believed Lukman, did Joseph really intend to kill him, or could he have assumed that Lukman would inform Malcolm? Was the order a warning, or a test to see whether Malcolm would report the threat to his despised superiors in Chicago, as required by the Nation's rules?

The new heavyweight champion checked into Harlem's Hotel Theresa on Sunday afternoon, March 1, and went straight into private conference there with Malcolm X. Although he arrived grandly in a chauffeur-driven Cadillac, Clay complained bitterly that he had been barred from restaurants and restrooms during his two-day drive (being afraid of airplanes) from Miami through the segregated South. He later composed some playful verse about his humiliation: “Man, it was really a letdown drag/For all those miles I had to eat out of a bag.” Malcolm tried to soften the naive Clay's introduction to hidden dangers within the authoritarian sect, and suggested that it might be possible to fight against segregation and still preserve the independence of Muslim culture. Overnight, he leaked word to the Negro press that Clay might join him on such a course, which went against Elijah Muhammad's teaching of aloofness from a doomed white world.

Crowds mobbed them on a night stroll through Times Square. “Malcolm X got more requests for his autograph than I did,” a beaming Clay told reporters. “
He's
the greatest.” Malcolm took Clay to look for a permanent home on Long Island, near his in Queens. On Wednesday, when Malcolm guided Clay on a tour of the United Nations, admiring dignitaries and employees swept past security guards to engulf them. Clay pronounced himself champion not only of the United States but of the whole world, including Africa and the globe's 750 million Muslims. Malcolm X fielded questions about American race relations. Reporters said the two of them caused the greatest buzz in U.N. hallways since Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had pounded his shoe against capitalism in 1960.

The whirlwind association of Malcolm X with Cassius Clay, while muffled generally in the press, drew the wrath of Elijah Muhammad. From his winter home in Phoenix, he sharply contradicted reports that Malcolm's suspension was nearly over, as Malcolm implied breezily in his public appearances. “I'm holding him down until he proves he can keep his mouth shut,” Muhammad told Captain Joseph. He scoffed at the rumors that Malcolm planned to create a new organization, saying he never could finance one—not with his proposed African imports company or the “many little things going on up his sleeve.” Muhammad prescribed a gentler approach to the young heavyweight champion: Joseph should inform Clay that the Nation would supply another Muslim escort in Malcolm's place. This proved a difficult assignment, and when Malcolm took Clay to the United Nations a second time on Friday, March 6, announcing there that he was granting Clay his “X,” Elijah Muhammad intervened with a statement recorded over the telephone to Chicago for broadcast that same night. He renamed Clay “Muhammad” after the original prophet of Islam and himself, and “Ali” after a commanding general of the Third Caliphate.

This radio announcement, which so jolted Malcolm X, was only one of several blows that weekend. Elijah Muhammad extended his suspension indefinitely in a scolding formal letter, and he sent Minister Louis X of Boston, who had been showcased in Chicago as Malcolm's replacement, to teach on Sunday at New York Temple No. 7. Nearly a thousand turned out to hear him, and Captain Joseph reported that he and other captains rousted large congregations elsewhere that stood to give Elijah Muhammad emphatic vows of allegiance “regardless of circumstances.”

Malcolm called reporters that same Sunday to announce that he was leaving the Nation of Islam. While professing loyalty to the teaching of Elijah Muhammad, he said he needed greater political freedom “to cooperate in local civil rights actions in the South and elsewhere.” He asserted that the nonviolent civil rights movement had run its course. “There can be no revolution without bloodshed,” Malcolm told reporters, “and it is nonsense to describe the civil rights movement in America as a revolution.”

 

T
HE EXIT STATEMENT
made crossover headlines on Monday, March 9, putting Malcolm X for the first time on page one of the
New York Times
, alongside the news from Washington—“Debate on Civil Rights Bill Opening in Senate Today.” He reclaimed his public voice just as heightened sensitivity fragmented racial news. “Now It's a Negro Drive for Segregation,” announced one of the national news magazines, suggesting that Negroes might be changing their minds about the civil rights bill. Malcolm tried to explain himself to those left hostile or captivated, sincerely or disingenuously confused, by introduction to his novel doctrines. “See, the mistake that the whites make, especially the white liberals, they throw that at me as if I am against integration,” he told a New York television audience. “My contention is that
America
is against integration. But they're hypocrites. They pose as being for integration while they practice segregation.”

Malcolm suffered the sharpest, most immediate rebukes from those who best understood his language. Although he publicly urged all Muslims, including the new heavyweight champion, to remain loyal to Elijah Muhammad, he ran afoul of Muhammad's teaching that Islam required absolute submission to him. “You don't just walk away from the sect of Islam as a deviater or hypocrite,” Muhammad told a reporter who called him in Phoenix, “and someone weep and cry over it.” In a fury, Muhammad called Captain Joseph with orders that Malcolm “must give up everything he has that belongs to Islam,” including his house.