Pillar of Fire (42 page)

Told that week of the wrathful notices being prepared inside the New York temple, Malcolm drafted a contorted defense. He presented Muhammad and himself as common victims of evil conspiracy by middlemen—Captain Joseph, Raymond Sharrieff, and National Secretary John Ali—and went so far as to describe his resignation as an act of loyal sacrifice. In order to “preserve the faith your followers have in you and the Nation of Islam,” he told Muhammad in a two-page telegram, Malcolm had assumed blame for scandal and corruption that rightly belonged to the conspirators. “You are still my leader and teacher,” he wrote, “even though those around you won't let me be one of your active followers or helpers.”

Captain Joseph led a grim delegation to Malcolm's house in Elmhurst, bearing a notarized letter dated Tuesday, March 10. Glumly, but without protest, Malcolm surrendered some of the temple valuables, including papers of incorporation and securities from the Nation's national treasury, but he balked at the demand that he vacate his premises. During the ensuing argument, some of Joseph's subordinates were visibly conflicted by personal sympathy for Malcolm as their fallen mentor. Maceo X Owens, the temple secretary who had prepared the letter of notice, had insisted on one conciliatory sentence: “If you continue to use the Nation's name on your car, then the Mosque will have to take possession of the car, which we do not want to do because this car is your personal property.” Owens felt that Malcolm had left the title in the Nation's name to set an example of fealty, but when Malcolm pressed a similar claim for the house, Joseph insisted that the Nation would sue if necessary.

Being stripped swiftly of defenses, Malcolm fought back through white newspapers. On Thursday morning, March 12, he took a tiny entourage and a stack of printed handouts to a jammed press conference at the Tapestry Suite of the Park Sheraton Hotel in midtown Manhattan. His purpose was “to clarify my own position in the struggle,” he told reporters, in a statement nevertheless littered with mixed signals. While he was creating a new Muslim Mosque Inc. as a base for his followers, Malcolm said he did not want to compete with his teacher, Elijah Muhammad. Moreover, recognizing that most people might be put off by Islam, he promised to make room at his mosque for secular members. He wanted to find common ground with civil rights leaders for what promised to be an explosive year (“As of this minute, I've forgotten everything bad that the other leaders have said about me,” he announced with a broad smile, “and I pray that they can also forget the many bad things I've said about them”), but he rejected their goal of integration along with their prevailing tactic of nonviolence. “It is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks,” he asserted. Citing Birmingham and Danville among ugly spectacles of unpunished violence the previous year, Malcolm called for mobile rifle clubs to defend the life and property of Negroes wherever the authorities failed.

Malcolm's words about armed defense jumped above the muddle of sectarian politics. “His Theme Now Is Violence,” warned
U.S. News & World Report
. “The Ominous Malcolm X Exits from the Muslims,” said
Life
. In a scalding editorial, the
New York Times
called Malcolm an “embittered racist” and an “irresponsible demagogue” who threatened the precarious chance for integration. The
Times
tried to dismiss him as an unfit subject—“Malcolm X will not deceive Negroes in New York or elsewhere”—but its news pages reported the stir of controversy: “Negroes Ponder Malcolm's Move”/“Dr. King Urges Nonviolence.” King and the established leaders sounded ponderous against Malcolm's avenging swagger. “It is regrettable that Malcolm X has publicly confessed to so negative and desperate a course of action,” King said in a statement released during his next trip through New York. “I must honestly say that this new turn of events is not so much an indictment against him as it is against a society whose ills in race relations are so deep-rooted that it produces a Malcolm X.”

Whether they stirred fascination or contempt, papers of all kinds approached Malcolm X carefully across the divide of race. The
Pittsburgh Courier
and
New York Times
alike treated his troubles with the Nation of Islam as a conventional power struggle over spoils of succession. Only baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson tried to see in Malcolm the schisms of a newborn religion colliding with the intermingled love and war of the movement era. Disparaged by Malcolm as a tool of the white man, Robinson struck back at a vulnerable spot. “Whom do you think you are kidding, Malcolm, when you say that Negro leaders ought to be ‘thankful' that you were not personally present in Birmingham or Mississippi?” Robinson asked in his newspaper column. Against Malcolm's provocative implication that he would have been—and still might become—a prowling wolf of retribution, Robinson threw up his past performance. “I think you would have done exactly what you did after your own Muslim brothers were shot and killed in Los Angeles,” he wrote. “You left it to the law to take its course.”

Robinson charged, and Malcolm X cheerfully agreed, that the emerging public sensation was largely a creation of the white press. “White colleges flood him with speaking engagement offers,” Robinson complained. “You can count on one hand Negro colleges which have invited him, if there are any.” Some Negro newspapers reported with gleeful irony that Georgia Senator Richard Russell emerged as the first major public figure to defend the Black Muslims and to oblige the heavyweight champion by using the name “Muhammad Ali” in public. Russell praised Ali for the courage to criticize integration in the face of humiliation and insult (“He will never be invited to the White House”), and castigated fellow senators for holding hearings on his fitness for the ring. Mischievously, he used the taunts being thrown at Southerners—“so intolerant, so narrow-minded, so bigoted”—to chastise the World Boxing Association for efforts to strip Ali of his title, observing tartly that boxing routinely embraced low-life criminals of “no religion at all.”

Most white papers left these volatile comments unmentioned, preserving Russell as a statesman of decorum, just as they avoided notice of the Racial Relocation Commission. On March 16, in his second major speech of the civil rights debate, Russell proposed an amendment that would resettle families massively until racial proportions were equalized among the fifty states. Alabama would export 637,263 Negroes, while California and Alaska would import 776,445 and 16,976 respectively, according to a large map Russell placed in the rear of the Senate chamber. “I have grappled with this problem and studied it, to the very best of my ability, over a long period of years…” he declared. “I favor inflicting on New York City, the city of Chicago, and other cities the same condition proposed to be inflicted by this bill on the people of the community of Winder, Georgia, where I live.” Russell defended his amendment against objections that it was preposterously unconstitutional and impractical, like schemes for a separate black nation. “I was never more serious in all my life,” he assured the Senate.

 

T
WO QUICK-WITTED
FBI agents slipped into Malcolm's Tapestry Suite press conference on March 12, disguised as journalists. For the record, they asked pointed questions about revolution and civil war (“I don't think I'm dumb enough to advocate armed revolt,” Malcolm replied), but their primary mission, for which they later received commendation from FBI headquarters, was to photograph the Muslim entourage under pretext of news. The New York FBI office knew already that Muslims willing to associate openly with Malcolm were scarce. Of twenty-two faces surreptitiously photographed at the press conference, Bureau agents identified only four as known Muslims—three bodyguards and James 67X (the sixty-seventh “James” granted the Nation's “X”), who had served as a lieutenant under Captain Joseph.

Those absent were more significant. Less than a week after deferring to Malcolm at the United Nations, the heavyweight champion recoiled from mentioning his name. “You just don't buck Mr. Muhammad and get away with it,” Muhammad Ali told a startled Alex Haley. “I don't want to talk about [Malcolm] no more.” Elijah Muhammad had sent a high-ranking delegation from Chicago to envelop Ali with a new identity, total business management, and the promise of a readymade wife to be selected from the Messenger's eligible granddaughters. Malcolm, deprived of Ali's public glamour, also found himself without visible support from fellow ministers in the Nation of Islam. None of his four trusted assistants stood with him at the break.

Pressure fell heavily on the ministers as second-level opinion leaders, and Captain Joseph prodded the New York assistants to denounce Malcolm from the temple rostrum as a hypocrite. To protect himself, Malcolm campaigned to undo years of resolute indoctrination from his own mouth. The assistants had been inclined to see his suspension as the result of friction with Captain Joseph—the soldier grown resentful of the minister's overbearing independence, the minister annoyed by Joseph's ties to Chicago as guarantor of the revenue stream. It did not occur to them that scandalous, deadly grievance ran directly to the august Elijah Muhammad, whom none of the assistants had ever met in person, until Malcolm began taking them one by one to the hideaway attic of his home to sample detailed “insurance” tapes about sexual and financial corruption.

For Assistant Minister Benjamin 2X, the precisely dictated revelations caused prolonged dizziness and sharp pangs of nausea, recalling the impact six years earlier of Malcolm's lecture on the sewer-like digestive tract of the pig. Benjamin had discovered himself physically unable to put pork into his mouth at dinners with friends, and had returned to Temple No. 7 for Malcolm's history lecture on Egypt and the land of Ur. Thunderstruck to hear that Africans had been something other than potboiling savages with bones in their noses, he persevered through ten rejected applications to gain his 2X from Elijah Muhammad. Malcolm had invited Benjamin to join the Wednesday evening public speaking class, where he not only conquered a childhood stutter but devoured books beyond the voluminous reading list, beginning with
The Story of the Moors in Spain
by Stanley Lane Poole and
The Crusades
by Harold Lamb. Possessed, Benjamin had worn out library cards at the Manhattan public library on Fifth Avenue. He copied scholarly articles and prepared class reports on shortwave radio broadcasts from mainland China. He quit his job as a shipping clerk for Vanguard Records and hired out as a live-in doorman, enabling him to study feverishly at his post.

At the end of 1958, Malcolm sent Benjamin out into Harlem with three props: a stepladder, a Bible, and a banner depicting the choice between the American and Islamic flags. He climbed the ladder to preach at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 125th Street, in front of the Chock Full 'O Nuts store where Jackie Robinson worked as a coffee spokesman. Like his contemporaries who passed the test as “ladder men” to become Muslim ministers, Benjamin eventually drew large crowds of “mentally dead” Negroes with spirited sermons asserting that he could answer any question from the Honorable Elijah Muhammad's complete body of knowledge. Malcolm sometimes observed from the fringe. “Never repeat anything you hear me say unless you confirm that it's true,” he instructed sharply, and he maintained an exacting, hidden distance from his assistants even as they founded new mosques together. Through sectarian study, they developed a more priestly version of the discipline that Captain Joseph instilled with martial drills and enforced quotas for newspaper sales.

Against Malcolm's secret revelations, Captain Joseph assured Elijah Muhammad that he was maintaining Benjamin 2X as a spy within Malcolm's camp at the Hotel Theresa. He conceded that Malcolm maintained counterspies, but boasted that even in his strongholds Malcolm attracted only the “weak ones” looking for an excuse to smoke cigarettes and vent their petty complaints. Elsewhere, Muhammad's officials felt secure enough to banish any Muslim associated with Malcolm X, and the FBI wiretaps picked up only one fence-sitting minister brazen enough to fight back. “As far as being a leader, they can have that,” he shouted over the phone to Chicago on March 17. “As far as coming to the temple, they can have that, too. But when they start saying, ‘don't you come by here looking for no money,' they gonna be in trouble! Do you hear me?” The renegade demanded his regular cut of the newspaper sales and refused to be treated like an innocent to the Nation's secrets. “You ain't dealing with no baby or with no faithful believer,” he growled. “I used to be a faithful believer. I'm just here now trying to get understanding…. I'm one of the ones threatening to kill people, beat up brothers for throwing the paper [
Muhammad Speaks
] in the trash.”

On March 18, Malcolm X lectured again at Harvard University, where he fended off questions about violent revolution by stating that America recognized upheaval and suffering “only when the white man himself bleeds a little.” Two professors argued dryly that the notoriously poor record of third-party movements in American politics weighed heavily against his agenda of black nationalism. Immediately after the lecture, and again a few days later, Malcolm ventured into the Boston ghetto to keep clandestine appointments at the Original Pastry Shop and other Muslim spots along Blue Hill Avenue. He recruited there among prescreened favorites from the first congregation he had founded for Elijah Muhammad, Temple No. 11, likening his desperate mission at times to the Christian Apostle Paul's fateful journey to confront Caesar in Rome.