Pillar of Fire (5 page)

Malcolm X convened a meeting of Elijah Muhammad's family during the February convention in Chicago, at which he carefully announced his intention to mediate solutions for festering problems before they injured the Nation. They were delicate, he said, and included everything from petty personal disputes to gross personal misconduct and disrespect for doctrine. Privately, he told one family member that he just wanted to help—that he had known of shortcomings in Chicago for some time but had been afraid Allah would punish him if he investigated. Family members boycotted a second meeting, however, and the phone wires burned with indignant calls to Phoenix. Wallace's sister Ethel Sharrieff told her father that Malcolm was insinuating there was something wrong with them and “smart” Malcolm must act as parent. Others warned Elijah that Malcolm was maneuvering to divide them, promote himself, and take over the Nation. It was subversive on its face that he called such a meeting without clearance from Elijah. They said Malcolm was using Elijah's Cadillac and making speeches all over the Midwest to promote himself. From Phoenix in mid-March, Elijah told officials to seize the keys to his Cadillac, cancel Malcolm's lectures, and order him back to New York.

Only then did Malcolm broach to Wallace a fourth issue of corruption beyond money, religious distortion, and dishonest exploitation of the Stokes shootings. At Elijah Muhammad's home before Savior's Day, he said, two former secretaries appeared on the lawn with their babies and shouted that they were going to stand there in the cold until Mr. Muhammad comforted his abandoned children. The household had reacted strangely, said Malcolm, who told Wallace he had rebuffed such rumors until the two frightened and shunned women petitioned in person for help. Wallace replied uncomfortably that he would seek out the secretaries, whom he knew personally, and he soon confirmed to Malcolm that he believed their confessions. Elijah had told them that his wife, Clara, was dead to him, like Khadijah, the wife of the original Prophet Muhammad, and likewise Elijah felt divinely sanctioned to seek out virgins to produce good seed.

Wallace Muhammad felt the revelations as a cruel injustice to his spurned mother, and raged against Elijah as an imposing but distant icon. Wallace scarcely knew his father, who had vanished into hiding for seven years after rival heirs to Fard offered a $500 bounty for his death in the 1930s. Although disciples arrived with daily tributes and breathless word of the aspiring Messenger, Wallace saw Elijah only a few times throughout his childhood—most notably in 1942 when he watched his mother and brothers roll the newly arrived fugitive under the bed in a rug, in a vain attempt to evade arresting police officers. Now, as a young man just out of prison, desperate to hang on to something from the bizarre omens of his past, Wallace interpreted the enormity of his father's sins as the price of strength that was implanting a new religion on the continent, allowing people of African descent first to define themselves by their own deity. He steeled himself to face facts, and to recognize that religious births in history tend to spread unseemly trauma over many decades. This became his anthem to Malcolm.

The FBI had known of Elijah Muhammad's bastard children for more than three years, and without much success had tried to generate publicity about them. Late in 1962, the Chicago FBI office began a prolonged campaign known as a counterintelligence program (or COINTELPRO) against the Nation of Islam that by later internal appraisal “was to be, and continues to be, operated on the ‘highest possible plane' and would not involve racism, name calling or mud slinging.” Agents recruited prominent Negro citizens, including a Chicago judge, to deliver scripted public attacks on the Muslims, but the wiretaps opened, on a lower plane, the chance to exploit the bastard children as the most sensitive, closely held secret within the Nation of Islam. Imaginative FBI agents anonymously composed and sent to Muhammad's inner circle a series of accusing letters laced with two years' accumulation of salacious details. “There was no indication Muhammad's wife or any of his followers made a direct confrontation with him as a result of these letters,” concluded the Chicago SAC (Special Agent in Charge). “The wife did come to hate some of the secretaries, but Muhammad continued his activities and probably still is continuing this activity.”

During jury selection for the Stokes trial, wiretappers picked up so much “griping within the ‘royal family'” that the Chicago FBI office recommended to J. Edgar Hoover that the Nation be left alone to stew without “any disruption tactics in the form of anonymous letters or phone calls.” Modestly, Chicago concluded on March 7 that provocation would be superfluous to the “extreme discontent” spreading naturally, “which could cause Malcolm to fall in disfavor with Muhammad.” When Malcolm sent Elijah Muhammad letters attempting to justify his Chicago initiatives, officials on tapped lines between Phoenix and Chicago denounced “a nasty letter” full of lies about the family, which was “seeking, prodding, and prying” while pretending to help. One told Muhammad that Malcolm was “an addict to publicity,” another that he was “a spoiled child.” Elijah sometimes praised Malcolm for meaning well, and for talent “boosting us up” all over the country, but he also ridiculed him as a usurper reaching beyond his depth, a changeling who bowed down to him like a lamb but then went outside and pretended to be a lion.

Muhammad predicted that Malcolm would never have the courage to talk with him in person about the cryptic “problems” described in his letters, but Malcolm did fly to Phoenix in April. Fainthearted in the presence of the Messenger, he made sure to mention the prodigal son Wallace as his cohort in an anguished mission of preventive repair. Should the irrepressible rumors of secretaries with babies prove true, Malcolm said delicately, he and Wallace were collecting precedents of justification from the Q'uran. Elijah nodded evenly, and suggested scriptural citations himself—the infidelity of King David, the debauchery of Noah, the incest of Lot. He betrayed no fear of this exercise. Both he and Malcolm maintained the pose of being helpful to the other through a preliminary test of will.

The unspoken reality was that Malcolm X already had crossed the threshold of defiance in a sect that allowed no initiative at all. He was tinkering with the image of a leader who claimed the very souls of his followers and the power to pronounce ultimate reality for black people. Both men shied from the consequences of the breach—Malcolm from Muhammad's command of the Muslim apparatus, Muhammad from the loss of Malcolm's visibility as the Muslim ambassador—just as outside upheavals crashed upon them from Birmingham and elsewhere.

D
URING THE WEEK
of Wallace Muhammad's chilled homecoming from Sandstone prison to South Chicago, Martin Luther King was introduced to Rabbi Abraham Heschel on the North Side of the same city. They came from backgrounds as different from each other as was either from the Nation of Islam—King the Baptist of Atlanta, descended from Negro preachers back into chattel slavery, Heschel the Orthodox Jew of Warsaw, descended from dynastic generations of Hasidic rabbis whose names remained luminous in East European Jewry—among them Rabbi Yitzhak of Berdichev, Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn, Heschel's namesake the Apter rebbe, and Rabbi Dov Ber of Mezeritch, successor in the eighteenth century to the founder of Hasidism himself, Rabbi Israel Ba'al Shem, who, wrote Heschel, “banished melancholy from the soul and uncovered the ineffable delight of being a Jew.” After Hitler made a vast cemetery of Jewish ghettos from Amsterdam to Kiev, Heschel in one of his books had memorialized his vanished heritage as a culture that measured its history not by wars or material landmarks but “by how much spiritual substance there is in its everyday existence.”

The separate paths of Heschel and King converged at the January 1963 Chicago Conference on Religion and Race, an unprecedented ecumenical gathering of nearly one thousand delegates including world-renowned theologians such as Paul Tillich and the established leaders of nearly every religious body in America. In private, there was a fair amount of sharp-eyed professional jockeying among the assembled clergy. Protestants considered themselves on the defensive because their churches housed nearly all those touched by the dispute over racial segregation in the South, where all warring sides claimed inspiration from the same Protestant doctrine. Since the landmark Supreme Court decision outlawing school segregation almost nine years earlier, only the former Vice President, Richard Nixon, had been able to convene the skittish Protestant denominations to deliver even platitudinous declarations on race, and not a few organizers of the Chicago conference hoped to relieve the embarrassment of that record. For the minority clergy, including Jews and Catholics, race was considered an “opportunity” issue on which leadership could reduce the stigma of inferior numbers or unorthodox belief, and for the Catholics there was also a chance to make membership inroads in new territory by moving more liberally than the entangled Protestants. Some cynics attributed to competitive church arithmetic the voluntary presence in Chicago of twenty-four Catholic bishops—a historic record, more hierarchy than ever assembled for anything other than a strictly Catholic conclave.

It was just as well that most delegates were spared the harsh truth that each keynote speaker was dangerously exposed where he was presumed to be strong—Heschel among rabbis and King among Negro preachers. Long before they knew each other well enough to disclose this, or to reveal the secret missions that preoccupied each of them in Chicago, the two men were drawn to each other by a shared commitment to the language and experience of the Hebrew prophets. The lasting bond that grew between King and Heschel was among many historical legacies of the ecumenical conference.

Heschel almost did not come. Since 1945, he had been conditioned to accept his private status as an outcast among his colleagues at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. The accepted rumor was that he had been hired at least partly as an ornament of piety, so as to blunt criticism of the seminary as a haven for Reconstructionist teachers who held that atheism was an acceptable, even preferred, belief for rabbinical students. Heschel was not permitted to teach courses in Jewish philosophy or theology, the subjects that had made him famous in Berlin and Frankfurt before he escaped the Nazis, and his elective course on Jewish mysticism was billed almost overtly as a quaint remnant from the speculative era. He bridled at the constraints. Students were startled to hear him say they were being trained for mere synagogue administration in the guise of the rabbinate, as it was possible to complete the seminary curriculum without attending a single class on the Jewish conception of God. “Intellectual evasion is the great sin of contemporary Jewish teaching,” Heschel warned. “Urgent problems are shunned, the difficulties of faith are ignored…Jewish thought is sterile. We appeal to Jewish loyalties, we have little to say to the imagination.”

Heschel only increased the discomfort of leading rabbis when he began to take his case outside the sealed space of the rabbinate—first through his books and then in public speeches as he grew more adept in the language of his adopted country, acting on his premise that there was healing sustenance within Judaism for gentiles as well as Jews. With his thick accent and striking visage—a kind of elfin patriarch of white beard and twinkling eyes—Heschel had delivered his trademark aphorisms at the Eisenhower White House (“Wisdom is like the sky, belonging to no man, and true learning is the astronomy of the spirit”) and more recently at President Kennedy's conference on aging (“…the cult of youth is idolatry. Abraham is the grand old man, but the legend of Faust is pagan”). Some of his colleagues were proud of Heschel's effort to take Jewish thought out of its protective cocoon, but others considered it dangerous, presumptuous, or demeaning.

By far the most sensitive venture Heschel joined was a quest to reform the ancient teachings of the world Catholic Church—official pronouncements, catechism, textbooks, even religious art—which appeared to exacerbate a hatred of Jews that culminated in the Nazi Holocaust. For his upcoming Vatican Council, Pope John XXIII assigned a study of anti-Semitism in Christianity to a secretariat on non-Christian religions headed by Augustin Cardinal Bea, who, in November of 1961, began consultations so secret that Bea's own staff heard whispers only afterward that a learned rabbi had slipped into Rome. Heschel submitted a private memorandum entitled “On Improving Catholic-Jewish Relations.” “There has never been an age which has witnessed so much guilt and distress, agony and terror,” he wrote. “At no time has the earth been so soaked with blood; at no time has man been less sensitive to God.” He asked Bea to consider four proposals, including a request that the Vatican Council declare by historic vote that the Jews were not a deicide people cursed by God for the murder of Jesus. “It is our understanding that the Church holds the sins of all mankind responsible for the death of Jesus,” Heschel added, in one of the delicate statements by which each side advanced an understanding of the other's doctrine, groping for language to reduce contempt without denigrating either religion. The shared goal was to block the path from private disdain to social catastrophe. “Speech has power and few men realize that words do not fade,” wrote Heschel. “What starts out as a sound ends in a deed.”

Still risking attack from all sides over his clandestine role as a Jewish lobbyist at the Vatican, Heschel did not accept the invitation to Chicago until he consulted Jewish specialists on the peculiar American politics of the race issue. He knew it was the presence of Martin Luther King among the religious hosts that would make the conference worthy of controversial attention, and he wanted to be careful about the mutterings against King that reached him at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Could it be true, asked Heschel, that King was a shallow, hack politician for Negroes, a troublemaker of hidden and perhaps Communist motives who might belong in the jail cells he frequented?

On being assured that King seemed spiritually well grounded in his mission against segregation, Heschel put aside practical equivocation to seize the Chicago Conference on Religion and Race with his opening speech. “Religion and race,” he said. “How can the two be uttered together? To act in the spirit of religion is to unite what lies apart, to remember that humanity as a whole is God's beloved child. To act in the spirit of race is to sunder, to slash, to dismember the flesh of living humanity…. Perhaps this Conference should have been called Religion
or
Race. You cannot worship God and at the same time look at a man as if he were a horse.” Far from positioning Jews safely as helpful bystanders to an essentially Christian conflict, Heschel declared that the soul of Judaism was at stake and had been so ever since Moses contended with Pharaoh at the “first” summit meeting on religion and race. “The exodus began,” said Heschel, “but is far from having been completed. In fact, it was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for a Negro to cross certain university campuses.”

 

T
O CLOSE
the Chicago conference, King brought with him his standard sermon on the complacency of the church. “Eleven o'clock on Sunday morning is still America's most segregated hour,” he said, “and the Sunday school is still the most segregated school of the week. The unpardonable sin, thought the poet Milton, was when a man, like Lucifer, so repeatedly says, ‘Evil, be thou my good,' so consistently lives a lie, that he loses the capacity to distinguish between good and evil. America's segregated churches come dangerously close to being in that position.” Behind his placid exterior, King concealed an impatience with religious institutions that far outran his text. In the past few days he had committed himself consciously to a life-threatening, watershed risk in Birmingham that neither relied nor waited upon the cooperation of his fellow clergymen.

King's resolve to gamble alone was the result of frustrations that had built in phases since the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56. After the boycott's strategy of nonviolent withdrawal proved difficult to transplant or expand, he had followed his trained gifts as a pulpit orator to preach hundreds of sermons against segregation in a touring frenzy modeled on the crusades of Rev. Billy Graham, from whom King received quiet encouragement and occasional advice. Through the late 1950s, this conversion approach had brought King the orator's nectar—applause, admiration, and credit for quite a few tearful if temporary changes of heart—but in everyday life Negroes remained a segregated people, invisible or menial specimens except for celebrity aberrations such as King himself. When college students pioneered a fresh tactic of nonviolent confrontation in the sit-ins of 1960 and the Freedom Rides of 1961, King had acknowledged their point that race was too intractable to be repaired by the inspiration of any orator. Only by slow, wrenching concession could someone like King admit that eloquence was weak even when buttressed by rank and education. And although he was honest enough to praise the students' courage, King repeatedly declined the drumbeat summons—“Where is your body?”—by which they made the first test of leadership not statements or seniority but a stark, primitive surrender to public witness.

Instead, King had clung to methods suited to his stature as a prince of the Negro church. While petitioning white leaders for change, he and his allies maneuvered to gain control of the National Baptist Convention. Their dream was to make of this largest voluntary body of Negroes in the world—upward of ten thousand preachers and some five million members—a ready-made civil rights phalanx that upon command could descend upon segregated targets for protest or Christian revival. The prerequirements were seductively in line with ordinary ambitions in church politics, as King's group aimed to establish a base in the isolated world built by their fathers and grandfathers before seeking any new confrontations with white segregationists. Even so, their plans ran into disaster in the person of the incumbent “Negro Pope,” Rev. J. H. Jackson. At two national conventions, the usual spectacle of sermons and massed choirs had descended into something more like soccer riots, in which the Jackson forces out-shouted, outshoved, and finally, at Kansas City in 1961, outscrimmaged the forces supporting King's civil rights platform to secure physical control of the podium before the police arrived. Victorious, Jackson had accused King of being responsible for murdering one preacher who had been pushed to his death in a brawl, and excommunicated King from the National Baptist Convention. In what amounted to a major schism, some two thousand pastors, including Rev. Gardner Taylor of Brooklyn and Benjamin Mays, president of Morehouse College, resigned with King, but others, including old family friends and eminent preachers such as Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., could not bear to tear away from the one place on the sparse landscape of Negro institutions that had anchored their identities in a national church.

Not until then, stripped of a reform agenda within the Negro church, did King throw himself into the escalating civil disobedience of the movement, most notably in the mass marches to jail at Albany, Georgia, beginning late in 1961. Hard experience there taught him that in any racial conflict large enough to draw the concentrated attention of the press, reporters inevitably would center their stories upon King as the character known to most readers, and generally, the focal issue of their stories would not be the moral worthiness of King's cause but the competitive outcome—who's winning, King or segregation? Thus pitted against the legal and cultural standard of the entire South, King had left Albany in 1962 branded a loser because segregation still stood, and as an ugly bonus he took the festering resentment of overshadowed colleagues. Then, on January 1, 1963—exactly one century after the effective date of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation—President Kennedy had dodged the last natural deadline for a scheme that King had pushed upon him privately but insistently for two years: a historic Kennedy proclamation to abolish at least some part of segregation by executive order.

Within days, King summoned his ten closest associates to a private retreat near Savannah, Georgia, to tell them in effect that there was no easy button to push, no executive alliance to be made. All the dignified routes had been closed off. The only paths he saw led either to retreat or forward over the cliff, and, haunted by fear that the integrationist mandate of the Supreme Court's 1954
Brown
decision and the energy of the Kennedy years soon would dissipate, King disclosed his resolve to take a calculated leap. Wyatt Walker, his chief assistant, presented a blueprint for a staged, nonviolent assault on Birmingham, the symbolic bastion of segregation—a city that combined the plantation attitudes of the surrounding Alabama counties with the bare-knuckled politics of its steel mill economy, personified in both aspects by the local police commissioner, Eugene T. “Bull” Connor.