Pillar of Fire (61 page)

 

I
N
H
ARLEM
, Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad scheduled competing rallies that Sunday, June 28, in their first head-to-head test of strength. Hours before the first event, a jittery Malcolm X called Wallace Muhammad in Chicago, and Wallace candidly reported that he had twice fended off ambush by his father's enforcers. He considered Malcolm to be in greater danger still. “You have to be very careful,” he warned. Malcolm hinted at staggering possibilities being discussed secretly—even an alliance with Martin Luther King for voter registration—and assured his friend that many Muslims “very faithful to Islam” looked to Wallace the son, instead of his father, Elijah, in religious matters. Malcolm predicted that Elijah Muhammad would cancel his rally at the last minute rather than face a skeptical New York crowd that was accustomed to Malcolm's oratory. When Wallace gently told him otherwise, he insisted that Elijah would only embarrass himself in public. “He'll look bad,” said Malcolm.

Full mobilization of the Nation proved him wrong. From distant cities, convoys of women in white robes and men wearing “We Are with Muhammad” armbands filled the Harlem Armory with nearly eight thousand people, which would put Elijah Muhammad on the front page of the
New York Times
. Security forces dumped two sympathizers of Malcolm X on the sidewalk outside, beaten senseless. The crowd cheered new heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali, then roared when tiny Elijah Muhammad emerged from a moving cocoon of stern bodyguards. “I will not beg 22 million people to accept me as their leader,” he declared, claiming divine communion in his plan to separate the race from the scorn and oppression of white slavemasters. “I am the key to every one of you,” he said. “I'm not something of myself, I'm something of God.”

After his speech, Elijah Muhammad vanished by motorcade to the airport without acknowledging controversy or the defector Malcolm X, who attracted a crowd roughly a tenth of his to the Audubon Ballroom that night. Outdone for once as a speaking attraction in Harlem, Malcolm challenged Elijah—“if he is the leader of the Muslims and a leader of our people”—to end his sectarian withdrawal and engage the world boldly. “Lead us against our enemies,” he said in his address. “Don't lead us against each other.” Elijah Muhammad smirked over Malcolm's small crowd as an undisciplined mix of residual Muslims, curiosity seekers, and self-centered intellectuals—“a lot of those fishes and freaks from Greenwich Village,” reported one of his spies. Among the new faces at the Audubon, King's lawyer Clarence Jones commended Malcolm's statement of principles to literary friends. He went so far as to offer Malcolm legal advice and staff work to disseminate his message, parallel to his services for King.

All day Monday, FBI surveillance teams followed Clarence Jones through the Manhattan business district, recording his movements in the hope of discovering an overtly Communist deed (“7:08
P.M.
Jones left the Post Office and returned to 165 Broadway stopping in route for a hot dog”). The agents acted on Director Hoover's worry about the impending civil rights bill, while Jones struggled to reconcile a fresh enthusiasm for Malcolm with his commitment to King. Although he had promised to “feel out” King about an accommodation, Jones could not bring himself even to mention Malcolm's name to King on the telephone. Instead, he promised to help prepare King's testimony for the upcoming Republican National Convention in San Francisco.

Malcolm, for his part, chafed that only ninety members of the Audubon audience registered interest in his new Organization of Afro-American Unity, the secular initiative he had designed to bypass the negligible appeal of Islam. He publicly offered vigilante assistance to suffering integrationists. “We will creep into Florida and Mississippi like Jesus,” he announced. Malcolm wired King in St. Augustine on Tuesday: “If the federal government will not send troops to your aid, just say the word and we will immediately dispatch some of our brothers there to organize self-defense units among our people, and the Ku Klux Klan will then receive a taste of its own medicine. The day of turning the other cheek to those brute beasts is over.”

Elijah Muhammad laughed when he learned of Malcolm's telegrams. “He doesn't have anyone to send,” he scoffed, driving home his point that Malcolm mesmerized fans but commanded no unquestioning soldiers. “He's no general, he's a fool,” Muhammad told one adviser. “He is dying a little at a time,” he told another, predicting that Malcolm and his children “will be out in the bread lines soon.”

 

I
N
S
T
. A
UGUSTINE
, where some whites already imagined Black Muslim snipers deployed on rooftops, Governor Bryant devised a blustering gambit to escape his own fearful predicament. Battered all weekend between choices leading variously toward insurrection, voter revolt, or humiliating punishment for contempt of Judge Simpson's federal court, he summoned reporters late Tuesday afternoon to announce that he had prevailed upon four distinguished local citizens to mediate the crisis in St. Augustine. He said he was withholding the names temporarily so that his state-appointed biracial committee could meet securely without harassment. When Mayor Shelley called to protest this surrender to Negro demands, Bryant swore him to secrecy before disclosing that the biracial committee did not exist; his announcement was a ruse to keep Judge Simpson at bay and get Martin Luther King out of town.

An avalanche of press attention demanded response in St. Augustine, where King detected no sign of truce. Connie Lynch was rallying segregationists again at the Slave Market. No Negro leader verified receiving an invitation to membership on a biracial committee. King himself had surrendered and made bond earlier that day on fresh criminal charges of corrupting Negro youth. Nevertheless, he decided to embrace even the appearance of concession by the governor of Florida as a “first step that at least opens the channels of communication.” He announced that the movement would suspend protest for two weeks to allow the unnamed committee to pursue a settlement. Looking up from his hastily composed statement, he told a mass meeting that the historic civil rights law would buttress their cause in the interim. “If things go as they are expected to go,” he said carefully, “the President of our great nation will sign this bill Saturday.” Then King began to preach about struggle and commitment. “And for God's sake let us not be satisfied until the total problem is solved,” he cried. “A few days ago I was in a community…and the newspaper came out with an editorial saying, ‘When will Martin Luther King and the Negroes be satisfied?'…We will not be satisfied until all of God's children can walk the streets of St. Augustine, Florida, with a sense of dignity and self-respect. We will not be satisfied until the walls of segregation in St. Augustine, Florida, have been finally crushed…. We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters….”

Wednesday morning brought the first of July and a one-day lull of quiet foreboding to St. Augustine, where the Episcopal bishop of Florida convened a hushed private audience within the walls of Trinity Church. “Outside influences have created upsetting upheavals within normal patterns of life,” Bishop Hamilton West declared in an opening bow to feelings of trampled resentment. Then he rebuked the assembled vestrymen for turning “certain persons” away from worship services by locking church doors, and for abusing racially mixed groups with “obscene or unseemly language.” Rejecting the 9-1 vote by which the vestry sought the resignation of their pastor, Rev. Charles Seymour, Bishop West closed with a prayer that “the love of God will claim each vestryman for Himself.”

Historian David Colburn later recorded that West's unexpectedly forceful statement threw the vestrymen into shock. One of them argued that even the forthcoming civil rights bill exempted churches from mandated integration. Another complained of excruciating social exposure, warning that because many outsiders did not know how fiercely Trinity resisted integrated services, “people will think we're trying to get the Negroes in.” One vestryman apologized for the policy of defining all Negro visitors as “demonstrators,” which allowed Trinity to practice segregation behind a claim of welcome to “worshippers” of all races. (“We are using the demonstrator bit as a cover-up,” he confessed.) Vestryman Hoopie Tebeault, owner of the local newspaper, asked squarely whether Trinity officials “must enforce entrance of Negroes to the church,” and wrestled out loud with his choice to be “an American or an Episcopalian.” Tebeault confronted Bishop West: “Must we provoke you to excommunicate?”

“Either that or be converted,” replied Bishop West. He held firm against dissenting interpretations of Scripture, prompting Tebeault to resign formally from the national Episcopal Church. Two leading vestrymen joined him before a rush to adjournment halted the exodus. Reverend Seymour, who stood trembling and mute through the confrontation, would accept transfer out of Florida by the end of the summer.

 

T
HAT SAME
W
EDNESDAY
, two advisers sent letters of caution to the White House. From the Justice Department, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach warned President Johnson against the popular clamor for federal intervention in Mississippi. “If they [Mississippi authorities] encourage violence or abdicate responsibility for law enforcement functions,” he wrote, “violence on a substantial scale is virtually certain to occur and the possibility of maintaining order by any means short of the use of federal troops becomes negligible.” Citing his harrowing experiences protecting the Freedom Riders and later James Meredith at Ole Miss, Katzenbach reminded Johnson that the U.S. government employed only six hundred deputy marshals and that drafting these scattered civilians for makeshift interventions presented dangers “more practical than legal.”
*

From his sickbed, dying of cancer, Aubrey Williams scrawled a “Dear Lyndon” letter to his rambunctious protégé of the New Deal era. He instructed the President that if he received the letter and did not find it “worth answering, do
not
send me one of those synthetic letters that some body signs for you.

Johnson soon defended his Asia policy as “the correct one” in a letter assuring his old mentor he “would never reply to you synthetically.” Before then, he called to congratulate Florida Senator George Smathers on the St. Augustine settlement, and Smathers partly confessed placing sole responsibility for a biracial committee on “poor ol' Herb Wolfe, who's got no business undertaking it because of his age. He's got Parkinson's disease, anyway, but he finally agreed. We begged him.” Toward the close of business on Wednesday evening, Johnson stopped by the desk of his secretary, Juanita Roberts—a gruff, savvy chain-smoker whose desk was perpetually clouded in haze from Viceroy cigarettes—to pick up an early draft of the remarks Bill Moyers had prepared for Thursday's signing of the historic civil rights legislation. The President rushed off by motorcade to a reception for the President of Costa Rica, then back to the White House for a private screening of the new Hollywood film
Night of the Iguana
.

 

A
LL SEMBLANCE
of peace within the tiny Muslim world shattered on Thursday, July 2, when Evelyn Williams and Lucille Rosary filed paternity suits against Elijah Muhammad in Los Angeles. Malcolm X escaped knife-wielding assailants outside his home even before the suits made the news. “Things are pretty hot for me, you know,” he told his mass meeting. “I'm trying to stay alive, you understand. I may sound like I'm cracking, but I'm facting.” Officials at FBI headquarters dismissed his speech as “merely another effort on the part of Malcolm Little to obtain publicity,” although the Bureau's own wiretaps picked up the gangland intrigue. They overheard the Los Angeles plaintiffs stand up to threats from Elijah Muhammad's lieutenants—“she didn't want to hear from any of them about any of their mess,” recorded a note-taking agent—then frankly confess terror to Malcolm: “she feels that they don't have a chance and will all be killed.” A caller warned Malcolm that orders had gone out in Chicago to kill him in New York, and an FBI contact reported that one of Muhammad's sons had sent members to get him in Detroit.

In Chicago, two of Malcolm's allies within Elijah Muhammad's own family made parallel accusations against the Nation of Islam. Within a week of the Los Angeles filing, young Hassan Sharrieff testified in open court that “Grandpa” Elijah's enforcers savagely beat Muslims of independent mind or pocketbook. Sharrieff explained his defection to reporters as a quest for true Islamic faith: “Uncle Wallace told me that conscience is the soft whisper of God in man.” Like Sharrieff, Wallace Muhammad rushed to the police and FBI for protection. “I know they are fanatics and will kill you,” he said of his relatives running the Nation. Wallace composed a manifesto about his lifelong odyssey between chosenness and dissent within the Nation of Islam. “Often I would imagine being in the presence of the Saviour, God, who wrote my name on the wall behind the door before I was born,” he recalled. “This my parents, my brothers and two sisters told me as far back as I am able to remember.” His manifesto sought to preserve something religious from predatory corruptions. “I beg all of you to face the facts,” he exhorted Muslims. “Your hopes of keeping my father's system of lies standing is like a man who hopes to eat the same portion of food that was eaten and digested by him yesterday….”
*