Tomorrow-Land (16 page)

Spellman hadn't seen
The Deputy
(nor would he), and although the publicity-seeking cardinal tore into the play, the protest never achieved critical mass: Only 150 people picketed the Brooks Atkinson Theater when it opened. Even Boston's Cardinal Richard Cushing, a close personal friend of the Kennedy clan, disagreed publically with his fellow Prince of the Church, declaring that maybe Spellman should see the play before damning it. Powerless to stop its Broadway run, or the drama's publication in book form that same year (by Rosset's Grove Press), Spellman, like his good friend Moses, was beginning to seem like a man from another age.

They weren't alone. Others manned the barricades against these seemingly endless assaults on the culture. One eloquent critic, English journalist and historian Paul Johnson, knew exactly whom to blame for these sorrowful turns of events: the Beatles. Just weeks after the band's triumphant introduction to America, Johnson tried to warn his fellow countrymen—and the English-speaking world—of “The Menace of Beatlism.”

Johnson thought the Beatles—their music, their modish suits, their disrespect for authority, and everything they stood for—were an assault on Western culture and the existing social order. Like other forms of “pop culture,” which to his mind included jazz virtuosos like Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington, “the growing public approval of anti-culture is itself . . . a reflection of the new cult of youth.” The young, screaming teenagers in the throes of Beatlemania formed “a collective portrait of a generation enslaved by a commercial machine.” He declared Beatlism as another “mass-produced mental opiate.”

Ironically, Johnson, the conservative anti-Communist, sounded like a Marxist zealot lamenting the undue influence of religion among the proletariat. However, one certainty that Johnson had the foresight to realize was that the stagnant postwar ancien régime of England—and America—was under attack. And the Beatles, along with their likeminded cultural avatars like Ali were leading the charge.

16.

Revolutions are never peaceful, never loving, never nonviolent. Nor are they compromising. Revolutions are destructive and bloody.

—Malcolm X, December 1, 1963

 

Malcolm X was evolving. By early 1964 his political ideas, his spiritual foundation, even his racial philosophy—everything that had turned a small-time hustler named Malcolm Little into one of the most dynamic and charismatic leaders in American history—seemed to be up for grabs. Although his metamorphosis had actually been a gradual process, like so much else in American life, in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, his transition reached critical mass. Malcolm was morphing into something new.

On December 1, 1963, less than two weeks after the events of Dallas, the dynamic orator was scheduled to speak at New York's Manhattan Center, filling in for Elijah Muhammad, the spiritual leader of the Nation of Islam. Muhammad issued direct orders to his National Minister just a few days earlier: Under no circumstances was Malcolm to discuss the assassination or even mention Kennedy by name. The Nation had always been apolitical, but more importantly, Muhammad was well aware of Kennedy's popularity among African Americans. He did not want a backlash against his sect, or more antagonism from white reporters in the mainstream press who would be attending Malcolm's talk, which was dramatically titled “God's Judgment of White America.” The stakes for all involved were much too high.

Malcolm, with his strong independent streak, was already chafing under the strict edicts of the Nation. But even he must have understood Muhammad's reasoning: Malcolm had regularly criticized the Kennedy administration for its gradualist approach to civil rights. The president's historic primetime speech on race back in June had done little to change the fiery minister's mind. In fact, just two days before the assassination, Malcolm had ridiculed Kennedy and his policies during a
talk at Columbia University. “Any time a man can become president and after three years in office do as little for Negroes as [Kennedy] has done despite the fact that Negroes went for him 80 percent,” he told the audience. “I'll have to say he's the foxiest of the foxy.”

Despite his orders, Malcolm took little time before veering from his script at the Manhattan Center. The killing of the president wasn't just random violence, he said, it was a violent act in a violent country that exported violence. Then, comparing Kennedy's death to the US-backed November 2 assassination of South Vietnam president Ngo Dinh Diem, he said the events in Dallas were nothing more than “the chickens coming home to roost.” Inspired by the enthusiastic reaction of the crowd, mostly Nation faithful, he pushed the rhetorical envelope further. “Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they've always made me glad,” he remarked. The audience roared with laughter and applause.

The fallout was immediate. Malcolm was suspended from all Nation activities for ninety days. He was forbidden from speaking at his spiritual and political headquarters, Mosque No. 7 in Harlem, and no Muslim in good standing with the Nation could speak to or be seen with him. Accepting his sentence obediently, Malcolm hoped to reconcile with Muhammad, a man he loved like a father, a man revered by Nation members as no mere mortal but the divine Messenger. Despite their increasing differences—Malcolm had been struggling spiritually since hearing of Muhammad's infidelities (the Messenger had a penchant for the attractive, young secretaries at the Nation's Chicago headquarters)—he hoped their fractured relationship could be mended.

During the early months of 1964, however, Malcolm came to the realization that the split was permanent. In fact, it was his close, personal relationship with Muhammad that had endangered Malcolm's role in the secretive Black Nationalist group. Muhammad's family members and closest advisors in Chicago were envious of Malcolm, fearing he would be named the Messenger's successor. In the end, petty jealousies and palace politics had played a critical role in sending Malcolm X into exile.

By March he was moving on, no longer shackled by the Nation's strict separatist or apolitical stances, which forbade members from participating in the white devil's political system or joining the civil rights movement. Seeing how the civil rights cause was fueled largely by Southern black Christians, Malcolm began to explore a more secular and practical approach to the liberation of black Americans. He was ready to “cooperate in local civil rights actions in the South and elsewhere,” he told the
New York Times,
announcing his split with the Nation of Islam. He was now entering a new phase of his life. “It is going to be different now,” he said. “I'm going to join in the fight wherever Negroes ask for my help.” However, he soon realized that this new, inclusive approach was dangerous, too: His former spiritual brethren in the Nation of Islam now viewed him as a traitor. In their eyes he was a heretic, and he knew they would stop at nothing to silence him if his voice grew too loud or his influence too large.

Malcolm founded a new organization, the Muslim Mosque, Inc. and commuted each day from his home in East Elmhurst, Queens, to the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, which served as the group's headquarters. In the poisonous atmosphere of race relations in New York City in early 1964, controversy immediately ensued. After reaffirming to local media his belief that blacks should arm themselves in self-defense—“by whatever means necessary,” in his famous words—taking full advantage of their Second Amendment rights, New York City Police Commissioner Michael J. Murphy immediately condemned him. “Nobody will be allowed to turn New York City into a battleground,” the commissioner warned, claiming Malcolm X and other local activists were driven by “a lust for power” and “other sinister motives.”

Maybe Murphy feared that the newly liberated Malcolm X would become the truly revolutionary figure that many activists had hoped for, or that Malcolm would rival, perhaps even overshadow, the nonviolent wing of the civil rights movement. Maybe the pressure of the job was getting to the police commissioner. Since the summer of 1963, the daily street protests and sit-ins in New York City had been threatening to boil over into a full-scale race riot. The World's Fair, which was set to
open in just weeks, had become a central focus for local radicals, like the Brooklyn chapter of CORE, who were promising a citywide stall-in to ruin Robert Moses' opening day.

Throughout March and April, Malcolm stayed in the spotlight, accepting speaking engagements in the Northeast. He visited the Capitol to witness the civil rights debate in the Senate. Historically, the US Senate was where civil rights legislation went to die or get watered down until it was largely meaningless. It was not lost on Malcolm that the person most responsible for gutting those previous laws was then Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, who was now the President of the United States. Malcolm refused to believe that this man, this Texan—who called the Democrats' 1948 civil rights plank “a farce and a sham”—was sincere when he met with Roy Wilkins, James Farmer, or Martin Luther King Jr. It was a leap of faith that Malcolm was not prepared to make.

But at least one aspect of his Washington, DC, trek would make the whole trip worthwhile. While leaving the Senate gallery, Malcolm and King—whom he had critiqued again just the week before, saying, “Martin Luther King must devise a new approach in the coming year or he will be a man without followers”—came face-to-face for the only time in their abbreviated lives. The meeting was short, just a minute or so, but the resulting iconic photo of the two men, laughing and shaking hands like old friends, would have a lasting historic significance. “I always had a deep affection for Malcolm,” King would later say, “and felt that he had the great ability to put his finger on the existence and root of the problem.” Although Malcolm continued to question the legitimacy of King's nonviolent approach, he began to speak of his rival as someone who had fought in the same wars, acquired the same scars, even if they continued to differ on tactics.

Soon after their historic meeting, Malcolm would lay the rhetorical foundation for his new approach, melding his unrepentant revolutionary ideas with the practical political strategies of King and other civil rights leaders. Instead of erecting philosophical walls between himself and other in the struggle for black freedom, Malcolm wanted to build
bridges. “Unity is the right religion,” he told a New York audience, just three days after meeting King. “Black people must forget their differences and discuss the points on which they can agree.” This was something new indeed.

Then on April 3, at Cleveland's Cory Methodist Church, Malcolm would deliver one of the most important speeches of his life in front of a multiracial crowd of more than two thousand people. Invited by the local chapter of CORE, and sharing the stage with his friend, author and activist Louis E. Lomax. The evening was devoted to the topic “The Negro Revolt—What Comes Next?” For Malcolm, this wasn't much of a question at all; the choice facing African Americans—indeed America itself—was evident in the title of the speech: “The Ballot or the Bullet.” He had first unveiled the speech at various engagements in New York at the end of March, and sounding every bit like the new man he was, he crafted the words for weeks until he perfected its every cadence and grace note.

Malcolm began with another plea for unity as he extended an olive branch to King and other leaders. “If we have differences, let us differ in the closet.” As Malcolm pointed out, if Kennedy had found a way to work with the Soviets, then African-American leaders could come together, too. “We certainly have more in common with each other than Kennedy and Khrushchev had with each other,” he said. The scenario Malcolm painted was stark, but the choices surprisingly simple: It was either going to be the ballot—that is, twenty-two million black Americans would be able to exercise their constitutional right to vote—or it would be the bullet. “It's one of the other in 1964,” he said. “It isn't that time is running out—time has
run out!
Nineteen sixty-four threatens to be the most explosive year America has ever witnessed.”

For Malcolm, black Americans would be treated as full and free first-class citizens, with all the protections of the US Constitution, or there would be an armed and bloody revolution where both black and white blood would flow. To put it in World's Fair terminology, there would be no peace through understanding unless America had a historic shift of its political axis.

Malcolm quickly explained to his audience why he didn't believe such a shift would happen: The Democratic Party itself was rotten to its Southern core. The coalition of voters—Northern liberals, urban ethnics, African Americans, and Southern segregationists—that Franklin D. Roosevelt had patched together for his unprecedented four terms as president was torn and frayed; the civil rights bill threatened to destroy it once and for all. And he named names: Senator Richard B. Russell—“that's [President Lyndon B. Johnson's] boy, that's his pal, that's his buddy”—and Senator James O. Eastland, two of the Senate's most notorious racists, who along with their senatorial kin were keeping the civil rights bill from getting anywhere.

Malcolm was airing the hypocrisy that was the heart of the Democratic Party. “A Dixiecrat is nothing but a Democrat in disguise,” he said. “A vote for a Democrat is a vote for a Dixiecrat.” Malcolm's political logic was hardly deniable: The Democrats held a massive majority in the Senate—sixty-five to thirty-five—and still a Democratic president couldn't get a civil rights bill through Congress. Malcolm didn't believe that Johnson would follow through on his promises. Although Malcolm X reinvented himself repeatedly, he had no faith in the president to do the same.

It was this intraparty civil war that Malcolm based his choices on. In the ten years since the US Supreme Court's historic Brown v. Board of Education decision that declared segregated schooling unconstitutional, Malcolm wanted to know one thing: “Where's the progress?” It was for all these reasons that he declared the American political system hopelessly and morally bankrupt;
that's
why younger activists were growing militant and choosing confrontation over nonviolence. Younger blacks “don't want to hear that ‘turn-the-other-cheek' stuff,” he said, noting that rioting teenagers in Jacksonville, Florida, had thrown Molotov cocktails at police during a recent melee. “It'll be Molotov cocktails this month, hand grenades next month, and something else next month. It'll be ballots or it'll be bullets. It'll be liberty or it'll be death.” Malcolm spoke of the struggle of black Americans in the universal language of revolution.

Malcolm wanted to bring America's racial crimes before the United Nations. It wasn't the first time such a demand was made: William Paterson, a black communist leader, charged the United States with genocide before the world court in the 1940s; and just months earlier, the NAACP and the Urban League, fed up with the impotent promises of Governor Rockefeller and Mayor Wagner and the silence from Moses, had marched outside the UN—the very international body that the Master Builder helped bring to New York—to complain about job discrimination at the World's Fair.

Seeking to unite the oppression of black Americans with the oppressed people of the world—“our African brothers and our Asian brothers and our Latin-American brothers”—was Malcolm's way of circumventing the hypocrisy of the American government and of tapping into the revolutionary energy that fueled so many former colonies in the Third World. And now these very same countries were coming to America to participate in the World's Fair as
free men
. For Malcolm—who like everyone living in Queens, had to be aware of the Fair—the irony had to be overwhelming. (Like millions of other New Yorkers, Malcolm had to navigate the same arterial highways that Moses was in the process of rebuilding in preparation for the Fair.)