Alex Haley (6 page)

There was a postscript to this situation: in a few years, Miller and Lucinda Williams got away from Louisiana unharmed and settled at the University of Arkansas, where he established a university press and became a nationally renowned poet. Lucinda became a celebrated singer and songwriter, nominated fifteen times for Grammy Awards and winning three. Bill Clinton asked Miller Williams to read his poem “Of History and Hope” at the 1997 presidential inauguration. And in 1998 Clinton appointed the staunchly Republican George Haley ambassador to the Gambia.

By 1962 Haley's freelance career was taking off. His work benefited from extensive critiques by
Reader's Digest
editors, especially a senior editor, Charles Ferguson. In 1963 the
Digest
arranged to pay Haley a monthly stipend of $300 and to cover his travel expenses as he scouted for stories. It was an unusual—and fortunate—arrangement for a freelance writer. The
Digest
paid him $12,000 in 1963. He wrote ten articles, of which the editors bought only two, for $4,000 each. He began to place stories with other magazines too. “I got to the point I'd sell one in every five and then gradually one in every four. Eventually I became able to sell just about whatever I wrote, particularly after I began to be assigned stories by editors who had. . . . acquired a certain amount of confidence that I could execute an assignment. I could make a month's pay with one article.”
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* * *

Haley's rise
as a freelance writer was linked in part to the growing notoriety of the Nation of Islam (NOI). He had first heard of the Nation when a black musician he knew in San Francisco went home to Detroit, was converted to the sect, and returned saying, “The white man is the devil.” In July 1959, about the time Haley got back to New York, Mike Wallace produced a sensationalist depiction of the group,
The Hate That Hate Produced
, for a local commercial New York station. Widely viewed, the report introduced the Nation to a white population previously unaware of it. The Nation had mosques in fifty American cities, and Wallace showed that some blacks had embraced the “flagrant doctrine of black supremacy.” Elijah Muhammad, known by his followers as “the Messenger” of Allah, led the Nation. Muhammad declared that blacks were not originally or naturally Christians. Among the sensational statements Wallace highlighted was the Messenger's promise “to give the call” for destruction of the white man by 1970.
The Hate That Hate Produced
also brought before the camera Malcolm X, a handsome, red-headed, copper-skinned man whose speeches riveted listeners, whether they agreed with him or not. Malcolm was brilliant at the podium and on television. His crackling baritone voice and his razor-edged opinions about white society's hypocrisies made for irresistible listening. In 1958 an FBI informant reported that Malcolm was an “expert organizer and an untiring worker” whose hatred for whites was not likely to “erupt in violence as he is much too clever and intelligent for that.”
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Malcolm recounted the Nation's creation story: the serpent in the garden with Adam and Eve was Yacub, a white man, from whom the pale races of men evolved. African civilization was originally superior to European civilization, and only through millennia of oppression had people been led to believe otherwise. Blacks were not really in favor of integration, Malcolm insisted, because it polluted black interests. The NAACP was a “black body with white head.” Malcolm was most compelling when he justified the Nation's hatred of “the white devil.” Whites' characterization of members of the Nation as subversive was outrageous, he said: “Here is a man who has raped your mother and hung your father on his tree, is he subversive? Here is a man who robbed you of all knowledge of your nation and your religion and is he subversive?”
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Malcolm had moved to Harlem in 1954 and transformed NOI Mosque No. 7 into an exciting place with a growing membership. Harlem residents seemed irresistibly drawn to him. His duties soon included expanding the Nation along the East Coast, which he did with astonishing success. He later claimed that the national membership of the Nation was only about four hundred when he began preaching but numbered in the tens of thousands by 1959. Malcolm and the Nation's message of strict personal conduct appealed to a growing number of residents of dangerous black ghettos.
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Haley interested
Reader's Digest
in a piece on the Nation, and he wrote Malcolm several letters that went unanswered. Finally he went to the Muslim restaurant in Harlem that served as Malcolm's office. Haley showed Malcolm a letter from
Reader's Digest
requesting a story on the Nation. “You're a tool—you're a white man's tool,” Malcolm responded, but he kept talking to Haley. Haley responded that he intended to write an objective piece, to which Malcolm replied that a white man's promise was worthless but that he would consider cooperating. Later Malcolm said that Haley would need the permission of Elijah Muhammad. Haley went to Chicago and had dinner with the Messenger. Nothing was said about the article, but when Haley returned to New York, Malcolm agreed to help. Haley began attending Mosque No. 7 in Harlem, and he traveled to NOI temples in several other cities. His easygoing demeanor and enthusiasm for research allayed at least some of the natural suspicions among the NOI men.
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Malcolm introduced Haley to Louis Lomax, the black television reporter who had collaborated with Mike Wallace. Lomax personally rejected the NOI's separatism but believed that 80 percent of blacks “vibrate sympathetically” with its open hatred of whites. Haley's friend James Baldwin held a sympathetic view of the Nation. In 1961 Baldwin wrote that “the Muslim movement has all the evidence on its side. . . . This is the great power a Muslim speaker has over his audience. His listeners have not heard the truth about their daily lives honored by anyone else. Almost all others, black or white, prefer to soften the truth, and point to a new day which is coming for America.” In a 1962
New Yorker
article, later published as the longer of the two essays in his celebrated book
The Fire Next Time,
Baldwin wrote that Elijah Muhammad had done “what generations of welfare workers and committees and resolutions and reports and housing projects and playgrounds have failed to do: to heal and redeem drunkards and junkies, to convert people who have come out of prison and to keep them out, to make men chaste and women virtuous, and to invest both the male and the female with a pride and a serenity that hang about them like an unfailing light.”
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Probably the greatest influence on Haley's understanding of the Nation came from C. Eric Lincoln. Haley and Lincoln were about the same age, had grown up in Alabama at the same time, and both had backgrounds in the AME church. They spent time together in Greenwich Village while Lincoln finished his dissertation, the first scholarly treatment of the Nation,
Black Muslims in America,
published in 1961. Lincoln placed the NOI within the historical context of black nationalism. Lincoln began with William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, who in 1903 published
The Souls of Black Folk.
Du Bois argued for the existence of an Afro-American folk spirit, writing that “the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world. . . . Negro blood has a message for the world.” Du Bois defined black nationalism as including a sense of alienation from white power and dominant white values. He emphasized blacks' common history—a glorious African past, the horrors of slavery, the disappointments of emancipation—and the myths that blacks built on them. Black nationalism included the celebration of African American culture and the belief that blacks' spirit as a people arose from their cultural distinctiveness. For Du Bois, whites, in essence, were selfish and violent, and blacks in their essence were gifted with higher sensitivity, a distinctive humaneness that whites lacked.
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Lincoln noted that most older members of the Nation of Islam shared a background in Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which had attracted millions of American members in the 1920s. Garvey insisted the United States was far too racist and undemocratic to ever include blacks as equals, and he cited the mistreatment of blacks during and after World War I to justify a plan for blacks' wholesale migration to Africa. Few of Garvey's followers actually intended to emigrate, but all responded to the movement's promotion of race pride. Unlike the NOI in its condemnation of Christianity, Garvey reconciled evangelical Christianity with black nationalism by portraying God and Jesus as black. It worked: many of the UNIA's most devoted organizers were Christian ministers, including Malcolm's own father. Garvey's influence among blacks raised the suspicions of the U.S. government, which believed rumors of armed Garveyites preparing for race war. In 1925 Garvey was convicted of mail fraud, sent to prison for several years, and then deported. The UNIA went into decline, but some of its supporters joined the Nation of Islam when it emerged in Detroit in the 1930s.

“Mr. Muhammad Speaks” appeared in
Reader's Digest
in March 1960. The article began with a tone similar to that of
The Hate That Hate Produced
. Blacks across America, the piece noted, were talking about Elijah Muhammad and the Nation, which Haley described as a “vitriolically anti-white, anti-Christian cult that preaches black superiority.” The Nation was building businesses and schools intended to end black dependency on whites and to help blacks in cities find “a new way of life—a militant and arrogant black unity.” He quoted Malcolm: “When I was a Christian, I was a criminal. I was only doing what the white man taught me.” This rejection of white society, Haley wrote, arose from discrimination against blacks, and his article turned more sympathetic to the Nation. He noted: “Old friends of new Muslims are astounded at the incredible changes of personality which take place as converts swap lifelong habits for new spartan standards.” He quoted black sources who understood the Nation's growth as a response to bad social conditions for blacks. He concluded that it was “important for Christianity and democracy to help remove the Negroes' honest grievances and thus eliminate the appeal of such a potent racist cult.”
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* * *

In 1961
Haley made a connection with a new magazine,
Show Business Illustrated,
published by Hugh Hefner and the
Playboy
enterprise. Haley developed a story about Miles Davis, the brilliant jazz trumpeter, a man known for his hostility to the media and his racial edginess. Davis routinely refused to talk to white journalists, but he gave the affable black journalist an interview. Before the article could be published, however,
Show Business Illustrated
folded. A. C. Spectorsky, Hefner's editorial director, was transforming
Playboy
from a girlie magazine into a publication with serious literary content and social criticism, including a concern for American race relations. Hefner was sympathetic to civil rights activism. He forced the desegregation of Playboy clubs in southern cities, and he and Spectorsky instilled a pro–civil rights message in the magazine. In July 1962
Playboy
ran a long article, “Through the Racial Looking Glass,” by Nat Hentoff, the jazz critic for the
Village Voice
and a writer in close touch with black intellectuals and artists, that explored black anger. Hentoff quoted the jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie as telling a group of white jazzmen, “You people had better just lie down and die. You've lost Africa and Asia, and now they are cutting out from white power everywhere. You'd better give up or learn how it feels being a minority.” James Baldwin asserted for the article that “the American Negro can no longer be, and will never be again, controlled by white America's image of him.” Hentoff also quoted the comedian Dick Gregory: “I'm so goddamn sick and tired of a white man telling us about us.”
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In 1962 Spectorsky appointed
Murray Fisher to develop the magazine's interview series. Fisher, tall and muscular and about thirty years old at the time, was described by Playboy colleagues as abrasive, combative, and even a bully. Fisher found Haley's unpublished piece on Miles Davis in the files of
Show Business Illustrated
and asked him to develop it into the first
Playboy
interview. Davis had liked Haley since the writer showed up at Davis's boxing gym and put on gloves to spar with him. “In a clinch I agreed with Davis that writers and reporters were a hateful, untrustworthy breed,” Haley recalled. Davis laughed and later gave Haley a series of illuminating interviews. He dwelt on the perils of being a black celebrity; he believed he had been mistreated by white critics and disrespected by white audiences at his performances, and unlike most black entertainers in the past, he did not keep his resentments to himself. Davis had long rejected bookings in the South. “I ain't going to play nowhere in the South that Negroes
can't
come. But I ain't going to play nowhere in the North that Negroes
don't
come.” Davis concluded by saying, “This whole prejudice mess is something you would feel so good if it could just be got rid of, like a big sore eating inside of your belly.”
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The Miles Davis piece established Haley as a gifted interviewer. Haley's affability and his reticence about his own political and social views lent an empathetic tone to his profiles. “I like to study the person,” he later said, “study what they've done, be low-key in my approach with them . . . project by my manner and my sincerity, which really has to be sincere, that I was genuinely interested in what they did and how they did it.” But in the Davis interview, Haley's questions did not exhibit overt sympathy; they might have come from a polite, white skeptic.