Blood Brothers (11 page)

So did Malcolm X. Since 1955, he had heard whispers about Muhammad's infidelities. Initially, he discounted them as unsubstantiated gossip, denying any possibility that the Messenger of Allah—his personal savior—would ever betray him and his followers. But the rumors persisted. He heard them everywhere he went, from New York to Chicago. By 1962, increasing numbers of Muslims began abandoning the Nation, forcing him to finally admit what he had suspected for years.
²³

In his solitude, Malcolm's mind drifted to the image of Muhammad groping young women. Some nights he couldn't sleep. Other nights he woke up damp with perspiration, panicked that the world would soon know Muhammad's secret. Scandalous headlines jumped at him in his dreams. At some point, he feared, an investigative journalist would stick
a microphone in his face and ask him, “Is it true, Mr. Malcolm X, this report we hear, that . . .” How would he answer the question? How could he come to terms with the idea that the man he had built up as a moral paragon was actually a fraud?”
²⁴

“I believed he was divine, divinely taught and divinely guided,” Malcolm later admitted. “And it was only when Elijah Muhammad—ah—something in his personal life—he found himself confronted with a moral question which he could not face up to as a man. And his failure to face up to that as a man made me begin to doubt him, not only as someone divine—divinely guided—but it made me doubt him as a man. And in the face of that, I began to analyze everything else he taught.”
²⁵

Malcolm was not the only one concerned about the Nation's future. Inside the Chicago headquarters, Muhammad's closest aides worried that his bronchial asthma and other ailments portended a leadership change. With Muhammad spending most of the year in Phoenix and his son Wallace serving prison time for draft evasion, Raymond Sharrieff, John Ali, and Muhammad's sons Herbert, Akbar, and Elijah Jr. expanded their influence over the sect. The junta enjoyed their growing power and the benefits that came with it.
²⁶

They lived an extravagant lifestyle while Muhammad's mostly poor followers struggled to survive and pay a weekly duty of three dollars and thirty cents. In some mosques, the Fruit demanded even higher tithes. Destitute blacks were urged to buy multiple copies of
Muhammad Speaks
, frequent the Nation's businesses, and drop donations into collection plates during mass meetings. FBI informants noted that Muhammad's followers were “continually harassed by NOI officials for greater and greater contributions.” Muhammad instructed his closest advisers “to purchase expensive cars and homes for him; to provide him with bodyguards and servants; and to give him other manifestations of affluence.” He even referred to the Nation's relief funds as “my checking account.”
²⁷

In some ways, Elijah stoked his advisers' fears that Malcolm might reduce their influence in the Nation. In February 1962, at the annual Saviours' Day rally in Chicago, he openly referred to Malcolm as his “heir apparent” and “chief aide.” He also gave Malcolm the authority to resolve conflicts between members of different mosques. When
Muhammad ordained him supreme authority by proxy, he gave Malcolm power that no other minister enjoyed, provoking deeper jealousies among his rivals.
²⁸

Malcolm's enemies charged him with avarice, a baseless accusation. Although he had access to the Nation's treasury, he and Betty, his wife of four years, lived on a strict budget, owning virtually nothing, not even the house they lived in. When he traveled, rather than pay for a taxi ride to and from the airport, he asked fellow Muslims to give him a ride. He avoided expensive restaurants, collected receipts for every expense, and kept meticulous records of his purchases. Whenever he received money for campus lectures, he made sure that the checks were always written out to the NOI and not himself. In his ascetic lifestyle, Malcolm completely rejected his old life as Detroit Red.
²⁹

Although his austerity made him a more appealing political figure to the black masses, his adversaries resented his puritanical beliefs. With the Nation's businesses thriving, Muhammad's cabinet feared that if he died and Malcolm replaced him, then Malcolm might terminate the spoils system. Benjamin 2X recalled, “There was a lot of money floating around and a lot of people were spending money in areas where it shouldn't have been spent, and Malcolm spoke out against it. And they knew that if Mr. Muhammad had passed on, they would not have their positions anymore, because they were the first people that Malcolm would have gotten rid of.”
³⁰

Malcolm had no aspirations of becoming the Supreme Minister. Uninterested in managing the national affairs of the Muslims or arbitrating disputes between Muhammad's children, he was far more concerned with the direction of the struggle for black freedom. The more he talked about confronting the white man, the more agitated his rivals in Chicago became. But after the Stokes murder, Malcolm no longer cared. He was on a mission, and now he would have to enlist foot soldiers of his own.

I
F
M
UHAMMAD WISHED
that Malcolm would avoid further controversy, his hopes were soon dashed. At a rally in Harlem on Saturday, May 26, he disobeyed Elijah Muhammad's order to stand down and suggested that Harlem's civil rights leaders coordinate a coalition against police brutality. On June 6, at a press conference, pressure intensified when
Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty played a police informant's recording of Malcolm speaking at a Muslim gathering. Referring to a plane crash in Paris that killed white passengers traveling from Atlanta, he declared, “I would like to announce a very beautiful thing that has happened. As you know, we have been praying to Allah. We have been praying that He would in some way let us know that he has the power to execute justice upon the heads of those who are responsible for the lynching of Ronald Stokes on April 27. And I got a wire from God today,” he said over a chorus of laughter. “Wait! All right! Well somebody came and told me that he answered our prayers over in France. He dropped an airplane out of the sky with over a hundred and twenty white people on it.” Since the Stokes case, he said, many blacks had asked him what the Muslims were going to do. “We call on our God,” he answered. “He gets rid of one hundred and twenty of them in one whop . . . and we hope that every day another plane falls out of the sky,” he said as the crowd roared with applause.
³¹

Malcolm's comments shocked Americans, crystalizing his image as a demagogue who preached hatred. Immediately, civil rights leaders condemned him. In Atlanta, Martin Luther King canceled sit-ins against segregated restaurants and lunch counters out of respect for the city's mourners. “That's my home town,” he said. “I knew many of the people who were killed. Many of them believed in progress.” When he was asked about Malcolm's comments, he answered, “If the Muslim leader said that, I would certainly disagree with him. Black supremacy is as dangerous as white supremacy.”
³²

Facing a firestorm of criticism, Malcolm traveled to Detroit, where Elijah Muhammad was scheduled to deliver a major address at Olympia Stadium on June 10. The “Old Red Barn,” as it was known in Motown, was a three-story, Romanesque arena with arched windows, built of steel, brown terracotta, and red brick. By noon, busloads of blacks had congregated outside the stadium at the corner of Grand River Avenue and McGraw Street. Uniformed police officers directed the traffic while several thousand people braved the wind and rain.

Shortly before two o'clock, when the rally was scheduled to begin, Cassius, Rudy, and Sam headed over to the stadium. In the crowded lobby, hundreds of earnest security guards patted down everyone who entered the building. Even Detroit's police commissioner submitted to
a body search. After the Clay brothers passed inspection, the FOI corps, communicating by walkie-talkie, ushered them into a long line of men who were escorted to their seats on the right side of the floor. Cassius had never seen such a spectacle of dignified-looking black people, all the men wearing dark suits and all the women, seated on the left, dressed in immaculate white gowns and shawls. Reporters and cameramen covering the event sat in the very front rows, near the curious blacks who were not members of the Nation.
³³

Cassius stretched his neck as he watched an honor guard escort Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm, and other officials onto the speaker's platform. Standing amid the awestruck silence, he felt the crowd's reverence for the Messenger. After exchanging the traditional greetings,
As-Salaam-Alaikum
and
Wa-Alaikum-Salaam
, Malcolm delivered his opening remarks and defended the Nation's doctrine. “We are not a sect or a cult, nor are we a hate group,” he asserted. “We are a group of people who have accepted the Islamic faith and believe that Allah is the Supreme Being.”
³⁴

When Malcolm finished, Muhammad, the featured speaker, rose from his large chair, like a royal descending from his throne, and walked over to the lectern. Cassius listened attentively as the slight man with a receding hairline forcefully asserted that the “so-called Negro” had been enslaved for more than four hundred years, echoing what Clay had heard at the Miami mosque. “That is a long time for a master to mistreat you,” he said. For two hours, Muhammad zealously preached while Cassius and Rudy sat well back in the crowded arena, “practically leading the applause.”
³⁵

Flanked by twenty to thirty members of the Fruit, Muhammad declared, “The time to rise is now.” It was time for black men to renounce the “games of white men,” he urged, time to abandon the struggle for integration and turn inward, looking to Allah's Messenger for salvation. Muhammad condemned the Los Angeles police for murdering Ronald Stokes and reminded his parents, the honored guests, that their son did not die in vain. The white man's day of judgment, he promised, would come before long.
³⁶

Muhammad demanded a separate state where blacks could live independently from whites. Malcolm sat just a few feet away from him,
nodding with approval as he listened. “We must remember that we are two different people and we must be separate. That is the only way out.”
³⁷

The message Clay heard that day jived with what he had learned from his father—keep your distance from white men; they will never treat a black man fairly. It reinforced what he had read in newspapers and magazines and seen on television—images of the mutilated body of Emmett Till, the bombing of Martin Luther King's Montgomery home, and a white mob assaulting black teenagers outside a Little Rock high school.

That day in Detroit changed Clay's life. There was something about Malcolm—his swagger, the dazzle in his smile, the way that everyone in the diner watched him—that alerted Cassius that the brother minister, who, in the words of activist Dick Gregory, “spoke like a poor man and walked like a king,” possessed an unbridled confidence and an audacity to speak his mind in a way that no else did.
³⁸

“My first impression of Malcolm X was how could a black man talk about the government and white people and act so bold and not be shot at? How could he say these things? Only God must be protecting him,” Clay said later. Malcolm was unlike anyone he had ever met. “He was fearless. That really attracted me.”
³⁹

Malcolm had magnetized Clay, drawing him toward the inner circle of the Nation. He had no idea the effect he had on the young boxer that day in Detroit, but he would soon see him again.

A
T THE END
of the rally, after Clay departed Olympia Stadium, all members of the NOI were required to remain seated. Malcolm read a letter from Supreme Captain Raymond Sharrieff requiring “every Muslim to obtain no less than two subscriptions” of
Muhammad Speaks
“per day for three months.” Those who failed to meet the sales quota “would be eliminated from the Mosque.”
⁴⁰

Since Stokes's death, the captains of every mosque had pressed their members to sell more copies of the newspaper.
Muhammad Speaks
not only offered the Nation an independent platform but also, more importantly, generated significant revenue for the organization. After the Stokes murder, instead of printing the newspaper on a monthly basis, Chicago officials began publishing the periodical biweekly. Supposedly,
the issue that covered his funeral sold more than four hundred thousand copies, a misleading figure since an unknown number of copies belonged to members who were forced to purchase stacks of the newspaper in cash but never actually sold them to others.
⁴¹

On Sunday, July 29, at two p.m., Malcolm attended a fund-raising benefit for Stokes's family at the Boston Arena. In the hours before the rally, Muslims stood on the corners of St. Botolph Street and Massachusetts Avenue, selling a special reprint edition of
Muhammad Speaks
featuring gruesome pictures of Stokes that resembled the images of Emmett Till's disfigured face in
Jet
magazine. An autopsy photo displayed Stokes lying on his back, his bare chest exposed with deep stitches and his skull lacerated and bruised from policemen's nightsticks. Inside the tabloid were pictures of black men tethered to trees and hanging from nooses. In an open letter to five black congressmen, Malcolm argued that Stokes was as innocent as “Mack Parker, Emmett Till, or Isaac Woodard,” all victims of southern lynchings.
⁴²

Despite the propaganda value of the Stokes murder, Muslim men in Boston resented the sales quotas, which were imposed under the guise of raising money for Stokes's family. His cousin, Aubrey Barnette, would later claim that Ronald's wife and baby never received a dime from the Muslims' national or local treasuries. The Nation, he charged, was nothing more than a “money-grabbing scheme feeding on the frustrations and the ignorance of Negroes.” When Muhammad's followers failed to bring in money, his lieutenants resorted “to terror, violence, and extortion.”
⁴³