Blood Brothers (17 page)

“I'm David,” he declared. “When you read about how David took another man's wife, I'm that David. You read books about Noah, who got drunk—that's me. You read about Lot, who went and laid up with his own daughters. I have to fulfill all of those things.”
²¹

After their conversation, Malcolm felt unsatisfied. If Elijah had convinced himself that he was David, Malcolm was less sure that the Nation would accept this convenient allegory. Instead of denying his worst fear, Muhammad had confirmed it, leaving Malcolm and the other ministers in the untenable position of having to convince the followers of Elijah's prophecy. Muhammad had instructed him to discreetly inform a few ministers about their conversation, but, he said, under no circumstances should he tell Brother Louis X. Do not tell Louis, he repeated.
²²

Malcolm returned to New York not knowing that Elijah was testing his loyalty. If Malcolm followed his orders, then Elijah would know that he could trust him. But the moment Malcolm attempted to “inoculate” the Nation from the “oncoming virus,” his enemies in Chicago would charge that he, not Elijah Muhammad, was the untrustworthy one.
²³

I
N
W
ASHINGTON
, DC, where Muhammad had recently assigned him to build up the Muslims' presence, Malcolm watched news footage of white police officers unleashing attack dogs on black teenagers who marched for freedom. He admired the courage of Birmingham's youth, but he could not believe that Martin Luther King would allow them to march on the front lines, unable to defend themselves. Teaching nonviolence, he insisted, sedated blacks into passivity. For Malcolm, King's willingness to turn the other cheek made him weak and cowardly, a message he shared with Cassius Clay. A real black man would never let a white man put a hand on him or “put their children on the firing line.” If a white man turned “his dogs on your babies, your women and your children, then you ought to kill the dogs, whether they've got four legs or two.”
²⁴

Despite Malcolm's position on the outskirts of the civil rights leadership, his violent rhetoric shaped the contours of the movement. In the public mind, he became King's foil, a dark and menacing alternative to the Christian philosophy of brotherly love. Malcolm's public criticisms of King's nonviolent philosophy moved him to the center of the national civil rights debate. The fact that reporters interviewed him, seeking his opinion about the Birmingham crisis, gave him further credibility and elevated his national profile.

Increasingly, journalists simplified the struggle as a rivalry between two political movements: the nonviolent integrationists and violent
Black Nationalists. In the aftermath of Birmingham, journalists wrote that the black freedom struggle had reached a crossroads. According to most writers, the struggle could either embrace the moderate leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the NAACP or turn toward the “extremism” of Malcolm and the Nation of Islam.
²⁵

In mid-May, after the Ku Klux Klan bombed Birmingham's A. G. Gaston Motel, King's organizing headquarters, rumors spread that Malcolm might visit the battered southern city, but he never did. Elijah Muhammad would not allow it. Instead of traveling to the South, Malcolm criticized Jackie Robinson and Floyd Patterson for going to Birmingham. He claimed that Robinson and Patterson were being used by white liberals to pacify angry blacks.
²⁶

For a boxer who admitted to being scared in the ring, nothing frightened Patterson more than going to Birmingham. When Robinson invited him to speak, he prepared for the worst: jail, beatings, even death. He had told Jackie that he could only afford to stay behind bars for three days, but when a television reporter asked him what he would do if the police turned on the hoses or unleashed the dogs, he answered, “I'm not used to standing by like the people in the South, who are much stronger than I am when it comes to this type of thing. I can't stand around and let an animal bite. So,” he declared, “I will have to do something.”
²⁷

Not every boxer shared Patterson's views. Heavyweight champion Sonny Liston scorned Martin Luther King's nonviolent ideas and the strategies of the NAACP. Several years before, he had called the Freedom Riders “stupid,” explaining, “That ain't no way to do things. You have to fight for what you get. It's like boxing. No use being in there if you just catch punches, because you're not going to get the decision. . . . Now, if some sucker comes and blows up my house, then someone else's house is going to be blowed up. And the next time this sucker ain't going to be in no hurry to go blow up houses.” It was all a matter of fighting back, trading punch for punch. He was not going to participate in any nonviolent protests. When a white reporter asked why he was not going to Birmingham, Liston answered, “I ain't got no dog-proof ass.”
²⁸

But Patterson was committed to a cause that Liston refused to join. When he and Robinson arrived in Birmingham on May 13, they learned that white vigilantes threatened their lives. Protected by a police escort,
they toured the ravaged city, visited with ministers and citizens, and spoke at rallies. The next night, they accompanied King to the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church. After Patterson spoke briefly about his admiration for the grassroots activists, Wyatt Tee Walker, the executive director of SCLC, introduced Robinson, a man who needed no introduction.

As the graying baseball legend rose from the pew and walked pigeon-toed toward the podium, leaning on his cane, the congregation cheered even louder than they had for King. They never forgot all the abuse—the beanballs, the vile epithets, and the death threats—that he had endured to prove that blacks belonged in the national pastime. His presence at the church demonstrated that he did not believe that his fight against segregation had ended when he hung up his baseball cleats. When Robinson spoke, the congregation drew strength from a “race man,” a proud, fearless black man who had stared down Jim Crow without blinking.
²⁹

Malcolm remained unimpressed with Robinson's politics, calling him a traitor for working with white politicians. Over the next year, they sparred through the press. Robinson claimed that he respected Malcolm's intellect, but he insisted that the Nation of Islam's Black Nationalist philosophy “set back the cause of the Negro.”
³⁰

Later in the year, Robinson indicted Malcolm for failing to risk his life fighting injustice the way that other activists did in the South. “Whom do you think you are kidding, Malcolm, when you say that Negro leaders ought to be ‘thankful' that you were not personally present in Birmingham or Mississippi after racial atrocities had been committed there? The inference seems to be that you would have played some dramatic, avenging role.”
³¹

Robinson did not believe Malcolm would have ever retaliated against white supremacists because he had never done so before. “I think you would have done exactly what you did after your own Muslim brothers were shot and killed in Los Angeles. You left it to the law to take its course.”
³²

Apparently Robinson did not realize how eager some Muslims were to retaliate against those who had crossed them. After the former baseball star wrote a searing editorial denouncing Elijah Muhammad, two Muslim officials brought a copy of the
Amsterdam News
to the Nation's Harlem restaurant. When a gang of Muslims overheard the lieutenants
condemning Robinson, they figured that it might be worth their trouble if they hurt him. The only problem was that the avengers confused the former baseball player with a boxer. They staked out the offices of the
Amsterdam News
, looking for
Sugar Ray
Robinson, but when he didn't appear they went to his house. Fortunately for him, he never came home. Eventually the Muslims drove away and both Robinsons escaped Allah's vengeance.
³³

Even if Malcolm disagreed with Robinson's views, he recognized the power of famous black athletes who engaged the freedom struggle, making Cassius Clay all the more valuable to his political aims. Before the early 1960s, most black professional athletes avoided overt political demonstrations, fearing negative consequences to their careers, while others evaded social action as a personal choice. Most black athletes let their performances on the field do the talking.

Yet in 1963, in the aftermath of the Birmingham crisis, some of the most prominent black athletes became important actors in the struggle, but most of them, like Robinson and Patterson, advocated integration as a racial ideal. So when Clay spoke out against the NAACP, he not only renounced the goals of the civil rights movement, he also rejected the accepted expectations for “Negro” athletes. The more time he spent with Malcolm, the more he began to sound like him. For now, though, reporters did not question the origins of his evolving political views. But soon the world would know that Cassius Clay had befriended Malcolm X.

A
S A SUBJECT, WRITER
Alex Haley found Malcolm X more fascinating than anyone he had ever interviewed. Everything he did seemed “dramatic and it wasn't that he was trying to be,” Haley later recalled. “It was just the nature of him.” In the early winter of 1963, before Malcolm flew to Phoenix to confront Elijah, he met Haley at the Muslims' Harlem luncheonette for a lengthy interview, which was later published in
Playboy
. Malcolm, as was his custom, sat facing the door, sipping coffee, while his aides occasionally whispered messages in his ear.
³⁴

The interview covered Malcolm's redemption story, and the Black Muslims' ideological beliefs. When Haley asked him if he regretted his comments about the plane crash that killed 120 white Atlantans, he replied, “Sir, as I see the law of justice, it says, as you sow, so shall you
reap. The white man has reveled as the rope snapped black men's necks. He has reveled around the lynching fire. It's only right for the black man's true God, Allah, to defend us—and for us to be joyous because our God manifests his ability to inflict pain on our enemy.”
³⁵

Malcolm knew that some of his answers would frighten people. He didn't trust that Haley or the editors at
Playboy
would publish his comments verbatim, as they had agreed, though the editors kept their word. He also knew that whatever he said would be read by Elijah and other officials in the Nation, so when Haley suggested that he was “the real brains and power of the movement,” he immediately corrected him: “Sir, it's heresy to imply that I am in any way whatever even equal to Mr. Muhammad. No man on earth today is his equal.” He insisted that no one, including himself, was worthy of replacing the Messenger.
³⁶

His answer must have pleased Muhammad. In May, after the magazine appeared on newsstands, Haley pondered something that Malcolm had said to him: “You wouldn't believe my past.” Perhaps, he thought, the minister would talk more about his life, his evolution, how Malcolm Little became Malcolm X. When the writer asked him if he would consent to an autobiography, he looked stunned. “It was one of the few times I have ever seen him uncertain,” Haley later recalled. Malcolm told him that he would need to think about the offer.

After considering it, Malcolm told Haley that he would agree on two conditions: first, every penny of his royalties would go directly to the NOI; second, Elijah Muhammad must approve the project. When Haley visited Muhammad in Phoenix, he explained that the book would help spread his message. Nodding, Elijah answered, “Allah approves.”
³⁷

After Haley returned to New York City, he and Malcolm signed a contract with Doubleday, which included a twenty-thousand-dollar advance for them to split equally. After planning their next meeting, Malcolm handed him a handwritten dedication: “This book I dedicate to The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, who found me here in America in the muck and mire of the filthiest civilization and society on this earth, and pulled me out, cleaned me up, and stood me on my feet, and made me the man that I am today.” As promised, Haley filed away the dedication, oblivious of how much Malcolm's life would change by the time he finished the manuscript.
³⁸

O
N
F
RIDAY
, J
UNE
14, 1963, an all-white Los Angeles jury rendered its decision in the Stokes case. It convicted nine of thirteen Black Muslim defendants, finding them guilty of assaulting police officers during the raid on the West Coast mosque. Two of the Muslims were acquitted, and the jury could not reach unanimous verdicts on two others. Four of the convicted men received prison sentences ranging from one to five years, one served time in the county jail, and the others received probation.
³⁹

Ten days later, WNDT in New York televised
The Negro and the American Promise,
a series of interviews Dr. Kenneth Clark conducted with Malcolm, King, and James Baldwin. Clark, a prominent psychology professor at City College in New York, taped the interviews separately and focused his questions on the future of the black man. Still carrying the burden of Birmingham on his shoulders, King looked exhausted on camera, as if he had just returned from a funeral. In a quiet, gentle voice, he recalled his experience in jail, unwavering in his commitment to nonviolence. Malcolm, angered by the Stokes ruling, spoke forcefully and bitterly, repeating his criticisms of King.
⁴⁰

James Baldwin sympathized with King but feared that America's blacks were exasperated with his message. Sitting cross-legged, smoking a cigarette, the slight, “dark splinter of a man” with bulbous eyes spoke in contemplative, almost theatrical tones. Wearily, he vented, “You can only survive so many beatings, so much humiliation, so much despair, so many broken promises, before something gives.” He warned that although King possessed great moral authority in the South, his message did not resonate with blacks in northern cities. “Poor Martin has gone through God knows what kind of hell to awaken the American conscience,” he said, “but Martin has reached the end of his rope.”
⁴¹