Blood Brothers (40 page)

No matter how much the Black Muslims threatened him, Malcolm refused to back down. On Friday, June 12, he arrived in Boston under police escort. An anonymous caller warned a radio station dispatcher that Malcolm would be “bumped off” if he spoke on the air. Undeterred, he recited Muhammad's affairs on air and called him a fraud. Later that evening, when he appeared on another station, Malcolm said that Boston minister Louis X knew all about Muhammad's transgressions long before he did. He also claimed that National Secretary John Ali had ordered a hit on him. According to one witness, Ali had recently visited the New York mosque, trying to convince the lieutenants that Malcolm had to die. Malcolm accused Louis, John, and other officials of conspiring against him, essentially “declaring war on the entire leadership group of the Nation of Islam.”
¹⁴

In the following days, after the NYPD received several tips about an attempt on his life, Malcolm prepared for a two-day eviction trial. The
proceedings began on June 15, when thirty-two police officers and eight bodyguards escorted him into the Queens courthouse for the Civil Court of the City of New York. When he took the stand, he looked out into the courtroom and saw about fifty menacing faces from the Fruit staring back at him. That same day, the Fruit held its regularly scheduled meeting at Mosque No. 7, where more than 180 soldiers from New York and New Jersey heard one of the speakers declare, “We should destroy Malcolm.” Yet one of the captains, most likely Joseph, warned that the timing was not right. “Malcolm is not to be touched, the rest is okay.”
¹⁵

On the second day of the trial, Malcolm testified for nearly two hours. At times he appeared unnerved, fidgeting and rambling. He did not have a solid legal claim on the house, even if Muhammad had told him it was his home. Near the end of his testimony, perhaps realizing that he was losing the case, Malcolm blurted that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad had taken nine wives. Dismayed, his lawyer, Percy Sutton, tried to redirect him, but Malcolm persisted. “
This
is the reason for my suspension,” he said. “My mouth was closed so that I couldn't talk.”
¹⁶

With each passing day, he more viciously attacked Elijah. “Muhammad was nobody until I came to New York as his emissary,” he argued. He suggested that since Muhammad broke with him, blacks had left the Nation in droves. Muhammad was so furious about the rising number of apostates that he planned to speak at a New York rally on June 28. The truth, Malcolm suggested, was that Mosque No. 7 no longer made the same kind of money it did when he was the minister there. “They haven't found anyone to do the job I have been doing in New York.” Convinced that he was irreplaceable, Malcolm imagined that no one else in the Nation could excite the Black Muslims the way he once did. But he was wrong.
¹⁷

I
T WAS THE
kind of heat-soaked day when the police expect trouble. On June 28, Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X organized competing rallies, battling for the soul of Harlem. In the days leading up to Muhammad's arrival, the police had heard rumors that Malcolm's men would assassinate him at the airport. They had also heard that the Black Muslims would never allow Malcolm to preach on the same day as Muhammad. The threats became so intense that Malcolm wrote
Muhammad an open letter declaring a truce, but he knew as well as Elijah did that the war would not end without causalities.
¹⁸

At 142nd Street and Fifth Avenue, a long line formed outside the Harlem Armory, where members of the Fruit frisked the crowd, searching for weapons and spies. Inside the building, the Fruit's security team took their positions, guarding the exits and patrolling the aisles. Two ranks stood in front of the speakers' platform, arms folded, while another squad scanned the audience from the balcony. Packing the auditorium, an estimated 7,500 followers stood up when a phalanx escorted Elijah on stage. Muhammad delivered a seventy-five minute harangue, coughing and wheezing as he strained his voice, while the audience fanned the stifling air with programs. Denouncing Malcolm without mentioning his name, he fumed, “There is some person who wants to be what I am, but that person is not able to be what I am.”
¹⁹

Sitting a few feet away from Elijah, where Malcolm once sat, the Nation's guest speaker, a handsome, enthusiastic black man, led the chorus, “Teach us! Teach us!” Reminding the faithful of his power, Elijah preached, “Maybe you won't believe it, but I am the key to everyone of you. I'm not something of myself, I'm something of a God.” Nodding, the guest speaker shouted above the crowd's applause, “Yes, sir! Yes, sir!”

When Elijah finished his address, the most famous Black Muslim walked over to the podium. Dressed in a black suit, white shirt, and skinny black tie, Muhammad Ali, tight-lipped and solemn, approached the lectern. After offering the traditional Muslim greeting—“
As-Salaam-Alaikum
”—he explained that he had rushed home from Cairo at Elijah Muhammad's request. Elijah desired his presence at the Armory so that Ali could remind all of Harlem why he had chosen the Messenger over the hypocrite. Ali told the Nation that Muslims all over the world recognized the Honorable Elijah Muhammad as a legitimate spiritual leader. Clearly, with Malcolm gone, the boxer would serve as Elijah's new spokesman.
²⁰

Ali delivered the goods. He said exactly what Elijah wanted him to say. Everywhere he went—Ghana, Nigeria, and Egypt—Muslims asked him the same question: “‘How is the Honorable Elijah Muhammad?'” If it were not for the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, he insisted, the whole world would not know his name. He owed everything to the Messenger. Graciously, he presented Elijah with a miniature golden
mosque, a gift sent from Egypt's Supreme Council of Islam. As he raised the mini mosque in the air, Louis X, Herbert Muhammad, John Ali, and Elijah Jr.—all enemies of Malcolm—crowded around him, smiling for the cameramen.
²¹

That same day, Ali's recently assigned press secretary, Leon 4X, also known as Leon Ameer, attended an FOI meeting at the Armory. A lean, diminutive man standing barely five foot four, Ameer was known as a karate expert with a quick temper. He had joined Mosque No. 7 in 1956, four years after receiving an honorable discharge as a steward in the marines. According to his FBI file, Leon was diagnosed with schizophrenia after exhibiting “a sudden episode of acutely disturbed and obviously psychotic behavior.” In a sudden rage, he attacked a large man with an axe during “an argument over a bedding roll.” After spending a few months in a psychiatric hospital, he returned to New York, where he was arrested on separate occasions for robbery and grand larceny. But the life of a hardened criminal dissatisfied him. He missed the marines and the feeling of camaraderie that came with serving in a military unit. When a fellow veteran convinced him to attend a meeting at the local mosque, Leon embraced the Nation's code of strict discipline and became a soldier in the Fruit of Islam. Soon, he turned his life around, teaching martial arts and eventually becoming one of Malcolm's bodyguards.
²²

After Malcolm left the Nation, though, he remained loyal to Elijah Muhammad, and John Ali gave him direct orders to keep an eye on the heavyweight champion. But when he heard the Messenger's son talk at the Armory, he began questioning his decision. Elijah Jr. spoke with a viciousness that troubled him. Malcolm was a “red, no good dog,” a hypocrite who deserved to die. “If we decide to kill Malcolm,” he said, “no one can help him.” Consumed with rage, Elijah's son berated the New York Fruit for failing to execute him. “Malcolm should have been killed by now!” If Malcolm refused to leave the Queens home deeded to the Nation, then they would make him leave. “All you have to do is go there and clap on the walls until the walls come down and then cut the nigger's tongue out and put it in an envelope and send it to me. And I'll stamp it approved and give it to the Messenger.”
²³

Leon knew what he had just heard. Everyone in the room understood the implications of the tirade. Looking back, Thomas 15X, a member of
the New York Fruit, said that when the Messenger's son spoke, he spoke on behalf of his father. “Back then, that was an
order
.”
²⁴

L
ATER THAT EVENING
, twenty blocks away at the Audubon Ballroom, more than six hundred people listened to Malcolm announce his latest initiative: the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), a movement inspired by his trip to Africa and the limitations of Muslim Mosque, Inc. (MMI). He had not given up on MMI, but he recognized that it lacked a clearly defined focus and that its religious name turned off too many secularists. Seeking a political platform, Malcolm courted black radicals and intellectuals to join his revolutionary program. In his opening address, he outlined the OAAU's goals: voter registration campaigns, rent strikes, business boycotts, and “an all-out war on organized crime.”
²⁵

Malcolm's speech articulated an ambitious program that he could not deliver. Facing mounting pressures, his attention fractured under too many demands. Without his salary from the Nation, Malcolm could hardly afford to feed his family, let alone fund two fledgling organizations. Continuing an extensive travel schedule, he tried raising money and building alliances abroad, but spending so much time away undermined his ability to build the OAAU. He hoped that publicizing the death threats would give him added protection from his assassins, but it also scared away potential members from attending his meetings.

On July 2, a few days after Malcolm announced the formation of the OAAU, two women filed paternity suits against Elijah Muhammad in Los Angeles. The sex scandal made sensational headlines. In large, bold letters, the
Chicago Defender
screamed: “
PATERNITY SUITS AGAINST MR. MUHAMMAD DENIED
.” Muhammad's former secretaries were not the only ones discrediting him. His grandson Hasan told the
Defender
that he had quit the NOI because the officials, including his relatives, exploited the members. His grandfather was nothing more than “a fake and a fraud,” stealing money from the poor. He could not understand why many of his grandfather's longtime followers never received their “original names,” yet “Cassius Clay was blessed to receive a Holy name.” Hasan's uncle Wallace echoed his nephew's charges, claiming that the Nation's officials ordered attacks against dissidents. “The leadership in Chicago is ruthless and frantic,” he said, and “they will kill you.”
²⁶

T
HE TIME FOR
talking was over. The blood season was beginning. A day after Muhammad's mistresses filed paternity suits, Malcolm worked from home while Betty rested at the hospital, recuperating from childbirth. Around eleven thirty p.m., he told the babysitter that he needed to move his car, possibly because he did not want assassins to think that he was home. After teaching the teenage girl how to handle a shotgun, Malcolm quietly opened the front door and peeked outside. Darting toward his car, he spotted two knife-wielding men charging at him. Before they could catch him, he leapt into the sedan, turned the key, and sped away. After circling the neighborhood, he returned home, called the police, and waited for them to arrive, shotgun in hand.
²⁷

The following day, Boston captain Clarence X and Springfield captain John Muhammad visited the Harlem mosque. Given full authority over the East Coast Fruit, Clarence, an arrogant, stocky man built like an “ex–middleweight boxer,” offered a reward to anyone who eliminated Malcolm. While he was in New York, he met with Leon Ameer. The two knew each other well because Clarence had been assigned as Muhammad Ali's bodyguard and Leon worked as the champ's press secretary. According to Leon, Clarence revealed a .38 caliber revolver that he intended to use on Malcolm and asked Leon if he could help locate a silencer. Stunned, Ameer said that he did not know where Clarence could find one, and began contemplating whether he should warn Malcolm.
²⁸

But Malcolm needed no warning. He already knew that his life was in danger. For his family's sake, he needed to get away from his assassins. Only Betty and a few trusted assistants knew that he planned to attend the second Organization of African Unity Conference in Cairo, tour Africa, and return in six weeks. On July 9, when he boarded TWA Flight 700, bound for London, he felt a sense of relief that he had not experienced since he last visited Africa. Escaping abroad brought him peace—a peace that would prove hard to relinquish even after a nearly twenty-week hiatus from the troubles that followed him at home.
²⁹

I
N THE MONTHS
after Muhammad Ali's return from Africa, Elijah Muhammad forbade him from staying at the Hotel Theresa. In early July, when Ali appeared on a television show,
Ladies of the Press, New York Amsterdam News
writer Sara Slack asked him if he and Malcolm had
split. Cautiously, he explained that when the Honorable Elijah Muhammad “cuts a man off, then he's automatically cut off from all of his followers.” Curious, the reporter asked if the division between Elijah and Malcolm had led him to cancel his accommodations at the Theresa. Interrupting her, Ali said, “My leader told me, uh, not my leader, but various officials said it would not be nice being in the same hotel he was in, and whatever they say goes.”
³⁰

It was clear from Ali's statement that he no longer made his own decisions. The writers mostly asked him questions about political issues, the Nation of Islam, and the civil rights movement. When one of the writers mistakenly called him “Mr. Clay,” he corrected her, reminding the panel that he had a new name. Appearing serious, Ali frequently referenced the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, just as Malcolm used to do. “Our leader teaches us that we are a nation within a nation,” he maintained. Confused, the moderator asked him what that really meant. Ali explained that America did not belong to the black man. The fact that whites constantly attacked blacks proved it. When the moderator asked him if he considered himself an American first and foremost, Ali definitively answered, “No, sir. No, sir. Proud to say no. First, I'm a black man. I'm an Afro-American.” When the moderator pressed him again, Ali insisted, “Well, I'm not no American. I'm a black man.”