Blood Brothers (42 page)

Ali didn't see any problem having Fetchit around him. In some ways, he could relate to the aging actor. For years, most Americans perceived “Lincoln Perry and Stepin Fetchit the character as one and the same,” much the way people viewed Muhammad Ali and the Louisville Lip, an outrageous, loudmouthed character. Sportswriters and biographers have failed to recognize that Ali created the Louisville Lip not just for show business but also to hide his emerging political defiance. Experts in subterfuge, both Ali and Fetchit had mastered the game of “putting on ole massa,” a shrewd masking tactic employed by slaves. In this tradition, Ali and Fetchit embodied the old folk tune sung by plantation slaves: “Got one mind for the white folks to see; 'nother for what I know is me.”
⁵¹

Fetchit understood that Ali's shrewdness confused people, but that was the way the champ had designed it. “People don't understand the champ, but one of these days he'll be one of the country's greatest heroes,” he predicted. “He's like one of those plays where a man is the villain in the first act and then turns out to be the hero in the last act. That's the way it'll be with the champ. And that's the way he wants it, because it's better for the box office for people to misunderstand him than to understand him.”
⁵²

The following evening, three days before the fight, Ali stretched out on his bed at the Sherry Biltmore Hotel while he watched
Little Caesar
on a sixteen-millimeter projector. After a five-mile run earlier that morning, he'd spent the day resting and visiting with friends in
his sixth-floor suite. His brother Rahman, Captain Sam, and Bundini served his every need.

Suddenly, around six fifty, he became nauseous. Ali streaked toward the bathroom and began vomiting.
⁵³

“Oh, something is awful wrong,” he groaned. “You better do something.”

“I'll call a doctor so the press won't find out!” Rahman said.

“Damn the press! Get me to a hospital, man. I'm real sick.”

Within minutes, paramedics placed Ali on a stretcher and rushed him to the emergency room. When the ambulance reached the hospital, a
Boston Herald
photographer attempted to snap a few pictures, but Captain Clarence and the Fruit ran him off. “Keep away!” Louis X shouted. Then the minister gave his lieutenants strict orders: “Nobody goes through these doors. Somebody will get hurt if they try.”
⁵⁴

At the hospital, doctors discovered that Ali had “a swelling the size of an egg” in his right bowel—in medical terms, an incarcerated hernia. Had Ali waited any longer to call an ambulance, the hernia could have killed him. After emergency surgery, the surgeon announced that Ali would be fine, but he would not be able to box for several months, delaying the fight. The Black Muslims suspected foul play, theorizing that someone had poisoned the champ. Patrolling the fourth floor, “the X boys”—Leon, Sam, Louis, Otis, and Clarence—guarded his recovery room. Before the police arrived, Clarence stood on a chair, giving orders. Watching the brooding Captain, Jimmy Cannon observed, “There wasn't any doubt who was in charge.”
⁵⁵

Devastated, Sonny Liston mixed a screwdriver when he heard the news. He really believed that he was in the best shape of his life. All those hours of training now meant nothing. He would have to wait months until Ali could fight, which meant that he would have to start training all over again. He had no idea if he would be able to train with the same focus and the same ferocity that he had built up on the eve of the fight. All he could do now was shake his head, muttering to himself, “That damned fool. That damned fool.” Then he took a long drink.
⁵⁶

O
N
N
OVEMBER
24, four days before Ali left the Boston City Hospital, Malcolm X returned to New York after spending nearly five months abroad. During his second tour of Africa, he'd met with several heads
of state, dozens of ministers, and scores of cabinet members. Gradually, though, the trip had worn him down. Although African leaders welcomed him “with open minds, open hearts, and open doors,” he must have realized that some doors closed tightly when he left. While African leaders listened politely to his proposals, he learned that most could not risk losing American foreign aid by charging the United States with international crimes. In Ghana, his old friends Julian Mayfield, Leslie Lacy, and Maya Angelou could see his fears weighing on him. Suspicious and irritable, he was certain that someone was following him. He admitted that he had extended his trip abroad because there were men in Harlem waiting for him, willing to take his life “for a dime.”
⁵⁷

Malcolm knew that his time was up. Every day for nearly three months, he awoke wondering if this was the day that he would die. But dying did not scare him nearly as much as failing to help his people. He had so much work to do that hardly a night passed that he slept more than four hours. Late one evening in December, Malcolm called Claude Lewis, a reporter at the
New York Post
. Lewis could tell that something was wrong. Malcolm spoke with an urgency to “get something ‘on the record'” before it was too late. Shortly thereafter, they met at a crowded Harlem coffee shop on 135th Street. Malcolm insisted that they meet in public. Sitting in a booth with Malcolm's bodyguard, Lewis asked a range of questions about his image, his new organization, his evolving politics, and the threats on his life.
⁵⁸

Listening to the fragile minister, Lewis sensed his vulnerability, that at any moment he might crack. The reporter waited to hear the old Malcolm, the fiery minister, bursting with rage and wrath. But the flame had burned out. The Malcolm he met that day looked exhausted and unraveled, beset with trepidation. Wondering how he would survive, Lewis asked about his future. Where was he headed? “I have no idea,” he repeated, “I have no idea.” All he knew was that he was “for the freedom of the 22 million Afro-Americans by
any means necessary
.” In the past, Malcolm had spoken in absolutes. Everything was black and white. Now, he lived in a world of grays. He remained open to anything that would bring freedom to black Americans. “I'm headed in any direction that will bring us some immediate results.”

By any means necessary
. Those words were not just a slogan or an ideology. They conveyed the mentality of a man pushed to the edge,
desperate for survival. “Whatever I say, I'm justified,” he told Lewis. “If I say the Negroes should get out of here right tomorrow and go to war, I'm
justified
. Really! It might sound
extreme
, but you can't say it's not
justified
.” Speaking like a soldier on the front lines, he insisted, “If I say right now that we should go down and shoot fifteen Ku Klux Klansmen in the morning, you may say well that's insane, but you can't say I'm not justified.”

Near the end of their interview, Malcolm talked about death. “I'll never get old,” he said. Lewis asked him why. “Well,” he explained, “I'll tell you what I mean and why I say that. When I say ‘by any means necessary,' I mean it with all my heart, and my mind, and my soul.” A black man, he said, should be willing to sacrifice his own life for freedom. And “he should also be willing to take the life of those who want to take his. It's reciprocal. When you really think like that, you don't have long to live.”

Chapter Seventeen

WORTHY OF DEATH

            
The price of freedom is death.

—
MALCOLM X

M
alcolm X, Elijah Muhammad foretold, would not survive Allah's wrath. In his
Muhammad Speaks
column, he warned his former minister, “Allah is sufficient as a helper. You will not be able to help yourself pretty soon.” His acolytes interpreted these prophetic words as a directive. For months, since the spring of 1964, vicious men, some with criminal records, seethed, daring Malcolm to return from Africa. Condemning Malcolm as a gutless coward, his former protégé Louis X called him an “international hobo” too scared “to face the music.” During Malcolm's time abroad, the Nation's avengers threatened retribution if he ever set foot in America again. At the Richmond, Virginia, mosque, Minister Nicholas condemned him: “Malcolm X really should be killed for teaching against Elijah Muhammad.”
¹

Inside the pages of
Muhammad Speaks
, NOI officials published a series of cryptic articles predicting Malcolm's death. In a five-page harangue, Louis pilloried his old mentor, denouncing him as a heretic. The Boston minister also praised Muhammad Ali for resisting Malcolm's advances. True believers like Ali would never fall for Malcolm's deceptions. “Only those who wish to be led to hell, or to their doom, will follow Malcolm,” he wrote. “The die is set, and Malcolm shall not escape, especially after such evil, foolish talk about his benefactor. . . . Such a man as Malcolm is worthy of death.”
²

Although there is no evidence that Elijah Muhammad sent his disciples a direct order to assassinate Malcolm, in this climate no such command was necessary. The vengeful language espoused at Muslim meetings and in the pages of
Muhammad Speaks
conveyed a clear mandate: Allah's Messenger blessed those who struck back against the most dangerous hypocrites.

The rhetoric espoused by Chicago officials contaminated the entire Nation. Muhammad Ali was convinced by their claims that Malcolm fabricated vicious lies about Elijah's infidelities. And no man, Ali declared, could slander the Messenger and get away with it: “Malcolm X and anybody else who attacks or talks about attacking Elijah Muhammad will die.”
³

C
APTAIN
C
LARENCE COULD
smell a rat. He was not certain, but he suspected that Leon Ameer, Ali's press secretary, had been talking to Malcolm, divulging the Nation's secrets and maybe even Clarence's plot to kill the despised minister. Ameer knew that any Muslim who talked to Malcolm risked his life. He had heard the Messenger say so himself. According to Ameer, in September, Muhammad called a secret meeting, ordering about two hundred men from the Fruit to report to Chicago. For hours, Muhammad berated the sect's defectors. Anyone who left the Nation should be treated as a hypocrite, he announced. And all hypocrites should be “taken care of, either by beatings or killings, but it [must] be done carefully when there were no witnesses.” As for Malcolm, “the greatest hypocrite,” Muhammad demanded that the Fruit stop him “at all costs.”
⁴

Ameer was convinced that the Fruit would go to any length to fulfill the Messenger's order. Shaken, he left the meeting certain that Malcolm was as good as dead. Since late July, when Clarence approached him about locating a silencer, he'd begun thinking about how he might leave the Nation. He would need protection, but not even Malcolm could offer that. Malcolm could hardly protect himself.

In October, while Ali trained in Boston, the heavyweight champion complained to Ameer that the Muslims required “numerous donations.” Usually, members paid monthly dues to their local mosque. In his case, he would have donated to the Miami mosque, but the Nation's officials demanded that he send all contributions directly to Chicago.
No one knows exactly how much money Ali funneled to the Nation's headquarters, but it was enough for him to grumble about it to Ameer.

Listening to Ali's complaints, Ameer thought that he might be able to persuade him to quit the Nation. The boxer “was foolish” for letting the Black Muslims exploit him, he said, and someday the Muslims would jettison him when he was no longer valuable to Muhammad. Yet Ameer's arguments failed to convince Ali. Malcolm had already told him the same thing, after all. “He's just a boy,” Malcolm later said. “He doesn't know what he's doing. He's being used.”
⁵

Ameer should have kept quiet. Around one p.m. on Christmas Day, he received a phone call in his room at the Sherry Biltmore Hotel in Boston. He was told that four newsmen wanted to talk to him about Ali's recovery. When one of the reporters asked if they could come up to his room, Ameer became suspicious and said that he would meet them in the lobby. Stepping out of the elevator, he immediately recognized Clarence X. Puzzled, he asked the Boston captain if he had seen a group of reporters, but before Clarence could answer, a man struck him from behind. Clarence and his three henchmen kicked Leon until an off-duty detective came to his rescue.
⁶

Later that night, after he received stitches above his left eye and returned to his hotel room, a group of men posing as investigators knocked on his door. When he opened it, they rushed him, swinging fists and clubs. Leon covered his face while they pummeled and kicked him, shattering his eardrum, breaking his ribs, and fracturing his skull. The following morning, a chambermaid screamed when she found him lying nearly lifeless in a tub splattered with blood.
⁷

Ameer survived. Recovering from a coma, he spent fifteen days in the hospital. On January 9, 1965, at a press conference in Harlem, he told reporters that he feared assassins would come after him again and that Ali's life was in jeopardy too. Ali would not admit it, but he had expressed “grave doubts about the integrity of certain powerful Muslims.” He knew all too well what could happen to him if he so much as thought about leaving the Nation.
⁸

Siding with Malcolm, Ameer began meeting with reporters, publicizing the violent threats the Nation made against him. In an interview with the
Amsterdam News
, he divulged Chicago's order to beat and kill any member who joined Malcolm. Clarence X and the Muslims who
attacked him were convinced that he was trying to drive a wedge between Ali and Elijah. And they were certain that only a man working for Malcolm would have told Ali to quit the Nation.
⁹

Three days after Ameer's press conference, on January 12, Raymond Sharrieff and other high-ranking officials attended the annual Fruit of Islam banquet, an evening of dinner, music, dancing, and a guest appearance from the heavyweight champion. The
Amsterdam News
reported that more than two thousand members from the East Coast packed the Audubon Ballroom, the same location where Malcolm held his weekly meetings. Located between Broadway and St. Nicholas Avenue on the south side of West 166th Street, the two-story building served as a dance hall and lodge for local organizations. What no one suspected, however, was that the Fruit's party at the Audubon was just a ruse for planning an attack on Malcolm. Over the next month, members from the Fruit would hold several meetings at the Audubon in which they plotted Malcolm's murder. On this night, though, Ali enraptured the angry young men seeking vengeance against hypocrites, denouncing Malcolm as jealous and attention-starved. “Malcolm believed the white press, which referred to him as the ‘number two man' and became disillusioned,” he said, sounding more and more like the Nation's ministers. Ali did not know it, but he had become a puppet in the assassination plot against Malcolm.
¹⁰

The following day, he became agitated when Robert Lipsyte asked about his relationship with Ameer. Feigning ignorance, he replied, “Ahmeer? Little fellow? I think I remember a little fellow who hung around camp, a little fellow who liked to go downstairs and get me papers.” Scribbling his answers in a notepad, Lipsyte encouraged Ali to keep talking. “Now I hear he's telling lies, saying he was my press secretary.”
¹¹

Ali shrugged, but when Lipsyte persisted, the champ burst into a tirade. “Any fool Negro got the nerve to buck us, you want to make him a star. Jim Brown said something about the Muslims and they made him a movie star.” The truth, Ali ranted, was that Ameer cheated on his wife with a young girl and stole money from the Nation. Ameer was nothing but a hypocrite. “He got what he deserved.”

Stunned, Lipsyte had never heard Ali speak so cruelly. When the
New York Times
columnist inquired if Ameer should really fear for his life, Ali snapped, revealing the depths of his disgust for Ameer—and
Malcolm. “They think everyone out to kill them because they know they deserve to be killed for what they did.”

T
ALMADGE
X
HAD
put his guns away. During the months Malcolm traveled abroad, he had not heard from any of the New Jersey men who plotted against Malcolm. He figured that maybe his partners had cooled to the idea of killing the minister. “Nothing was happening,” he recalled. “So I thought that maybe things were going to get better, man.” But when Malcolm returned home, the cadre began meeting again. Sometimes they drove around Paterson, planning the perfect crime. Other times they canvassed New York, looking for Malcolm outside the Audubon. One evening they drove out to his home in Queens, planning an ambush, but when armed guards appeared they sped away.
¹²

The New Jersey hit men were not the only ones stalking Malcolm. Around eleven fifteen p.m. on Friday, January 22, three Muslims rushed toward him when he stepped outside his front door. He quickly slammed the door, locked it, and called the police. By the time officers arrived, his attackers had disappeared. Betty lived in fear of his assassins knocking on the door at any moment. Late at night, she watched Malcolm stand near the front window holding a double-clip automatic carbine rifle, his eyes scanning the shadows for the slightest movement. While he protected their home, Betty cried herself to sleep, fearing that her worst nightmare would come true by the time she awoke.
¹³

Every time Malcolm left the house, she agonized that he would not return. On January 28 he flew to Los Angeles to meet with attorney Gladys Towles Root and the two secretaries involved in the paternity suit against Elijah Muhammad. His cousin Hakim Jamal and his friend Edmund Bradley arrived at the gate about an hour before his plane was scheduled to land. While they waited for TWA Flight 9, Jamal noticed a heavyset black man with a familiar face. At first, Jamal was certain that he had seen the man at the Nation's meetings, but when the stranger bought a pack of cigarettes he began doubting whether he was truly a Muslim. Later, after Malcolm checked into the Statler Hilton Hotel, Jamal saw the man from the airport again. Walking through the lobby, Malcolm noticed Minister John Shabazz, Captain Edward, and a half dozen other men from Mosque No. 27. Spotting Malcolm, no one from the Fruit moved. “They absolutely froze,” Jamal recalled. When they
hesitated, Malcolm and his hosts slipped out of the hotel and drove away.
¹⁴

How could the Fruit have known when Malcolm would be in Los Angeles and where he was staying? “An official must be in town—someone from Chicago,” Malcolm surmised. “There were a lot them [in the lobby]. . . . I wonder if it could be Raymond [Sharrieff] or John Ali?” When he mentioned John's name, Jamal immediately realized that he was “the brother at the airport—the cat who was buying the cigarettes.”
¹⁵

Malcolm was right; John Ali was in town. But there was no way, he thought, that Ali and the Black Muslims had the resources to track him from New York to Los Angeles. He knew their operations too well. Besides his wife, cousin, two aides, the two secretaries, and their attorney, no one knew about his flight to Los Angeles. Only the FBI could have known that he would be in California—and they did. About two weeks earlier, an informant had notified special agents that Malcolm planned to visit Los Angeles. Somehow that information fell into the hands of John Ali.
¹⁶

It was Malcolm's belief that John Ali had turned FBI informant. Nor was he the only one. Journalist Louis Lomax also suspected that Ali was working for the FBI. In 1963, when he published
When the Word Is Given
, a study of the rise of the Nation of Islam, Lomax referred to Ali as “a former FBI agent.” According to FBI documents, Lomax's book threatened the anonymity of a highly placed informant inside the Nation. In a series of memos, FBI officials considered telling Lomax about Ali's “true status,” though it's unclear if the Bureau ever approached Lomax about Ali. Nonetheless, Malcolm was convinced that the Muslims had a chain of informants working with the FBI and that the Bureau's agents gave the Black Muslims his itinerary.
¹⁷