Blood Brothers (6 page)

Muhammad prophesied that the white man's rule would end in 1970 after the “Battle of Armageddon.” Destruction of the white man, he foretold, would be carried out by the Mother Ship, a wheel-shaped spacecraft a half-mile wide. Piloted by the most intelligent black men, the Mother Ship would carry fifteen hundred bombers. The plane could not be attacked, of course, because it could disappear behind the stars. In the days leading up to the resurrection, the Mother Ship would litter the earth with pamphlets printed in English and Arabic, telling Allah's followers where to hide when the planes attacked. When the battle was over, the white man would be eliminated from the planet and the black man would rise up from the smoldering ashes. In the 1960s, purported sightings of unidentified flying objects startled many Americans, but for followers of Muhammad, the presence of flying saucers portended that the Day of Judgment was near.
⁴¹

Cassius Clay began reciting Muhammad's lessons, leaving his friends at a loss as to what he was talking about. Ferdie Pacheco recalled driving
around in his vintage Cadillac convertible on a muggy Miami night with Clay and two women. Suddenly, Clay tapped the doctor on the shoulder and told him to pull over to the side of the road. He stood up and pointed toward the stars.
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“See that?” Cassius asked, his arm extended toward the sky. “It's the spaceship.”

“What spaceship is that?” one of the women asked.

Clay stared at her, dumbfounded that she did not know about
the spaceship
. Then he launched into a lecture on Nation theology.

“One day, 'bout six thousand years ago, a bad, mad scientist named Dr. Yacub created the white race off the black. . . . The mad doctor made the whites superior, and pushed the blacks down into slavery. That period is coming to an end now.”

“What's that got to do with the spaceship?” the young woman asked.

“Well, a spaceship took off with twenty-six yellow families living on it, circling the globe. They called it the Mother Ship. The non-white races are being oppressed by the whites, and soon they will come down and wipe out the white race.”

“What they been waiting for, chile?” asked the older woman.

Clay, ignoring the question, rambled on in a serious tone. “Once a year they come down from the North Pole, put down a big plastic hose, and scoop up enough oxygen and ice to last them a year,” he said.

Then, he just pointed toward the sky, looking in awe: “The Mother Ship.”

For Cassius, the Muslims' tales about a big-headed scientist, mythical spaceships, and the coming of Armageddon were more than the stuff of fantasy. Muhammad's prophecy offered Clay a means of survival in a hostile country. Cassius's own belief in prophecy developed as a youth living in segregated Louisville. A schoolteacher explained,

If you can't stand the world you live in and you can't change it, you've got to believe in magic, in predictions. That's Cassius when he was growing up, living with that wild father and all that crazy talk around the house. You've got to believe that things are gonna change. So predictions have a great charm and appeal. ‘Next year the white man's gonna lose his power,' . . . ‘1966'll be a bad year for the white man.' That's great news to some people dumb enough to believe it. Believing
in predictions is a way of warding off evil in the present when you can't ward it off any other way. You can bear living miserable if you accept a prediction that tomorrow will be better. That's why you get so much predicting and prophecy in the Negro churches. That's why you get so much predicting and prophecy from Cassius Clay, too.
⁴³

For Clay, the Black Muslims offered security, a sanctuary from the violent world that surrounded him, and he steadily gravitated toward the Miami temple as a result. His frequent visits excited Sabakhan and Saxon, who alerted Jeremiah X, minister of the Atlanta mosque and the chief organizer of the Nation in the Deep South. Jeremiah visited Cassius in Miami, teaching him about the Muslims' moral code. He explained that they prayed five times a day, at sunrise, noon, midafternoon, sundown, and before bed, and that all Muslims prayed facing east, toward Mecca. But before Clay prayed, he had to make the proper ablutions: rinsing his mouth and washing his hands, feet, and arms. Cleanliness, inside and out, Jeremiah reminded him, was absolutely essential. Furthermore, Muslims were required to attend at least two temple meetings each week, though because of Clay's schedule—and his celebrity—the minister made an exception.
⁴⁴

Clay learned that Elijah Muhammad instructed his followers to live a “righteous life,” prohibiting extramarital sex, gambling, dancing, attending movies, taking long vacations, lying, stealing, defying civil authority, and disobeying ministers. Muslims, he commanded, should refrain from consuming alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, and from overeating. An overweight Muslim could be fined until he lost the excess weight. And pork was strictly forbidden. The hog was a “parasite,” “dirty, brutal, quarrelsome, greedy, ugly, foul, a scavenger which thrives on filth,” just like the white man.
⁴⁵

In the process of educating Clay about the laws of the Nation of Islam, Jeremiah cultivated a personal relationship with him and later his brother Rudy, who was even more eager to join the Nation. The more Cassius learned, the more he questioned. Jeremiah recognized that Clay's presence in the movement could create potential conflicts for the boxer and the Nation alike. The minister understood that if the public learned about Clay's association with the Nation, the boxer might be vilified. It could ruin his career. So Jeremiah sought the counsel of John
Ali, the Nation's national secretary and adviser to Elijah Muhammad. When Jeremiah called Ali on the telephone and informed him that a fighter had attended their meetings, Ali “roundly condemned” the minister “for being involved with a boxer.” Elijah Muhammad himself later told Jeremiah that he'd “been sent to the South to make converts, not to fool around with fighters.”
⁴⁶

Muhammad disapproved of sports, especially boxing, which he maintained was just another avenue for the exploitation of black youths by white, mostly Jewish men. He associated boxing with the evils of gambling, drunkenness, and crime. In his
Muhammad Speaks
column, he argued that sports encouraged blacks to throw away their money on the white man's “games of chance.” The only reason the white man allowed blacks to participate in their sports, he claimed, was to distract them from their real problems. Sports were just another tool to keep the black man down.
⁴⁷

Yet perhaps Clay's pursuit of a righteous life was not as incompatible with boxing as Muhammad believed. In many ways the ritual and regimen of the Nation's strict code of behavior mirrored the boxer's spartan training. The Muslim ministers dictated when Clay prayed, what he ate, and how he spent his leisure time. Similarly, Angelo Dundee created his training routine: he told him when to rise in the morning, when to run, when to eat, when to spar, and when to go to bed. Clay's spiritual mentors and boxing instructors required hard work, sobriety, and proper nutrition. Both worlds—boxing and the Nation of Islam—demanded physical fitness and a purity that rewarded resistance to temptation.
⁴⁸

In Miami, Clay chose to occupy both worlds. There were two places where he felt most comfortable, two sanctuaries that provided shelter from outsiders and antagonistic white men: Muhammad's Temple No. 29 and the 5th Street Gym. One hardened his body, the other nurtured his soul. Yet he had no idea what would happen when those two worlds collided.

Chapter Two

GOD'S ANGRY MAN

            
I have no last name. Just a name some white man gave one of my ancestors a long time ago. I'd rather be called nigger.

—
MALCOLM X

O
n a cold April evening in 1957, a fight broke out between two black men at the corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue in Manhattan, the heart of Harlem. Swiftly, police cars arrived at the scene, sirens wailing, and officers jumped out of their vehicles. White patrolmen broke through the crowd, gripping their nightsticks, demanding the onlookers disperse. As the policemen thumped a suspect, the crowd watched in horror. “Why don't you carry the man to jail?” Johnson Hinton asked. In Harlem, patrolmen routinely subjected black men to random searches and brutal force. The officers ignored Hinton's protest, ordering him to move on. But he just wouldn't listen.
¹

Growing bolder and louder, he shouted: “You're not in Alabama! This is New York!” Enraged, Officer Mike Dolan knocked Hinton to the ground. The officer unleashed his baton, cracking Hinton in the skull until blood gushed onto the sidewalk. While the police stuffed his limp body into the squad car, black and brown faces looked on in disgust, complaining in hushed tones. It seemed that there was nothing that they could say, nothing that they could do. The one black man who had challenged the police found himself behind bars, silenced by a bloody baton.
²

In Harlem, the black man's anger toward the white man had long simmered. Everywhere he turned, the white man embarrassed, exploited, and emasculated him. The white man arrested him. The white man raised the rent. The white man got the job. The white man cut his wages. The white man denied his loan application. The white man had better schools, nicer homes, and more money. The goddamn white man.

“My hobby,” Malcolm X said with a sly grin, “is stirring up Negroes.” A provocative orator, he stirred crowds with his quick wit and sharp tongue. Malcolm's fearlessness and his scathing critiques of white men made him a hero in Harlem and the subject of FBI surveillance.
Associated Press

“To live in Harlem,” Ralph Ellison wrote in 1948, “is to dwell in the very bowels of the city; it is to pass a labyrinthine existence among streets that explode monotonously skyward with the spires and crosses of churches and clutter underfoot with garbage and decay.” Black families lived in crowded tenements, crumbling buildings infested by vermin and cockroaches. In the shadows of dark alleys and on crowded street corners, men sought relief, drinking, smoking, and gambling away the little money that they had. Poverty, addiction, and violence plagued black neighborhoods. “Overcrowded and exploited politically
and economically,” Ellison observed, “Harlem is the scene and symbol of the Negro's perpetual alienation in the land of his birth.”
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As the squad cars pulled away from the scene, a woman who witnessed the assault rushed to the Nation of Islam's Shabazz Restaurant at 113 Lenox Avenue. She told the men that one of their Muslim brothers—Johnson X, as he was known—had been severely beaten by the police. Immediately, Joseph X, the rugged captain of the local temple's Fruit of Islam (FOI)—the Nation's “secret army”—organized more than fifty men using a phone chain. Every temple had a security unit made up of an elite group of men who were held to a higher standard of discipline than other members. Trained soldiers, the FOI was responsible for enforcing the laws of the Nation and protecting Elijah Muhammad's followers. They defended the temples and regularly drilled in paramilitary tactics, boxing, and judo, though they were forbidden from carrying arms.
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When the Muslims arrived at the 28th Precinct on 123rd Street, the police feared that they were hiding guns under their heavy coats. The temple's minister, a lean, copper-skinned man with a long face and square jaw, wearing thick, black horn-rimmed glasses, marched right into the station. Standing nearly six feet three inches tall and sporting a camel-hair coat, Malcolm X spoke forcefully but calmly, requesting to see Hinton. The police denied that any Muslims were held inside their jail, but as an angry throng of nearly two thousand black people gathered in front of the station, they allowed the minister to check on him. Lying on the cold cement floor of the jail, Hinton could hardly speak; an officer had struck him across the jaw with his baton when he began praying inside his cell. Containing his rage, Malcolm demanded that the lieutenant in charge take the concussed prisoner—who was actually suffering from subdural hemorrhaging—to a hospital. Fearing a riot outside the station, the police called for an ambulance.
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When the minister walked out of the precinct, he directed the brethren to follow him to the hospital.

Outside of his congregation, few people in the crowd knew much about Malcolm. They had never seen him lead a march or a picket or a boycott. The Muslims rejected the American democratic system, refusing overt political action. They didn't even vote. Instead, the Nation occupied an insulated world of complete separation.

Elijah Muhammad taught his followers to respect civil authority and avoid confrontations. “Be polite, courteous, and respectful so that you may inspire respect from the police officers,” he preached. “If you are attacked when peaceful, God comes to our rescue. If you are aggressive, you must fight your own battle without Allah's help.” Yet nonviolence had its limits, as Muhammad acknowledged: “If attacked the Holy Koran says fight back.”
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Tired of wanton police violence against blacks, Harlem itched to fight back. In Harlem, most black men never dared to question a white man in uniform. So when Malcolm strode into the 28th Precinct, challenging white authorities, he inspired black Harlem. From there he marched at the front of a solid line of nearly one hundred Muslims and the sympathetic onlookers who had gathered at the precinct, leading them to the hospital.

As the Muslims advanced down Lenox Avenue, Harlem's busiest thoroughfare, more than two thousand blacks clustered closely behind them. Shortly after they arrived at the hospital the doctors treated Hinton, but then inexplicably released him and he was taken back to jail.
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Surging back toward the police headquarters in a fury, within an hour more than four thousand people stood in solidarity with the Nation outside the 28th Precinct. Standing in rank formation, “God's angry men” stared straight ahead, arms crossed, waiting for the minister's orders. Inside the station, Malcolm negotiated with the police, securing the release of two other Muslims who were arrested with Hinton. But the commanding officer refused to send the injured prisoner back to the hospital because he had to be incarcerated overnight to appear in court the next day.

By two thirty a.m., Malcolm sensed a stalemate and an opportunity to demonstrate his authority. The police pleaded with him to break up the crowd, promising that Hinton would continue to receive medical care. Fearing a violent confrontation between the police and his followers, he walked outside, turned toward one of his lieutenants, and whispered in his ear. Then he raised his fist, signaling for the Muslims to disperse. Without a word, the minister's troops drifted into the darkness, as did the other blacks who had gathered in the street.
⁸

The police had never witnessed a man control a crowd the way that Malcolm X did that night. Stunned by the scene, an officer looked at
James Hicks, a reporter for the
Amsterdam News
, and said, “No one man should have that much power.”
⁹

I
N THE AFTERMATH
of the Nation's protest against police brutality, Malcolm X became a Harlem folk hero. “For the first time,” he later recalled, “the black man, woman, and child in the streets were discussing ‘those Muslims.'” The New York City Police Department instantly became interested in “those Muslims” too, urgently seeking more information about “Mr. X.” Undercover agents in the NYPD's surveillance program, the Bureau of Special Services (BOSS), sat in parked cars monitoring the activities of the Harlem temple. Malcolm's increasing visibility in New York concerned the FBI too, and about a year after BOSS began its surveillance, the FBI designated him “a key figure.” For the rest of his life, government agents would track his movements, document his speeches, and record his telephone calls. Malcolm could hardly smile, frown, or smell a flower without the FBI knowing about it. Meanwhile, public curiosity led increasing numbers of blacks to visit Malcolm's temple. Before the Johnson Hinton episode, the New York temple had only a few hundred members; afterward, several thousand became followers of Elijah Muhammad at Temple No. 7.
¹⁰

Benjamin Goodman was one such visitor. A tall young man with an angular face, Goodman was raised in the Christian churches of Virginia. After moving to New York, he bounced between unfulfilling jobs until he found a position in the shipping department of Vanguard Records. One of his friends at work insisted that he visit the temple at the corner of 116th Street and Lenox Avenue to hear “the Minister.”
¹¹

Inside the paper-littered doorway of the storefront temple, a red hand-painted sign greeted visitors: “Welcome to
MUHAMMAD
'
S TEMPLE NO
. 7. Every Wed. & Fri. at 8:00
P.M
. Sun. at 2:00
P.M
. Elevator Service 4th Floor.” When Goodman arrived for his first meeting, two sharply dressed men acknowledged him: “Welcome, brother.” Climbing three flights of creaking, rotting stairs, he could hear the echo of black men's voices. When he reached the fourth floor, which was much cleaner than the others, two large men directed him into the men's room, where four other men stood bolt upright, eyes forward, lips closed. A stocky man in a dark suit, standing only a foot away from him, leaned in close enough to smell his breath and firmly asked, “Do you have any weapons, alcohol,
cigarettes, or drugs in your possession?” Had he answered affirmatively or reeked of liquor, he would have been asked to leave. After Goodman emptied his pockets, the security guard frisked him thoroughly. When the inspection was over, the guard thanked him for his cooperation and informed him that he could enter the auditorium.
¹²

Goodman walked inside the lecture hall and sat on a metal folding chair on the men's side of the aisle, across from women dressed in white floor-length gowns and wearing head coverings. While he waited for the meeting to begin, he studied the blackboard, which was divided into two sides: one representing Christians, the other representing Muslims. On the left side, he saw an American flag framed by a cross and a silhouette of a black man hanging from a tree. In the corners of the flag, painted in bold letters, were the words
Christianity, slavery, suffering,
and
death.
On the opposite side, the corners of a red Muslim flag included the words
Islam, freedom, justice,
and
equality.
Beneath both flags, the congregation read the central question of the Nation: “
WHO WILL SURVIVE THE WAR OF ARMAGEDDON
?”
¹³