Malcolm X (3 page)

Nevertheless, under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI had exhibited intense hostility to all forms of African-American militancy, including the politically inert black nationalism of the 1950s. Indeed, David Garrow, in his study of the FBI's vendetta against King, has argued that the Bureau's essential “social role has been not to attack critics, Communists, blacks, or leftists per se, but to repress all perceived threats to the dominant, status-quo-oriented political culture.”
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Hoover's intense racism, however, insured that he would use his power with special vigor against black militancy. Hoover's career in the Justice Department began during the era of “New Negro” militancy after World War I, and, as an official of the General Intelligence Division
and the Bureau of Investigation, he soon became involved in counterintelligence efforts aimed at Marcus Garvey and A. Philip Randolph.
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As head of the FBI, he intensified the Bureau's program of domestic surveillance during the 1930s and 1940s. During this period, the United States government became far more concerned about communist subversion than about waning black nationalist activism and the FBI's continuing interest in the minuscule Nation of Islam was largely a result of the group's opposition to military service. This surveillance did not result from a belief among most government officials that the Nation was subversive but from the determination of Hoover to maintain surveillance of a large number of suspect groups, even without explicit authority from his nominal superiors in the Justice Department.

During the early years of Malcolm's ministry the federal government's policies toward the Nation of Islam were inconsistent. While Hoover and other Bureau officials saw the group as one of many which advocated black militancy, other officials of the Justice Department were not convinced that the Muslims posed a serious threat. The 1975 Church Committee hearings on intelligence activities revealed extended discussions between the FBI and Justice Department officials regarding the Nation of Islam. According to testimony before the committee, the Bureau suggested in 1952 that the Muslims be added to the Attorney General's list of subversive organizations. The Department of Justice concluded the following year that the Nation of Islam would not be prosecuted under the anticommunist Smith Act but decided that “the group would under certain circumstances represent a serious threat to our national security.” In 1954, government officials decided against prosecuting the Nation for conspiracy to violate the Selective Service Act. Afterwards, the Justice Department approved continuing wiretap surveillance of Elijah Muhammad while also responding inconclusively to the FBI's requests for advice on whether Muslim activists should remain on the Security Index. In 1959, Hoover's nominal superiors refused to support his request to prosecute the NOI or place it on the Attorney General's list of subversive organizations. The following year, the Justice Department advised Hoover that Black
Muslims could not be automatically barred from government employment but gave the FBI authority to continue its investigation of the Nation of Islam. During the 1960s, Justice Department officials continued to questioned whether Elijah Muhammad's prophesies actually constituted national security threats even while refraining from ordering the FBI to discontinue its investigation. Without explicit instructions from Justice Department officials, the FBI continued to compile information on the Muslims until after the death of Elijah Muhammad.
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During his public life Malcolm gradually shifted his nationalist perspective from Elijah Muhammad's politically inert racial separatism towards a Pan-African perspective that brought him closer to the increasingly militant African-American political mainstream. While a loyal spokesperson for Elijah Muhammad, he had advocated a form of nationalism that aroused the emotions of blacks and the fears of whites. The FBI reports of his early speeches mentioned his apocalyptic predictions of race wars and divine retribution, but Justice Department officials were more perplexed than worried by Malcolm's vague metaphors and religious prophecies that communicated anti-white sentiments without explicitly calling for racial confrontations. An FBI report of Malcolm's speeches at New York's Temple No. 7 offers an example of the kind of apocalyptic prophecies that excited black audiences while not provoking white authorities:

When FBI agents interviewed Malcolm a few months after this speech, they described him as “uncooperative” but nevertheless willing to reassure them that “Muslims are peaceful and they do
not have guns and ammunition and they do not even carry knives.” Malcolm insisted that he had “never been a member of the Communist Party” and that the NOI did not “teach hatred.” When questioned about the War of Armageddon, Malcolm reportedly “remarked that the Bible states this will be when God destroys the devil.”
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Malcolm sought to separate himself from leftist subversion and civil rights agitation, which were more immediate government concerns than was black nationalism. Malcolm's initial hostility toward the expanding civil rights protest movement at times extended beyond verbal attacks to include opportunistic overtures to the white opponents of civil rights. As had Marcus Garvey during the 1920s, Malcolm represented the Nation of Islam in a meeting with the Ku Klux Klan representatives, seeking to arrange an accommodation based on mutual support for racial segregation. According to the FBI's report of the meeting, which occurred in Georgia on January 28, 1961, Malcolm solicited the Klan's help with Muslim plans to separate from the United States. After his break with Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm expressed his shame over participating in the meeting, revealing that it resulted in a tacit agreement between the NOI and the Klan. “From that day onward the Klan never interfered with the Black Muslim movement in the South.”
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During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Malcolm X's speeches often suggested that the federal government was worried about the threat posed by the Nation of Islam, but such comments overstated the government's concern. When compared to the extensive FBI investigation of King, the file on Malcolm contains few indications that the FBI ever devoted much effort to combating his influence until after his break with Elijah Muhammad. Even then, the FBI did not understand the nature of the threat posed by either Malcolm X or Elijah Muhammad, nor did it develop a coherent program to combat black nationalist agitation until after Malcolm's death. Instead, during the first half of the 1960s, the FBI was primarily concerned with the possibility that communists, rather than black nationalists, might gain control over the African-American freedom movement.

While investigating Malcolm and the Nation of Islam, the FBI
rarely made them the targets of its aggressive and often illegal counterintelligence activities. When Hoover officially established the COINTELPRO in 1956, its initial goal was to disrupt the activities of the Communist Party, USA, which had long been the target of aggressive FBI tactics, including extensive recruitment of informers and efforts to exacerbate factionalism. COINTELPRO was later expanded to include such targets as the Socialist Workers Party, the Puerto Rican independence movement, and even the Ku Klux Klan. Although isolated COINTELPRO activities were undoubtedly directed against Malcolm and the Nation of Islam, only in 1967, two years after Malcolm's death, did Hoover include the Nation of Islam as a COINTELPRO target. Elijah Muhammad was mentioned among “extremists” who warranted special attention. An August 25 memorandum to field offices announced:

As Malcolm became increasingly successful as a minister of the Nation of Islam, he also began to recognize the political limitations of his religious message. During the first decade of his ministry, his political perspective had been shaped by the apolitical, religious orientation of the Nation of Islam. He was always careful to acknowledge that he was speaking on behalf of Elijah Muhammad and sought to distance himself from black radicalism. This was not only a reflection of his subordinate status in the Nation but also of his belief that religious conversion to Muhammad's form of Islam offered a better route to racial advancement than the strategies of social reform within the American political system. Malcolm's account of his formative experiences mentioned few contacts with political ideas, whether conventional or radical. He had only a passing awareness of the extensive leftist
activities that took place while he was in New York during the 1940s. Although Malcolm's autobiography mentions in passing rent-raising parties where activists sold the Communist newspaper
Daily Worker
, and proclaimed the Communist Party as “the only political party that ever ran a black man for the Vice Presidency of the United States,” Malcolm describes himself as unaffected by left activism: “to my sterile mind in those early days, it didn't mean much.”
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Even Malcolm's 1950 statement that he had “always been a Communist” should be seen primarily as an outgrowth of Malcolm's effort during World War II to convince selective service officials that he was unfit for the military. The 1952 visit Malcolm reportedly received in prison from a member of the Crispus Attucks Club of the American Youth for Democracy may suggest a latent openness to radicalism, but he was undoubtedly sincere, if not totally accurate, when he told FBI interviewers in 1955 that he had “never been a member of the Communist Party or the American Youth for Democracy” and claimed not “to have known anyone who was associated with it.”
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Malcolm's primary function as a Muslim minister was not to advocate a political program but to present Elijah Muhammad's religious ideas and recruit new members for the Nation. As a devoted follower of Elijah Muhammad, he saw civil rights leaders primarily as unworthy competitors to the person he proclaimed “the greatest Living Emancipator and Truth Bearer that the world has ever known.”
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Nevertheless, even as he verbally attacked white “devils” and “brainwashed” integrationist leaders, his effort to expand his audience eventually brought him into direct contact with civil rights activists. Despite his insistence that the Nation of Islam truly represented the black masses, the upsurge of Southern civil rights protests forced Malcolm to reassess his relationship to the Southern black struggle. For the most part, the most visible manifestations of mass militancy among blacks during the early 1960s were guided by representatives of the civil rights organizations that had been the targets of Malcolm's verbal barbs against integrationism. Malcolm's nationalism did not supplant the civil rights activism of the early 1960s. Instead, his mature thought represented a convergence of
his earlier ideas and those that emerged from sustained black protest movements. The “Black Power” rhetoric of the period after Malcolm's death owed much to his influence, but the new African-American racial consciousness also resulted from internal changes in the civil rights protest movement—particularly the increasing involvement of poor and working-class blacks and the growing emphasis on economic and political empowerment. As the Southern civil rights movement became a broadly focused, national freedom struggle, a new militant racial consciousness became evident among grass roots activists, even among those who had little awareness of Malcolm X. Organizers and activists who were involved in the grass roots mobilizations of 1963 and 1964 increasingly saw the ideas of Malcolm X as consistent with the conclusions drawn from their own movement experiences.

Malcolm X, for his part, not only attracted increasing support from grass roots activists but also moved toward their confrontational tactics and away from Elijah Muhammad's tactical accommodationism in anticipation of Allah's eventual retribution. Although he was the Nation of Islam's most effective proselytizer during the decade before his death, Malcolm increasingly recognized the insufficiency of the Nation's religious and racial separatism as a means of achieving African-American advancement. He saw that his own early criticisms of the civil rights protest movement had overstated the Nation of Islam's credentials as a force for social change and understated the potential of grassroots activists in the civil rights movement to become such a force. Malcolm abandoned his position as a dissenter affiliated with a small religious group in order to forge closer relations with black activists who had successfully mobilized mass protest movements. While remaining critical of cautious mainstream civil rights leaders, he acknowledged the success of some of these leaders in pushing the civil rights movement toward greater militancy.

During the late 1950s, in the aftermath of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad reacted ambivalently to the emergence of King as a nationally known civil rights leader. According to a 1958 FBI report, Malcolm, apparently seeking to distance his organization from civil rights activism while securing the release of two jailed Muslims in Alabama,
referred to King as a “traitor” “who is being used by the White man.”
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As Lewis V. Baldwin has demonstrated, these verbal attacks against King did not prevent Malcolm from seeking a dialogue with King and other civil rights leaders.
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In 1960, for example, Malcolm wrote to King, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, and other leaders to invite each as “spokesman and fellow-leader of our people” to attend and, if they wished, to speak at an “Education Rally” in New York. Malcolm explained that by participating, civil rights leaders could hear Elijah Muhammad and then “make a more intelligent appraisal of his teachings, his methods and his programs.”
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Malcolm recognized that King had little to gain from attending the Muslim-sponsored rally, but the appeal for dialogue was a consistent theme in Malcolm's speeches, even as he became more and more caustic in his attacks on civil rights leaders.