Malcolm X

Table of Contents

 

 

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VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R oRL, England

 

First published in 2011 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

Copyright © Manning Marable, 2011 All rights reserved

 

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
by Malcolm X and Alex Haley. Copyright © 1964 by Alex Haley and Malcolm X. Copyright © 1965 by Alex Haley and Betty Shabazz. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

 

PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS

Insert p. 2 (top): Eve Arnold / Magnum Photos • p. 2 (bottom): Frank Scherschel / Getty Images • pp. 5 (bottom), 15: © Bob Adelman / Corbis • p. 6: © Hulton-Deutsch Collection / Corbis • p. 8: Keystone / Getty Images • p. 10: Orlando Fernandez, New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Library of Congress • p. 12: New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Library of Congress • All other photographs: © Bettman / Corbis

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Marable, Manning, 1950–

Malcolm X : a life of reinvention / Manning Marable. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-1-101-44527-3

1. X, Malcolm, 1925–1965. 2. Black Muslims—Biography. 3. African Americans—Biography. I. Title.
BP223.Z8L57636 2011
297.8’7092—dc22 2010025768
[B]

 

 

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PROLOGUE

Life Beyond the Legend

I
n the early years of the last century, the neighborhood just north of Harlem, later to be named Washington Heights, was a sparsely settled suburb. Only the vision of a businessman, William Fox, led to the construction of an opulent entertainment center on Broadway between West 165th and 166th streets. Fox’s instruction to the architect, Thomas W. Lamb, was to design a building more splendid than any theater on Broadway. By the time all was finished, in 1912, an expensive terra-cotta facade adorned the front walls, marble columns stood guard at the entrance, while carvings of exotic birds graced the foyer: it was these colorful motifs, inspired by the great nineteenth-century artist John James Audubon, that prompted Fox to name his pleasure palace the Audubon. On the building’s first floor, Lamb designed a massive cinema, large enough to seat twenty-three hundred people. In subsequent years, the second floor was reserved for two spacious ballrooms: the Rose Ballroom, which could accommodate eight hundred patrons, and the larger Grand Ballroom, holding up to fifteen hundred.

Within a few decades, the neighborhood around the Audubon began to change, becoming increasingly black and working class. The Audubon's management catered to this new clientele by booking the most celebrated swing bands of the era, including Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Chick Webb. The Audubon also became the home for many of the city’s militant trade unionists, and from 1934 to 1937 the newly formed Transport Workers Union held its meetings there—accompanied by the occasional violent confrontation. One night in September 1929, for example, a four-hundredstrong party sponsored by the Lantern Athletic Club was disrupted by four gunshots. Two people were badly wounded.

During World War II, the Audubon was rented out for weddings, bar mitzvahs, political meetings, and graduation parties. After 1945, however, the neighborhood changed yet again, as many white middle-class residents sold their properties and fled to the suburbs. Columbia University’s decision to expand its hospital at West 168th Street and Broadway into a major health sciences campus generated hundreds of new jobs for the black influx, while the Audubon adapted to economic realities by shutting down its cinema and subdividing the space it had occupied into rentals. However, both the Rose and Grand ballrooms remained.

By the mid-1960s, the building had surrendered most of its original grandeur. The main entrance for the ballrooms was small and drab. Customers had to climb a steep flight of stairs to the second-floor foyer, then maneuver past the manager’s office and on into either the Rose, at the building’s left (east) side, or the Grand, which faced Broadway. The larger room was about 180 feet by 60 feet, its north, east, and west walls housing about sixty-five separate booths, each of which could hold up to twelve people. Farthest from the building’s main entrance, along the south wall, was a modest wooden stage, behind which was a cramped, poorly lit antechamber where musicians and speakers would muster before walking out to perform.

On the winter afternoon of Sunday, February 21, 1965, the Grand Ballroom had been reserved by the controversial Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), a Harlem-based political group. For nearly a year, the Audubon's management had been renting the ballroom to the group, but it remained concerned about its leader, Malcolm X. About ten years before, he had arrived as the minister of Temple No. 7, the local headquarters for a militant Islamic sect, the Lost-Found Nation of Islam (NOI). Later commonly described in the press as Black Muslims, its members preached that whites were devils and that black Americans were the lost Asiatic tribe of Shabazz, forced into slavery in America’s racial wilderness. The road to salvation required converts to reject their slave surnames, replacing them with the letter
X
, the symbol that represented the unknown. Members were told that, after years of personal dedication and spiritual growth, they would be given “original” surnames, in harmony with their true Asiatic identities. As the Nation’s most public spokesman, Malcolm X gained notoriety for his provocative criticisms of both civil rights leaders and white politicians.

The previous March, Malcolm X had announced his independence from the Nation of Islam. He quickly established his own spiritual group, Muslim Mosque, Inc. (MMI), largely for those NOI members who had left the Nation in sympathy with him. Despite his break, he continued to make highly controversial statements. “There will be more violence than ever this year,” he predicted to a
New York Times
reporter in March 1964, for instance. “The whites had better understand this while there is still time. The Negroes at the mass level are ready to act.” The New York City police commissioner responded to this prediction by labeling Malcolm “another self-proclaimed ‘leader’ [who] openly advocates bloodshed and armed revolt and sneers at the sincere efforts of reasonable men to resolve the problem of equal rights by proper, peaceful and legitimate means.” Malcolm was not intimidated by the attack. “The greatest compliment anyone can pay me,” he responded, “is to say I’m irresponsible, because by responsible they mean Negroes who are responsible to white authorities—Negro Uncle Toms.”