Malcolm X (26 page)

His second major Southern tour, the centerpiece of the campaign that Muhammad had approved, took place in September and October of 1958, beginning in Atlanta, which, with its flourishing temple, remained one of the few urban centers in the region to have a significant NOI presence. By September 29 he was in Florida, and over the next two weeks the state’s NOI members coordinated public lectures for him in Miami, Tampa, and Jacksonville. Apparently Malcolm did not modify his talks to address regional issues that were particularly relevant in the South. Nevertheless, his speeches did attract modest media coverage, and the tour enhanced the Nation’s profile, especially in Miami.

The NOI never captured the following in the South that it achieved in the mostly urban industrial Midwest, on the East Coast, and in California. Its organizational weakness in the region was compounded by several critical errors it made in its response to newly emerging desegregation campaigns. Following Muhammad’s lead, NOI leaders believed that white Southerners were at least honest in their hatred of blacks. The NOI could not imagine a political future where Jim Crow segregation would ever become outlawed. Consequently, Malcolm concluded, “the advantage of this is the Southern black man never has been under any illusions about the opposition he is dealing with.” Since white supremacy would always be a reality, blacks were better off reaching a working relationship with racist whites rather than allying themselves with Northern liberals. This was a tragic replay of Garvey’s disastrous thesis that culminated in his overtures to white supremacist organizations. “You can say for many Southern white people that, individually, they have been paternalistically helpful to many individual Negroes,” Malcolm was to argue in
Autobiography
. “I know nothing about the South. I am a creation of the Northern white man.”

Even though Malcolm’s Southern campaign ultimately scored limited gains, that effort paled in comparison to his remarkable success in growing the Nation of Islam across the country. Of the thousands of new converts he made in 1956-57, two would figure in his own life in ways he could not have imagined. One was James Warden, a New York City native and son of a labor organizer who may once have been a member of the Communist Party. After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, Warden attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and then served a two-year stint in the military, returning home to enroll in an M.A. program at Columbia University’s East Asian Institute. Sometime in 1957, when he was twenty-five, a black friend persuaded him to go to the NOI temple to hear Malcolm. He took some convincing: Warden disliked everything he had heard about this strange, racist cult. “I was convinced that these people were saying, ‘The white man is the devil,’” he recalled. “I figured, hey, it’s some crazy group, [but] America is full of them.” Upon entering the temple at West 116th Street and Lenox Avenue, he was offended to find he had to submit to a physical search. When the program began, he met with further frustration; the evening’s speaker was not Malcolm but Louis X Walcott. As Louis launched wildly into his sermon, a bewildered Warden asked himself, “Has this man lost his mind?” The concept of whites literally as devils seemed ridiculous. Warden vowed to himself, “If I get out of this place without being arrested, I will never come back.”

But curiosity got the better of him. Five nights later he returned, but once again was disappointed when yet another minister addressed the congregation. Still, he persisted, and two nights later finally heard Malcolm. The experience was a revelation. On display was Malcolm’s great strength not merely as an orator, but as a teacher. For this sermon, as for many, he used a chalkboard as part of his presentation and employed evidence from academic sources to buttress his arguments. He also didn’t mind being challenged. When Warden left that night, he realized he wanted to return. For the next nine months, he continued to attend meetings regularly, though he stopped short of joining formally. What finally put him over was finding himself the target of racial insults from schoolmates at Columbia. When they ridiculed him as a “nigger,” he became infuriated. “I felt that I was in classrooms with people who because of our mutual interests had some kind of appreciation or respect for me as a person,” he said. “This was not the case.” Giving himself over to the Nation, Warden flourished, and by 1960 was named an FOI lieutenant. It was in this capacity that his friendship with Malcolm grew to dedication. Short, pugnacious, fluent in three foreign languages including Japanese, the workaholic Warden—renamed James 67X—would eventually become one of Malcolm’s most steadfast advisers.

Another significant recruit was Betty Sanders. Born on May 28, 1934, like Malcolm she had been raised in a household where race issues played a prominent role. Her foster parents, Lorenzo and Helen Malloy, had taken her in from a broken home as a young girl and provided her with a stable middle-class existence. Lorenzo Malloy was a graduate of Tuskegee Institute and a businessman who owned a shoe repair shop in Detroit. Helen Malloy was active in civil rights, serving as an officer in the National Housewives League, a group that initiated boycotts of white-owned businesses that refused to hire blacks or sell black products . She also belonged to the NAACP and to Mary McLeod Bethune’s National Council of Negro Women, two pillars of the black bourgeoisie. Betty attended Detroit’s Northern High School, and upon receiving her diploma in 1952 enrolled in the Tuskegee Institute, intent on studying education. After two years, she switched her major to nursing; against her parents’ advice she transferred to Brooklyn State College School of Nursing, where she earned her undergraduate degree in 1956, and soon began her clinical studies at the Bronx’s Montefiore Hospital.

Betty’s discovery of the NOI was, like Warden’s, entirely fortuitous. One Friday night in mid-1956, an older nurse at Montefiore invited her to an NOI-sponsored dinner, followed by a temple sermon. Betty found the main lecturer “bewildering.” With serious reservations, she consented to go one more time, and on this occasion Malcolm spoke. As she noted his thin frame, her first impression was one of concern. “This man is totally malnourished!” she thought. Following the lecture, she was introduced to him, and as they conversed Betty was struck by Malcolm’s relaxed manner. Onstage, he had seemed soldierly and stern; in private, he was personable, even charming. Intrigued, she began attending Temple No. 7 sermons, at first hiding her fascination with the Muslims from her parents. By that fall, Betty Sanders officially joined, becoming Betty X, and serving as a health instructor in the MGT's General Civilization Class. Her friends outside the temple believed that her newfound dedication to the Nation had a lot to do with her feelings for Minister Malcolm.

In late 1958, an African-American FBI informant candidly evaluated both Malcolm’s character and his standing within the NOI:

This assessment underscored the FBI’s problem. Though the Bureau saw Malcolm as a potential threat to national security, his rigid behavioral code and strong leadership skills would make him hard to discredit. He did not have obvious vulnerabilities, nor was he likely to be baited into making a mistake. Yet what the evaluation also gathered, quite astutely, was that Malcolm’s authority within the sect emanated directly from his closeness to Elijah Muhammad. It would not take the Bureau long to deduce that any conflict provoked between Muhammad and Malcolm could weaken the Nation as a whole.

By late 1957, Malcolm was becoming the NOI’s version of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.—a celebrity minister based in New York City, but whose larger role took him on the road for weeks at a time. His responsibilities still growing, he led a pressurized existence, his life often a blur of planes and trains, speeches and sermons. At some level, he must have felt a great weight of loneliness and frustration, especially as the freshness of new initiatives gave way to the inevitability of routine. The acclaim he found so intoxicating at the beginning came with equally significant burdens: the difficulties and humiliations that all blacks encountered when traveling across the country during these years; the administrative and budgetary puzzles of managing thousands of people; the challenges involved in pastoral work—going to see members in hospitals, overseeing funerals, preparing sermons and prayers. When he was in New York, he was expected to be a nightly presence in his temple, while the week’s schedule was strictly regimented. Every Monday was FOI night, where men were drilled in martial arts, as well as “the responsibilities of a husband and father,” as Malcolm put it. Tuesday evenings were “Unity Night, where the brothers and sisters enjoy each other’s conversational company.” Wednesday was Student Enrollment, with lectures explaining NOI theology. Thursdays were reserved for the MGT and General Civilization Class, at which Malcolm frequently lectured. Fridays were Civilization Night, with classes “for brothers and sisters in the area of the domestic relations, emphasizing how both husbands and wives must understand and respect each other's true natures.” On Saturdays, members were free to visit each other's homes, with Sundays reserved for the week’s main religious service.

Whether prompted by a gnawing sense of emptiness in his life or something less emotional, Malcolm’s thoughts turned to marriage. Such a move would have practical benefits; Malcolm calculated that he could be a more effective representative of Elijah Muhammad if he married. He had heard the many rumors about his romantic attachments, and had tried to suppress them. Everyone in Temple No. 7 undoubtedly knew about their minister's long-term relationship with Evelyn Williams. It is impossible to know whether the minister rekindled sexual intimacies with his longtime lover, or if Islamic sanctions against premarital sex affected their behavior. In 1956, Malcolm proposed marriage and Evelyn accepted, but a few days later he retracted his offer. Of all the women with whom he was involved, Malcolm would later write to Elijah Muhammad, “Sister Evelyn is the only one who had a legitiment [
sic
] beef against me . . . and I do bear witness that if she complains she is justified.”

But Evelyn was not the only recipient of a marriage proposal from Malcolm in 1956. That same year, he asked another NOI woman, Betty Sue Williams. Little is known of her, though she was likely the sister of Robert X Williams, minister of the Buffalo temple. Both women, in different ways, were unsuitable choices. Malcolm sensed that he had built bonds of trust and spiritual kinship between himself, his religious followers, and to a growing extent the Harlem community. The woman he chose as his wife would impact all these relationships. Romantic love and sexual attractiveness, he reasoned, had little to do with fulfilling his primary roles as a minister and role model. Evelyn had known and loved him when he was Detroit Red, and though he had changed drastically, her claim on him by virtue of their shared past would always compete with his commitment to the Nation. For this reason, Malcolm believed it necessary for his spouse to have no knowledge of or connection to his prior life. And Betty Sue, who probably lived in Buffalo, four hundred miles from Harlem, was not a member of Temple No. 7’s intimate community. Malcolm was proud of the bonds he had established with both the members of Temple No. 7 and the Harlem community generally. The minister ’s wife, he felt, was an extension of himself ; she would sometimes be his representative at public occasions, and would have to possess the same commitment to Muhammad and the NOI that he had. Malcolm’s failed proposals in 1956 surely increased his sense of personal isolation and private loneliness.

If practical reasons came to dominate the way Malcolm thought about choosing a wife, it may have had much to do with the sense of betrayal he long harbored about his mistreatment at the hands of partners past, especially Bea. He had come to fear that it was impossible for him to love or trust any woman. “I’d had too much experience that women were only tricky, deceitful, untrustworthy flesh,” he complained. “To tell a woman not to talk too much was like telling Jesse James not to carry a gun, or telling a hen not to cackle.” And knowing when not to talk was a crucial skill for anyone who was to be Mrs. Malcolm Shabazz.

Malcolm also possessed firm ideas about the role a wife should play. “Islam has very strict laws and teachings about women,” he observed. “The true nature of a man is to be strong, and a woman’s true nature is to be weak . . . [a man] must control her if he expects to get her respect.” Because he viewed all women as inherently inferior and subordinate to males, he was not looking for a spouse with whom he would share his innermost feelings. He expected his wife to be obedient and chaste, to bear his children and to maintain a Muslim household.