Malcolm X (55 page)

Out of the Nation yet hardly liberated, Malcolm found himself forced to grapple with the past and the future at once. His decision to cut ties made him a kind of free agent, and some groups and leaders realized the potential advantage in bringing him into the civil rights fold. Yet Malcolm was still working to consolidate his own ideas, on both Islam and politics, and the wounds left by his break with the Nation of Islam were still too fresh to give him a truly clean start. In these early weeks, he alternated between reaffirming his loyalty to Elijah Muhammad’s ideas and decrying his flawed morality, sometimes in speeches only days apart. At the same time, he struggled to stake out ground for Muslim Mosque, Inc., apart from the Nation, and here the most promising path was that which Elijah Muhammad had circumscribed: civil rights. In some way it must have been freeing; without John Ali and Raymond Sharrieff constantly looking over his shoulder, he could cast off the last vestiges of restraint. One of the MMI's initial press statements declared: “Concerning nonviolence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks. It is legal and lawful to own a shotgun or a rifle. . . . When our people are being bitten by dogs, they are within their rights to kill those dogs.” When New York police commissioner Michael Murphy condemned such comments as “irresponsible,” Malcolm responded that such a condemnation was a “compliment.”

In his efforts to establish himself as a solo force, he cast a wide intellectual net, swinging from powerful arguments on the importance of black nationalism to occasional expressions of support for desegregation. On March 14 he attended a meeting in Chester, Pennsylvania, of East Coast civil rights leaders, including the most prominent public school desegregation leader in metropolitan New York, the Reverend Milton Galamison; the comedian and social activist Dick Gregory; and the Cambridge, Maryland, activist Gloria Richardson. Only weeks earlier, he had still been in the Nation of Islam routinely denouncing integration, yet here he was embracing efforts to promote school desegregation and improvements in the quality of blacks’ public education. It marked an early, tentative concession to the idea that perhaps blacks could someday become empowered within the existing system. That same day he had given an interview to the
Amsterdam News
, during which he accused the Nation of attempting to murder him, a reference to the plot cooked up by Captain Joseph that Anas Luqman had divulged. While these comments were certain to provoke an angry response from the Nation, they also afforded Malcolm some breathing room. With the threat made public, it would be harder for the NOI to move against him. Still, Malcolm’s assertions were probably not widely believed by most observers of the Nation. Up to 1964 the Nation’s routine violence and beatings of its members had largely escaped public scrutiny. It was also well known that the Fruit never carried weapons, and Malcolm’s reputation for hyperbole and extremism probably led police and most blacks to dismiss his claims.

On March 16, Muslim Mosque, Inc., became a legal entity, filing a certificate of incorporation with the County of New York, listing its address as Hotel Theresa, Suite 128, 2090 Seventh Avenue—in reality, a large room located on the hotel’s mezzanine. Two days later at Harvard University, Malcolm set to work defining the goals of the organization. The black man, he said, had to “control the politics in his own residential areas by voting . . . and investing in the businesses within the Negro areas.” African Americans had become “disillusioned with nonviolence” and were now “ready for any action which will get immediate results.” In these remarks stirred the beginnings of what would evolve a few years later into the Black Power movement. According to FBI surveillance, during the question and answer session at Harvard he was asked whether he was advocating bloody revolution. Malcolm said no, although he did note that the African American “has bled all the time, but the white man does not recognize this as bloodshed and will not until the white man himself bleeds a little.” It was not an endorsement of violence, but this statement and others like it made it difficult for critics to gauge whether his militancy was receding. The following day, he gave a lengthy interview to the African-American writer A. B. Spellman, which appeared in the independent Marxist journal
Monthly Review
that May, and once again he denied his advocacy of violence. Yet if he sought to avoid controversy in that respect, his comments in the interview concerning Jews did nothing to endear him to progressives. “We are not racists at all,” he stated, but then continued, “The Jews have been the tradesmen and the business people of the ‘black community’ for such a long time that it is normal that they feel guilty when one says that the exploiters of the blacks are the Jews. This does not say that we are anti-Semitic. We are simply against exploitation.”

Along with crafting the MMI's agenda, Malcolm also hoped to establish the organization’s legitimacy. In the Nation, he had represented a group that numbered between seventy-five thousand and one hundred thousand, but with the MMI he started virtually from scratch. It was probably for this reason that he exaggerated the group’s size when a few days later he appeared on the show
Listening Post
, hosted by Joe Rainey on WDAS in Philadelphia. When Rainey asked whether MMI was a nationwide organization, Malcolm grandly proclaimed that “student groups from coast to coast” had requested information on how to join up. Yet though the group struggled early to put members on its rolls, Malcolm himself continued to attract sizable crowds. On March 22 he was the featured speaker at an MMI-sponsored rally held at the Rockland Palace that drew one thousand people, a surprisingly large audience given Malcolm’s recent death threat charges. Reporters covering the event speculated that Malcolm was planning to form “a black nationalist army.”

The work of building any kind of army would promise to be slow and labored. By name and nature the MMI was a religious organization, which limited its growth to Muslims; Malcolm had yet to establish a secular branch that could gather non-Muslims around his cause, so he now looked to members of the Nation that he might peel away, despite urgent warnings by James 67X and others that he should avoid conflict with the Nation. Scheduled to appear on the Bob Kennedy show on Boston radio on March 24, Malcolm decided to drive up early. Accompanied by James 67X and probably also by Charles 37X Kenyatta, he held meetings with several NOI members, almost certainly to discuss potential recruitment. Though he risked trouble by poaching on Louis X's grounds, the trip made strategic sense. Malcolm had established the Boston mosque himself, and Ella’s presence in the city gave him an especially strong foothold in a certain part of the black community.

The subject of discussion on Bob Kennedy’s radio program had originally been billed as “Negro—Separation and Supremacy,” but Kennedy wanted Malcolm to explain how he had changed his views since leaving the Nation of Islam. Here Malcolm was forced to negotiate difficult terrain. Despite all that had transpired, he felt a lingering loyalty to the man who, more than any other in his life, had fulfilled a paternal role, and he responded by reaffirming his spiritual and ideological fidelity to the Messenger. “Everything” he knew, he asserted without hesitation, was “a result of Elijah Muhammad’s doing.” To reconcile this statement with his break from the Nation, he went on to explain that only by establishing himself as an independent force could he implement Muhammad’s teachings. With only one exception, he avoided criticism of civil rights leaders. “Martin Luther King must devise a new approach in the coming year,” he predicted, “or he will be a man without followers.” Once again, he wallowed in the pose of racial avenger: “So far only the Negroes have shed blood, and this is not looked on as bloodshed by the whites. White blood has to be shed before the white man will consider a conflict as a bloody one.”

Yet at this moment, Malcolm struggled greatly to come to terms with just how he felt about the Messenger's teachings. Over the years, as his fidelity to the core NOI dogma had waned, he had grown more interested in orthodox Islam. In his role as national minister, he had responded to tens of letters, public and private, written by orthodox Muslims attacking the Nation on its core religious principles, and the steady drumbeat of scorn had not failed to challenge his assumptions about Islam and increase his curiosity. Now, without an organization to define him, he realized that the structure of orthodox Islam could provide a new spiritual framework, and at this moment when almost any direction seemed possible, he saw his chance to fulfill the dream that he had carried since first visiting the Middle East in 1959: making a pilgrimage to Mecca.

Before his suspension the previous year, he had been back in contact with Dr. Mahmoud Shawarbi, the Muslim professor that he had first met in October 1960 at an NOI-sponsored event. They had kept in sporadic touch, but after Malcolm’s silencing their meetings became more frequent and intense. Malcolm’s expanded interest in orthodox Islam greatly pleased Shawarbi, and upon Malcolm’s departure from the Nation Shawarbi immediately began giving him instructional sessions in the proper Islamic rituals. He encouraged Malcolm’s trip and used his pull with the Saudis to pave the way for Malcolm through diplomatic channels; he also alerted his friends and associates in the Middle East about Malcolm’s upcoming visit to the region, requesting that they assist him.

Shawarbi was crucial to Malcolm’s development in other ways. Persistently, but without confrontation, he challenged Malcolm to rethink his race-based worldview, admitting that many orthodox Muslims also fell short of the color-blind ideals they professed. He finally convinced Malcolm that the Qur'an, as conceived in the recitations of the Prophet Muhammad, was racially egalitarian—which meant that whites, through their submission to Allah, would become spiritual brothers and sisters to blacks.

By the time of his recruitment trip to Boston, Malcolm had made his decision to undertake the pilgrimage to Mecca. The chance for spiritual purification at this juncture of great change and uncertainty seemed too important to pass up. It was likely during his time in Boston that Malcolm visited Ella and asked her to loan him the money, some thirteen hundred dollars, that he would need to make the pilgrimage. Despite all the trouble they had given each other since he had moved in with her as a teenager, she agreed.

On March 26, Martin Luther King, Jr., was on Capitol Hill with plans to discuss the stalled 1964 civil rights bill with Senators Hubert Humphrey, Jacob Javits, and others. The moment caught King at a difficult time, when even close aides like James Bevel were warning that “people are losing faith . . . in the nonviolent movement.” When King moved to a conference room off the Senate floor to discuss developments with the press, Malcolm, who was also visiting that day, slipped in to listen. After the conference, the men left through separate doors, but as King was walking along the crowded Senate gallery observing the filibuster of pro-segregationist senators, he encountered Malcolm and several aides. Malcolm probably was not eager for an informal encounter, much less a staged photograph. It was James 67X who had cleverly set up the entire affair, pushing his boss around a marble column until he and King suddenly stood facing each other. A photographer in the gallery took a photo of them shaking hands, which would come to symbolize the two great streams of black consciousness that flourished in the 1960s and beyond. It was the only time the two men ever met.

Yet the handshake also marked a transition for Malcolm, crystallizing as it did a movement away from the revolutionary rhetoric that defined “Message to the Grassroots” toward something akin to what King had worked his entire adult life to achieve: improvement in the black condition through changing the American system. Three days after the meeting, Malcolm gave a speech at the Audubon Ballroom before six hundred people that served as a foundation for a more famous address he would give a week later. Though the announced topic, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” seemed incendiary, at its core the speech actually contained a far more conventional message, one that had defined the civil rights movement as far back as 1962: the importance of voting rights. In the speech, Malcolm emphasized that all Harlemites, and by extension blacks everywhere, had to register as voters. Gone was the old Nation of Islam claim that participation in the system could have little effect. Now Malcolm called for a united black front that would seek to wrest control of blacks’ economic and political future. “Unity is the right religion,” he insisted. “Black people must forget their differences and discuss the points on which they can agree.” He also questioned the ability of the civil rights movement to compensate blacks for “three hundred ten years of unpaid slave labor.” What was most significant was his shift from the use of violence to achieve blacks’ objectives to the exercising of the electoral franchise. By embracing the ballot, he was implicitly rejecting violence, even if this was at times difficult to discern in the heat of his rhetoric.