Malcolm X (86 page)

Ella Collins purchased an attractive Harlem town house that would become the OAAU’s headquarters. Peter Goldman, who visited Collins in the early 1970s, observed that “the OAAU’s active membership had dwindled to a handful, and its most visible activities in Harlem were the annual commemorations of Malcolm’s birth and death.”

Meanwhile, James 67X simply slipped into obscurity. From 1976 until 1988 he lived in Guyana. When he came back to the United States, he became a nurse; in his sixties he remarried and started a new family. His earlier life as Malcolm’s chief aide became as remote as another world.

Muhammad Ali once again met Sonny Liston, in Lewiston, Maine, on May 25, 1965, for their second heavyweight championship bout. Although Ali quickly knocked out Liston, the fight was secondary to the swirl of police activity surrounding the event. Prompted by bomb threats, two hundred Maine police were stationed in the arena. FBI agents and state troopers were also present. The mood was so tense that the event’s singer, entertainer Robert Goulet, forgot the words to the national anthem.

Over the next two years Ali achieved a spectacular boxing record. In November 1965, he humiliated former heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson. Several months later Ali was reclassified by his draft board as 1-A, and was soon notified that he would be inducted into the U.S. military. Ali’s response in opposition to the Vietnam War—“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong”—placed the Black Muslim, paradoxically, in the identical political posture as Malcolm X. When Ali refused to be inducted, his championship was stripped from him and he was barred from fighting for more than three years. He became a hero to the antiwar generation that rejected both the war and the military-industrial complex. To millions of Muslims throughout the world, Ali became a symbol of resistance to American imperialism. There would be many more twists and ironic turns in the magnificent but flawed journey of Ali, from his 1974 recapturing of the heavyweight championship by defeating George Foreman in Zaire to his 1996 surprise appearance at the Atlanta Olympics, holding a torch in his hands to mark the opening event. Like Malcolm before him, Ali also evolved in his beliefs from the Nation of Islam to orthodox Islam. Despite his physical infirmities, he has found peace within his life.

It would be left to Wallace Muhammad to complete Malcolm’s posthumous rehabilitation. His 1965 capitulation to his father was so transparently contrived that his ouster from the sect several years later was predictable. However, by 1974 he was back in the Nation, preaching orthodox Islam and challenging prominent ministers like Farrakhan. When Elijah Muhammad died, on February 25, 1975, Wallace quickly outmaneuvered his siblings to seize control of nearly all the Nation’s operations. Within a year, he had carried out an orthodox Islamic revolution within the sect. Farrakhan was stripped of his Harlem ministry and sentenced to serve at a minor mosque in the Chicago suburbs. Yacub’s History, the demonization of whites, the advocacy of strict racial separatism—these were all discarded. In June 1975, the Nation of Islam announced that it would accept white followers, and a few whites actually joined. The organization’s archival heritage—its thousands of publications and newspapers, audiotaped recordings, internal records, and photographs—were largely destroyed, and a new memory, branded by orthodoxy, was imposed. Wallace later changed his name to W. Deen Mohammed, to distinguish himself from his father.

As the group’s new imam, W. Deen Mohammed opened the financial records of the Nation for the first time to its members. Its fish import enterprises alone grossed $22 million in income annually. The Nation employed more than a thousand people and owned over $6 million worth of farmland—yet it also carried a $4.5 million debt, due in part to financial mismanagement. But Imam Mohammed’s most shocking move for diehards was the restoration of Malcolm X. On February 2, 1976, Mohammed announced that Harlem Mosque No. 7 was to be renamed in honor of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, and praised Malcolm as “the greatest minister the Nation of Islam ever had, except for the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.” As the name Nation of Islam was jettisoned in favor of World Community of Al-Islam in the West, Farrakhan had enough, and began to reconstitute the old Nation of Islam around himself. Imam Mohammed’s response, in 1977, was to excommunicate him. Fidelity to Elijah Muhammad’s teachings now meant being expelled from the Islamic faith community.

And even years after the Messenger’s death, embarrassing episodes generated by his sexual infidelities continued to surface. In 1981, for example, three individuals claiming to be Muhammad’s illegitimate children filed a $5 million lawsuit charging that Muhammad’s children, relatives, and two banks had converted millions of dollars of Muhammad’s assets for themselves. The children suing were the son and daughter of June Muhammad—Abdulla Yasin Muhammad (born December 30, 1960) and Ayesha Muhammad (born September 4, 1962), and the daughter of Evelyn Williams, Marie Muhammad (born March 30, 1960).

Larry 4X Prescott at first supported Wallace’s efforts to reform the Nation of Islam. However, when Farrakhan broke with Wallace to reestablish the old NOI, Prescott joined him. Now, as Akbar Muhammad, looking back four decades, he identifies errors of judgment that he believes were made on both sides. After the firebombing of Malcolm’s home, for instance, James 3X Shabazz was among those who had accused Malcolm of burning his own house. “And Malcolm responded, ‘Do you think that I would burn a house down with my babies in there?’ . . . And it made us look like we were really out to lunch.” But Shabazz’s rhetoric had the effect of intensifying anti-Malcolm sentiment among “the brothers in the mosque, the bean soup eaters and the black coffee drinkers, they start to say, ‘Yeah, he went so far as to burn his own house down.’ That’s the way it started going.” Prescott suggested that the MMI was too small to represent “a challenge to the Nation.” What truly motivated Malcolm, he believed, was “wanting to get in the front of the civil rights movement.” His blanket repudiations of the Nation of Islam and the revelations of Elijah Muhammad’s infidelities all advanced Malcolm’s objectives. A last-minute rapprochement between the factions was never going to be possible.

Some of those who had a hand in Malcolm’s murder began disappearing from the scene as early as the 1970s. The body of James 3X Shabazz, fifty-two and the boss of the Newark mosque, was discovered on September 4, 1973, next to his Cadillac, which was parked in his driveway. In a mob-style hit reminiscent of that of Bugsy Siegel, James had been shot just above his left eye, with another bullet wound through the forehead into his brain. He left behind a wife and thirteen children. Apparently, James 3X’s death was not in belated retribution for Malcolm X, but the result of a war between the corrupt Newark mosque and a local criminal gang, the New World of Islam, for control of extortion and murders for hire. Three thousand people attended Shabazz’s funeral, including Newark mayor Kenneth Gibson and Farrakhan. The Newark murders continued. On September 18, 1973, two Muslims were shot to death, their bodies found in an automobile near an auto plant. A copy of
Muhammad Speaks
was spread out over the dead men’s faces. One month later, the heads of Newark mosque members Michael X Huff and Warren X Marcello were found in a lot near James 3X Shabazz’s home. Their bodies were subsequently found four miles distant.

There were also attempts on the life of Raymond Sharrieff. On one occasion in October 1971, someone pumped five shotgun rounds into Sharrieff’s Chicago mansion from outside; Sharrieff was wounded by several pellets. In late December 1971 an assailant shot into his downtown office window, just barely missing his secretary. Sharrieff died, peacefully, of natural causes on December 18, 2003.

Members of Elijah Muhammad’s family also began disappearing from the scene. Elijah’s third son and former manager of Muhammad Ali, Herbert Muhammad, spent years in litigation fighting his younger brother, Wallace, in the 1990s. On August 26, 2008, Herbert died from complications after heart surgery, leaving a wife, Aminah Antonia Muhammad, six sons, and eight daughters. About two weeks later, on September 9, 2008, Wallace Mohammed died. At the time of his death, Muhammad was the spiritual leader of 185 mosques with an estimated fifty thousand congregants. In death he was proclaimed as “America’s imam” by Ahmed Rehab of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

In the final years of their lives, Ella and Betty were locked even more intensely in conflict. In the early 1990s, when Spike Lee proposed a Hollywood-style biographical film on Malcolm X, Ella was outraged to find out Betty was retained as a paid consultant. “Spike Lee’s after the money, the prestige,” Ella contemptuously complained to a reporter. “He doesn’t know any facts.” Ella protested that Betty “doesn’t know enough about Malcolm to consult on anything pertaining to his life. Her activities [with him] were very limited.” Betty had her revenge by eliminating any references to Ella in Lee’s movie. “I don’t have any respect for the lady,” Betty coolly explained to the
Boston Globe
. “She was not a good influence on him.” As the renaissance of interest in Malcolm exploded across American popular culture, Ella’s personal situation became much worse. No longer able to maintain the OAAU headquarters in Harlem, she relocated to Boston. Her health soon declined as she fell ill with diabetes; in 1990 she was discovered in her apartment lying in her own waste. One of her legs, swollen with a gangrenous ulcer, was filled with maggots. Both of her legs were soon amputated. Ella painfully passed away on August 6, 1996.

Following Malcolm’s death, Betty Shabazz appeared to live a successful and rewarding life. In 1972 she enrolled in a doctoral program in education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, receiving her Ph.D. three years later. Subsequently she served as an academic administrator at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, becoming a sort of celebrity among black middle-class and professional groups. But she could never escape Malcolm’s shadow, his terrible death, and the desire to punish those who were responsible. Her animus largely focused on Farrakhan, who she felt had betrayed Malcolm, and she believed he had directly participated in the conspiracy to murder him. Betty’s attacks on Farrakhan probably inspired her daughter Qubilah to attempt to hire a hit man to murder him in 1995. The would-be assassin, Michael Fitzpatrick, was an FBI informer, and Qubilah was quickly arrested and charged in federal court. In an astute move, Farrakhan rallied to Qubilah’s defense, claiming the young woman had been entrapped by the FBI. The government’s case fell apart at trial. Betty was forced to praise Farrakhan publicly for his “kindness in wanting to help my daughter.”

Tragically, barely a year after Qubilah’s legal ordeal, her disturbed twelve-year-old son, called “Little Malcolm” by the family, set fire one night to his grandmother’s apartment. Betty, sleeping in her bedroom, was horrifically burned. She struggled in the hospital for more than three weeks, with severe burns covering more than 80 percent of her body. Physicians took aggressive action, operating five times to remove layers of charred skin and replacing it with artificial skin. But the damage was too great and Betty Shabazz died on June 23, 1997. President William Jefferson Clinton noted her passing, applauding her for her commitments to “education and to uplifting women and children.” Like Malcolm X, noted District of Columbia representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, Shabazz “will be remembered not for her death, but for the principled life she lived and the tower of strength she became.” Her public memorial gathering, held at the prestigious Riverside Church in Manhattan, included testimonials by Republican governor George Pataki of New York and New York City’s Republican mayor, Rudolph Giuliani. The mayor, widely unpopular among many working-class and poor black New Yorkers, was roundly booed when he began to address the audience. It was significant that the eldest daughter, Attallah Shabazz, rushed to the podium in defense of Giuliani, praising the conservative mayor’s gestures of kindness toward her mother and criticizing the mostly black crowd for its rudeness. Her defense of Giuliani may have reflected Betty’s black bourgeois politics, but not those of her father.

From the beginning of the criminal investigation following Malcolm’s murder, BOSS detective Gerry Fulcher had been troubled by what he considered major mistakes. The problems began at the crime scene. The first priority, Fulcher later recounted, should have been to “protect the whole area. You get rid of everybody who’s not going to be a witness.” Any evidence must be preserved. “You don’t want people finding things. . . .” In Fulcher’s judgment, the NYPD’s treatment of the murder scene was “totally contrary to what should be standard operating procedure. That thing should have been covered all night long.” In high-profile cases, it is not unusual to find “crime scenes stay[ing] locked up for days.” Fulcher expressed his misgivings to his police colleagues at the time of the assassination. Perhaps as a consequence, he found himself shut out of the investigation. Fulcher recalled:

Several months after the assassination, Fulcher was transferred from BOSS headquarters to one of the city’s most dangerous precincts, Fort Apache in the Bronx. He lasted there less than three years, before resigning from the force.