“Do you know why the white man really hates you?” Malcolm X would ask his black congregations in the nineteen-sixties. “It’s because every time he sees your face he sees a mirror of his crime—and his guilty conscience can’t bear to face it.” In the midst of what seemed the high moral adventure of Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s nonviolent civil-rights campaigns, Malcolm appeared as some marginal shadow-figure of wrath, always paralleling King’s progress. A ghetto street hustler turned grimly austere evangelist for a racial subsect of Islam known as the Black Muslims, he became one of those unnerving black figures who periodically rise up before the eyes of white society as an image of its own systematic dehumanization, at once a casualty of and a judgment upon America’s racism. In ghostly black-and-white news footage from that time, he can be glimpsed at street rallies of inner-city blacks—a long, lank, sober-suited figure, hatted and bespectacled—excoriating the white man in a level, measured tone with rapid licks of scorn: “We don’t want to have anything to do with any race of dogs.” Spearing his forefinger in the air, he cries, “Two-legged white dogs sicking four-legged dogs on your and my mother!”
Twenty-seven years after his sudden death, in a bedlam of gunfire in a Harlem auditorium, his presence still hangs palpably among us. It’s not merely in the speckling of “X”s on caps and T-shirts which one now sees everywhere (even on Bill Clinton’s jogging cap)—a ubiquitous pop rash that has anticipated the film biography by Spike Lee. In this cinematic Second Coming, Malcolm promises finally to pass, in one form at least, into the mythology of America. Of course, such theatrical reconstructions, like “JFK” and “Mississippi Burning,” can work their own polemically simplistic vandalisms on the past, coarsening the collective memory from which our understanding of our own times is formed.
Beyond his ascension into the pop firmament, though, Malcolm abides among us in a far more elemental sense. From the turbulent black awakening of the sixties, two lines of descent—two temperaments, two potentials—have contended for the spirit of black Americans: a tension between the children of Martin and the children of Malcolm. Though King’s perspective was far more radical than the eventual sentimentalism about him would lead one to suppose, it was suggested even in his day that his vision—of a transcendent, nonviolent struggle of moral confrontation that would shame a racist and essentially barbarous society into redemption—could never be more than a dream. But if it could be said that King’s vision expected too much of the species, Malcolm’s seemed a vision of humankind’s nature reduced to the basest, most minimal terms of anger and retribution for abuse. Malcolm proclaimed to his black audiences that only fools “could love someone who had treated them as the white man has treated you.” He demonized the abuser as a “blue-eyed white devil,” genetically beyond any moral appeal, who would never consent to admit blacks into his company and was unworthy of such ambitions anyway—a predator who could properly be handled only with contempt and threat.
To no small degree, Martin and Malcolm were projections of two separate black cultures. King, the son of an eminent minister, had grown up in the comfortable insulation of Atlanta’s black gentility—part of that black establishment eager to join in a civil-rights coalition with the nation’s white liberal community. Malcolm, on the other hand, arose from the lowest reaches of the black urban underclass. In “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” narrated shortly before his death to Alex Haley, Malcolm acknowledged, “I know nothing about the South. I am a creation of the Northern white man and of his hypocritical attitude toward the Negro”—an attitude closer, actually, to that of the nation as a whole.
It is now clear that Malcolm was in communion with submerged heats of anger far more widespread in the black community than most whites ever suspected. Peter Goldman, in his discerning 1973 biography, “The Death and Life of Malcolm X,” reports that when he was a newspaperman in St. Louis in the early sixties “a bewildered cop told me that even the hookers and boosters were calling him a blue-eyed devil and would only talk to his black partner.” Concurrent with King’s nonviolent campaigns in the South was the emergence around the country of such guerrilla militants as the Black Panthers and radical young activists like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, with their cries for “black power!” What disturbed some observers about this new phase of the movement was a contraction of its moral terms to a bitter cynicism that saw the human lot as one of hopeless racial alienation. I was covering the civil-rights movement in the South then, and one summer night in Greenwood, Mississippi, as King was conducting a mass meeting of fifteen hundred blacks in a local church, I sensed Malcolm’s effect even there. King’s voice pealed over the gathering, “We have a power that’s greater than all the guns in Mississippi, greater than all the bombs and armies of the world—we have the power of our souls!” From several young partisans of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee scattered around the back of the church, there arose a counterpoint of derisive hoots: “Oh, de Lawd! De Lawd, now!”
If, all these years later, the tensions between the visions of Martin and Malcolm have endured in the black community, it can sometimes appear that Malcolm’s flat, blank anger has carried the day—and not merely in a certain style of attitude, as evidenced by the swagger and bluster of many rap artists. How Malcolm’s presence far more deeply lingers among us was illuminated by the recent upheavals in Los Angeles, after the acquittal of the policemen tried for the beating of Rodney King. But if the lasting racial alienations in America would seem to put King’s high moral proposition in doubt, the irony is that at the time Malcolm was slain he had begun to move away from the fierce, implacable persona to which his mystique and his children have now fastened. He had broken with the Black Muslims, and in the last year of his life he had been venturing, however tentatively and unevenly, beyond the insular racial delirium of their doctrine and was approaching a more open and conciliatory vision—a vision closer, if still only in certain nuances, to King’s own. James H. Cone, in his recent book “Martin & Malcolm & America,” writes that “they complemented and corrected each other.” Malcolm, in fact, was killed in the midst of a kind of metamorphosis. Just three days before his death, he confessed to a reporter, “I’m man enough to tell you that I can’t put my finger on exactly what my philosophy is now.” Charles Kenyatta, one of his followers at the time, recently told me, “All this hype now, they’re trying to give the false image that Malcolm had come to be the Saviour of black people. But he didn’t know himself who he was.” In the end, he was groping, alone, for some different purpose, some different self-definition. Indeed, at no point in his life could Malcolm cease struggling, as if by dim but resistless instinct, for more light.
As Malcolm tells it in the “Autobiography,” he was born into rage and despair, in the spring of 1925, in Omaha. His mother, Louise Little, was from Grenada—a lithe, erect woman of somewhat finely strung nerves, whose own mother, Malcolm claimed, had been raped by a white man, and who was herself pale enough to be taken for white. His father, by contrast, was an oil-black roisterous colossus of a man, named Earl Little—a one-eyed construction laborer and part-time Baptist preacher from Reynolds, Georgia, who had struck out on his own after finishing either the third or the fourth grade. A brooding, disappointed man, full of turbulence, he had become a disciple of Marcus Garvey, who, in flamboyant plumed uniforms with gold braid,was Harlem’s aspiring black-nationalist Moses in the early years of the century. Garvey was imprisoned for mail fraud the year Malcolm was born.
From prison, Garvey had promised his believers, “I shall come back to you. . . . Look for me in the whirlwind or the storm, look for me all around you.” Earl took young Malcolm to fevered meetings of Garvey’s faithful, where such messages were regularly invoked. Because of Earl’s devotion to Garvey, according to a somewhat melodramatic account of Malcolm’s, Klan night riders with torches swept down on the family’s house in Omaha shortly before he was born. Certainly, as Malcolm later liked to cast it, white harassment had pursued Earl Little in his migratory struggle to scrap out a living for his family; he moved them briefly to Milwaukee, then to Lansing, Michigan, where their home was burned—by white racists, Malcolm would claim. Earl Little finally moved his family to a rural plot two miles out of East Lansing.
There, in a drab and wintry countryside, in a tar-shingle house of only four rooms, each with a single naked light bulb dangling over a rugless board floor, Malcolm passed his boyhood—a shabby and cheerless one, utterly unlike King’s. His autobiography contains almost no mention of holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving. His father ruled the family with frequent beatings, exempting only Malcolm, the fourth of seven children. Earl was particularly interested by his wife’s scruples about diet: she disdained pork and rabbit. Once, Malcolm related to Haley, his father took a rabbit from the pen outside and ripped its head off with “one twist of his big black hands,” then flung the body at his wife’s feet, ordering her to cook it, and stormed out of the house. It was the last time any of them saw him alive. Late that night, police brought word that he had been found, mangled and dying, beside some streetcar tracks, where he had apparently fallen under the wheels. Malcolm was then six years old. He later insisted that his father’s death had also been the work of white racist vigilantes.
If Earl was gentler with Malcolm than with his other children, Malcolm surmised in his autobiography, it was because “he was subconsciously so afflicted with the white man’s brainwashing of Negroes that he inclined to favor the light ones, and I was his lightest child.” Of a brassy hue—“bright,” it was sometimes called—he seemed tortured by the whiteness in him. He later told his followers, of the man he claimed had raped his mother’s mother, “Yes, that raping, red-headed devil was my grandfather! That close, yes! My mother’s father! . . . If I could drain away his blood that pollutes my body, and pollutes my complexion, I’d do it! Because I hate every drop of the rapist’s blood that’s in me.” There were moments, Malcolm said, when that most intimate of helpless outrages to his person left him “so choked up” that he would stalk the streets, solitary, late into the night.
After his father’s death, his mother struggled on in a Depression poverty so stark that sometimes she had nothing to feed her family except stale surplus bread and boiled dandelion greens, and the children would be “dizzy” with hunger. Malcolm, at school, would huddle off by himself to eat a wild-leek sandwich. Before long, the remnants of the family began to disintegrate. “Some kind of psychological deterioration began to eat away our pride,” Malcolm later said. At the age of nine, he began pilfering from stores in town. And his mother, sitting alone in a rocking chair chattering to herself with all window shades drawn, began to drift into insanity. The Christmas of Malcolm’s thirteenth year, according to Bruce Perry’s “Malcolm,” a formidably researched biography that appeared in 1991, his mother was found wandering barefoot along a snow-dappled road, dirty and unkempt and clutching a baby, her eighth, this one illegitimate. Shortly afterward, she was delivered into a state mental hospital. Her children were scattered about as wards of the state, and Malcolm was briefly in a detention home.
Such hurt does not readily permit the inward grace for any sort of transcendent understanding like King’s. Its only gift is, perhaps, a certain icy unsentimentality, a terrible bleak clarity of consciousness. At any rate, Malcolm never forgave white society for what had happened to him. By that time, he had reached the seventh grade, and was a tall, gawky youth, preternaturally bright and quick, but he was resentful even of being elected class president by his white fellow-students: as he told Haley, “I was unique in my class, like a pink poodle.” Not unaware that he held a special promise, he speculated to his English teacher that he might like to become a lawyer; the teacher advised him, amiably, “You’ve got to be realistic about being a nigger. . . . Why don’t you plan on carpentry?” Withdrawing into a sullen and wordless isolation, he dropped out of school after finishing eighth grade and went to live with a half sister in Boston’s Roxbury section.
There he swiftly moved into a night world of black bars and pool halls and dance halls, where, he recounted in his autobiography, “I met chicks who were fine as May wine, and cats who were hip to all happenings.” He conked his hair to a sleek russet straightness with a scalp-scorching compound of lye, eggs, potatoes, Vaseline, and soap, and arrayed himself in billowy zoot suits of Crayola colors, with a long gold chain looped at the waist, a rakish wide-brimmed hat, orange bulb-toed shoes, and a pint flask in his inside coat pocket. He became something of a sensation on the ballroom floors for his abandon in dancing the Lindy. Before long, he was peddling dope, shooting craps, playing the numbers. After a time, he began keeping conspicuous company with a blond white woman, who regularly made expeditions to Roxbury’s dance halls. He was then still in his mid-teens.
He managed to get a job as an attendant on Pullman trains between Boston and New York, and wound up staying in Harlem, which was, he remembered in his autobiography, “like some technicolor bazaar. . . . This world was where I belonged.” There, as he recounted it, he became one of the snazziest of hustlers. He was called Red, or sometimes, because he came from Michigan, Detroit Red. Running numbers, steering men to prostitutes, selling dope, using dope. He carried automatics now, which he would flourish in random stickups.
Before long, sensing that the police and, more important, a gambling enforcer were closing in on him in Harlem, he returned to Boston, and set up a small burglary ring, enlisting the white woman there whom he was still dating, and her sister, to scout promising residences from their base, a rented apartment in Harvard Square. “Sometimes the victims were in their beds asleep,” the “Autobiography” tells us. “In stockinged feet, we’d go right into the bedrooms. Moving swiftly, like shadows, we would lift clothes, watches, wallets, handbags, and jewelry boxes.” It was as if he were exacting from all white society his own form of reparations. But a certain lunging recklessness had set in to his operations by now. It was only a matter of time before he was apprehended. And in February of 1946 he began serving an eight-to-ten-year sentence for burglary. He was not quite twenty-one.
Confined in Charlestown’s Dickensian prison, whose closet-size cells had no plumbing, he kept himself in a constant rage, he told Haley, coming to be called Satan by his fellow-inmates, and spent much of his time pacing “like a caged leopard,” railing aloud to himself. He had, he later reflected, “sunk to the very bottom of the American white man’s society.” And it was there that the Nation of Islam found him.
It came through the intercession of Malcolm’s brothers and one of his sisters, who, in visits and letters to him in prison, told him they had converted to a faith they called the “natural religion for the black man.” Its creed was that the white man was, quite literally, the devil—a pale, blue-eyed race genetically predisposed to a systematic devastation of “every race of man not white.” It was an illumination that Malcolm compared to that of Paul on the road to Damascus—a blazing revelation that it was whites who had visited on him all the mortifications and torments of his past. He was so overcome by this discovery that, he recounted in the “Autobiography,” he resolved to spend the rest of his life informing white people about their true natures, and he began by scrawling letters to the mayor of Boston, the governor of Massachusetts, and President Truman.
In that enterprise, he came to realize that he had lost to the streets what little schooling he’d had: “I didn’t know a verb from a house.” He began studying ferociously, copying out with a pencil on a blue-lined school writing tablet every word in the prison dictionary. He had taken a correspondence course in English, even one in Latin. In his cell at night, in the glow of the corridor light, he read digests of world history by H. G. Wells and Will Durant. He read commentaries on Herodotus and Socrates, and he read Schopenhauer, Kant, and Nietzsche, volumes on linguistics and etymology. He later told Haley, “I didn’t know what I was doing, but just by instinct I liked books with intellectual vitamins.” In this prodigious exertion, he acquired the con’s kind of enormous but eclectic, unproportioned learning.
This isometric amassment of scholarship was marked, particularly in its racial obsession, by odd gaps. In later life, he informed his audiences that blacks had been mistaken about their true enemies ever since they were brought captive to Jamestown “in the year 1555.” In a 1958 newspaper article (included in Clayborne Carson’s “Malcolm X: The FBI File”), he referred to “this Jesus who preached in Palestine, which is on the Arabian Peninsula.” He once explained to Haley that Homer was among the Moors—“Homer and Omar and Moor, you see, are related terms”—who had been abducted from Africa by Europeans, blinded so they couldn’t return, and forced to “sing about the Europeans’ glorious accomplishments.” He argued that Shakespeare’s plays were written by King James I, the same King James “who poetically ‘fixed’ the Bible—which in itself and its present King James version has enslaved the world.”
All this came to be mixed in with the Nation of Islam’s racial theological history, which Malcolm earnestly subscribed to until almost the last year of his life. It was a kind of intellectual “Fantasia” that rivalled, in its fabulous loopiness, the racial anthropology of “Mein Kampf.” Original humankind was black, appearing about seventy trillion years ago. A sublime civilization, which founded the city of Mecca, and even exercised dominion over Mars, it was presided over by twenty-four wizards, or “wise scientists,” who created the animals and made the mountains, and even “deported” the moon from the earth. One of the wizards, a malcontent named Mr. Yacub, born about sixty-six hundred years ago and known as the “big-head scientist,” because he had an oversized cranium, learned how to breed races scientifically. When, for his seditious agitation, he was exiled from Mecca to the Isle of Patmos—later famed for the Book of Revelation—he contrived as revenge, Malcolm explained, a means of creating a “bleached-out white race of devils.” Mr. Yacub knew that black men contained two germs, black and brown, the lighter being the weaker. Through an eight-hundred-year process of genocidal culling—by means of needles inserted into the brains of unsuitably darker infants—that progressed from the black race to a brown, a red, and then a yellow race, the project at last produced a blond, pale-skinned, blue-eyed devil race, which wound up in the caves of Europe. In time, Malcolm reported, Moses was chosen by Allah to “civilize” these devils, the first with whom he succeeded being the Jews. But all the pallid devil race eventually gained ascendancy, through “tricknology,” and finally seized into slavery a portion of the Original People, the tribe of Shabazz, who had been led into Africa fifty thousand years earlier to harden and toughen them for their predestined ordeal.
This entire historical panorama had been disclosed, in Detroit, in 1931, to the future Messenger of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in the Wilderness of North America, Elijah Muhammad—then still Robert Poole, a slight young migrant from rural Georgia, with only a fourth-grade schooling. The source of the revelation was an enigmatic figure known as Mr. Fard, a small, beige man who was a peddler of silks and yard goods. Mr. Fard, whose real name, according to Bruce Perry, was Wallace Dodd Ford, described himself generally as a “brother” from the East, but at one point he confided to Robert Poole that he was “the Mahdi.” In any case, after setting up the new Islamic sect in Detroit, he mysteriously disappeared. Some adherents believed he had returned to Mecca; others suspected he had been disposed of by the disciple into whose hands leadership of his little religion fell: Robert Poole, now calling himself Elijah Muhammad.
In 1952, after serving about six and a half years of his sentence, Malcolm was released on parole. He emerged from prison with his hair shorn close to his skull, in the Muslim fashion, and with only a ten-dollar suit; on his first day of freedom, he bought a new pair of eyeglasses, a wristwatch, and a suitcase. He passed more or less directly from prison into the community of the Nation of Islam, which must have seemed to him, after the ferocities of his life up to that point, like arriving in a paradise of calm and order.
Its leader might have appeared, at first glance, a somewhat improbable mighty messenger of Allah. An elfin man of a delicate amber hue—a fragile bronchial asthmatic—Elijah had a peculiar daintiness of manner, with prim tightenings of the mouth, and he was usually dressed in a dull black suit with a black rubber-shiny bow tie and, on his head, a pillbox cap twinkling with a scimitar moon and radiant orbs and stars. But behind his wistful little demure smiles there lurked an unmistakable wiliness, and a cool deadliness of purpose: he reigned, after all, as the source and center of the Muslims’ radioactive field of racial menace. Nevertheless, his message of a black Islamic elect of righteousness had effected wonders of regeneration among numerous souls lost, like Malcolm, in the spiritual desolation of America’s ghettos. For his part, Malcolm would insist up to his end that he “believed in Mr. Muhammad more than [Mr. Muhammad] believed in himself.” His slave name of Little was now replaced by a symbol for his long-lost and unknown African family name: he became Malcolm X.
Owing to his own rapt, consuming intensity, Malcolm was soon inducted into the Muslim ministry, and he was ultimately anointed by Elijah Muhammad to serve as a kind of peripatetic national missionary for the Muslims. Under his unflagging evangelism, the Nation of Islam swiftly expanded from a baroque and tiny variant of Islam, confined to about four hundred faithful who gathered mostly in storefront mosques, into, by 1960, a truly national congregation, of perhaps ten thousand registered followers, with some forty temples and missions spread across the country and a network of more than thirty radio stations. It formed a separate interior culture, with its own school system, its own economic complex of shops and service businesses, and its own religious militia of solemn, dark-suited centurion guards, called the Fruit of Islam.
In Harlem alone, where Malcolm now presided over the Nation’s major mosque, he was addressing street rallies of fifteen thousand for up to four hours. One of his converts from the early years, Benjamin Karim, recalls, “He held me spellbound. Listening to him, I began to understand how empty I was. And he put in me, in place of that emptiness, knowledge. And out of that came self-discovery, and pride.” Malcolm moved ebulliently along Harlem’s teeming sidewalks, a rangily tall, overcoated figure, talking with everybody—one of Harlem’s own now returned, purged, to prophesy to his people. There was, indeed, with his glinting eyeglasses, a certain priestly quality about him. He lived modestly, in a succession of residences in Queens (they were provided him by the Muslims), drove a blue Oldsmobile, and dressed in staid funeral-director suits, with a tie clip of a leaping sailfish, and unfailingly polished plain black shoes. He was scrupulously—almost fanatically—punctual, and ceaselessly entered notations with a red ballpoint pen in a red pocket notepad. He had about him a tightly machined self-containment. His only betrayal of excitement or anger, at some moment of confrontation, was a rosy tinge rising, under his brassy hue, from neck to face. “I was with him for seven or eight years,” Karim, who became one of Malcolm’s assistant ministers, told me. “I was as close as anybody could get to him without burning up. But It was impossible to really know him. Nobody could really get close to him.” When one of Malcolm’s brothers—the very one who had first introduced him to Islam in prison—later defected from the faith and then lapsed, like his mother, into insanity, Malcolm commented, with a strangely chill detachment, that “it was meant, for Reginald to be used for one purpose only: as a bait, as a minnow to reach into the ocean of blackness where I was, to save me.”
Indeed, he could take on at times the grimness of a Torquemada. He fervently observed the Muslim strictures against not only the common carnal vagaries like fornication but also dating, dancing, smoking, drinking, movies, gambling, sports, and eating more than one meal a day. He usually slept just four hours a night. About the only indulgences he allowed himself were coffee and, late at night, tea. He permitted himself to watch only newscasts on television. There was a fastidious priggishness about him. He abstained from profanity and also from slang, once reproving Alex Haley for referring to children as “kids”: “Kids are goats!”
He was yet more forbidding when it came to the daughters of Eve. “All women, by their nature, are fragile and weak: they are attracted to the male in whom they see strength,” he declared in the “Autobiography.” Moreover, “you never can fully trust any woman. . . . Whatever else a woman is, I don’t care who the woman is, it starts with her being vain.” Karim remembers that Malcolm would admonish women about how to dress, telling them, “If you walking down the street with a piece of fresh meat in your hand, you can’t blame a dog for snatching the meat. If you exposing meat, you either selling it or giving it away.” At the same time, though, he would assure the women in his audiences that “the black man never will get anybody’s respect until he first learns . . . to shelter and protect and respect his black women!”
For that matter, Malcolm kept himself an ascetic bachelor until, in 1956, he began to notice in the congregation at his mosque in Harlem a tall, dark-brown young woman named Betty Sanders. Born in Detroit, she had been an education major at Tuskegee Institute, in Alabama, and was now studying nursing at a New York hospital. She had not yet converted to Islam, but what struck her about Malcolm, she told me recently, was “his intensity.” She said, “I thought, You can’t play with this guy—he’s serious.” He also had what she calls “a high civility,” and, she recalls, “When he used this high civility, a lot of girls took it to mean that he was interested in them. I was not going to be one of those fickle-hearted little females.” She carefully maintained a sober tone in their first encounters, at a nearby restaurant. “However, there came a time when I thought”—and here she gave a girlish flip at the back of her hair with her hand—“I was onto something.” When she indicated that she might do a lot of partying after graduating from nursing school, Malcolm reacted with an instant, visible alarm. When she eventually introduced him to her parents, who were Methodists, he struck them as “a marvellous young man—clean-cut, and he knows so much,” but when she asked them if they would like him as a son-in-law “it was a little different,” she says. In fact, they were horrified by the possibility that he might take her, their only child, away from them forever into the mysterious and alien world of the Muslims. Just over a year later, after Betty’s conversion, and in accordance with a carefully and gravely deliberated arrangement sanctioned by Mr. Muhammad, they were married. Malcolm was then thirty-two. Betty’s parents became estranged from her, and reconciled themselves to Malcolm only after she began bearing his children. “They finally accepted his ‘difference,’ ” she says.
But marriage hardly mellowed the fury of Malcolm’s obsessive pentecostalisms against America’s devil rule: that mission had become the total meaning of his life. According to F.B.I. files, he declared, with an air of celebration, “We, the black men of the world, created the white man and we will also kill him. . . . Only in this way can there be peace on the earth.” He named his first daughter Attilah, he later explained, for the Hun who “sacked Rome.”
With the narrowed stare of his eyes giving Malcolm himself a vaguely Tatar aspect, he took on, for many whites, a sulfurous malevolence. Indeed, it does no service, either to the reality of Malcolm or to history, to try to moderate in memory the racial vituperativeness of his oratory then. “We don’t want to integrate with that ole pale thing!” he would cry to black audiences, light flashing blankly off his glasses. “The dog is their closest relative. They got the same kind of hair, the same kind of skin, and the same kind of smell. Oh, yeaaah!”
It was a racial invective that was only an inverse, in fact, of that to be heard whinnying from the flatbed loudspeakers at any cow-pasture Klan rally of the time. Malcolm insisted this was only reflexive to four hundred years of white racism, but it captured him in the same cramped, bleak mentality, which placed a racial construction on all life. Malcolm readily professed that he shared the Southern whites’ aversion to integration, as a sure prelude to miscegenation. As he declared, integrationists “want your wife and your daughter and your sister and—and your mother.”
It is not, then, quite so bizarre as it might first seem that one night in 1961 Malcolm held a clandestine meeting with Klan chieftains in Atlanta to solicit their support for the Muslim ambition to establish a separate country within the United States. He told the assembled Klansmen that the Muslims were as deeply committed to segregation as they were, and, according to an F.B.I. report, assured them that “the Jew is behind the integration movement, using the Negro as a tool.”
Two years earlier, he had pronounced the Jews “one of the worst of the devils,” claiming, “He does more to take advantage of the so-called black people than any other and yet poses as being a friend.” He averred at one rally, Peter Goldman reports, that “everybody talks about the six million Jews. But I was reading a book the other day that showed that one hundred million of us were kidnapped and brought to this country—one hundred million. Now everybody’s wet-eyed over a handful of Jews who brought it on themselves.”
In general, his fulminations seemed to carry an unappeasable malignance, which impossibly outraged white sensibilities. He declared that because of the genetically determined iniquity of all whites, in any race war it would be imperative to slay even their children. In 1962, not long after seven unarmed Muslims were shot, one of them fatally, in an altercation with the Los Angeles police, it happened that at Orly Airport, near Paris, a chartered jet bearing many of Atlanta’s cultural élite crashed during takeoff. “I would like to announce a very beautiful thing that has happened,” Malcolm told a Muslim rally in Los Angeles, according to the F.B.I. “As you know, we have been praying to Allah. . . . And I got a wire from God today.” Allah “really had answered our prayers . . . in one whop,” he went on. “He dropped an airplane out of the sky with over one hundred and twenty white people on it.” And “we will continue to pray and we hope that every day another plane falls out of the sky.” He could be just as pitiless about the deaths of white civil-rights workers. Goldman reports that when a white minister perished under the tracks of a bulldozer during a demonstration at a construction site in Cleveland, Malcolm told an audience in New York, “What he did—good, good, great. What he did—good. Hooray, hooray, hooray. . . . It’s time some white people started dying in this thing.”
In all, Malcolm was still operating from his old, street hustler’s cynicisms. He contemplated the gathering civil-rights struggle, and its leaders, with the deepest disdain. The whole appeal for integration seemed to him craven, a spectacle of the abused who, out of some perverse compulsion, were “trying to unite” with their abusers. All that the movement was achieving anyway, as in Birmingham, was “promises that they will be able to sit down and drink some coffee with some crackers in a cracker restaurant,” as an F.B.I. report quoted him. “Now, what kind of advancement is that. They still don’t have a job.” He particularly deplored the principle of nonviolence. “I believe it’s a crime for anyone who is being brutalized to continue to accept that brutality without doing something to defend himself,” he told Haley. “If that’s how ‘Christian’ philosophy is interpreted, if that’s what Gandhian philosophy teaches, well, then, I will call them criminal philosophies.” He held a special contempt for King. Charles Kenyatta, who is now a Baptist minister in Harlem, remembers that, in private, “Malcolm had always said, when he met King, he was gonna hit him in the jaw and see just how nonviolent he really was.”
Although, as some have pointed out, Malcolm never directly urged in public the initiation of any specific act of outright violence, his oratory fairly reeled with exultant anticipation of an impending racial Armageddon, some “maximum retaliation against racist oppressors” in a “racial conflict . . . that could easily escalate into a violent, worldwide, bloody race war.” Kenyatta recalls, “I thought, the way Malcolm was talking, just had to be some unhidden guns and armies somewhere. He preached once, ‘Anybody lays a hand on you when you go out of here, think five times.’ And I told him, ‘You done brought me all the way up here ready to kill somebody, what you mean ‘Wait five times’?”
King, for his part, in an interview with Playboy did not conceal his misgivings about Malcolm’s “demagogic oratory,” saying of Malcolm’s “litany of articulating the despair of the Negro without offering any positive, creative alternative” that he felt that “Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice.” It was as if they were talking two different languages. While King refused to engage Malcolm in any open confrontation, he did occasionally indicate privately that he might like to have a conversation with him at some point. In fact, they encountered each other only once, and only glancingly—when both happened to be in the corridors of the Capitol during the debate on the 1964 civil-rights bill. Malcolm pounced to King’s side. They exchanged amenities and briefly clasped hands, King’s smile faint and tentative, Malcolm’s a wide grin, in a flaring of flashbulbs. But that was it. They quickly parted and returned to their separate realms.
When Malcolm’s startling separation from the Nation of Islam came about, in late 1963, the pretext initially given was that Elijah Muhammad had been dismayed by remarks of Malcolm’s about the assassination of President Kennedy. Kennedy’s slaying was “the chickens coming home to roost,” Malcolm had said, and it made him “glad.” He maintained that he had in mind, among other things, Kennedy’s allowing the death, in a coup, of South Vietnam’s dictator Ngo Dinh Diem. At the headquarters of the Nation of Islam, in Chicago, the day after he made these remarks, he was told by Elijah Muhammad, “That was a very bad statement. . . . I’ll have to silence you for the next ninety days—so that the Muslims everywhere can be disassociated from the blunder.” Malcolm initially submitted to this discipline, but he later asserted in his autobiography, “I hadn’t hustled in the streets for years for nothing. I knew when I was being set up.”
Charles Kenyatta, who was given the name Charles 37X, recalls, “Malcolm had become the money-maker. He had taken them out of the wilderness and brought them into the Promised Land, where all of a sudden they were being looked on as a very powerful organization.” But tensions had been developing for some time, among those around Messenger Muhammad, over Malcolm’s growing national conspicuousness. To be sure, Malcolm did seem to have become fascinated by his reflection in the media, white devils’ instrument or no. He would willingly sit for three-hour interviews with the press. While he grumbled in the “Autobiography” that the media had “somehow” managed to filch his home phone number, he had actually slipped it to journalists himself. Kenyatta later lamented to Goldman that the media’s bright mirror “really destroyed him,” and went on to say, “He got drunk off it. He used to sit by the TV set and watch himself, and you could see how much he liked it.” Increasingly, in the national eye, Malcolm himself became the Muslims. He had first attracted the attention of the F.B.I. in 1953, when it was informed that he might be a Communist sympathizer. But what sustained the Bureau’s continued surveillance was a curiosity about him as an exotic racial incendiary. In any case, according to one F.B.I. undercover report, Elijah Muhammad finally complained to Malcolm that he had been constantly “hearing about MALCOLM this and MALCOLM that and even MALCOLM being called leader.” Malcolm must never forget that he was “ELIJAH’S property.”
Meanwhile, Malcolm, as his engagement with the world around him expanded, had been growing restive within the confines of the Black Muslims’ righteous ghetto, the isolation of its millennial racial mythos. Despite all his berating of the civil-rights movement, he found himself increasingly stirred by the spectacle it presented, as the most powerful mass drama then unfolding in the black community. As many blacks saw it, he said, “Muslims talk tough, but they never do anything.”
But there was more to his restiveness than that. Elijah Muhammad, he had heard earlier in 1963, had engaged in dalliances with a succession of young secretaries, and some of them were pregnant or had already borne what members of Muhammad’s court delicately referred to as “divine babies.” This news left Malcolm profoundly stunned. “I had discovered Muslims had been betrayed by Elijah Muhammad himself,” he told Haley, and he described its effect on him in almost Shakespearean terms: “I felt as though something in nature had failed, like the sun, or the stars.”
When word of Malcolm’s reaction got back to the Muslims’ inner councils, he was called to a session with Elijah Muhammad, beside the swimming pool of Muhammad’s home in Phoenix, which had been acquired for him out of solicitude for his bronchial disorder. An implausibly frail and wheezy gnome to have disported himself so briskly with teen-age nymphs, Elijah explained that these activities had been an exercise Biblically imposed upon him. “You recognize that’s what all of this is—prophecy,” he said, according to Malcolm. “I’m David. When you read about how David took another man’s wife, I’m that David. You read about Noah, who got drunk—that’s me. You read about Lot, who went and laid up with his own daughters. I have to fulfill all of those things.” Charles 37X was with Malcolm at this last session with Elijah Muhammad. “The old man told Malcolm”—at this point, Kenyatta stood and wagged his forefinger—“ ‘Son, go back and put that fire out. Or my followers are gonna hurt you.’ But Malcolm had too much pride to do that.”
Malcolm still viewed a final excision from the Muslim faithful with considerable reluctance and trepidation, however, and for some months he kept up a kind of furtive scrimmaging to ease himself back into a family whose elders had already effectively disowned him. Yet, at the same time, he began industriously distributing word of the Messenger’s indecorous frolickings to others within the Nation of Islam, among them the future Louis Farrakhan, a natty and bright-eyed former calypso singer who was then presiding over the Boston mosque. He, along with others, relayed the tidings of Malcolm’s betrayal back to Chicago. Then Malcolm, in escalating desperation, disclosed the matter publicly. Journalists hesitated to run the story at first, because of libel considerations. (One reporter told him, though, according to an F.B.I. wiretap, that he “wished to God he could print the bit about the divine babies.”) Finally, Malcolm managed to persuade three of Muhammad’s former secretaries to furnish affidavits, and two of them to file paternity suits.
In due time, Malcolm received a telegram from a captain of the Fruit of Islam in Chicago, stating, “Mr. Malcolm: We hereby officially warn you that the Nation of Islam shall no longer tolerate your scandalizing the name of our leader and teacher the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.” A few months earlier, an F.B.I. wiretap had picked up a call to Malcolm’s home by an unidentified person who instructed the woman who answered, “Just tell him he is as good as dead.” Malcolm himself was confident that someone in the Muslim ranks would “take it upon himself to kill me as a ‘religious duty,’ ” as he put it to Haley. But, he declared, what to him was worse than death “was the betrayal.” Even at that point, “I could conceive death. I couldn’t conceive betrayal.” Indeed, when it became plain that he was now permanently cast out from the Muslims’ midst, he wept.
The previous spring, perhaps not coincidentally, Malcolm set out alone on a pilgrimage to Mecca, and afterward he claimed to have discovered that the Black Muslim racial dogma had all along been an eccentric aberration, and no part of true, classical Islamic theology. At the airport in Cairo, among a multitude of other pilgrims headed for Mecca, he removed his Western apparel and wrapped his waist and shoulders in two white cloths, his long rusty-skinned legs now extending bare and ostrichlike below, and he had shoved his large feet into sandals. On the flight to Jedda, he told Haley, he was awed to find the plane crammed with “white, black, brown, red, and yellow people, blue eyes and blond hair, and my kinky red hair—all together, brothers.” On the verge, as it were, of a second release from a captivity—this one a release he had never anticipated—he was filled with exhilaration to note that “the whole atmosphere was of warmth and friendliness.” He said, “The feeling hit me that there really wasn’t any color problem here.” Upon reaching Mecca, he found himself eating “from the same plate . . . with fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white.” In all his life, he said afterward, it was “the first time I had ever stood before the Creator of All and felt like a complete human being.”
His wonder and elation over such commonplace cordialities somehow hinted at the childlike simplicity—innocence, even—that had lurked all along under the ferocities of his racial exhortations back in America. Exorbitant or not, this euphoria—“Why, the men acted as if they were brothers of mine!”—now prompted in him, he declared, “the start of a radical alteration in my whole outlook about ‘white’ men.” If there seemed an oddly poignant naïveté in his jubilation, a part of that naïveté was also a capacity for belief so instant and total, as the actor Ossie Davis would tell Peter Goldman, that “when he saw something, he embraced it. . . . It was wow! a truth! and he grabbed it.”
He returned to New York—with a scanty goatee, and wearing an Astrakhan hat—no longer the Malcolm X of his Black Muslim years but with a new name, honoring his completion of the pilgrimage: he was now El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. He held a press conference at Kennedy Airport—a pandemonious convocation—at which he announced his enlightenment and his transformation. “In the past, yes, I have made sweeping indictments of all white people,” he said, but, after what he had experienced in Mecca, “I never will be guilty of that again,” and he added, “A blanket indictment of all white people is as wrong as when whites make blanket indictments against blacks.”
Over the following months, it did seem that he had moved significantly beyond his old simple racial fixations toward what he described in his autobiography as “a new insight”: that “the white man is not inherently evil, but America’s racist society influences him to act evilly.” And it was less a matter of economics than a “historical neurotic pathology—the abiding and almost limitlessly complex permeation of society by the legacy of slavery, a “political, economic, and social atmosphere.” His mission now was “to help create a society in which there could exist honest white-black brotherhood,” and in which “both races, as human beings, had the obligation, the responsibility, of helping to correct America’s human problem” and, ultimately, “to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth.”
It is easy to make a bit too much of this development in Malcolm: it was, at most, only the beginning of a transmutation. He never became able, for instance, to accept the ethic of nonviolence; in fact, in the very press conference in which he proclaimed his new racial illumination he had also recommended that blacks form rifle clubs and otherwise arm themselves in case of attack. Neither had he lost his essential mistrust of the whole concept of integration. Even in Mecca, he contended in the “Autobiography,” there was “a color pattern to the huge crowds. . . . I saw that people who looked alike drew together and most of the time stayed together.” More dismally, there continued to gutter in him the old, acrimonious suspicions that “so many Jews actually were hypocrites.” As for whites: “Let sincere whites go and teach nonviolence to white people!”
But now, in his striving to free himself from other thralls in his past, he found that, in contrast to his almost immediate and total new birth in prison, he had to develop and define this regeneration extemporaneously and on his own. Peter Goldman, in a recent conversation, spoke of Malcolm at that time as being in “a period of explosive and chaotic growth, re-creating himself on the run.” Benjamin Karim, his longtime associate, whose own memoir is shortly to be published, said that at the time he “saw a person who was trying to remake himself into another image, one that was not racially inclined—not to like or dislike a person according to his race. Committed to brotherhood, you know. Some of the people with him—because of ignorance, he had to deal with them about that.” Malcolm even went so far as to propose what once, when he was a Black Muslim, would have been heresy—that blacks might use the vote to achieve political power. But he had wandered into a kind of thematic no man’s land, caught between the simple clear rancors of his past and his still unformed mission for a more hopeful future. Charles Kenyatta says he cautioned Malcolm, “You can’t tamper with another person’s God if you don’t have another to give them.” Karim, who left the Muslims with Malcolm, says, “He had to shift into another gear he didn’t know about. He never found that gear. He never came into focus. And that was right down to the last day.” Malcolm had lost the simple certitude that is vital for any leader, and he was balked on every side: the civil-rights movement rejected him as too militant, and the militants discounted him as too moderate. He once blurted to Haley, “They won’t let me turn the corner! I’m caught in a trap!”
Now that he was outside the society of the Muslims, he found that, for the first time since emerging from prison, he no longer had any real place. He improvised two organizations of his own—Muslim Mosque, Inc., and a more secular operation, which he called the Organization of Afro-American Unity. A good two years before the widely heard calls for “black power” and the eventual, now commonplace invocations of “community control,” he called for a form of black nationalism that was his own variation on the Muslims’ concept of self-contained black neighborhoods, taking their own economies and politics into their own hands. Beyond that, he sought to develop an active bond between the black society in America and the Mother Continent—a sort of Pan-African black Zionism promising a massive liberation of spirit for America’s black minority as it identified with the world’s overwhelming dark majority. In turn, he exhorted African nations to call the United States to account before the United Nations, for the oppression of its black population—as they had called South Africa to account in November of 1961, in the wake of the Sharpeville massacre. This was all an inspiration that had evolved from two journeys he made through Africa in the months following his pilgrimage to Mecca. To him, those journeys had seemed the ultimate spiritual homecoming, a return at last to the lost Eden of the Old Country. In those visits, as he forged about, looped in cameras and ceaselessly, greedily taking pictures, he was welcomed by governments there with much pomp and celebration, as if he were a visiting ex-officio head of state.
At the same time, though, some Africans were a bit disconcerted by the pallor of his skin, and assumed he was an albino. He tended to be considered more an American than an African. Most of all, the African governments he had entreated to indict the United States before the United Nations later proved singularly reluctant to oblige him, and thereby jeopardize the considerable American aid they were receiving.
In a sense, then, in moving beyond the Muslims—“the only group that really cares about you,” he had been taught—Malcolm found that he had moved into a kind of void. Benjamin Karim remembers that at the time “he was living on the edge. Before that, he had everything set up for him. Now he had to do it on his own. For the first time, he became very edgy, very sensitive.” What was particularly painful, Malcolm was repudiated by Muhammad Ali, whom he had tutored in the Muslim faith over a period of three years, while Ali was still Cassius Clay. In the first days of Malcolm’s suspension by Elijah Muhammad from public speaking, Ali had invited him and his family down to his training camp in Miami Beach before his heavyweight title fight with Sonny Liston—a kindness for which Malcolm remained passionately grateful. But at the time of Malcolm’s final, open break with the Muslims, Ali told Haley, “You just don’t buck Mr. Muhammad and get away with it. I don’t want to talk about him no more.” When their paths happened to cross in Africa, Malcolm addressed Ali as “Brother,” but Ali, according to an F.B.I. report, remarked to his entourage afterward, “Man, did you get a look at him? Dressed in that funny white robe and wearing a beard and walking with a cane that looked like a prophet’s stick? Man, he’s gone so far out he’s out completely. . . . Nobody listens to that Malcolm anymore.”
In the meantime, the high pageantry of the civil-rights movement continued to sweep past, oblivious of him. He became, in fact, a familiar figure looming tall and alone at the margins of its rallies and demonstrations, again thickly hung with cameras and earnestly taking pictures of the proceedings. “He wanted so much to come on in, to be a part of it,” Kenyatta remembers. “He had always this dream to belong.” From abroad, he had directed an aide to write letters to leaders of the movement, offering his hope that his “new position” might be “attractive to you.” Back home, he made blurting attempts to reach out to them more directly. Once, when I was covering King’s campaign in St. Augustine, Florida, in which his marchers were undergoing Walpurgis Nights of Klan mayhem, I learned that Malcolm had sent a telegram to King, assuring him that, on his word, “we will immediately dispatch some of our brothers there to organize our people into self defense units . . . and the Ku Klux Klan will receive a taste of its own medicine.” King’s reaction to this overture was, as I recall it, one of appalled dismay.
While King was in jail during the Selma demonstrations, Malcolm was invited by Snick partisans, for their own mischievous designs, to address a mass meeting in a Selma church. Malcolm wound up seated on the podium beside Coretta Scott King. At one point, he leaned close and whispered to her—with what seemed an apologetic and wistful urgency, Coretta later recalled—“to let Martin know he was not causing trouble or making it difficult, but that he was trying to make it easier,” that he simply wanted to confront whites with “an alternative” to King’s appeal. In his address, he made no equivocation about his own aversion to nonviolence but pointed out that whites “better be glad Martin Luther King is rallying the people because other forces are waiting to take over if he fails.”
But his past would not turn him loose. He began to see everywhere, he said, on the streets and in elevators and in passing cars, “the faces of Muslims whom I knew, and I knew that any of them might be waiting for the opportunity to try and put a bullet into me.” Of this period Kenyatta remembers, “We were on the move, one place to another, trying to dodge the bullets.” Malcolm was also floundering financially, sustaining himself on loans and lecture fees and the less than imposing collections at his services, and finally, toward the end, on advances on his autobiography. Furthermore, a court had found for a claim by the Muslims that they were the legal owners of a house in East Elmhurst, Queens, occupied by Malcolm and his family—a house, Betty Shabazz still insists, that had been given to her by Elijah Muhammad himself as a wedding gift. And there now drew close the harrowing near-certainty that Malcolm, his pregnant wife, and their four daughters would be evicted from their home.
Malcolm had often claimed that his earliest memory was of waking up, when he was four, amid the flames and chaos of the fire at his home in Lansing and of his father shooting at two white men fleeing into the night. Now, some thirty-five years later, he found himself on the eve of a virtually inevitable court denial, in a Monday-morning hearing, of his last appeal to prevent the Muslims from flushing him and his family out of their home and repossessing it. And in the black early-morning hours of that Sunday there was a boom and a glare of flames around the house, and once again he was standing amid his family, in pajamas, with children crying, out in the yard, watching his home burn. Dawn showed that about half of it was scorched and spottily charred, from two fires—one that had exploded in the front parlor, the other at a back window.
In a service at the Audubon Ballroom, in Harlem, two evenings later, Malcolm declared, “My house was bombed by the Muslims! . . . I wouldn’t care for myself if they would not harm my family!” However, it is not readily apparent why members of the Nation of Islam, whatever their general balefulness, might have wished to terrorize Malcolm out of the house by burning it, on the eve of the almost certain affirmation of an eviction order that they had already obtained. “We own this place, man,” a Muslim chieftain protested. “We have money tied up here.” The Nation of Islam asserted that the fire had been Malcolm’s own handiwork—what might seem a manifestly absurd suggestion, since his four small daughters were sleeping in the house at the time.
Nevertheless, close scrutiny of some of the evidence does make it appear at least a peculiar affair. An F.B.I. summary of police and Fire Department reports states that while Betty told the firemen that she had been the first to awaken and had roused Malcolm, he stated that he awoke himself and discovered the fire. According to the summary, the only alarms came from two chance witnesses, a neighbor and a passing taxi-driver, who heard the window glass shatter but saw no one outside the house either in front or in back. Shortly after the fire was extinguished, investigators found the neck of a whiskey bottle containing a scorched cloth wick in the back yard, about fifteen feet from a broken bedroom window with a scorched venetian blind. Oddly, though, as Bruce Perry noted in “Malcolm,” the window glass had scattered only into the yard, not into the room, and a fan pattern of burned weeds suggested that the bottle had actually been thrown from inside the house. A whiskey bottle containing a small amount of gasoline was found on the unburned front porch, which led firemen to suspect that gasoline from the bottle had been first splashed around the parlor and set afire, and the bottle left broken on the porch. Even more suspicious, the summary reported that “a quart whiskey bottle filled with gasoline was located standing upright on the dresser” in a rear bedroom, and that “this bottle had a screw cap which was intact and did not have rags attached to it.” Malcolm afterward attested that it was his wife who had first called the firemen’s attention to the bottle. And, according to Perry, when a fireman picked up the bottle it left a clear circle amid the soot from the fire which had settled on the dresser top—evidence that the bottle had been set there before the fire. After stories appeared about the discovery of this gasoline-filled bottle, Malcolm maintained that it had been planted in the house, and postulated a conspiracy between the police, the Fire Department, the press, and the Black Muslims. The question is how the police or the firemen could have deposited in the room precisely the same sort of bottle that had been used to fire the house. It seems inescapable that the hand that set the bottle on the dresser was the one that had poured the contents of the others about the house and flung them out the windows. The difficulty with such a conclusion, of course, is that it assumes that Malcolm would knowingly put his children at risk.
Malcolm’s mood at the time had become one of cornered frenzy. He told Haley that when he concluded that Elijah Muhammad had sanctioned his extermination “my head felt like it was bleeding inside.” Some of the people close to him began to fear that he was approaching a psychic shattering. He seemed given more and more to a kind of blindly barging, barely contained berserkness, in which his resorting to such a personal scorched-earth recourse would not be wholly inconceivable—allowing him then to call down on the Muslims the vengeance at least of a public outrage and condemnation. As he declared afterward, “I’m waking up America to the great Muslim menace.”
Moreover, Bruce Perry has discovered that the Lansing fire that traumatized Malcolm as a child—the fire he had always avowed to be the work of white racists—may have been set by his father, who, Perry found, had also faced eviction, and was briefly jailed for arson: a two-gallon oilcan that had contained kerosene was found under a bedspring in the basement; Earl Little had purchased kerosene only hours before the fire. Both the Lansing fire and the East Elmhurst fire occurred at 2:30 A.M.,and during the days following the East Elmhurst fire rumor had it that Malcolm’s wife appeared visibly enraged at him. When I asked her about the fire recently, she said, “I’m not gonna talk about all that now.”
The week after the fire was the last week of Malcolm’s life. His protégé Louis Farrakhan had announced in a Muslim newspaper, with the scorpion vigor for which he later became more widely noted, “The die is set, and Malcolm shall not escape. . . . Such a man as Malcolm is worthy of death.” The Chicago elect, Goldman reports, issued a tape-recorded statement, to be played for other temple memberships, that Malcolm was due to be “blasted clear off the face of the earth.” Malcolm said that in the Nation of Islam “any death-talk for me could have been approved of—if not actually initiated—by only one man.” What confronted him now was like the most primal of dreads—that the man who had been his soul’s true father wanted to kill him. Kenyatta recalls that, even after all that had happened, Malcolm “missed the old man more than the old man missed him. He was so close to a breakdown that he wanted death, that’s how close he was.” Malcolm declared, “Black men are watching every move I make, awaiting their chance to kill me. . . . Anyone who chooses not to believe what I am saying doesn’t know the Muslims in the Nation of Islam.” He seemed to move sluggishly, fitfully, in a trance of doom. “Each day I live as if I am already dead,” he told Haley, and kept assuring others, “I’m a dead man.” And the irony of this inevitability did not escape him: that the Muslim faithful could be trusted to deliver on their threats “because I taught them myself.” It was as if he were ambushed from the past by his own hand. In the end, for all Malcolm’s apostleship of wrath over the years, the only violence his message ever demonstrably precipitated was upon himself.
The Audubon Ballroom in Harlem was on the second floor of a building with an arcing roof that looked from outside like an airplane hangar or a civic gymnasium. A frumpish, musty relic from the dance-hall years of Malcolm’s past, it had been converted into an auditorium for his post-Nation of Islam ministry, with folding chairs for a congregation of four hundred. On the mild afternoon of Sunday, February 21, 1965, it was filled with a wan wintry light.
As had become Malcolm’s policy, despite the miasma of threats surrounding him now, those entering the ballroom were not searched at the door. Moreover, the New York City Police, who had provided a twenty-man uniformed guard detail, were asked to post all but two of them outside. Charles Kenyatta was standing in the back of the ballroom and noticed the absence of police. “I said to two or three of the brothers, ‘What is this? What’s goin’ on?’ They said, ‘This is the way he wanted it, didn’t want any security.’ He had come to long to die. That’s the reason he pulled those guards. Seemed he was just asking for it. I told him, ‘We can’t keep on goin’ like this. Got to be some fightin’ back. You lost your street knowledge.’ But Malcolm said, ‘You have lost your faith in Allah.’ Thing was, Malcolm felt under a stroke of fate.” Kenyatta paused for a moment, and continued, “Listen, he was lonely. That’s why he wanted to die. He wanted to be a martyr. He knew.”
Earlier that morning, in his room, at the midtown Hilton, where he had stayed overnight, Malcolm put on a dark-brown suit over, despite the unusual balminess of that February day, long-john underwear. He talked to Betty on the phone, telling her not to come to the rally. But before leaving he called her back, saying that he did want her there. Malcolm had also asked several community notables and ministers, and also the Ossie Davises and Martin Luther King’s attorney, to join him on the platform for the afternoon’s service, but when he arrived at the Audubon he learned that none of them would be coming. In a small anteroom offstage, he barked sharply at a young woman there, an O.A.A.U. assistant, and then, according to Haley, a little before going out to speak he apologized to her, saying, “I’m just about at my wit’s end.”
Benjamin Karim was chosen to introduce him. As they waited in the anteroom, Karim recalls, “it was absolutely weird. Standing there looking at him, I felt he really couldn’t go any further. But he had come to a point where he still couldn’t see his goal. I didn’t know he was going to be assassinated, but it was like looking at a man who had been physically lifting logs, and had lifted the last log he could lift. The burden had become too much. He was very drawn. He looked like he had already begun moving out of life.”
Appearing on the platform to an explosion of cheering and applause—that familiar tall and gangling figure, his face wrapped in one of his spacious grins—he waited for silence, and then offered the Islamic greeting “As-salaam alaikum, brothers and sisters,” and the audience chorused in turn, “Wa-alaikum salaam.” At that instant, about eight rows back in the crowd below him, a man leaped to his feet crying, “Get your hand out of my pocket!” As heads turned and Malcolm’s security guards at the foot of the platform began moving toward the distraction, Malcolm lifted both arms and called, “Hold it! Hold it! Don’t get excited. Let’s cool it, brothers.” But now a man was scrambling toward him, hunched forward over a long glint of metal. And, with Malcolm’s arms still lifted in that becalming gesture, a shotgun blast blew him backward with a perfectly circular seven-inch pattern of holes over his heart. He toppled, with blood spattered across his face and shirt, down through two empty chairs to the platform, his head hitting with a loud thunk, and the shotgun, a sawed-off double-barrel twelve-gauge, blasted him again where he lay. Now two other men, in overcoats, at the foot of the platform, were clattering away at him with pistols—a 9-millimetre and a .45 automatic. “It looked like a firing squad,” one witness recalled. Betty, sitting near the stage with her daughters, saw the original disturbance out of the side of her vision, and when she heard the shots, she says, she had an instant certainty: “I knew there was no one else in there they’d be shooting at.” She turned to see Malcolm falling, and immediately threw the children under some chairs and covered them with her body. “They never actually saw it, what had happened,” she says.
The auditorium had become a storm of howling people floundering for cover in a tumble of chairs, some of which were flung through the air as two of the gunmen fled for the door. In a continuing clangor of gunfire, some of it now from Malcolm’s guards, the two gunmen made it down the stairway to the street, but there one of them, who had been shot in the leg, was overhauled by the crowd, and came close to being beaten to death before he was claimed by hastily arriving police.
Meanwhile, back inside the ballroom, Betty, crying, “They’re killing my husband!,” attempted to rush forward to where Malcolm lay. “I wanted to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but a person was holding me back,” she says. A stretcher was finally brought from a nearby hospital, and Malcolm was borne away, his face fixed, in death, in a fierce grimace of bared teeth—almost as if he had been at last reclaimed by the old, irreconcilable rage of the Malcolm X who had been pursuing him all these many months.
Today, recalling that Sunday afternoon at the Audubon Ballroom, Betty Shabazz says, “I still carry it with me all the time. I prayed for years for it to be taken away, not to be able to remember it.” She had even refused to take the children to the funeral, for fear “they’d see him there prone, not moving.” She says, “But my consciousness expanded, so I can live with it.” In fact, she has become, like Coretta King, the public keeper of her husband’s memory. (According to her, it was Malcolm who suggested to Haley that he look into his ancestors’ past in Africa—a suggestion that led to “Roots.”)
After Malcolm’s death, Betty earned a doctoral degree in education, and she is now an administrator at Medgar Evers College, in Brooklyn. She is an imposing dowager of a woman, with a round, full face that has a stately impassiveness. During a recent conversation, she began by declaring, with a forefinger spearing upward, much in Malcolm’s old preacherly manner, “To understand Malcolm, you must understand his mission”—which she is now constantly explaining to audiences across the country. “He’s called a racist—no, no, no! Sometimes you have to exaggerate in order to get people to see. What did he do? He held up a mirror. Sometimes you don’t like what you see in a mirror.” She added, quietly, “When he’s away, he’s here. I still feel his presence. He still lives with me. The guy was so strong.”
Not long after Malcolm’s death, Elijah Muhammad consented to receive the press—even those members with blue eyes and chalky skins—in a vast chamber of his mansion in Chicago. Tiny and solemn amid walls hung with white silk, he declared, in a fluting voice, “We have not, as I said, never resorted to no such thing as violence. Way I see it, Malcolm is the victim of his own preachin’. He preached violence, and so he becomes a victim of it.” But Peter Goldman reports that to a gathering of his believers four days later he said, between coughings and wheezings, “He tried to make war against me. . . . It’s wrong to even stand beside the grave of a hypocrite. . . . Malcolm got what he was preaching.” Two of Malcolm’s brothers were presented, to denounce him one last time as “a man who was no good.”
Three black men—all Muslims, as it eventually proved—were arrested, and in a two-month trial nearly a year later were found guilty of the slaying and sentenced to life in prison. Two of them are now out on parole. The third, Talmadge Hayer, who was the gunman apprehended immediately outside the ballroom, confessed at the trial but declared that the two others had not been involved. They have continued to maintain that they had nothing to do with the shooting. In prison, Hayer admitted to Goldman that Malcolm’s execution had been plotted by five Muslim street regulars, under the inspiration of the Muslim leadership, as retribution for the discomfort that Malcolm had afforded Elijah Muhammad. The message in comments heard by the faithful from some of Muhammad’s close courtiers, such as “If you knew what Malcolm said about the Dear Holy Apostle, you’d kill him yourself,” was as unmistakable as Henry II’s legendary complaint about Thomas Becket.
Norman Butler is one of those convicted of Malcolm’s murder who still denies he participated in it, but he nevertheless told Goldman that, beforehand, “security people rolled in from everywhere—captains from all over the country. . . . And New York was made to look bad,” and he quoted one of them as saying, “What we got to do—bring in people from all over to take care of your business?” These words came, Butler said, from a member of Elijah Muhammad’s own household in Chicago, who elaborated, “Cut the nigger’s tongue out and put it in an envelope and send it to me, and I’ll stamp it approved and give it to the Messenger.” Butler told Goldman, “And that, at that time, was death. Back then, that was an order.” It was not as if defectors and apostates from the Nation of Islam hadn’t been killed before, and for considerably tamer affronts than Malcolm’s. Charles Kenyatta says today, “They were nothing but a Mafia operation.” As Elijah Muhammad’s somewhat more benign son, Wallace, was later appalled to discover, at least ten believers who were simply restless about the overbearing manner of the Fruit of Islam had also been killed. All those who investigated Malcolm’s assassination were convinced that, beyond the three convicted, at least one person and possibly three more people were involved.
Other speculations have since swarmed: suspicions—invigorated by subsequent disclosures about police operations against other perceived menaces, like the Black Panthers—that swiftly turned into certainties about complicity by the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the New York police, or all the engines of the state combined, choreographed from Washington, and including a possible betrayal by one or several of Malcolm’s own. Malcolm’s film biographer, Spike Lee, has written, “We all live in a wicked country where the government can and will do anything to keep people in check. . . . I see the F.B.I., C.I.A. and the police departments around this country as one and the same. They are all in cahoots and along with the Nation of Islam, they all played a part in the assassination of Malcolm X. Who else? King? Both Kennedys? Evers?” It testifies to a curious superstition about the omniscience of federal agencies to maintain, as Lee does, that “the Bureau knew Malcolm’s every move, knew he was being hunted down, but stood back.”
In reality, Malcolm was warned by the F.B.I. of threats against his life, and was assured that the F.B.I. would supply witnesses if he wished to take the Muslims to court. And he was repeatedly offered protection by New York’s police. One was a formal offer of a twenty-four-hour police guard, and he had received as many as seventeen offers to station uniformed officers at his rallies at the Audubon Ballroom—offers made, to be sure, with the anticipation that Malcolm would almost certainly refuse them, as he mostly did. The only probable complicity of the F.B.I. and the police in what happened would have been that, knowing a strike at Malcolm to be almost certainly impending, they chose not to intervene any more actively to avert it.
The case for some larger official conspiracy to execute Malcolm proceeds from the supposition that at that time he presented a serious concern to the custodians of the national interest, both internally and abroad. Evidence cited for such a conspiracy includes the claim that, during a journey of Malcolm’s to Cairo to try to persuade the African Unity Organization to take America’s racial policy before the United Nations, he was, while staying at the Nile Hilton, “poisoned.” But, having partaken of the fare of Cairo, including that of the Nile Hilton, on several visits of my own there, I can say that I have been poisoned on at least two occasions myself. The truth is, the notion that the national authorities had become so hoodooed by Malcolm that they would actually engage in a plot to eliminate him rather exaggerates the perception of his threat at the time. Though he did eventually attract more interest from the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. with his transmutation from a Black Muslim isolationist into a militant advocate of a Pan-African black nationalism, that interest never seems to have ranged much further than his potential for embarrassment. What unease about black militancy had gathered in government agencies was focussed principally on King, with his incomparably larger following. Malcolm’s true danger to the nation’s management—that he was creating a radical new consciousness of pride and assertiveness in the nation’s black community—was a phenomenon still inherently beyond the institutional imagination.
To be sure, Malcolm himself once said to Haley, “The more I keep thinking about this thing, the things that have been happening lately, I’m not all that sure it’s the Muslims. I know what they can do, and what they can’t, and they can’t do some of the stuff recently going on.” Nevertheless, his expectation of assassination was fixed, for the most part, on the Muslims alone. One Muslim operation to exterminate him, he reported afterward, went awry only when one of the participants had second thoughts and came to warn him.
In the end, much of the speculation about a conspiracy arises, as in the case of Kennedy’s death, from a reluctance to accept the absurd disparity that so much could have been destroyed through any circumstance so paltry and mundane. In Malcolm’s case, an obscure internal religious war on the fringes of the black community seems impossibly out of proportion to his life and its meaning now. But one should always be wary of explanations that are far more arabesque and fantastical in detail than the paradoxes they’re trying to explain.
In the years after Malcolm’s assassination, and Elijah Muhammad’s serene expiration, in 1975, Elijah’s son, Wallace, diverged with some Muslims into a far milder and more conventional version of Islam, in the process quietly discarding his father’s claim to have been Allah’s Messenger. He even began restoring Malcolm as a venerated figure of the faith, and eventually renamed the Harlem mosque in Malcolm’s honor. (There has also survived a straighter line of doctrinal descent, from Elijah Muhammad to Louis Farrakhan, who now occupies Elijah’s mansion in Chicago.)
But beyond the singular personal testament of his autobiography, Malcolm, to all appearances, left little behind him that was measurable. Both of his organizations had already fallen into ramshackle disarray, on the verge of dwindling away altogether. His grand Pan-African political offensive had evaporated against the cold calculations prevailing at the United Nations. He remained little more than a kind of garish rogue figure on the edge of the ongoing surge of the civil-rights movement. But Malcolm’s true epitaph has turned out to be much like a fulfillment of that old invocation of his father’s great hero, Marcus Garvey: “I shall come back to you. . . . Look for me in the whirlwind or the storm, look for me all around you.”
Shortly after his death, as the civil-rights movement shifted to the urban North, speculations arose that Malcolm would become an increasingly formidable figure in the black consciousness and that King would be forced to adapt to Malcolm’s message. The suggestion, though, that Martin and Malcolm were actually converging, in their widening campaigns against poverty and the dehumanization of American policies, seems ultimately illusory: they held two profoundly different understandings of humankind. King was animated by a vision of how things could and should be; Malcolm operated within a flat, rancorous acceptance of things as they were. “This is an era of hypocrisy,” he declaimed. “You pretend that you’re my brother and I pretend that I really believe you believe you’re my brother.”
But the duality between their visions is an abiding one, reaching beyond both Martin and Malcolm, and it has become, if anything, even more pertinent in what seems now yet another quickening of America’s old racial travail. Specifically, the government’s—and the society’s—bland obliviousness of the plight of the poor in the last decade seems only to have placed more pressure on the racial fault line in the national community. Beyond that, there are those who have even proposed that racial turmoil may well be the coming theme of international history, as the world contracts into an ever more intimate neighborhood: that ethnic or tribal conflicts like those today in the remnants of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, in Sri Lanka and Somalia, to say nothing of the Middle East, will replace the long historical kinetic force of state nationalism and ideology and economic contention—that the real conflicts that will occupy governments and their armies will be as primitive a matter as the clashings of races.
In this country, at least, the implications of the increasing bitter estrangement of the children of Malcolm (in his latter days he noted, “Thicker each year in these ghettos is the kind of teen-ager that I was”) can be nothing less than a deepening dissolution of the old dream of a common, egalitarian American neighborhood. To an extent, Malcolm incontestably emancipated a form of black pride: he himself claimed, with considerable fairness, that he had acted “to revolutionize the American black man’s thinking, opening his eyes until he would never again look in the same fearful, worshipful way at the white man.” Jesse Jackson, who as a college student once drove from North Carolina to Harlem hoping to meet with Malcolm, remembers that “he was able to cut down the enemy with his tongue—that was his excitement for black people. Martin’s liberation was his public movement, opening up the system to blacks. But Malcolm’s was personal—he somehow removed the fear in blacks’ personal encounters with whites.” Ossie Davis proclaimed in his eulogy at Malcolm’s funeral, “Malcolm was our manhood, our living, black manhood . . . Our own black shining prince!” He is still hailed by many as the most authentic voice of America’s vast black underclass. In this he was actually ahead of King. Virtually by his oratory alone, he helped call forth the dawning of black consciousness in America; a cultural decolonization of the black spirit.
But it has been his earlier incarnation to which his posterity has somehow clung: to Malcolm’s own slayer, in effect. On book covers, and on posters that have proliferated throughout the black community—in university black-student unions and inner-city bookstores—it is the image of Malcolm during his Muslim days that glares out, in his old finger-spearing racial judgment and malediction; it is, as the myriad profusion of “X”s shows, still Malcolm from his Nation of Islam years. For that matter, most of Malcolm’s children may now have only a dim impression of him, as a fearsome black orator who was once the nemesis of white America.
It was his own hope, he told Haley, that “one day, history may even say that my voice—which disturbed the white man’s smugness, and his arrogance, and his complacency—that my voice helped save America from a grave, possibly even a fatal catastrophe.” But the true tragedy of Malcolm’s life would be if, along with his inner emancipation of blacks, his gift to his people should also become, from that grimmer evangelism which finally claimed him in the Audubon Ballroom, the lurid liberation of their anger in the moral nihilism most recently beheld in the firestorm of Los Angeles. The rage after the acquittals of the Los Angeles police officers who had been seen on video systematically beating Rodney King was much in the spirit of the old Malcolm X. It is a matter of some irony, then, that Rodney King himself, around whom the rage of the children of Malcolm had billowed, turned out to be consummately one of the children of Martin when he appeared before cameras and, pained and stunned, ventured the appeal, in a halting, stumbling voice that yet had an eloquence beyond all the roaring of those days, “Can we all get along?”
It was toward that simple but ultimately civilized sentiment that Malcolm was making his last pilgrimage. He undertook it against fearful odds—odds that, after all these years, still confront his people. For the rest of us, then, the parable of Malcolm X should serve as an urgent warning. We must at last come by the recognition, the conscience, and the will to somehow make it possible for Malcolm’s children—the still dispossessed descendants of America’s aboriginal crime of slavery—to continue the journey that he began. ♦
