The Messenger, page 37
There are twenty to thirty million Negroes in America today, so the fact that you have only two hundred to three hundred thousand followers indicates that the majority of Negroes do not accept your program because it breeds hate. Your organization is just about the same as the KKK.50
Despite Muhammad’s statements about divine protection, he was free-falling into the hell of paranoia—the Harlem mosque had gone up in flames at nightfall on February 21, and someone had tried to set fire to Muhammad Ali’s apartment in Chicago.51 He was surrounded by so many guards on Saviour’s Day that it was nearly impossible for his Muslims to see him; those in the “nosebleed section” had a good vantage point, but only if they had brought along binoculars.
“He criticized, he criticized, he criticized,” the Messenger intoned as Farrakhan, Junior, and other ministers on stage grinned, laughed, or otherwise cheered him on. “There is no chicken about Muhammad.… Malcolm got what he preached … he was a star as long as he was with me. Now he is a man, his body on the way to the middle of the earth.”52 Malcolm’s brothers Wilfred and Philbert were on stage, too. They hadn’t attended Malcolm’s funeral for fear of being labeled “hypocrites” and ending up like Malcolm. Philbert had let his love for Muhammad come between him and Malcolm, but not Wilfred. “He was my little brother and I loved him,” Wilfred ruefully reminisced, “and nothing Muhammad said or did could ever change that.”53
To deflect the tension in the Chicago Coliseum, Wilfred told the assembly that the murder of his brother should not be the focus of the convention. Rather, he said, they should focus on “the one who got us into this condition in the first place.” As for Farrakhan, an intellectual bulimic (he regurgitated half-digested ideas), his warning that Malcolm X deserved to die had come to pass. Seemingly oblivious to his tendency to provoke violence, Farrakhan spotted Ben Holman, a black reporter who joined the NOI, quit, and then wrote a first-person account of what it was like inside the group for the Chicago Daily Press. Holman, who was covering the convention for CBS, froze when he saw Farrakhan looking in his direction. Suddenly Farrakhan shouted: “We have a traitor in our midst.” As he pointed toward Holman, every eye in the building followed the accusing finger. “There he is!” A small group headed toward Holman as Muslims booed him, and guards escorted him from the auditorium while Junior ordered the crowd to remain calm.54 When it was his turn to take the lectern, Farrakhan could not think of a single kind thing to say about the man who was the only father he had ever known. When he first heard Malcolm X, Farrakhan had said, “The thought came to my mind that if this man was not God, he was very close to it.” Nine years later, he had joined the confederacy of dunces that condemned Malcolm as Satan. Little wonder, then, that the Messenger distrusted someone who vacillated to such extremes so easily.55
Another individual Malcolm had once trusted also appeared at the convention. Wallace, the wayward son whose allegations helped trigger the schism, made a cameo appearance as the Oz-like Cowardly Lion. He had run back to his father the day Malcolm was assassinated and begged forgiveness. The choice was not his, Muhammad said. If he wanted shelter, he would have to go before the throng on Saviour’s Day (which he did) and ask them to accept him (which they did).56 Wallace embraced his father, then took a seat. As the crowd started to thin out, Muhammad tried to hold them with tales from the Twilight Zone. “Allah takes pictures of people on Mars. They’re tall and skinny. They’re about seven to nine feet tall … not as intelligent as we are.”57
Everyone who visited the Messenger’s mansion in the weeks after the assassination was searched by members of the FOI and the Chicago Police Department, and the police examined every arriving letter and parcel thoroughly. The fear of retaliation from Malcolm’s group sparked more violence by Muhammad’s loyalists. On March 3, Muhammad Speaks ran its version of the old Western “Wanted” poster. Although it did not say that the three followers of Malcolm X were wanted “dead or alive,” it might as well have, as it accused them of plotting to assassinate the Messenger. Under a heading reading “Editorial: Wanted,” Donald Washington, Omar Ahmed, and Leon 4X Ameer were shown in mug shots obtained from the New York Police Department. The men, the editorial claimed, were part of Malcolm X’s “vengeance” squad who “are headed for Chicago to assassinate the great Islamic leader, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.”58 Two days later, someone in a fast-moving car fired two shots through a window of the Messenger’s home in Phoenix. Several police were standing guard around the house, but oddly, they did not give chase, so the assailants were never apprehended.59 The Messenger was still in Chicago.
Talmadge Hayer was the only one of Malcolm’s five assassins who was caught at the time of the killing. He, like the others, was recruited in the Newark area a year earlier (Hayer later identified his four accomplices as the men recruited along with him in May 1964).60 According to a witness that prosecutors planned to call during Hayer’s trial, John Ali had met with Hayer at the Americana Hotel in New York the night before the assassination, and flew back to Chicago in time to join Muhammad’s press conference the next day.61 Another mystery involved Farrakhan. The FBI’s investigation of his activities revealed that he left Boston at one-thirty on the morning of February 21 and was at the mosque in Newark at the time of the assassination. The assassins had left Newark on February 20 and conferred with men linked to the Harlem mosque, where Alvan X Farrakhan was chief underling to Joseph. When asked about his disappearing act, Farrakhan’s story was that he had gone to Newark as part of his regularly scheduled ministerial program. For the next several months, the FBI’s investigation of Malcolm’s death centered on three mosques: Mosque No. 7 in Harlem, Mosque No. 11 in Boston, and Mosque No. 25 in Newark.62
The national media had never even heard of Farrakhan until February 27, the day that Malcolm was buried at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. He did have one shining moment in 1953 when he appeared on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour, but that was as Louis Eugene Walcott, violinist. His debut in the February 27, 1965, edition of the Saturday Evening Post did not constitute the kind of attention one welcomes. The article, titled “The Black Muslims Are a Fraud,” was written by Aubrey Barnette, a former member of the Boston mosque, and portrayed Farrakhan as a man without convictions.63 Barnette recounted in detail how Farrakhan was dominated by Gill and how readily he backtracked whenever his opinions were challenged, particularly by anyone close to Muhammad. The article’s description of Junior’s brutish behavior, by contrast, reminded one of the adage that “even the devil can quote scripture.”
Meanwhile, the investigation into Malcolm’s murder continued, though the FBI said publicly that it was an open-and-shut case. Since a firebomb had been used to destroy Malcolm’s home on February 15 and to burn Benjamin Brown’s mosque on January 5, Thomas 15X Johnson and Norman 3X Butler became prime suspects. Suspicions about their involvement intensified because a shotgun was used in the fatal attack (Johnson had hunted deer in Pennsylvania as a youth), and because Butler wore a tweed coat that fit the description of the coat worn by one of the assassins. Butler was taken into custody on Saviour’s Day.64
Betty Shabazz was astounded when she heard that Wallace had gone crawling back. What she hadn’t realized, however, was that the constant harassment from his own family and COINTELPRO had Wallace living the same way that she and Malcolm had, like deer dodging a hunter’s scope.
Even civil rights leaders who disagreed with Malcolm’s philosophy agreed that the black community had suffered a tremendous loss with his murder. Just days after the assassination Roy Wilkins said,
Certainly I do not agree with most of what Garvey or Malcolm X preached. But I do think Malcolm X’s most significant contribution to the Negro was his unswerving insistence that Negroes develop good, sound family relationships. He campaigned against drugs and whiskey, and he spoke up for self-respect among black people.… He also encouraged Negroes to develop their own businesses and to seek a certain amount of independence. Every American must admire this side of Malcolm X. In this regard, he represents a great loss.65
Dr. Martin Luther King, who was interviewed in Selma as he was leading a voter registration drive, said somberly that the assassination of Malcolm “revealed that our society is still sick enough to express dissent through murder.”66 The assassination shook King up because he himself had been warned only weeks earlier by a high-level government official that there was “authoritative evidence of a plot taking place in Selma and Dallas County to take my life.” Several days after the interview, King nearly joined the growing list of assassination victims. While he was in Los Angeles for a movie premiere, police discovered that a white segregationist had planted dynamite in the theater. The dynamite was traced to a young gun dealer who was awaiting trial on a charge of trying to kill another black man in September 1964. Police discovered boxes of dynamite and other explosives during a search of the suspect’s apartment.67
Although the mainstream American media had few kind words for Malcolm X, he was hailed as a fallen hero in many countries in Africa and Asia. Several African nations flew their flags at half-mast. Some moved quickly to incorporate Malcolm into high school history lessons about racism and political oppression in America. Others created postage stamps bearing his likeness. When Ella Collins approached African and Arab dignitaries for aid to Malcolm’s family, not one of them turned her down.68 They preferred to refer to him by his Arabic name, “El Hajj Malik El Shabazz,” but they also got a kick out of calling him “Mr. X.” On May 19, which would have been Malcolm’s fortieth birthday, Ethiopia and Liberia filed their final arguments with the International Court of Justice at the Hague on the issue of South Africa’s violation of the human rights of its black citizens.69 It was a fitting posthumous birthday gift to a man who had dedicated the last twelve years of his life to emancipating people of color everywhere. He had shown them how the United Nations could be coerced into doing part of its job through embarrassing it in the media, and they had taken his lessons to heart. However, despite convincing arguments, their appeals were ultimately unsuccessful.70
Ameer, who had vowed that Malcolm’s death would be avenged, feared for his own life after someone’s apparent attempt to shoot Elijah in Phoenix. He contacted several reporters in New York on March 10, the same day that Thomas 15X Johnson was arrested for his alleged role in the conspiracy to murder Malcolm. During Ameer’s interview, he charged that Muslims loyal to Muhammad had filed false embezzlement charges against him in order to discredit him “before they come out and kill me.”71 He repeated his story to FBI agents the following afternoon. But he told the agents something that he had withheld from the reporters: he could positively identify another one of Malcolm’s assassins. On March 12, a housekeeper at the hotel where Ameer was hiding out opened the door to his room after he failed to respond to her knocking. She turned the knob to see if the door was unlocked, opened the door, walked over to the bed, and discovered Ameer’s lifeless body.72
The OAAU and Muslim Mosque, Inc., fell apart after Ameer’s death. The randomness of the mayhem within the Black Nationalist movement and the discovery that police informants and agents provocateurs had penetrated a number of civil rights organizations unleashed an avalanche of mistrust. College-educated members of Malcolm’s groups were suspected by less-educated members as probable government informants.73 On the other hand, some less-educated members who wanted to govern were ill-equipped to do so, leading to inertia. Making matters worse, Ella Collins and Betty Shabazz became entangled in a bitter dispute over Malcolm’s papers after an OAAU member reportedly saw Betty putting them into the trash bin in her yard. Some documents—Malcolm’s letters, drafts of speeches, and other material—were retrieved and sold to a small publishing company.74
Betty had given birth to Malika and Malaak Shabazz on March 10, and was in desperate need of funds since she had no health insurance.
Muhammad was at this time in the throes of a severe diabetes crisis and fighting to stay alive. After running several tests, his doctor warned him that he had an “extremely high blood-sugar and acetone count.” Even though he was on the verge of lapsing into a diabetic coma, he was much too afraid to go to the hospital. If he didn’t get insulin and fluids fast, odds were that he would die, his personal physician said. He didn’t seem to care. He told the doctor that he would probably die even if he did go to the hospital, and hinted that his sudden death would be convenient for a society that blamed him for the assassination of Malcolm X.75 The doctor did what he could for him, then left. When he returned in the first week of June, Muhammad’s ankles were swollen because of excessive salt in his system, and his blood pressure, the doctor noted, was “grossly elevated.” He was as listless as he had been since shortly after Malcolm’s assassination.
By the time the Messenger was up and about again a month or so later, Clara had to return to Georgia to help care for her ninety-four-year-old senile father. Seeing her father in his demented state was devastating. One minute he was fine, she told Elijah. The next, he was tearing off his clothing and complaining of being too hot. Mercifully, the torture of his illness ended on July 28.76 When she called Elijah to tell him, he replied that he was unable to attend the funeral because he was experiencing severe asthma attacks.
Funeral preparations and the burial had taken so much out of Clara that she was reluctant to return to Chicago, where nothing but trouble awaited her. Going home meant returning to a spouse who mistreated her, and who had shamefully confessed that he knew of plans by Chicago NOI officials to kill Wallace. The whole nightmare—from Barnette’s beating to Malcolm’s murder to threats against Wallace—was the result of careless rhetoric, words that led to deeds that could not be recalled any more than a mother could return her premature baby to the womb. Her struggle to keep Wallace from being harmed in the weeks before and after Malcolm’s murder had also worn her out. Six weeks after losing her father, Clara learned that Tynetta Nelson had borne yet another child by Elijah. (Two years later, Tynetta gave birth to another son sired by the seventy-year-old Messenger, who by then was the father of at least twenty-one children.77)
If Malcolm’s death proved anything, it was that there are no winners in war. Even the FBI, whose Chicago field office bragged about fomenting the deadly conflict between the Messenger and his messenger, realized too late that Malcolm was the symptom of urban unrest, not the cause. The long hot summer that Malcolm predicted in early 1964 erupted in seven Eastern cities that year. In August 1965, urban violence shifted to the West Coast. Cynicism became fashionable, triggered in part by the hasty passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 after Malcolm’s murder, the Warren Commission’s whitewash, and the doubling of the number of American soldiers in Vietnam. The counterculture preferred Eldridge Cleaver’s socialism over Ward Cleaver’s romanticism. For once, a generation of black and white teenagers were united in a fight against political leaders who desecrated the Constitution while passing laws against desecrating the American flag.
The Watts riot and similar outbreaks forced King to acknowledge that nonviolent protest had nearly run its course. In desperation, King asked the Messenger to join him on August 17, 1965, in issuing a public statement condemning the violence in Watts, then in its sixth day.78 Muhammad refused. He felt that King had snubbed him by refusing to join him at the previous February’s Saviour’s Day ceremonies, and now was time for a payback. As Muhammad saw it, Watts and the lynching of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman were signs of “the fall of America.” He insisted that his prophecy that the government would collapse by 1970 was on target. William R. Ming, the lawyer who represented King and Muhammad, took steps to bring the two together, and King went to Chicago and met with Muhammad for an hour on February 23, 1966.79 Afterward, the two told reporters that they had “mutual areas of concern” and planned to confer again soon. “One point of agreement was that Negroes are trapped in deplorable slums because of an evil system,” a spokesman for King said.80 Muhammad Speaks portrayed the discussion as a meeting of the minds: “We must concentrate our energies on a united solution to the problem [of racism]. We now must know and act according to the time. Our work must correspond with the changing needs of the times. The world of white rule over blacks is at an end.… Our people want no more licking of the white man’s boots.” King’s response reflected his growing militancy: “I know we are in absolute agreement on that. We suffer domestic colonialism like the black people in Southern Rhodesia. We must achieve self-determination.” From the article, one would have concluded that King was moving toward the Messenger’s philosophy of separatism, and that the two agreed on a host of issues. In truth, the meeting had not gone well; King had agreed with Muhammad on only one or two issues, namely the housing crisis and self-determination. Muhammad tried to coax King into attending the convention but King wouldn’t even consider it. “I do hope we can get together again and have a more extensive discussion,” King replied, making it clear that he had no intention of attending the Saviour’s Day celebration.
During the convention, Muhammad praised the New Jersey Supreme Court for ruling that Black Muslim school children could not be forced to salute the flag. He also praised Muhammad Ali for refusing to fight “the little brown people” in Vietnam. “The white man hates to go to war, even to fight for his country. If he wants us to help fight, he should give us something to fight for.” In reference to the Army’s unprecedented release of Ali’s intelligence-test records, the Messenger said: “You classified him as unfit and then you call him. You tell him that if he won’t go to Vietnam, he can’t fight and make money.” For its hypocrisy, Muhammad said, America would pay a terrible price. “The Vietcong will fight you for twenty years.”81 Despite the Messenger’s prediction that Ali would win in court, the boxer was found guilty of draft evasion four months later. On June 20, he received the maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.82
