The messenger, p.36
The Messenger, page 36
Ameer, who had been transferred to the Boston mosque after he raised questions about bookkeeping practices in the New Haven mosque, was ordered to call Joseph after he was released from the hospital. As East Coast FOI overseer, Joseph informed him that Farrakhan wanted to meet with him at the Harlem mosque.17 Farrakhan was spending a great deal of time there after Malcolm quit the NOI. His brother, Alvan, was Joseph’s right-hand man. Alvan, an officer in the Harlem mosque confided, was well known as a subspecies of hooligan.18 This officer had been present when Alvan threw a man down a flight of steps over a minor transgression and had seen Alvan beat other members with apparent pleasure. Despite being fearful, Ameer followed the order to meet Farrakhan on January 5 at the mosque. Upon arriving at Mosque No. 7, Ameer was taken to Joseph’s office. Two men with worse reputations for violence than Alvan—Lieutenant Thomas 15X Johnson and Norman 3X Butler—stood guard outside the door.19 Ameer knew something was wrong when the office door closed because Farrakhan was nowhere to be seen. When he asked where Farrakhan was, Joseph replied that the minister—who shuttled among the mosques in Harlem and Boston and Newark to preach—had had a sudden change of plans and would not be coming to the meeting after all.20
Suspecting that he had been set up, Ameer asked why the henchmen were standing outside the door. Joseph replied that they were there to take care of a hypocrite who had quit the NOI and established his own storefront mosque. The defector had angered Muslims because he had placed a photograph of the Messenger in the window of an unauthorized mosque. That evening, Johnson, Butler, and other Muslims surrounded the Universal Peace Mosque run by Benjamin X Brown. According to an eyewitness, a Molotov cocktail was thrown in a side window of the building, forcing Brown and his group out into the street.21 Johnson accosted Brown as the minister stood out front and asked him why he hadn’t taken the photo of the Messenger out of his window as he had been ordered to do earlier in the week. When his answer, that he wished to show his continued loyalty to the beliefs of NOI, failed to satisfy Johnson, he pointed a shotgun at Brown’s chest and fired, hitting him just above the heart. As Brown fell to the sidewalk, the would-be assassins scattered, leaving him for dead just as Ameer had been left in Boston. Once again, the victim survived. Johnson and Butler were arrested, and police recovered the shotgun from a closet in Johnson’s apartment.22 Ameer, upon hearing of Johnson and Bulter’s arrest, finally understood what Joseph had meant at their last meeting. When Ameer told Malcolm, he replied, “If my life is worth two cents, yours is worth one.” Ameer left the NOI after the incident and joined Malcolm’s new crusade.
One week later, male Muslims from across the country, particularly the East Coast mosques under the control of Gill and, nominally at least, Joseph, arrived in Harlem for what was billed as “A Night with the FOI.”23 In the advertisement, which ran in Muhammad Speaks, attendees were promised that Muhammad Ali would be the guest, and that Raymond Sharrieff, the Supreme Captain of the FOI, would be the featured speaker. What was so unusual about the evening was the location. Muhammad’s Mosque No. 7, formerly headed by Malcolm and now run by Farrakhan, was holding the event “at the beautiful Audubon Ballroom,” where Malcolm held meetings every Sunday. It is unlikely that the Audubon was selected for its architectural splendor; whatever the reason, the long evening gave NOI enforcers ample opportunity to study the building’s floorplan. When the two women who had filed paternity suits against the Messenger learned about the gathering, their lawsuit suddenly seemed like a bad idea. Their Los Angeles Superior Court hearing was scheduled for January 11, but neither woman showed up for the hearing.24 Their failure to appear gave the judge no alternative but to remove the case from the court’s calendar until there was an explanation lodged for their absence. Malcolm, who was scheduled to testify for the women, grew nervous when he heard about the delay, saying, “If this case doesn’t get to trial soon, I won’t be alive to testify.”25
On January 24, muckraker Jack Anderson revealed that the intelligence community—particularly the CIA—was getting nervous, too, about Malcolm’s pending petition before the United Nations.26 High-level government officials were concerned, the New York Times reported, because the petition stood a good chance of being scheduled for review if a single government threw its support behind it.27 As it turned out, Malcolm had the firm support of several African nations. Lobbying out of his tiny office in the U.N. building, Malcolm had convinced Nkrumah and others that he and King could form an alliance to bring pressure on the American government to stop fomenting coups in Africa. Other supporters, a CIA memorandum noted, included Egypt’s Nasser, Abdul Rahman Babu, the newly appointed head of Tanganyika, and John Karefa-Smart, the former foreign minister of Sierre Leone. John Karefa-Smart was the older brother of Frank Karefa-Smart, who was dating (and later married) James Baldwin’s sister Gloria.28 By early 1965, FBI agents were closely monitoring Baldwin’s activities, and noted that he was meeting frequently with Frank and Malcolm. Even more troubling, though, was the appointment of Alex Quaison-Sackey of Ghana as president of the U.N. General Assembly. Quaison-Sackey, who had experienced American racism firsthand (a bigot had torched his home in a predominantly white neighborhood) and was a staunch supporter of Ethiopia’s petition against South Africa, was also viewed as a powerful supporter of Malcolm’s petition.29
While Malcolm’s influence grew from national to international, Muhammad’s world shrank. Membership in the NOI continued to drop since no one else had Malcolm’s organizational skills—or his integrity when it came to handling large sums of money. Malcolm’s resilience and success pushed the Messenger closer to the brink of homicidal madness. He and Malcolm had had a hundred discussions about the day when emissaries from the NOI would break bread with Muslim diplomats. That day had come, at least in terms of diplomatic contact—but it was Malcolm who was being wined and dined. Muhammad’s attempts to break Malcolm through economic and psychological ploys had failed. Had it not been for growing outside interference, it would have been only a matter of time before the NOI met the same fate as Garvey’s UNIA.
Alas, the army came to the rescue—literally. When Malcolm arrived in Detroit on January 17, agents from the army’s G-2 intelligence corps were there to monitor his movements, as were FBI agents and local undercover policemen.30 Moreover, the FBI was working with major city police departments to keep tabs on him. “Elijah seems to know every move I make,” Malcolm told journalist Louis Lomax. What Malcolm later guessed was that the Messenger’s Muslims knew his itinerary because the FBI, through a chain of reliable informants, told officials of the NOI where Malcolm would be at any given moment.31 On January 28, for example, Malcolm went to Los Angeles for a meeting with attorney Gladys T. Root and the two secretaries involved in the paternity suit against the Messenger. He was caught completely off guard upon arriving at the Los Angeles airport when he saw John Ali, the Messenger’s chief aide and a man who reportedly had ties to the FBI, waiting inside the terminal.32 After Hakim Abdullah Jamal, Malcolm’s cousin and a former Muslim, alerted airport security that they were being stalked, John Ali and his henchman quickly departed.
John Ali and Basit Naeem weren’t the only people whom FBI agents portrayed as “reliable sources” close to Muhammad. Surprisingly, Wallace and Hassan were also considered allies, though they may not have been aware of it. Essentially, anyone who consistently gave FBI agents reliable information was pegged as a reliable source or reliable informant. Wallace and Hassan fit the bill because they had provided the Bureau with information it considered crucial to inciting violence between Muhammad’s camp and Malcolm X.33
Despite unmistakable cracks in the walls of his castle, Muhammad was in Phoenix carrying on as usual. A young secretary who was there with him was startled in late January when he approached her and tried to French kiss.34 She noisily recoiled in shock, attracting the attention of other people who were there. Embarrassed, Muhammad feigned outrage. “I have kissed millions of believers!” he shouted. “You can’t work here any longer.”35 The secretary gathered her belongings and went back to Los Angeles. When she told her fiancé what had happened, he was ready to wring Muhammad’s neck. Instead, the couple did the next best thing: they told everyone they trusted about the episode. On February 1, Minister John Shabass from Mosque No. 27 called Muhammad to ask him about the incident. It had happened, he said, but not in the way that the young woman had described. It was an innocent little kiss that the secretary had taken for something more. He declared that her behavior had dishonored him and that she should have known that telling her fiancé would cause problems. But the kiss, he said, was not the only reason that he fired her; she was a very poor secretary. “She could hardly do three to four letters a day.… It’s just wicked.… People like her that build this fire will regret it.” Before hanging up, Muhammad told Shabass to sentence the secretary to ninety days in “Class F” and to expel her fiancé and her mother.36
Malcolm retaliated against Muhammad for the attempts on his life by revealing as many of the NOI’s false teachings as he possibly could. When he appeared on the Irv Kupcinet Show on January 30, he described the Messenger as a liar and a coward. Malcolm dismissed the notion that the white media was using him to discredit Muhammad; as he saw it, the Messenger had done a bang-up job of discrediting himself. “What Elijah Muhammad is teaching is diametrically opposed to the principles of Islam and the Muslim world itself,” he said. “The religious officials at Mecca … and those at the top authority on Islam theology totally reject what Elijah Muhammad teaches as being … Islam. On the other hand, what he is teaching can easily be defined as a religion, but it cannot be labeled Islam.” As there were so few Islamic scholars and mosques in America, Malcolm said, it was easy for “any phony or faker to come along with a concocted, distorted product of his own making and say that this is Islam.”37
“Are you by inference saying that Elijah Muhammad is a faker and a phony?”
Malcolm explained that he had once believed in the Messenger more than the Messenger believed in himself, but that changed when the Messenger
was confronted with a crisis in his own personal life and he did not stand up as a man. Anybody could make a moral mistake, but when they have to lie about it and be willing to see that murder is committed to cover up their mistakes, not only are they not divine—they are not even a man.38
Malcolm’s words stung Muhammad like African honeybees.
On February 14, Joseph took on his Al Capone persona and began his version of the Valentine’s Day massacre. Malcolm’s phone rang so often that day that Betty Shabazz, then four months pregnant with her fifth and sixth daughters, said she felt as if she was having a nervous breakdown. Led by Lieutenant Edward X, Joseph’s death squad hid in the darkness outside Malcolm’s house.39 Once the last electric light went out, the house was like a duck in the middle of a small pond. There was an alley at the rear of the house and walkways on either side. The darkness gave the death squad ample opportunity to torch the house with Molotov cocktails without being seen by the neighbors. Qubilah Shabazz, Malcolm’s four-year-old daughter, was awakened by the sound of shattering glass and the smell of smoke in the bedroom she shared with her six-year-old sister, Attallah. Qubilah woke her sister and the two dashed to their parents’ bedroom. By the time Malcolm and Betty realized what was going on, the fire was out of control. Malcolm rushed his wife and four daughters (Ilyasha and Amilah were toddlers) to safety on the front lawn—and only afterward did he realize that he was standing outside in subzero weather in his underclothes.40
Later that morning, Joseph went to the scene of the firebombing while his lieutenant, Alvan X Farrakhan, remained at the temple.41 He went, he said, to assess the damage to what he called “the Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s property.” To Joseph, it was his finest hour; he finally had succeeded at something—something that anyone with common sense would have been ashamed of. Had it not been for Qubilah’s quick thinking, four little girls in Elmhurst would have suffered the same horrible fate as the four little girls trapped inside the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham when the Klan torched it in 1963. Joseph had often railed against the “devils” who committed that crime. It never occurred to him that he had become the thing he hated.
James 3X McGregor, acting minister of the Harlem mosque, joined Joseph in telling fire marshals that the NOI had nothing to do with the blaze. Malcolm “probably set the fire himself,”42 he said, because he was angry over the eviction lawsuit. Fire investigators lent credence to McGregor’s statement by releasing a statement claiming that a whiskey bottle filled with gasoline was discovered on top of a dresser in a child’s bedroom. Malcolm called the allegation ludicrous; a black firefighter later told him that the bottle was planted during the investigation by a man wearing a policeman’s uniform.
Although Malcolm knew that Muhammad had had nothing to do with France’s decision not to permit him entry into Paris a few weeks before the fire,43 the fireman’s revelation provided further evidence that the Messenger had bedfellows in law enforcement circles. The day after the bombing, Malcolm moved what remained of the family’s belongings out of the house. Juanita Poitier (Sidney Poitier’s wife), Ruby Dee, Sammy Davis Jr., and others collected money for the uninsured Shabazz family.44
Thomas X Wallace, Ruby Dee’s brother, who was viciously beaten after he quit the Harlem mosque to follow Malcolm, invited his hero’s family to live with him until things settled down. Malcolm reluctantly accepted the offer. Ordinarily, he would never have accepted, but the constant harassment had worn him down. “I’m just about at the end of my rope,” he told a colleague. He was tired, tired of arguing with his distraught wife, tired of staying up all night to keep the Messenger’s maggots from eating his children, tired of playing “double jeopardy” with the FBI. He knew that he could not escape; his only prayer was that his children and wife would. So, he prepared himself for the inevitable.45
“It’s a time for martyrs now. And if I am to be one, it will be in the cause of brotherhood. That’s the only thing that can save this country. I’ve learned it the hard way—but I’ve learned it,” Malcolm told photojournalist Gordon Parks on February 19.46 On February 21, Malcolm went to the Audubon Ballroom shortly before three o’clock to discuss his plans for the OAAU. With his wife and four children looking on, he approached the podium and welcomed those who had come to see him. Before he could begin his lecture, two men in the audience created a disturbance. As Malcolm tried to restore calm, he was shot by three men standing near the stage. The sound of gunfire turned the Audubon into a scene from a war veteran’s nightmare.
A blast from a shotgun knocked Malcolm backward. As he went down, Betty and others rushed to his aid. One witness recalled hearing the sound of his choking on blood. Gene Roberts, a bodyguard who was actually an undercover agent for the New York Police Department’s BOSSI division, hovered over him and appeared to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.47 The gunmen ran for their lives. “The police and press were unfair,” Betty Shabazz told the reporters waiting at the entrance of Bellevue Hospital. “No one believed what he said. They never took him seriously. Even after the bombing of our home, they said he did it himself. Now what are they going to do—say that he shot himself?”48
On the evening that Malcolm X was assassinated, the Messenger gave a rare interview, this one to WVON-AM radio’s popular black radio personality Wesley South. “We understand that there is a group coming from New York who intends to try to assassinate you and leaders of your organization,” South said. “What is your reaction?”49
“It is Allah who has chosen me to do this work,” the Messenger replied in his trademark deliberate drawl. “I rely solely upon him. My trust is in him, and if he gives me up to the hands of some wicked one, then I am still satisfied. So long as it pleases Allah, I do not run, nor am I afraid of the consequences.” Notwithstanding the Messenger’s assertions of faith, South noted that police and hundreds of members of the FOI had formed a human shield around the Messenger’s mansion. He also observed that the interview was being conducted by telephone, and that the Messenger had not ventured outside his home since Malcolm’s murder. But the Messenger had anticipated the question and offered a stock rebuttal. “We don’t teach violence,” he said. “We are not to be the aggressor. But if anyone attacks us, we will try to protect ourselves.”
Although South tried to enliven the debate on his call-in show, a technical snafu at the telephone company prevented any calls from getting through after the first one, so South was on his own. Having run out of prepared questions, he started to stammer a bit and complained about the phone service. While he waited for the technical problem to be solved, he ran repetitious commercials urging listeners to buy “healthful, zestful Joe Louis Milk.” When it became apparent that the telephone company could not repair the problem anytime soon, South started asking the Messenger some very general questions about the NOI.
Q. Do you hate white people?
A. I will say, as I have always said, they could have been any color they wanted, or God wanted to make them. They could have been blue, green, yellow, or any color. It is not so much their color; it is the characteristics or nature of the person. I do not teach race hate, I teach truth. When we say devil, it means a wicked person. They [white people] are that because by nature they were made that. You can’t call truth hate.
Q. How many followers do you have in your organization?
A. This is not an organization; it is a resurrection. I have an estimated two hundred to three hundred thousand throughout the country.
For some in South’s audience, what sounded perfectly logical to Muhammad reminded others of Father Coughlin’s radio ranting and Hitler’s diatribes against Jews. An irate caller who finally made it through—the only one to get through that night—pointed out the irony of all the attention the media were giving such a relatively small religious group:
