James Baldwin, in The Fire Next Time, recalled a visit in 1962 to the Chicago mansion headquarters of Elijah Muhammad, Supreme Head of the Nation of Islam, during which the Messenger of Allah told him that the white man’s time was actually up in 1913, but Allah was waiting for the lost black nation, “the so-called Negro” in the United States, to be freed from white masters and returned to the true faith. Baldwin, as a former child preacher and Harlem street rat, had no trouble understanding the appeal the Black Muslims held for a soap-box constituency: the police seemed afraid of them, and since the white God had failed, maybe the black God wouldn’t. But having heard prophecies of divine justice from many quarters every day of his youth, Baldwin wondered how someone went home on a given night, looked around, and decided to believe. The need to hear that whites were sinners, devils, inferior, and doomed ensured that the market for doctrines of black salvation or black supremacy would never dry up.
My Indianapolis barbershop was psychologically far from the mosques and bean pies of Chicago or Harlem. The “men among men” were distant from us, “the Lost-Founds,” the still-Negro. Muhammad Ali was more famous than Malcolm X as a symbol of the kind of defiant brotherhood that whites seemed to find so threatening and that was therefore so gratifying to blacks. Ali’s name change in 1964 made a more favorable impression than Malcolm X calling the 1963 March on Washington a “circus” or the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a “con game.” Malcolm X’s notoriety was derived from his appearances on the evening news as the gifted aphorist of racial apocalypse. Not until his assassination in 1965, the publication of his autobiography that same year, and the shock of the slogan “Black Power” to the country’s psyche did blacks in general feel that Malcolm X had been with them all along and that they had been in sympathy with him all that time, too.
They say that Malcolm X liked to quote a line from Aesop: “Even when you are dead, you can get even with an enemy.” He can certainly worry some whites from the grave, as evidenced by the anxiety surrounding the making and release three years ago of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, a film as harmless as Gandhi. But the momentary fashion for X caps and BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY T-shirts, the possibility that young black men might be influenced by Malcolm X’s inspired belligerence, set off a delirium of alarm, even though The Autobiography of Malcolm X has never been out of print.
Malcolm X died estranged from the Nation of Islam, the cult his charisma had done so much to broaden into a movement. Among those who expressed an unsavory satisfaction in the heretic’s punishment was Louis Farrakhan. As Malcolm X’s protégé, the suspicion goes, Farrakhan had to reassure the jealous Elijah Muhammad.
The Nation of Islam first permitted its members to vote in 1966, around the time that the civil rights movement left the red roads of the South and came up North to falter among the concrete towers. The National Guard was called in to put out fires, more whites left town, and plenty of businesses and some blacks followed them. While the Vietnam War spread the mystique of revolution, racial solidarity and group autonomy, supported by rediscovered episodes of U.S. history such as Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement, seemed like alternative faiths or secret passageways to power. The exasperated pointed to Muhammad as the most successful disciple of Booker T. Washington’s program of economic self-sufficiency, but blacks on campuses were busy arguing over the validity of armed self-defense and the legacy of Malcolm X.
In his lifetime Malcolm X brought large numbers of young people into what had been an organization composed mostly of the middle-aged. In death he introduced the children of the black middle class and the students everyone expected to become middle-class to what had been, historically, black working-class sentiments about race redemption. Garveyism had been most attractive to the laboring masses who migrated from the South around World War I. Garvey’s movement fell apart in the 1920s, but it left behind in its urban settings a deep feeling about the ancestral destiny of blacks.
Elijah Muhammad, born Elijah Poole in Sandersville, Georgia, in 1897, moved to Detroit in 1923 and became a corporal in the local Garvey group. During the Depression he met W. D. Fard, the founder of the Temple of Islam, whose ideas were a mixture of millenarianism and Garveyism. When Fard inexplicably vanished from the scene, Poole, now Muhammad, claimed that Fard was the Messiah, the Mahdi, and eventually he left Detroit to spread the Messiah’s truth. Perhaps this tradition of making converts to racial mysticism among those who had left the South explains why separatists, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, always sounded like city slickers trying to wise up countrified cousins just off the bus.
Muhammad had once predicted that Armageddon would come in 1970, but it was difficult to connect him with the Black Muslims who perished the following year in Attica. He trusted in God’s solution, but in 1973 rumors began to circulate that the Nation of Islam’s financial empire was crumbling. The Nation of Islam chain of clothing stores and bakeries may have been overvalued in the public mind to begin with. A three-million-dollar loan was said to have been obtained from Libya, and there was some talk that financial difficulties had brought about a shift in the policy of no contact with white devils and that this pragmatism had led to internal strife. Some weakness at the center was suggested by what looked like a collapse in discipline at the outposts. Stories appeared about sectarian murders of Muslims in Washington, D.C., in New Jersey; about Muslim involvement in murder cases in Baton Rouge in 1972 and in San Francisco in 1973. Muhammad countered that they were not affiliated with his temples. In those days everything made sense as an FBI conspiracy once it had been denounced as such. The Nation of Islam had had run-ins with the FBI since the 1930s.
The Dear Holy Apostle was reportedly ailing, and Farrakhan became increasingly visible as press spokesman for the Nation of Islam, much as Malcolm X had been before him. He addressed the Black Solidarity Rally in Harlem in 1971 and attended the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, in 1972. Later that year a violent police confrontation at the Harlem mosque resulted in allegations of police misconduct and a Muslim campaign to have only black policemen deployed in Harlem. Malcolm X, too, had first come to the attention of the New York press during a militant standoff with police in 1957. An observer of those days told me that Muhammad was probably contemptuous of Farrakhan for such claims. As with Malcolm X, he really didn’t like his people making themselves conspicuous, because that brought him to the attention of the IRS.
When Muhammad died in 1975, Farrakhan did not succeed him. One of his sons, Wallace Deen Muhammad, was affirmed as leader. He wanted to bring the group closer to conventional Islamic teachings, and within a year of his father’s death he had repudiated the doctrine about white devils and had even invited whites to join. Muhammad Speaks became Bilalian News. In 1977 Farrakhan, who had been transferred from Harlem’s Mosque #7 to Chicago headquarters, broke with the younger Muhammad over his conciliatory policies. Some of Farrakhan’s children had married some of Elijah Muhammad’s grandchildren. Muhammad’s illegitimate children sued for their portion. It looked like a corporate family soap opera along the lines of Dynasty. The Nation of Islam split into various factions. Wallace Deen Muhammad eventually renamed his group the American Muslim Mission and moved to California.
The son was free of the father, but his rival still had need of the father’s imprimatur. Farrakhan revived Elijah Muhammad’s litany. In 1981 he declared that Muhammad had been resurrected. By bringing the Messenger back from the dead, he could revise the act of succession and make himself the heir. In 1983 he said that a hurricane that had swept through Texas was Muhammad’s revenge for the execution of a Black Muslim in that state. That Muhammad’s presence was immanent removed an obstruction for Farrakhan. Unburdened of Muhammad’s watchful “dollarism,” Farrakhan could then insinuate himself where Malcolm X had not been allowed to go. He endorsed Harold Washington’s candidacy for mayor of Chicago in 1983, but it was through his fraternal association with Jesse Jackson’s presidential bid in 1984 that he perfected a talent for
outrage and became an American celebrity.
In the task of remaking and expanding his constituency, it helped Farrakhan that Reagan was in office, that deregulation of capital made every day look like White Collar Crime Day to the poor, and that conservative judicial appointments seemed to most blacks like the determination of whites to take up the drawbridge, because, as Baldwin had explained years before in Nobody Knows My Name, though one could not accept his conclusions, it was “quite impossible to argue with a Muslim concerning the actual state of Negroes in this country.” It also helped that Farrakhan was so richly despised, because that more than anything gave him the aura of a true black leader. His defenders boasted that King had also been reviled by many whites in his day. The loathing Farrakhan conjured up was all the persuasion he needed with young black men who believed he spoke for them, the outcast, the demonized, and the very image of the black man we were about to be asked to chastise ourselves for at the Million Man March.
In 1985, gauntlets of security guards, the Fruit of Islam, had rapidly frisked each of the men who were part of that October night’s huge audience waiting to enter New York’s Madison Square Garden to hear Farrakhan speak. The formality said that we were being transferred to another jurisdiction, removed from the sidewalks, where policemen gave the orders, to the arena, where authority belonged to Farrakhan. Power at Last … Forever!, his cassette and videotape was titled. Ten years later the Fruit of Islam are famously on offer as bodyguards. There are reports that the Nation of Islam has been awarded security contracts at housing projects, television stations, and cultural festivals in various cities. Whereas in the old days the Black Muslims had rehabilitated individuals by urging them to surrender to their collective identity, the community service the Nation of Islam is now praised for is that of reclaiming neighborhoods through the sheer force of its reputation. Having tamed themselves, they hold out the promise to tame others.
I heard more than once on the Mall that Sunday afternoon that the Nation of Islam deserved credit for chasing drug dealers from black neighborhoods, such as a part of northwest Washington the police wouldn’t go into. Most whites and the middle class in general live emotionally and visually isolated from people who feel their neighborhoods are abandoned and under siege. Back up Pennsylvania Avenue, on Freedom Plaza, I watched a group of nine teenagers, all male, riding skateboards in the five o’clock sun. Their shirttails and the flags high above them answered the breeze. They were white, black, and Asian, but what made them seem so upper-class was that they were clearly there together.
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That evening the hall of display tables and people in African costume at the Washington Convention Center’s pre-march Prayer and Praise rally resembled Black Expos, those trade fairs that have become an annual event on the civic calendar of most U.S. cities. Inside the large auditorium itself, the delegate-like section seating reminded me of NAACP conventions. When we stood for “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” the black national anthem, I half expected to hear my mother’s alto at my shoulder.
Services in black churches turn easily into protest meetings, and civil rights meetings have long been conducted as prayer services, but this was a fundamentalist crusade. One speechmaker after another swore that “the devil must be mad, because he’d lost the souls he thought he had,” or proclaimed that when black men said they shall not be moved, the whole black nation stood still “in a divine way.” We saluted upper bleachers of male figures dressed in white, the Turn Germantown Around group that had walked all the way from Philadelphia. Marion Barry welcomed us. “He’s a black man and not afraid to be one,” the MC bellowed. We were going to march for the living, the dead, and the unborn, for the grieving families of gunned-down black youth, for the black children born out of wedlock, for the “millions” of black boys and girls on drugs. “Somebody needs to march for Kunta Kinte.” “If they kill you, just rise again.” Former congressman Walter Fauntroy in his guise as a pastor began to croon one of those old favorites with many verses.
Something almost deliberately foreboding in tone was to stick out in the long night of Baptist choreography. Dr. Abdul Alim Muhammad speaks like a future rival to Farrakhan. I’d seen him on local television earlier. Head of Washington’s Mosque #4 and president of its Abundant Life Clinic, he was articulate, telegenic, and he’d dominated the talk show panel with the conviction of a man on the rise. He told us that there were men who said it could not be done, that black, white, blue, green, and other colors of misunderstanding had said that we would not stand, but we were “a free, liberated people in the eyes of God.” Other speechmakers told us that for “the African nation” here in America religious barriers were coming down, that “Christians and Muslims and Catholics” were forming bonds, that political and economic power was riding and resting on our spiritual power. Never again would they divide us. Satan was trying to keep God’s children apart. One of Elijah Muhammad’s sons and two of Farrakhan’s children were introduced. The promotional style of that family firm, the Nation of Islam, began to assert itself.
Some people had insisted that the message could be separated from the messenger, that black people ought to get behind any effort dedicated to unity. But others had argued that no one had come up with the idea except Farrakhan, that no one else could get them to Washington in such numbers, and several of the speechmakers at the rally were adamant that the messenger could not be removed from the message, that to do so would be for black people to let others tell them once again who their leaders were. Though the leadership of the National Baptist Convention had declined to endorse the March, the banner of the Union Temple Baptist Church stretched over the stage. Small stockholders were being sold on a merger, persuaded of a takeover the board opposed—the leveraged buyout of Jesus & Co.
We were told that the March was “totally” funded by our own community. We applauded donations. Rock Newman, the boxing manager, gave ten thousand dollars. He broke the O.J. taboo and brought people to their feet. “You can live in a big white house, with a lot of white women, and it still doesn’t make you a man.” Some stopped applauding because that sounded like a criticism. The MC reminded us that raising dollars was as much a part of the program as the spoken word and the choir, but people were leaving. Outside, in the confusion of traffic, vendors called: history for sale, up for grabs, open to manipulation. The souvenir edition of African-American Consumer and Business Magazine featured on the cover a photograph of King’s face superimposed on a crowd and another of Farrakhan’s superimposed on the same scene.
Early Monday morning we moved in the dark through the trees toward the lit-up dome of the Capitol. Black men were everywhere, atop ledges, perched on branches. Whenever someone in a bow tie and suit led forward a file of men, hand on shoulder, we squeezed aside to let them through. When the push became too great, we passed the word for everyone to take a step back. We stepped on toes behind, on heels ahead. “Excuse me, brother.” Though the March changed somewhat in character from hour to hour, depending on where and with whom I stood, this solemn courtesy never went away. “Excuse me, black man.”
Stage lights at the steps of the Capitol were aimed directly at us. I could look up at the hierarchy of illumination in the sky, stars, quarter moon, and helicopters, or behind, at the faces that multiplied away. There was little talk, because of the sense of occasion, because of the relentless drumming. Sometimes the long blast of a ram’s horn or the sound of an ululating woman came from the direction of a group that had set up an encampment. The drumming went on for an hour, until a loudspeaker crackled and released a piercing burst of township jive. Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” the music of the Vietnam veteran, made the men cheer, but they weren’t in the mood for Earth, Wind, and Fire. “This ain’t no party,” they chanted. “Turn the music off.” The music stopped, the men cheered, and the drumming began again. “This is all right,” a man said. “This is deep.” Assembled at the steps of Pharaoh and waiting. After another hour I followed the path made b
y a wheelchair and came to a lawn. The smells of incense, barbecue, and pot wafted through the cold air.
A clear morning was coming up fast on the standing, the strolling, the reclining. A man noted ruefully that we had let the Muslim dawn go by. In the developing light I could see banners, signs, sandwich boards, sweatshirts. FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH OF CROWN HEIGHTS; THE DURHAM, NC, POSSE; BOWIE STATE FOOTBALL TEAM; LOCAL 420. DUKE, GEORGETOWN, HOWARD, NC STATE, the caps said. A white man held up a handwritten message on cardboard: The Howard Stern Show Salutes You. The marchers themselves carried so many cameras and camcorders that one paranoid remark I heard—“They’re taking pictures to see who’s who”—became something of a joke. However, there were times when I was glad of my sunglasses, shades that went some way toward reassuring those who became suspicious of my notepad and pen, as if jotting down what became a matter of public record as soon as it boomed down the Mall offended the spirit of unity.
“Assalamu alaykum.” A Baptist preacher introduced the muezzin, who sang and translated the adhan. Everything in U.S. history can seem like a turning point, but after King’s martyrdom the feeling ran high that blacks had done more for Christianity than Christianity had done for them. Islam was increasingly perceived as being Afrocentric and a declaration of one’s Otherness in a thrilling way. Time magazine reported a year after King’s death that there were 350,000 black Jews in the United States, although two years later The Negro Almanac put the figure at 44,000. Moreover, those who have identified themselves as Muslim are not necessarily allied with the Nation of Islam. Figures about its membership have always varied widely. But at the west front to the Capitol, facing east, the stillness, the bowed heads, the American flag, the policemen on the steps, in the dome’s balcony, signaled a competing godliness in a nation getting narrower in its culture the more broadly religious it becomes. “And I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.” A style brochure distributed by the American Muslim Council taught us how to spell shahadah, the declaration of faith.
Busted in New York and Other Essays Page 3