Fard named Karriem to be the “supreme minister.” A bitter feud sprang up among those who had been passed over, most of whom were better educated than Karriem, and more articulate. But the dissent only reinforced Fard’s conviction that Elijah was the most suitable candidate. He renamed his chief lieutenant once more, this time as Elijah Muhammad.
Then, in 1934, Fard simply vanished. The last public notice of any kind to mention him is a Chicago police record, dated September 26, 1933, citing his arrest for disorderly conduct.
Even before this mysterious disappearance, his followers had split sharply over who should succeed him. A vocal majority in Detroit strongly opposed Elijah’s elevation; Muhammad had little choice but to take his wife and children and a handful of supporters into exile to Chicago. Even here, his leadership was soon challenged by his youngest brother, Kallat Muhammad, who had been appointed “supreme captain” by Fard. One of Elijah’s assistant ministers in Chicago, Augustus Muhammad, defected to Detroit, and later helped initiate the pro-Japanese black American organization, Development of Our Own. Over the next decade, the majority of Nation members quit the cult, either drifting into Christian sects or becoming Ahmadi Muslims. Elijah Muhammad stubbornly refused to give up, traveling the road for years like an itinerant evangelist, eking out his existence by soliciting donations for his sermons. In later years, NOI loyalists would see parallels in the Prophet Muhammad’s flight from Mecca in 622 CE and Elijah Muhammad’s wanderings. Elijah was never a charismatic speaker, but his sheer persistence earned him followers.
Still under FBI surveillance, on May 8, 1942, Elijah was arrested in Washington, D.C., and charged with failure to register for the draft and for counseling his followers to resist military service. Convicted, he did not emerge from federal prison until August 1946. Somehow the Lost-Found Nation of Islam managed to survive, largely due to the administrative talents of his wife, Clara, who became especially active in the running of the Chicago temple, corresponding regularly with her husband and visiting him in prison. But the hard years living underground and the demands of prison life took their toll. Muhammad’s asthma and other chronic health problems became worse, his body frail and thin, but the experience of enforced isolation provided him ample time to redesign his tiny sect in his own image. He would use his “martyrdom” to convince former members to return to the Nation.
Even years before his incarceration, Elijah Muhammad had revealed to his closest followers that Fard had informed him privately that he, Fard, was God in person. Fard’s elevation from prophet to savior also thrust Elijah into the exalted role of being the sole “Messenger of Allah.” Elijah later explained that an angel had descended from heaven with a message of truth for the black race. “This angel can be no other than Master W. D. Muhammad who came from the Holy City of Mecca, Arabia, in 1930.” Thus the recipient of one message became himself the messenger to his people.
Malcolm learned of all this—Fard’s teachings, his persecution, his disappearance, and the ultimate triumph of Elijah Karriem—at Norfolk. Reading the letters from his siblings and the occasional letters from Elijah himself, with whom Malcolm had struck up a correspondence, he drew further into the world and worldview of the Nation of Islam. He soon convinced himself about Fard’s divinity. “The greatest and mightiest God who appeared on the earth was Master W. D. Fard,” Malcolm would eventually profess. “He came from the East to the West, appearing at a time when the history and prophecy that is written was coming to realization, as the non-white people all over the world began to rise, and as the devil white civilization, condemned by Allah, was, through its devilish nature, destroying itself.”
Under Fard, the Nation’s preachers had always mentioned the cosmic inevitability of the white race’s decline, associating this with an apocalyptic vision of the final days. Fard and Elijah Muhammad both used the Torah’s tale of Ezekiel’s Wheel to explain the existence of a mechanical device from heaven that could save the faithful. In his most widely read work, Message to the Blackman in America, Elijah gave even greater emphasis to this than Fard, as well as the specific details for the pending apocalypse: There is a similar wheel in the sky today which very well answers the description of Ezekiel’s vision. . . . The Great Wheel which many of us see in the sky today is . . . a plane made like a wheel. The like of this wheel-like plane was never seen before. . . . The present wheel-shaped plane known as the Mother Plane, is one-half of a half-mile and is the largest mechanical manmade object in the sky. It is a small human planet made for the purpose of destroying the present world of the enemies of Allah. . . . It is capable of staying in outer space six to twelve months at a time without coming into the earth’s gravity. It carried fifteen hundred bombing planes with the most deadliest explosives—the type used in bringing up mountains on the earth. The very same method is to be used in the destruction of this world.
To Elijah Muhammad, the world was divided into two: the community of devout believers, which included “Asiatics” and “Asiatic blacks” such as American Negroes who might be converted; and, in orthodox Islamic terms, the “House of War,” all Europeans or white people, the devils. No reconciliation or integration was possible or even conceivable. If the millions of black Americans could not physically return to Africa, then a partition of the United States along racial lines had to be instituted. Middle-aged and older African Americans who had belonged to the UNIA immediately recognized Muhammad’s program as similar to Garvey’s, but with a kind of divinely based apocalyptic fury, and it ignited a revolutionary spark that touched Malcolm in a way Garveyism never would have.
Since neither wholesale emigration nor the secession of several Southern U.S. states under blacks’ authority was immediately likely, Muhammad counseled his followers to withdraw from active civic life. America’s political institutions would never grant equality to the Original People. Muhammad preached that registering to vote or mobilizing blacks to petition the courts, as the NAACP did, was a waste of time. In the years prior to Brown v. Board of Education, the May 1954 Supreme Court decision that outlawed racial segregation in the country’s public schools, Muhammad’s arguments could be reasonably defended, but his “audience” among blacks still remained small. By 1947, he had consolidated control over Fard’s followers in only four cities—in Washington, D.C., Detroit, Milwaukee, and at his headquarters in Chicago. The Nation’s combined membership was four hundred, an insignificant number compared to the thousands of African-American members of the growing Ahmadiyya movement, or even the fading remnants of the Moorish Science Temple.
Yet there was also a growing group of black prisoners converting to the Nation of Islam while still in prison, where the depression caused by long confinement made inmates particularly vulnerable. Muhammad’s own prison experience had taught him to channel his recruitment efforts at convicted felons, alcoholics, drug addicts, and prostitutes. Malcolm numbered among these, and as he sat in isolation, anxiously writing letters to Elijah on an almost daily basis, the intensity of his commitment grew until he reached total acceptance.
Prison life can shatter the soul and will of anyone who experiences it. “It destroys thought utterly,” Antonio Gramsci observed in his prison notebooks. “It operates like the master craftsman who was given a fine trunk of seasoned olive wood with which to carve a statue of Saint Peter; he carved away, a piece here, a piece there, shaped the wood roughly, modified it, corrected it—and ended up with a handle for the cobbler's awl.” Confined to Mussolini’s prisons for over a decade, Gramsci struggled fiercely to maintain his sense of purpose, and eventually realized that only through a dedicated program of intellectual engagement could he endure the physical hardships. He wrote, “I want, following a fixed plan, to devote myself intensely and systematically to some subject that will absorb me and give a focus to my inner life.” Faced with a similar dilemma, Malcolm committed himself to a rigorous course of study. In doing so, he consciously remade himself into Gramsci’s now famous “organic intellectual,” creating
the habits that, years later, would become legendary. His powers of dedication and self-discipline were extraordinary, and directly opposite to the wayward drifting of his earlier years. The trickster disappeared, the clowning side of disobedience, leaving the willful challenger to authority.
At Norfolk, the prisoners in the debate club engaged in weekly exchanges on a variety of issues. Malcolm and Shorty, who had also been transferred to Norfolk, found a forum for Malcolm’s new beliefs and arguments. “Right there, in the prison, debating, speaking to a crowd, was as exhilarating to me as the discovery of knowledge through reading,” Malcolm wrote. “Standing up there, the faces looking up at me, things in my head coming out of my mouth, while my brain searched for the next best thing to follow what I was saying, and if I could sway them to my side by handling it right, then I had won the debate—once my feet got wet, I was gone on debating.” It soon did not matter what the formal topic was. Malcolm had by now become an expert debater, thoroughly researching his subjects in the prison library and planning his arguments accordingly. The common theme of his public discourses, however, was his indictment of white supremacy.
Malcolm now began perfecting what would become his distinctive speaking style. He possessed an excellent tenor voice, which helped him attract listeners. But even more unusual was how he employed his voice to convey his thoughts. Coming into maturity during the big band era, he quickly picked up on the cadence and percussive sounds of jazz music, and inevitably his evolving speaking style borrowed its cadences.
Once he had started reeducating himself, there was no limit to his search for fact and inspiration. Through Norfolk’s library, Malcolm devoured the writings of influential scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, and J. A. Rogers. He studied the history of the transatlantic slave trade, the impact of the “peculiar institution” of chattel slavery in the United States, and African-American revolts. He learned with satisfaction about Nat Turner’s 1831 uprising in Virginia, which to him provided a clear example of black resistance: “Turner wasn’t going around preaching pie-in-the-sky and ‘non-violent’ freedom for the black man.” Nor did Malcolm restrict his studies to black history. He plowed through Herodotus, Kant, Nietzsche, and other historians and philosophers of Western civilization. He was impressed by Mahatma Gandhi’s accounts of the struggle to drive the British out of India; he was appalled by the history of China’s opium wars, and the European and American suppression of the 1901 Boxer Rebellion. “I could spend the rest of my life reading,” he reflected. “I don’t think anybody ever got more out of going to prison than I did.” Malcolm had undertaken his studies with the idea of becoming, like Bembry, the well-respected figure of wisdom behind the prison’s walls. But as 1948 drew to a close, his breadth of understanding had transformed him into a trenchant critic of white Western values and institutions. There was something passive about teaching, and Malcolm was not passive.
His routine at Norfolk provided him with the leisure time to correspond extensively with family members and friends, and he now became a devoted letter writer. In an undated note to Philbert, probably written mid-1948, he was preoccupied with family gossip. “Phil, I love all my brothers and sisters. In fact, they are the only ones in the world I love or have. However,” he emphasized, “never say ‘we are happy to own you as a brother.’” Such language smacked of tolerance rather than love. “Under no circumstances don’t ever preach to me,” he warned. Malcolm also continued to correspond with Elijah Muhammad, and by late November the tone of his letters to Philbert had been transformed. He now opened each letter with the declaration: “In the Name of ‘Allah,’ the Beneficent, the Merciful, the Great God of the Universe . . . and in the Name of His Holy Servant and Apostle, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad . . .” He praised family members for bringing him into the grace of Elijah Muhammad’s guidance. Now a devoted NOI follower, he shared his belief that “things are jumping out there . . . I’m unaware of what is actually occurring, but I know it is being Directed by the Hand of Allah and will rid the planet of these wretched devils.” Malcolm’s new commitment undoubtedly provided another reason to figure out some way out of prison.
His letters were also filled with lines of verse. He explained, “I’m a real bug for poetry. When you think back over all of our past lives, only poetry could best fit into the vast emptiness created by men.” Later that same month, he wrote, “I will have three years in [prison] on the 27th of this month. I want to get out this year if I can.” But he recognized how improbable his parole would be. “It’s my own fault I’m here,” he admitted. “The whole ordeal, though, has benefited me immensely because I have fully awakened to what I’m surrounded by. I certainly woke up the hard way, hmm?”
In another letter to Philbert, his thoughts turned to racial politics. “Yes, I’m aware many Brothers were put into the federal institutions for not taking active part in the war. Surely you must remember, I would have taken imprisonment first also.” Although he had not been aware of Elijah’s teachings during World War II, Malcolm claims that “I was even at that time aware of the devil and knew it to be foolish for yours truly to risk his neck fighting for something that didn’t exist.” He also expressed a new appreciation for their mother.
Reginald visited in late 1949, but all was not well. Malcolm was dumbfounded when his brother began to speak ill of Elijah Muhammad. He learned subsequently that Reginald had been expelled from the Nation of Islam for having sexual relations with the female secretary of the New York City temple. Reginald was his closest Little sibling, and his disaffection provoked a crisis of faith within Malcolm, which he only partially revealed later in the Autobiography. How could a religion devoted to the redemption of all black men expel Reginald? Frustrated and confused, he promptly wrote to Elijah in his brother's defense. The next night, in the solitude of his prison cell, he thought he had been awakened by a vision of someone next to him: He had on a dark suit. I remember. I could see him as plainly as I see anyone I look at. He wasn’t black, and he wasn’t white. He was light-brown-skinned, an Asiatic cast of countenance, and he had oily black hair. I looked right into his face. I didn’t get frightened. I knew I wasn’t dreaming. I couldn’t move, I didn’t speak, and he didn’t. . . . He just sat there. Then, suddenly as he had come, he was gone.
He would come to believe that his vision had been that of “Master W. D. Fard, the Messiah.” Days later, Elijah Muhammad sent a stern reply, chastising his new disciple for his pleas. “If you once believed in the truth, and now you are beginning to doubt the truth, you didn’t believe the truth in the first place,” he charged.
Such a letter of rebuke, combined with the twilight vision of “Master Fard,” convinced Malcolm that Reginald’s censure was not only justified but absolutely necessary. His actions could not be tolerated within the Nation’s small community. Months later, when Reginald visited again, Malcolm noted his physical and mental deterioration, and reasoned that this was evidence of “Allah’s chastisement.” Several years later, Reginald’s complete mental collapse led to his being institutionalized. To Malcolm, struggling to make sense of his brother's fate, there was only one explanation: Reginald had been used by Allah “as a bait, as a minnow, to reach into the ocean of blackness where I was to save me.”
By early 1950, Malcolm had converted several black inmates, including Shorty. The small group began to demand concessions from the prison administrators, on the grounds that they were exercising their rights of religious freedom. They requested that Norfolk’s menu be changed, to accommodate the dietary restrictions of Muslims, and also refused to submit to standard medical inoculations. Norfolk’s officials viewed these requests as disruptive, and in March 1950 Malcolm and Shorty were told that they would be transferred back to Charlestown along with several other Black Muslims. Norfolk’s officials also recorded that Malcolm’s letters provided indisputable evidence of “his dislike for the white race.”
Malcolm rationalized the transfer as best he could. “Norfolk was g
etting on my nerves in many ways, and I didn’t have as much Solitude as I wished for,” he complained to Philbert. “Here we are in our cells for seventeen of the twenty-four hours in each day . . .” He also recounted a brief visit by their sister. “Ella wants to try to get me out. What should I do? Previously when she had asked me if I wanted out I have said ‘not particularly.’ But Saturday I told her to do whatever she can.”
He began agitating for even greater concessions, impelled by the requirements of his faith. He and other Muslims not only insisted on changes in their food and on the rules governing typhoid inoculations; they asked to be moved into cells that faced east, so that they could pray more easily toward Mecca. When the warden rejected their requests, Malcolm threatened to take their grievances to the Egyptian consul’s U.S. office, at which point the warden backed down. The local media learned about the controversy, and several articles soon appeared, the first to present Malcolm to a public audience. On April 20, 1950, the Boston Herald reported the incident under the headline “Four Convicts Turn Moslems, Get Cells Looking to Mecca.” More colorful and descriptive was the Springfield Union: “Local Criminals, in Prison, Claim Moslem Faith Now: Grow Beards, Won’t Eat Pork, Demand East-Facing Cells to Facilitate ‘Prayers to Allah.’”
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