Although Malcolm seldom referred to the case after 1960 or so, it was just as significant as the Johnson Hinton incident. The resolution to fight the case, and to identify it in civil rights terminology, created sympathy and solidarity among most blacks, even those who did not share the NOI's separatist views. Malcolm absorbed this lesson from this chaotic event: when the NOI came out in solidarity with civil rights and civil liberties groups addressing problems like police brutality that affected nearly all blacks, the NOI was rewarded with favorable media attention and swelling membership. Meanwhile, the FBI’s New York office informed its director that it would “continue to follow LITTLE’s activities” and issue a surveillance update every six months.
The FBI had the resources to hire scores of black informants to infiltrate the Nation, but it failed to comprehend the nature of the sect it had deemed so dangerous. It was convinced that the NOI was subversive because it promoted “black hate.”
The FBI never understood that the NOI did not seek the destruction of America’s legal and socioeconomic institutions; the Black Muslims were not radicals, but profound conservatives under Muhammad. They praised capitalism, so long as it served what they deemed blacks’ interests. Their fundamental mistake was their unshakable belief that whites as a group would never transcend their hatred of blacks. The FBI also viewed the Islamic elements of the Nation as fraudulent. As a result, the Bureau never grasped the underlying concerns that motivated Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad, and how both men had constructed a dynamic organization that attracted the membership of tens of thousands of African Americans and the admiration of millions more. The NOI's theology certainly “demonized” whites, yet its program in many ways merely channeled the profound sense of alienation that already existed among working-class blacks, born of the reality of Southern Jim Crow segregation and Northern discrimination.
Malcolm and Muhammad did not look to the American political system to redeem itself or to solve the problems of “black Asiatics” in America. It would only be through the grace of Allah, and the building of strong black institutions, that blacks would rediscover their strengths. Malcolm at this time did not consider his pubic addresses “political,” but rather spiritually inspired, based on the prophetic teachings of both the Qur'an and the Bible, in anticipation of the final days. A time would soon come, however, when the separation between spirituality and politics was no longer a tenable position.
CHAPTER 6
“The Hate That Hate Produced”
March 1959–January 1961
The questions Malcolm faced at the end of 1959 about the necessity of bold political action were not his alone to ponder. During the 1950s, as the civil rights movement grew, it contended with powerful internal struggles over how to move forward. There was not general agreement on the direction that black activism should take or even on the goals that needed to be achieved. While the NOI stood virtually alone in its rejection of direct action, many black leaders, including Malcolm, grew increasingly enamored with the ideals and successes of Third World revolutionaries. Some saw in the Marxist struggle a better way of defining and addressing racial conflict. In the era of McCarthyism, this ideological identification put additional pressure on civil rights groups as black leaders came under intense scrutiny from government agencies. Malcolm was by no means the only one deemed a threat to national security by the FBI.
Despite this pressure, and the general political swing toward conservatism in the postwar years, black activists continued to make significant advances. In December 1952, when Brown v. Board of Education came before the Supreme Court, the political world was still rigidly coded by black and white. “Separate but equal,” as defined by the precedent of the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, remained the law of the land. Yet the years leading up to the 1954 Brown decision saw changing circumstances that presaged its outcome. With the outlawing of the whites-only primary elections by the Supreme Court in 1944, many blacks throughout much of the South began voting for the first time. Between 1944 and 1952, the number of black registered voters there soared, from about 250,000 to nearly 1.25 million. In 1946, in its Morgan v. Virginia decision, the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional any state law requiring Jim Crow sections on interstate buses, a decision that prompted a new civil rights organization, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), to launch a series of nonviolent protests challenging local segregation laws on interstate public transport. In late 1955, King was catapulted to international prominence by his role in the Montgomery bus boycott, while in nearby Tuskegee, Alabama, blacks staged a three-year-long economic boycott of local white merchants in response to that state legislature’s gerrymandering of nearly all black voters outside the town’s boundaries. In 1960, the Supreme Court sided with Tuskegee’s black protesters by declaring racial gerrymandering illegal.
These successes were the fruits of concerted efforts by a new generation of African-American leaders that supported confrontational challenge. In New York City, Ella Baker was elected branch president of New York City’s NAACP in 1952, and went on to build interracial coalitions around two issues that affected nearly all blacks—police brutality and public school desegregation. Meanwhile, in Mississippi, NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers eschewed King’s nonviolent approach for one of armed self-defense, committing himself to investigating and publicizing racist crimes. In 1957, Baker, Bayard Rustin, and liberal attorney/activist Stanley Levison drafted a series of papers to develop what would become the agenda of the new Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). What these individuals shared was a willingness to place their own lives at risk. They were all critical of the slow pace of reforms by older civil rights leaders; economic boycotts, civil disobedience, and youth organizing, they believed, should spearhead their protests.
The frightening specter of McCarthyism and virulent anticommunism had taken its toll among black liberals. America’s most prominent African-American sociologist, E. Franklin Frazier, for example, had been investigated by the FBI for belonging to the Negro People’s Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy in the 1930s. Educator and Eleanor Roosevelt confidante Mary McLeod Bethune was grilled by authorities for membership in the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born. But the political virus had run its course, and as the anticommunist demagogues retreated, there was a rebirth of a black left, whose resurgent fortunes were symbolized by the status of controversial singer and actor Paul Robeson. Banished from stage and screen during the years of McCarthy repression, Robeson had had his passport confiscated by the State Department, yet in 1958 his comeback tour across the United States received strong support from the black community. These concerts coincided with the publication of his manifesto Here I Stand, part memoir and part political commentary, which emphasized the struggles for independence in Africa as well as the fight for civil rights within the United States. The book was widely praised in the African-American press, yet did little to endear Robeson to white authorities. When the prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, called for a national celebration of the singer’s sixtieth birthday, the United States tried unsuccessfully to pressure his government to cancel the event.
Perhaps no single person better symbolized the trends toward militancy than Robert F. Williams. After serving in the military and working as a laborer, Williams returned home to North Carolina in 1955, where he soon joined campaigns for civil rights. His charisma and militancy attracted followers, and he was soon elected head of the Monroe, North Carolina, branch of the NAACP. Controversy first beset him in 1959 when, following the acquittal of a white man who had assaulted an African-American woman, Williams told the press that maybe blacks should “meet violence with violence in order to protect themselves.” The NAACP national leader, Roy Wilkins, publicly distanced the association from these remarks and had Williams suspended. In turn, Williams’s supporters condemned Wilkins’s actions, which sparked a long-suppressed debate within the civil rights community.
Williams subs
equently became involved in a well-publicized “kissing case,” in which he defended two black boys—ages eight and ten—who had been jailed in Monroe for the crime of kissing a white girl. By mid-1961, tensions in Monroe surrounding the case had reached a boiling point. When the civil rights organizer James Forman visited the town, he was assaulted and thrown in jail simply for being associated with Williams. White gangs cruised the streets after dark searching for blacks to terrorize, to which the black community responded by arming itself. When a white couple mistakenly drove into a cordoned-off black district, Williams ordered that they be detained, to ensure their safety. Local authorities, however, promptly charged him with kidnapping.
The collective impact of Baker, Williams, and other militants pushed organizations like the NAACP toward greater activism, pressuring both major political parties to adopt new legislation. In 1957, Congress passed a weak civil rights act that established an advisory group, the Commission on Civil Rights. The SCLC responded by initiating the Crusade for Citizenship Campaign, which broadened its strategic agenda to include voter registration and civic education. Organized by Ella Baker, the campaign held press conferences and rallies in more than two dozen cities.
The fire of this new activism burned brightest in the South, but it also had a profound effect on Northern black communities, where legal segregation may not have existed but patterns of exclusion were deep and long-standing. In September 1957, inspired by the struggle earlier that year to desegregate Little Rock, Arkansas’s Central High School, New York activists picketed city hall in protest against racial discrimination in public schools.
Some activists concluded that they should run for office, perhaps figuring that creating legislation would be more effective than merely agitating for it. Their model was attorney Benjamin Davis, Jr., a communist who represented Harlem in the New York City Council from 1943 to 1949. Even after his political views got him convicted for violating the 1940 Alien Registration Act, known generally as the Smith Act, in a losing bid for Manhattan reelection in 1949, Davis won more Harlem votes than in his previous elections. On a similarly progressive agenda, Ella Baker ran unsuccessfully for the New York City Council in both 1951 and 1953. The attorney Pauli Murray, who would later defend Robert Williams before a national hearing of the NAACP, also ran for the council. But although Hulan Jack was elected Manhattan’s first African-American borough president in 1953, New York blacks continued to be underrepresented. In 1954, for instance, more than one million of the state’s fourteen million residents were African Americans, yet they had only one of New York’s forty-three members of Congress; one of its fifty-eight state senators; just five of the 150 state assembly members; and ten of its 189 judges.
In Harlem, activism took a cultural turn. From 1951 to 1955, radicals there published a newspaper called Freedom. Some anticommunist black nationalists, such as the writer Harold Cruse, criticized the paper's orientation as “nothing more than integration, couched in left-wing phraseology.” The paper soon closed, but in early 1961 many of its old staff established a new quarterly, Freedomways, as a link between black communists, independent radicals, and the left wing of the civil rights movement. For nationalists like Cruse, however, even the new magazine was compromised, due to its associations with the Marxist left.
Despite such ideological misgivings, the majority of the new generation of radicals increasingly came under the influence of the black left, best illustrated by the growing African-American fascination with Cuba. In January 1959, an unlikely band of guerrilla fighters led by Fidel Castro had wrested control of the country from dictator Fulgencio Batista. Though Castro traveled to Washington in April to reassure the Eisenhower administration of his good intentions, the U.S. government quickly concluded that the new regime was anti-American and set to work trying to destabilize it. American radicals who sympathized with the young revolution responded by establishing the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which attracted such notable intellectuals as Allen Ginsberg, C. Wright Mills, and I. F. Stone. A significant number of African-American artists and political activists joined the committee, or at least publicly endorsed Castro’s revolution. These included journalists William Worthy and Richard Gibson, writers James Baldwin, John Oliver Killens, and Julian Mayfield—and, unsurprisingly, Robert Williams.
In June 1960, the committee sponsored Williams’s first trip to Cuba, and the following month organized an African-American delegation, which he led. Its members included Mayfield, playwright/poet LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), historian John Henrik Clarke, and Harold Cruse. Even for bitter anticommunists like Cruse, the experience was inspirational. “The ideology of a new revolutionary wave in the world at large,” he observed, “had lifted us out of anonymity of lonely struggle in the United States to the glorified rank of visiting dignitaries.” But Cruse struggled to maintain his objectivity—much as Malcolm did under similar circumstances several years later when he visited Africa. To Cruse the fundamental questions to be answered were, “What did it all mean and how did it relate to the Negro in America?” A significant lesson, he wrote, reflecting the increasingly militant feelings among black activists, was “the relevance of force and violence to successful revolutions.”
As the civil rights movement adopted an increasingly confrontational approach involving a mix of protest and politics, Malcolm and the NOI watched from a distance. Holding fast to its doctrine of strict separatism, the Nation had little to contribute to the dialogue over how best to change the existing order. Many of the Nation’s leaders did not truly understand the growing civil rights struggle; they were still convinced that they should distance themselves from anything controversial or subversive. Yet when it came to competing for the minds of black Americans, the issue-based platforms and forceful personalities within the Black Freedom Movement presented a direct challenge to the NOI. The positive press coverage received by King and other civil rights leaders gave them a relevance to political realities that the NOI lacked.
In a letter written in April 1959 to James 3X Shabazz, the newly appointed minister of Temple No. 25 in Newark, Muhammad expressed concern about “the all too frequent clashes with Law Enforcement Agents that we, the Believers of Islam, are being involved in.” He was troubled by the confrontation in Malcolm’s home between the NYPD and the NOI members, as well as by the publicity surrounding the subsequent trial. “Whenever an officer comes to serve a notice or to arrest you, you should not resist whether you are innocent or guilty,” he instructed. “We must remember that we are not in power in Washington, nor where we live, to dictate to the authorities. . . . Lawyers, bonds and fines are expensive, and being beat up and bruised is too painful to bear for nothing.” Allah would ultimately punish those who had mistreated his followers. “But, remember that you should not be the cause for them to take the opportunity to mistreat you, since you now know that the devil has no Justice for you.”
Privately, Malcolm disagreed. The extensive press coverage around the trial of the Molettes, Minnie Simmons, and Betty, he thought, generally presented the Nation of Islam in a favorable light. “If it had not been for the on-the-spot reporting of the Amsterdam News from the very beginning of the case,” he wrote in a public letter, “these innocent people would now be behind bars.” He astutely linked the NOI’s confrontation with the police to the larger struggle for civil rights and the need for a crusading African-American press. Some of “Malcolm’s Ministers” inside the NOI surely felt the same way.
He was looking beyond the NOI, to non-Islamic black Americans, and making overtures to blacks outside the Nation—as indeed he had done for several years. It was during this time that he was contacted by a young African-American representative of the local television station WNTA Channel 13, Louis Lomax, who was preparing a series of television programs about the NOI. Lomax was working on the project with another journalist, Mike Wallace, who by the late 1950s had become a familiar presence on New York-area television.
The two men had different reasons
for approaching the NOI. Wallace was in his late thirties and had extensive media experience, but was still looking for his big break. Given Malcolm’s and the Nation’s rising profile, he sensed the possibility of controversy in exposing the NOI’s divisive racial ideas before a large audience. Lomax’s interests were more complicated. Born in 1922 in Valdosta, Georgia, he had earned a bachelor’s degree from Paine College, as well as master's degrees from American University and Yale (in 1944 and 1947 respectively). While studying at Yale, he had flourished, hosting a weekly radio program that “marked the first time a Negro had written and presented his own dramatic skits over the air in the District of Columbia.” But by 1949 he had fallen on harder times. After moving to Chicago’s South Side, he became involved in a scam leasing rental cars in Indiana and driving them to Chicago to be sold. The police easily tracked down the stolen cars and busted him; he was convicted of a series of larcenies and remained behind bars until paroled in November 1954, during which time his wife had divorced him.
In 1956, he had an unexpected reversal of fortune. That February, his parole officer gave him permission to work for the Associated Negro Press in Washington. The opportunity revitalized Lomax; during the next three years, he placed articles in such newspapers as the New York Daily News and the New York Daily Mirror and analytical pieces in magazines such as Pageant , Coronet, and The Nation. Through these his name reached Wallace, who offered him the job of conducting preinterviews with guests prior to their appearance on his show. It was Lomax who came up with the idea of a series devoted to the NOI, having secured Elijah Muhammad’s approval through Malcolm. Lomax may also have shared with Malcolm his history in prison, which would have strengthened their relationship.
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