Malcolm X

by Manning Marable

  Rustin’s isolation from the Black Freedom Movement and his desire to use the publicity surrounding Malcolm to reestablish his own credentials may help to explain his growing interest in the Nation of Islam. On November 7, 1960, the two men debated each other on New York City’s WBAI radio, the beginning of a friendship that would endure despite their divergent agendas. Malcolm, speaking first, began by distinguishing the NOI's approach from that of black nationalism. A nationalist, Malcolm explained, shared the same aim of a Muslim. “But the difference is in method. We say the only solution is the religious approach; this is why we stress the importance of a moral reformation.” He denied any commitment to practical politics, asserting Elijah Muhammad was “not a politician.”

  Malcolm had by this time garnered much experience as a debater, but Rustin had more, and he worked over his younger opponent; it didn’t help that the holes in Malcolm’s argument were easy to spot. Rustin attacked Malcolm’s separatist position as conservative, even passive. The vast majority of blacks, he said, were “seeking to become full-fledged citizens,” and the purpose of civil rights protests was to further this cause. Malcolm denied the possibility that “full-fledged” citizenship was attainable. “We feel that if a hundred years after the so-called Emancipation Proclamation the black man is still not free, then we don’t feel that what Lincoln did set them free in the first place.” Rustin quickly pointed out that Malcolm was avoiding the question.

  The older man’s superior debating skills kept his opponent on the defensive. At one point, Malcolm denied that integration was ever going to happen, but admitted that “if the white man were to accept us, without laws being passed, then we would go for it.” This alone was a significant concession, except Rustin wanted to force Malcolm to the logical end point of this argument: that if change was impossible to achieve in America, blacks would have to set up a separate state elsewhere. When Malcolm finally admitted as much, Rustin closed the trap. It was relatively easy for him to recount the major reforms that had taken place, and the practical impossibility of a black state. “The great majority of Negroes [are] feeling that things can improve here. Until you have some place to go, they’re going to want to stay.”

  In a matter of minutes, the essential weakness of the Nation of Islam had been exposed. It presented itself as a religious movement, with no direct interest in politics. Yet, as King had shown, when it came to driving change, religion and politics did not need to be mutually exclusive. Hundreds of black Christian ministers were already using their churches as centers for mobilizing civil disobedience and voter registration efforts. The Nation saw the white government as the enemy; Elijah Muhammad often claimed in speeches that the government had failed black Americans. But with John F. Kennedy’s election in November 1960, largely on the wings of significant support by blacks, reforms seemed to be on the horizon. And even if those reforms were limited, the Garveyite notion of one or more separate black states was never a realizable alternative.

  Most devastating for Malcolm was that he knew Rustin was right. For all the strides the Nation had made in promoting self-improvement in the lives of its members, its political isolation had left it powerless to change the external conditions that bounded their freedoms. Malcolm himself had already embraced the necessity of direct political action when he marched down Harlem’s busiest thoroughfares and blockaded a police station to secure the safety of Johnson X Hinton. And the Third World movements he embraced—from the postcolonial struggles inspired by Pan-Africanism to his identification with Castro—were driven fundamentally by a commitment to politics. Rustin showed that Malcolm was defending a conservative, apolitical program that, by his own actions, he did not endorse.

  Had Malcolm been quicker to grasp the practical implications of Rustin’s logic, he might have avoided one of the great disasters of his career. Soon after the debate, he was charged with leading the NOI's mobilization in Dixie. By the late 1950s, most civil rights organizations were devoting their resources to support campaigns across the South, and the NOI did not want to be caught out. In 1960 in Jackson, Mississippi, thousands of blacks had participated in an economic boycott of segregationist white merchants that proved to be 90 to 95 percent effective. That August NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers investigated and publicized police brutality cases in the state. CORE was also poised for growth, when in December 1960 the Supreme Court ruled in Boynton v. Virginia that racial segregation was outlawed in all interstate transportation terminals, much as the earlier Morgan v. Virginia had done for interstate bus travel itself. In early 1961, under new director James Farmer, CORE would initiate “Freedom Rides” of desegregationist protesters into the Deep South.

  Unlike these civil rights groups, however, the Nation’s Southern strategy would be anchored to its program of black separatism. Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm had together constructed an anti-integrationist strategy that they hoped would find a receptive audience among Southern blacks. A key element of their approach was to brand African-American Christian clergy, especially those involved in nonviolent protests, as “Toms”—even though such an ugly attack directly contradicted Malcolm’s public commitment to the building of a black united front. The plan also called for the construction of new NOI mosques across the region.

  In December, Malcolm traveled to Atlanta, announcing his presence there in an interview on that city’s WERD radio. He attended meetings and gave lectures at Atlanta’s Mosque No. 15 on at least five occasions, before moving on to an interdenominational ministers’ conference in Alabama and other meetings in Tampa, Miami, and Jacksonville.

  Malcolm returned home for the Christmas Day birth of his second daughter, Qubilah, named in honor of Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, but by late January he was back in Atlanta, ostensibly to participate in local NOI meetings. The main purpose of this trip, however, was to establish an understanding with the Ku Klux Klan.

  No single incident in Malcolm’s entire career has generated more controversy than his private caucus with the Klan in January 1961. Most of the details about the planning and logistics of this meeting are still sketchy. What is established is that, despite a previous exchange of hostile letters between KKK leader J. B. Stoner and Elijah Muhammad, both the Klan and the NOI saw advantages to crafting a secret alliance. On January 28, Malcolm and Atlanta NOI leader Jeremiah X met in Atlanta with KKK representatives. Apparently, the Nation was interested in purchasing tracts of farmland and other properties in the South and, as Malcolm explained, wanted to solicit “the aid of the Klan to obtain the land.” According to FBI surveillance, Malcolm assured the white racists that “his people wanted complete segregation from the white race.” If sufficient territory were obtainable, blacks could establish their own racially separate businesses and even government. Explaining that the Nation exercised strict discipline over its members, he urged white racists in Georgia to do likewise: to eliminate those white “traitors who assisted integration leaders.”

  Malcolm himself seems to have viewed the entire affair with distaste, as he complained about it afterward to Elijah Muhammad and did not publicly admit his role until years later. Even then, he worked to distance himself, claiming that he had no knowledge about NOI-Klan contacts after January 1961, though this seems highly unlikely. Jeremiah X, who was actively involved in the Klan negotiations, participated in a daylight Klan rally in Atlanta in 1964, receiving the public praise of Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard Robert M. Shelton.

  To sit down with white supremacists to negotiate common interests, at a moment in black history when the KKK was harassing, victimizing, and even killing civil rights workers and ordinary black citizens, was despicable. Malcolm’s apologetics about negotiating with white racists were insufficient. He had also told the Klansmen that “the Jew is behind the integration movement, using the Negro as a tool.” He had to know that this overture would be used to undermine the struggle for blacks’ equal rights, that Klansmen and white supremacists were committed to murdering civil rights leaders in the region
. Malcolm’s uncritical adoption of Elijah Muhammad’s conservative, black separatist policies had led him to an ugly dead end.

  CHAPTER 7

  “As Sure As God Made Green Apples”

  January 1961-May 1962

  Betty was suffering. For the three weeks prior to the birth of Qubilah, Malcolm had been traveling. On the day of her birth itself, he had devoted most of his time to the mass trial of members from Mosque No. 7. Now her husband was once again away. Within weeks, she would pack up Attallah and Qubilah and journey south to North Philadelphia, this time seeking temporary refuge at the home of her birth father, Shelman Sandlin.

  As Malcolm waited in Atlanta to negotiate with the Ku Klux Klan, he worried that relations with Betty might have reached a point of no return. On January 25, 1961, they spoke by phone, but their conversation only troubled him further. Later that day he decided to write to her. Malcolm observed that his wife had undergone a meaningful change of character during recent weeks. Perhaps expressing his appreciation for the strength and sacrifices Betty had made, especially during her pregnancy and Qubilah’s birth, Malcolm conveyed his love for her. In an act of uncharacteristic generosity—for him—he even stuffed forty dollars into the envelope with the love letter.

  These expressions of affection probably were insufficient to reassure Betty about his love. She had come to resent the fact that for Malcolm, the work of the Nation always came first—the letter had even included a request for Betty to iron out details about the possibility of an NOI show at Carnegie Hall. With little in the way of an emotional connection to build from, inviting his spouse to share in his duties for the NOI may have been his way of trying to bridge the distance between them.

  If the great difficulties Malcolm encountered with Betty ever led him to wonder whether he’d made the right choice of partners, he must have been surprised to learn, sometime in late 1959, that Evelyn Williams, the woman he had turned away, was pregnant. Unmarried, she had been working for only a short time in the secretarial pool at the Nation’s Chicago headquarters, and her scandalous condition brought upon her the full weight of the NOI's draconian policy of punishment and scorn. Yet what no one including Malcolm knew, and would not know until 1963, was that the unborn child’s father was none other than the Messenger himself, Elijah Muhammad.

  With his network of informants throughout the NOI, Muhammad was well aware of the troubles between Malcolm and Betty, and he certainly knew of the romantic feelings Evelyn still harbored toward Malcolm. And yet he selfishly chose to have her anyway. His decision, however, set off a chain reaction that quickly tested the limits of his control. Evelyn became pregnant in the middle of 1959, and by October she began phoning Muhammad at his home, demanding money. She strongly implied that she would cause trouble for him if it was revealed that she was carrying his child. Muhammad was outraged, convinced that he was being blackmailed. “You must think I’m a fool or Santa Claus,” he told her. After another telephone conversation with Evelyn, Muhammad turned to a minister who had heard the exchange and said coldly, “It looks like she will have to be put down.” In an organization where members were routinely beaten for transgressions as innocuous as smoking a cigarette, this statement could not be simply dismissed as tough talk. But Muhammad did nothing to harm Evelyn, and she gave birth to their daughter, Eva Marie, at St. Francis Hospital, in Lynwood, California, on March 30, 1960.

  It would be easy to ascribe Muhammad’s trysts with Evelyn to some secret jealousy he felt over Malcolm’s growing media profile, but Evelyn’s case was not unique. Three months before her child was born, another unmarried NOI secretary, Lucille X Rosary, also gave birth to a child; two more children were born to NOI secretaries that year, in April and December. All were the progeny of Elijah Muhammad, who had taken advantage of the weeklong Chicago MGT tutorials—such as the one Betty had attended—to select attractive and talented young women for service in the national headquarters’ secretarial staff. Once they arrived, it took little for him to get what he wanted from them.

  On the surface, Muhammad was not an impressive-looking man. He was short, mostly bald, homely, and his thin body had been crippled by severe bronchitis. But these external features obscured the attractive power that he exercised over his followers. They were convinced that he had actually spoken to God, and that his mission on earth was to redeem the black race. Muhammad radiated power and authority. When he demanded sex from a woman in his organization, it was inconceivable to him that his overtures would be rejected, or even questioned. The fact that his actions directly violated his own sect’s rules regarding sexual transgressions and morality were irrelevant to him.

  For a time Muhammad’s long-suffering wife, Clara, pretended that she was unaware of her husband’s lascivious behavior, talking only to her daughter, Ethel Sharrieff, and other female confidantes. She complained bitterly to Ethel, for instance, when she discovered a love letter from one of his mistresses. When she refused to turn it over to him, he angrily stopped speaking to her. Clara Muhammad told her daughter, “I don’t know what he thinks my heart is, flesh and bone or a piece of wood or what.” Leading up to the February 1960 Saviour's Day, Clara became overwhelmed by news of additional relations concerning her husband. On February 13, 1960, after a shrill argument, Elijah abruptly abandoned his home. Tearfully, Clara complained to Ethel, “I’m sick of being treated like a dog.”

  Thanks to its wiretaps and informants, the FBI was fully apprised of Muhammad’s infidelities. Having been frustrated in their attempts to find Malcolm’s weaknesses, Bureau officials now considered ways to turn Muhammad’s actions to their advantage. On May 22, 1960, FBI assistant director Cartha De Loach approved the text of a fictive anonymous letter to be sent to Clara Muhammad and several NOI ministers. The letter provocatively charged that “there appears to be a tremendous occupational hazard in being a young unmarried secretary employed in the household of Elijah Muhammad.” He had “preached against extramarital relationships but he doesn’t seem to be able to keep things under control in his own household.” To ensure greater privacy with his mistresses when in Chicago, Muhammad rented a love-nest apartment on South Vernon Avenue, but the Bureau kept one step ahead of him: its Chicago field office contacted the director, who gave approval for telephone taps and electronic bugging devices in the apartment. The Chicago field agent explained, “Muhammad, feeling he is secure in his ‘hideaway,’ may converse more freely with high officials of the NOI and his personal contacts. Through this it is hoped to obtain policy and future plans of Muhammad.”

  By 1961, Muhammad had purchased a second, luxurious home at 2118 East Violet Drive in sunny Phoenix; NOI members were informed that due to the deterioration of Muhammad’s health from severe bronchitis, it was beneficial for him to spend most of the year in the arid southwest. The family home in Chicago, however, was retained. The new property also afforded Muhammad yet another layer of privacy for his sexual adventures. By early October the FBI counted at least five different NOI women who were regularly having sexual intercourse with Muhammad, two of whom were sisters. Like a young gigolo, Elijah tried to play one woman against the others as they competed for his affections.

  Soon there were so many illegitimate children to take care of that new household arrangements were necessary. In October 1961, Muhammad telephoned Evelyn Williams in Chicago and asked her if she would be willing to raise and supervise his illegitimate children in a large home located on the West Coast. He approached with flattery, telling her that he needed to have his “Sweet and Honey come and stay with me for two or three months . . . or years.” Faced with financial burdens and a child, Evelyn agreed, but it didn’t take long for the new arrangement to sour. In July 1962, she phoned Muhammad demanding more money, and accused him of treating his illegitimate children like “stray dogs.” “You don’t allow your other children to live on $300 a month,” she argued. “All I want is money to pay the rent and to get some food and clothing.”

  Muhammad once again complaine
d of blackmail. “I won’t speak to you,” he told her, “or give you one red cent!” Stymied, Evelyn and Lucille Rosary took their children to Muhammad’s Phoenix home, and when no one answered the front door, they left the children at the entrance. Raymond Sharrieff eventually came to the front door and called out to the women to take their children back. Evelyn and Lucille refused, and left. Sharrieff went back inside and called the police, reporting that several small children had been abandoned on their doorstep. The children were subsequently turned over to social workers for investigation. The next day, Muhammad called Evelyn in a fury, but she refused to back down. “From now on, I’m not going to protect you in any way, shape or form,” she warned him. “If you want trouble, you’ll get it.” She told Muhammad that calling the police on his own children was “the dirtiest thing you could do.” Yet whether out of fear, love, or a lingering sense of loyalty, when police interrogated Evelyn about the father of her child, she would not divulge his name. Both Lucille and Evelyn were placed on notice for “child neglect,” but neither was formally charged. These emotional and legal conflicts could not be entirely suppressed or contained by national secretary John Ali, Raymond Sharrieff, or other Chicago officials. By mid-1962 rumors of Muhammad’s messy sex life were circulating widely in Chicago. Malcolm undoubtedly heard these rumors but continued to refuse to examine whether they were true and never imagined that Evelyn was involved.