Williams then took a different tack. “When this suspension without cause was taken,” he asked, “did you ever seek any legal remedy to restore you to your position?”
“I tried to keep it private,” Malcolm replied. “I tried to keep it out of the court and I tried to keep it out of the public and I asked for a hearing in private . . . because there were facts that I thought would be destructive to the Muslim movement.”
“You are making it public now,” Williams replied.
“Yes,” Malcolm acknowledged, “only because they have driven me to the point where I have to tell it in order to protect myself.”
“Isn’t it a fact that you have organized another mosque?” Williams asked.
Malcolm at first dodged the question, but finally admitted that he had started Muslim Mosque, Inc., “to spread the Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s teaching among the twenty-two million non-Muslims.”
As Williams continued to hammer away, the framework of Malcolm’s argument—that he continued to be a faithful follower of Elijah Muhammad—fell apart. The evidence against him was simply all too plain for anyone willing to look closely. Williams noted, for example, that many MMI members were former NOI members. He pointed out that Malcolm had announced to the press that he was “no longer affiliated” with Mosque No. 7, and that he had renounced the leadership and spiritual authority of Muhammad. Therefore, he concluded, the East Elmhurst duplex rightfully belonged to the Nation of Islam.
But Malcolm wasn’t yet ready to concede. He pointed out that he actually held two formal positions within the NOI: minister of Mosque No. 7 and national minister. He had been suspended, technically, as Mosque No. 7’s head, but Muhammad had never abolished the national minister's office. He argued that the East Elmhurst residence agreement was exclusively “between me and the Honorable Elijah Muhammad,” that the place had been “purchased for me,” and that the Messenger “told me the house should be mine.” Elijah himself had emphasized that this was truly a gift to him personally: “He told me over and over that it should be in my name, that it was for me because of the work I was doing and had been doing.”
Williams tried to undercut this argument by implying that Malcolm had been skimming money from the Nation for years—much of his public speaking honoraria surely had gone into his pocket. He tried to present Malcolm’s life in the Nation as a long, cushy ride on the organization’s dime, asking, “Isn’t it also a fact that every mosque you go to, that the mosque themself [sic] takes care of your expenses?” Malcolm fought back, denying such claims as slanderous, and asserting that the real reason for his “suspension” in December 1963 was due to a “very private” matter. “I never sought to gain anything personally from the Nation of Islam. This is why I lived [at the beginning of his ministry] in a room and then lived in three rooms.” But Williams continued to question Malcolm’s motives. “Now, sir, when this house was being purchased,” he noted, “you were not even around when they met to buy this house. When they had the first discussion in the mosque about the house, you weren’t around, were you?” He was astutely using Malcolm’s proselytizing travels to establish his lack of interest in the acquisition of the property.
Malcolm must have been in anguish, sitting before a white judge, listening to himself being accused of theft and corruption in an organization for which he once would have gladly sacrificed his life. He could accept many things, but not dishonor. And the legal maneuvering was merely a way of avoiding the central issue, the real reason for the split, which he remained hesitant to bring up on the record. He told Williams that the funds purchasing the residence never came from the incorporated Mosque No. 7; no mosque trustees met to issue a check covering the home’s down payment. “It came from the spiritual body from the Muslims.”
Then, after nearly two hours, he finally told the court that “the Honorable Elijah Muhammad had taken on nine wives besides the one that he had. . . . This is the reason for my suspension.” He emphasized that he had been prepared to keep “the whole thing secret and private if they would give me a hearing. . . . They would rather take the public court than keep it quiet among Muslims.”
What Malcolm may not have fully appreciated until the trial was that the ideological campaign against him was turning into a religious jihad, and the issues raised by the Queens trial only increased the tensions between the two camps. On the first day of courtroom proceedings, 180 men attended Mosque No. 7’s regular FOI meeting, whose topic was “So What if He [Elijah Muhammad] Is Not All Pure, Look What He Did for You and I [sic].ʺ During this lecture, the speaker asserted, “We should destroy Malcolm.” An FOI captain at the meeting—probably Joseph—instructed the Fruit, saying, “Malcolm is not to be touched, the rest is okay”—a statement that amounted to a declaration of open season on any Malcolm loyalist.
The next evening, shortly after eleven p.m., six of Malcolm’s followers, believing rumors that their leader had been either kidnapped or murdered, drove to Mosque No. 7, at 102 West 116th Street. The man instigating the confrontation was William George, who was armed with a .30 caliber M-1 carbine rifle containing a clip with thirty rounds of ammunition. Fifty-one-year-old Herbert Dudley, another Malcolmite, brought a 6.75 Beretta rifle. About thirty to thirty-five Nation members rushed out into the street to confront the attackers with improvised weapons of self-defense, such as broom handles. For a few minutes there was a tense standoff, since neither side was prepared to start the hostilities. The NYPD raced to the street scene and largely concurred with the NOI group that Malcolm’s people had provoked the incident. The Malcolmites were arrested and their firearms seized. A day later, at Mosque No. 24 in Richmond, Virginia, Minister Nicholas of Washington, D.C., declared that “Malcolm X really should be killed for teaching against Elijah Muhammad.”
For as much as the trial and the increasing threats on his life consumed Malcolm, they did not keep him from maintaining a hectic schedule of speeches and organization building. Already he sensed that his days were numbered—“I’m probably a dead man already,” he’d candidly told Mike Wallace—and as the summer progressed he pushed through events with great speed, straining to accomplish his goals. He accepted many speaking invitations, including one from Henry Kissinger at Harvard, and continued to work at simultaneously building the size and credibility of both Muslim Mosque, Inc., and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Chairing an MMI business meeting in Harlem, he announced that he was considering asking MMI members to tithe ten dollars weekly, for a period of six months. A report would then be circulated on “all the money taken in” along with all expenditures. His plan was to establish a newspaper similar to Muhammad Speaks. MMI branch organizations were also to be established in Boston and Philadelphia, then in other cities. It was finally clear that Malcolm envisioned a national Islamic network that one day could be truly competitive with the Nation of Islam. At an MMI rally in late June he praised Islam as “the only true faith” for black people and promoted the OAAU, which would develop “an educational program” to highlight blacks’ contributions to history. This new formation would not engage in sit-ins, he promised, but instead “they will take what is rightfully theirs.”
He also returned to his correspondence with a renewed sense of urgency. News of a workers’ strike in Nigeria had reached Malcolm, so he wrote to his friend Joseph Iffeorah, of the Ministry of Works and Surveys, asking for information. Malcolm was also highly attentive in efforts to recruit new followers. A letter he wrote on June 22 to a young, single African-American woman working at the New Yorker magazine displayed charm and flattery. “Your recent correspondence is really one of the best written letters that I’ve ever received,” she replied. It was “very poetic, but at the same time your thoughts were very clear.” The young woman told Malcolm that she did not want to join any organization because she wanted to feel “free.” Malcolm reminded her that it takes “organization to coordinate the talents of various people.” He urged her to come to the OAAU's founding public gathering at the
Audubon on June 28: “Even if you have no desire to become an active participant, I do wish you would come out Sunday as a spectator.” The young woman, Sara Mitchell, not only attended that rally, but within several months became an invaluable leader of the OAAU.
The progress Malcolm made in these weeks was constantly under threat of being undone by the growing violence of his increasing public feud with the Nation. In the streets, things were getting out of control. In the Corona neighborhood of Queens, assistant minister Larry 4X Prescott had recently established a Muslim restaurant on Northern Boulevard. On June 22 seventeen-year-old Bryan Kingsley, a Malcolm supporter, was loitering at the restaurant’s entrance, talking tough. Larry went outside and smacked the boy hard across the head before—along with other NOI members—he chased Kingsley down the street. The boy telephoned Tom Wallace, Ruby Dee’s brother and a strong advocate of Malcolm’s. Wallace drove his station wagon to the restaurant, pulled out a rifle, and confronted Larry and another NOI member. “Thomas and I [had] worked together, and I knew something about [his] character,” Larry 4X recalled in a 2006 interview. “I said, ‘Well, go ahead and shoot if you’re going to shoot me.’ ” Wallace warned him not to approach him, but Larry walked toward him, convinced he would not pull the trigger. When he got close enough, Larry grabbed the rifle and, turning the weapon butt-first, “beat him with it. And then I broke out all of his car windows.” His face shattered and bloody, Wallace filed charges with the NYPD, which arrested Larry; Larry in return filed assault charges against Wallace, who was also arrested. Both men were charged five hundred dollars bail, with their cases remanded to the Queens Criminal Court.
Malcolm was extremely disturbed by Wallace’s beating. From a personal perspective, it was a deep betrayal: Larry 4X had been one of his trusted protégés. Perhaps worse, the incident threatened to damage connections he needed for his political work, as Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee had become pivotal to his access to the black arts and entertainment community. To the Amsterdam News, Malcolm asserted that Muhammad was responsible for the escalating violence. “The followers of Elijah Muhammad,” Malcolm explained, “will not do anything unless he tells them to.”
Larry 4X clearly recalled his Queens Criminal Court appearance because he had “my suit on, and bow tie.” All the other prisoners began to laugh. “They said, ‘Look at this guy, and he’s clean as a pimp, and he has assaulted somebody!’” Soon after Larry was taken to court, Malcolm entered the chamber: “He came over to me,” Larry recalled. “He said—and this is the part where I have lost my respect for him—he said, ‘Larry, you’re dead.’ ” The court dismissed the charges against both men, but the damage was done. “That was the last time I had any words with Malcolm,” Larry stated. “Then things just got progressively worse.”
The beating of Tom Wallace and similar incidents in these weeks prompted Malcolm to issue an “open letter” of conciliation to Elijah Muhammad. Both groups, Malcolm wrote, needed to address the civil rights issues confronting Southern blacks. “Instead of wasting all this energy fighting each other we should be working in unity . . . with other leaders and organizations.” On the surface, it was an appeal for the feuding sides to end the violence, but to those in the Nation who could read between the lines, Malcolm’s letter was yet another provocation. The appeal asked Muhammad how, since the Nation had refused to use violence in response to “white racists” in Los Angeles and Rochester, it could employ violence against another Black Muslim group. Muhammad’s earlier failure to authorize retaliatory violence against excessive police force was still a sore point for many of Malcolm’s followers.
In the midst of the feuding, Malcolm managed to steer the Organization of Afro-American Unity to its triumphant public birth. At a major rally on June 28, a thousand people gathered at the Audubon Ballroom to celebrate the group’s official founding. Just over twenty blocks away, the Nation of Islam was holding its own rally before a crowd at least six times as large, but at the Audubon a pivotal event in black American history was unfolding, with the emergence of a militant black nationalist political group that had the potential for redefining both the civil rights mainstream and black electoral politics. And unlike the Nation of Islam or even Muslim Mosque, Inc., the Organization of Afro-American Unity was purely secular, which vastly expanded its potential reach. As Herman Ferguson recalled, “I felt that if Malcolm could . . . present his politics minus the religious side of it, that would remove a lot of the concerns that many black people had.” This sentiment could be felt deeply among the group’s early organizers. Even before the founding rally, the “nonreligious people” like Shifflett, Ferguson, and others had long felt “they were not a part of the old guard. There was tension and resentment.” Finally, though, it was their moment, as Malcolm publicly reached out to the mainstream of the civil rights struggle and the most progressive elements of the black middle class. Present at the rally to acknowledge Malcolm’s turn were attorney Conrad Lynn, writer Paule Marshall, newspaper editor William Tatum, and Juanita Poitier, Sidney Poitier's wife.
The high point of the rally was Malcolm’s reading of the OAAU's “Statement of Basic Aims and Objectives,” in which the new group dedicated itself “to unify[ing] the Americans of African descent in their fight for Human Rights and Dignity” and promised to “dedicate ourselves to the building of a political, economic, and social system of justice and peace” in the United States. The statement praised, among other historic documents, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, which “are the principles in which we believe and these documents if put into practice represent the essence of mankind’s hopes and good intentions.” Central to the OAAU's program was Malcolm’s campaign to bring the United States before the United Nations, where “we can indict Uncle Sam for the continued criminal injustices that our people experience in this government.” The bold statement placed the OAAU firmly within the rich protest traditions of black America going back to Frederick Douglass in the nineteenth century.
Instead of demonizing whites, Malcolm now offered them a role in his human rights initiative. White allies could contribute financially to the OAAU, and they were encouraged to work for racial justice within white communities. Black liberation, however, came with a price: OAAU membership cost two dollars, and members were expected to donate one dollar each week to the organization. The group also promised to mobilize the entire African-American community “block by block to make the community aware of its power and potential.” Taken in the broad view, the OAAU's founding marked the first major attempt to consolidate black revolutionary nationalism since the age of Garvey.
In June, Paul Reynolds negotiated a “one-shot sale” of excerpts from the Autobiography that would appear in the Saturday Evening Post prior to the book’s publication. To obtain Doubleday’s consent, Reynolds volunteered to cut the authors’ advances to $15,000. Since Haley and Malcolm together had already been paid a total of $17,769.75, the authors had to agree to pay back $2,500, plus not to request any additional advance money from Doubleday until after the book was published. Unfortunately Haley was still hard-pressed for money, and the new Doubleday agreement provided no material incentive to finish the book project.
Although Malcolm’s schedule had become too hectic to accommodate new interviews with Haley, the two men continued to communicate. On June 8, Haley confessed that, after getting a postcard from Malcolm, he had submitted it to “one of the ranking grapho-analysts in the country” and wanted to include “such objective findings” in his afterword of the autobiography. The analyst described Malcolm as an outgoing personality, broad-minded and possessing “a definite feeling of purpose, a calling. His goals are practical.” But the subject was also “not a deep thinker” and showed “a lack of decisiveness in his makeup.” Despite the questionable basis of the report, Haley wrote confidently that “it comes very close to you, I feel, from my own personal appraisals.”
Less than two weeks later, Haley again wrote to Malcolm, as well as to P
aul Reynolds. In his seven-page typed letter to Malcolm, he urged him to exercise caution: “I sometimes think that you do not really understand what will be the effect of this book. There has never been, at least not in our time, any other book like it. Do you realize that to do these things you will have to be alive?ʺ He pleaded with his subject to consider Betty’s predicament if he should die—”and for the rest of her life, trying to explain to your and her four children what a man you were.” To Reynolds, Haley revealed an entirely different agenda. Reviewing the “wealth of material” in the still unfinished manuscript, he wrote that the book could benefit from “careful, successive rewritings, distilling, aligning, [and] balancing . . . to get it right.” Its conclusion, he now recognized, was “all important,” because it placed his subject “on the world stage.” He cited an article by Malcolm, “Why I Am for Goldwater,” and the existence of his recent tour diary, a “soupçon of even fissionable international religious and political concerns.” Haley said that he wanted to edit and expand both, asserting that the texts would “keep [Malcolm] on-stage, while providing him with more funds.” (These extraordinary materials would not be seen by scholars or the general public until 2008. Malcolm never had the time, or opportunity, to develop his travel diaries into a second book.) Within the severe limitations of his schedule, he read through Haley’s Autobiography drafts as they were produced. The final essay chapters that had been prepared earlier were cut, a decision that may have been Haley’s alone; these are what today are called the book’s “missing chapters.” Malcolm probably sensed that the Autobiography might become a crucial part of his political legacy, and he became more determined to complete the project. Ironically, his extended absence from the United States beginning in July gave Haley an excuse for not working vigorously on the manuscript. As the summer began, Haley moved his attention to more potentially lucrative writing projects. He was already pitching to Kenneth McCormick a book manuscript idea called Before This Anger, which a decade later would become the best seller Roots.
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