Alex Haley
Page 6
Haley interested Reader’s Digest in a piece on the Nation, and he wrote Malcolm several letters that went unanswered. Finally he went to the Muslim restaurant in Harlem that served as Malcolm’s office. Haley showed Malcolm a letter from Reader’s Digest requesting a story on the Nation. “You’re a tool—you’re a white man’s tool,” Malcolm responded, but he kept talking to Haley. Haley responded that he intended to write an objective piece, to which Malcolm replied that a white man’s promise was worthless but that he would consider cooperating. Later Malcolm said that Haley would need the permission of Elijah Muhammad. Haley went to Chicago and had dinner with the Messenger. Nothing was said about the article, but when Haley returned to New York, Malcolm agreed to help. Haley began attending Mosque No. 7 in Harlem, and he traveled to NOI temples in several other cities. His easygoing demeanor and enthusiasm for research allayed at least some of the natural suspicions among the NOI men.16
Malcolm introduced Haley to Louis Lomax, the black television reporter who had collaborated with Mike Wallace. Lomax personally rejected the NOI’s separatism but believed that 80 percent of blacks “vibrate sympathetically” with its open hatred of whites. Haley’s friend James Baldwin held a sympathetic view of the Nation. In 1961 Baldwin wrote that “the Muslim movement has all the evidence on its side. . . . This is the great power a Muslim speaker has over his audience. His listeners have not heard the truth about their daily lives honored by anyone else. Almost all others, black or white, prefer to soften the truth, and point to a new day which is coming for America.” In a 1962 New Yorker article, later published as the longer of the two essays in his celebrated book The Fire Next Time, Baldwin wrote that Elijah Muhammad had done “what generations of welfare workers and committees and resolutions and reports and housing projects and playgrounds have failed to do: to heal and redeem drunkards and junkies, to convert people who have come out of prison and to keep them out, to make men chaste and women virtuous, and to invest both the male and the female with a pride and a serenity that hang about them like an unfailing light.”17
Probably the greatest influence on Haley’s understanding of the Nation came from C. Eric Lincoln. Haley and Lincoln were about the same age, had grown up in Alabama at the same time, and both had backgrounds in the AME church. They spent time together in Greenwich Village while Lincoln finished his dissertation, the first scholarly treatment of the Nation, Black Muslims in America, published in 1961. Lincoln placed the NOI within the historical context of black nationalism. Lincoln began with William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, who in 1903 published The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois argued for the existence of an Afro-American folk spirit, writing that “the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world. . . . Negro blood has a message for the world.” Du Bois defined black nationalism as including a sense of alienation from white power and dominant white values. He emphasized blacks’ common history—a glorious African past, the horrors of slavery, the disappointments of emancipation—and the myths that blacks built on them. Black nationalism included the celebration of African American culture and the belief that blacks’ spirit as a people arose from their cultural distinctiveness. For Du Bois, whites, in essence, were selfish and violent, and blacks in their essence were gifted with higher sensitivity, a distinctive humaneness that whites lacked.18
Lincoln noted that most older members of the Nation of Islam shared a background in Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which had attracted millions of American members in the 1920s. Garvey insisted the United States was far too racist and undemocratic to ever include blacks as equals, and he cited the mistreatment of blacks during and after World War I to justify a plan for blacks’ wholesale migration to Africa. Few of Garvey’s followers actually intended to emigrate, but all responded to the movement’s promotion of race pride. Unlike the NOI in its condemnation of Christianity, Garvey reconciled evangelical Christianity with black nationalism by portraying God and Jesus as black. It worked: many of the UNIA’s most devoted organizers were Christian ministers, including Malcolm’s own father. Garvey’s influence among blacks raised the suspicions of the U.S. government, which believed rumors of armed Garveyites preparing for race war. In 1925 Garvey was convicted of mail fraud, sent to prison for several years, and then deported. The UNIA went into decline, but some of its supporters joined the Nation of Islam when it emerged in Detroit in the 1930s.
“Mr. Muhammad Speaks” appeared in Reader’s Digest in March 1960. The article began with a tone similar to that of The Hate That Hate Produced. Blacks across America, the piece noted, were talking about Elijah Muhammad and the Nation, which Haley described as a “vitriolically anti-white, anti-Christian cult that preaches black superiority.” The Nation was building businesses and schools intended to end black dependency on whites and to help blacks in cities find “a new way of life—a militant and arrogant black unity.” He quoted Malcolm: “When I was a Christian, I was a criminal. I was only doing what the white man taught me.” This rejection of white society, Haley wrote, arose from discrimination against blacks, and his article turned more sympathetic to the Nation. He noted: “Old friends of new Muslims are astounded at the incredible changes of personality which take place as converts swap lifelong habits for new spartan standards.” He quoted black sources who understood the Nation’s growth as a response to bad social conditions for blacks. He concluded that it was “important for Christianity and democracy to help remove the Negroes’ honest grievances and thus eliminate the appeal of such a potent racist cult.”19
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In 1961 Haley made a connection with a new magazine, Show Business Illustrated, published by Hugh Hefner and the Playboy enterprise. Haley developed a story about Miles Davis, the brilliant jazz trumpeter, a man known for his hostility to the media and his racial edginess. Davis routinely refused to talk to white journalists, but he gave the affable black journalist an interview. Before the article could be published, however, Show Business Illustrated folded. A. C. Spectorsky, Hefner’s editorial director, was transforming Playboy from a girlie magazine into a publication with serious literary content and social criticism, including a concern for American race relations. Hefner was sympathetic to civil rights activism. He forced the desegregation of Playboy clubs in southern cities, and he and Spectorsky instilled a pro–civil rights message in the magazine. In July 1962 Playboy ran a long article, “Through the Racial Looking Glass,” by Nat Hentoff, the jazz critic for the Village Voice and a writer in close touch with black intellectuals and artists, that explored black anger. Hentoff quoted the jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie as telling a group of white jazzmen, “You people had better just lie down and die. You’ve lost Africa and Asia, and now they are cutting out from white power everywhere. You’d better give up or learn how it feels being a minority.” James Baldwin asserted for the article that “the American Negro can no longer be, and will never be again, controlled by white America’s image of him.” Hentoff also quoted the comedian Dick Gregory: “I’m so goddamn sick and tired of a white man telling us about us.”20
In 1962 Spectorsky appointed Murray Fisher to develop the magazine’s interview series. Fisher, tall and muscular and about thirty years old at the time, was described by Playboy colleagues as abrasive, combative, and even a bully. Fisher found Haley’s unpublished piece on Miles Davis in the files of Show Business Illustrated and asked him to develop it into the first Playboy interview. Davis had liked Haley since the writer showed up at Davis’s boxing gym and put on gloves to spar with him. “In a clinch I agreed with Davis that writers and reporters were a hateful, untrustworthy breed,” Haley recalled. Davis laughed and later gave Haley a series of illuminating interviews. He dwelt on the perils of being a black celebrity; he believed he had been mistreated by white critics and disrespected by white audiences at his performances, and unlike most black entertainers in the past, he did not keep his resentments to himself.
Davis had long rejected bookings in the South. “I ain’t going to play nowhere in the South that Negroes can’t come. But I ain’t going to play nowhere in the North that Negroes don’t come.” Davis concluded by saying, “This whole prejudice mess is something you would feel so good if it could just be got rid of, like a big sore eating inside of your belly.”21
The Miles Davis piece established Haley as a gifted interviewer. Haley’s affability and his reticence about his own political and social views lent an empathetic tone to his profiles. “I like to study the person,” he later said, “study what they’ve done, be low-key in my approach with them . . . project by my manner and my sincerity, which really has to be sincere, that I was genuinely interested in what they did and how they did it.” But in the Davis interview, Haley’s questions did not exhibit overt sympathy; they might have come from a polite, white skeptic.
In January 1963 the Saturday Evening Post published another profile of the NOI titled “Black Merchants of Hate,” which Haley co-authored with Alfred Balk, a white investigative reporter on the Post staff. Balk and Haley presented themselves as an interracial investigating team that discovered things both “heartening” and “deeply disturbing.” During their research, Balk was reporting to the FBI on his and Haley’s research and getting information from the Bureau with the promise that he would not attribute it to the FBI. This was a common tactic at the Bureau in investigating organizations suspected of “un-American” activities.22 Haley and Balk’s story began with how, in 1957, Malcolm dispersed a Harlem crowd assembled to protest the beating of an NOI member. “No man should have that much power,” a white policeman observed. Police in Chicago insisted that the NOI was not a mere cult but “a mass movement on a national scale.” Haley and Balk described an NOI meeting of five thousand that put them in mind of the “huge meetings at which Hitler screamed his doctrines of Aryan supremacy.” As quoted in the article, Elijah Muhammad declared that whites were corrupt and their civilization doomed: “Get away from them! . . . They was taught to do evil! They was taught to hate you and me! Stand up and fight the white man! . . . We will rule!” Haley and Balk quoted C. Eric Lincoln’s characterization of NOI members as having been uneducated, unskilled, isolated from “the common values of society,” “shunned by successful whites and Negroes alike,” and hopeless until they heard Muhammad’s prophecy of race supremacy.23 The article delivered the message of black subversion of traditional authority, which the FBI consistently advanced about black groups, including civil rights organizations.
“Black Merchants of Hate” carried a harsher tone about the NOI than Haley’s 1960 Reader’s Digest piece. The Post had a history of racist fiction and edgy investigative journalism. It probably reflected the influence of Balk, and perhaps through him the anti-black views of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Haley had certainly been exposed to a much more complex understanding of black anger than was reflected in the Post piece.
The other noteworthy difference between the Reader’s Digest piece and the Saturday Evening Post article was the latter’s much more extensive focus on Malcolm X. He was portrayed as the most influential Black Muslim. The media attention contributed to a growing opposition to Malcolm in the close circle around Elijah Muhammad, especially on the part of Muhammad’s aide John Ali, formerly a protégé of Malcolm, and of Muhammad’s daughter and son-in-law, Ethel and Raymond Sharieff. In 1960 and 1961 Muhammad had disapproved of Malcolm’s meeting with Cuban leader Fidel Castro and his public criticism of President Kennedy; the Messenger discouraged any activity that invited closer scrutiny and harassment by the federal government. Muhammad downplayed his unhappiness with Malcolm when they met, but the inner circle schemed against Malcolm with Muhammad’s tacit approval. At the same time, people within the sect had been whispering that Muhammad had fathered a number of children with secretaries in the organization. The gossip was true, but Malcolm tried to ignore it. He saw himself as a loyal servant of the Messenger and wanted to be seen as such by others, even as his fame as the main public representative of the NOI grew.24
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Haley’s positive relationship with Malcolm X seemed not to suffer because of “Black Merchants of Hate.” When Haley asked him to do a Playboy interview, Malcolm and Muhammad again agreed. Spectorsky, who was Jewish, objected to the interview, probably because of the vicious anti-Semitism Malcolm expressed. Hefner overruled him, and the editors justified the interview on the grounds that “knowledge and awareness are necessary and effective antitoxins against the venom of hate.” Introducing the interview, Playboy characterized Malcolm as Muhammad’s erudite disciple, who wielded “all but absolute authority over the movement and its membership as Muhammad’s business manager, trouble shooter, prime minister and heir apparent.”25 In the interview, Malcolm said there had never been a sincere white man, ever, in history. Whites had brainwashed blacks, but now blacks had seen the truth of the white devils’ malevolent influence, and the white man’s influence in the world was finished. Christians of all varieties were evil, especially Catholics, who produced fascist and communist dictators. Jews liked to advise the black man, he said, “but they never advise him how to solve his problem the way Jews solved their problem.” Elijah Muhammad “cleans us up—morally, mentally and spiritually” from the “the mess that white men have made.” Blacks should be given their own territory in the United States. Muhammad taught that it was God’s intention “to put the black man back at the top of civilization, where he was in the beginning—before Adam, the white man, was created.” Bourgeois Negroes pretended to be alienated from the Black Muslims, “but they’re just making the white man think they don’t go for what Mr. Muhammad is saying.”
Throughout the interview, Haley challenged Malcolm’s interpretations of history and motive, but the minister never backed away from the anti-white doctrines of the NOI. Malcolm insisted to Haley that Playboy’s editors would never print the interview as he gave it, and he was taken aback when in fact they did. Haley and Malcolm had created a seminal document of American history and a memorable expression of black alienation. The interview changed the course of both men’s lives.
4
The Fearsome Black Demagogue
In early 1963 Charles Ferguson, Haley’s editor at Reader’s Digest, arranged for him to meet the literary agent Paul Revere Reynolds Jr. Ferguson and Reynolds were good friends and neighbors in the Westchester County town of Chappaqua, home of Reader’s Digest. Reynolds, tall with silver hair, in his late fifties, gave the strong impression of a proper Yankee gentleman. Son of the first American literary agent to represent English writers in the U.S. market, including Winston Churchill, H. G. Wells, and Arthur Conan Doyle, Reynolds was now one of the most influential literary agents in New York. He represented Irving Wallace, Morris West, William Shirer, and Howard Fast and had nurtured Richard Wright’s career with sensitivity to the racial indignities that he endured. Reynolds agreed to take on Haley as a client. Haley sent Reynolds two hundred pages of what he called “advance material” for the book he entitled “Henning, U.S.A.” This was Haley’s original attempt to treat life in his Tennessee hometown as representative of race relations in the South. Reynolds’s response was not encouraging. “I’ve got to be pretty pessimistic about this manuscript. I’m keen about you as a writer, about your ability as a writer. But these vignettes would be very difficult for a book publisher to sell in my opinion.” Haley was undaunted by the critique: “I have heard so much of the caliber of your judgment, and of the publishing field’s respect for you, that I now feel as though a milestone has been achieved when my efforts at a book cause you to want to discuss it.”1
In late April 1963 the New York Times ran a story titled “Assertive Spirit Stirs Negroes,” written by M. S. “Mike” Handler, who had just returned to the United States from three decades of reporting on the origins and aftermath of World War II in Europe. Perhaps because he was out of the United States during the popular de
monization of the Nation of Islam, Handler offered a more dispassionate evaluation of the black mood than it had received in the American media so far. Thirty years of experience in Europe had taught him that powerful forces in a struggle were frequently “buried beneath the visible surface and make themselves felt in many ways long before they burst out into the open.” He believed that ideas had more power than Americans typically afforded them, and he sensed that the opinions most influencing black thinking at the moment came from “those working in the penumbra of the [civil rights] movement—‘underground,’ so to speak.” Handler defined Black Nationalism—giving its name in the upper case—as an assertive mood represented by the Nation of Islam and in particular by Malcolm X. All segments of the black population shared some of the black nationalist anger, but only the Black Muslims renounced integration with whites. Handler called Malcolm X “the dynamic leader” of the Black Muslims and said he now overshadowed Elijah Muhammad. Malcolm articulated black anger more powerfully than anyone else. Handler gave Malcolm the last word: “You cannot integrate the Negroes and the whites without bloodshed. . . . The only peaceful way is for the Negroes and whites to separate.” The story ran while Martin Luther King Jr. demonstrated in Birmingham, but his leadership of the civil rights movement was peripheral in Handler’s story.2
The Handler story coincided with the publication of Haley’s Playboy interview with Malcolm. A great many Americans in 1963 would believe something was true only if they read it in the New York Times, and now Haley had that validation. He wrote to Reynolds about the man Haley now referred to as “the fearsome black demagogue.” He thought the combination of his Playboy interview and the Times article created a “tailored package to impress upon a publisher what Malcolm’s signed book would offer.” Haley had that day discussed with Malcolm the idea of collaborating on a book. Malcolm was happy with the responses to the Playboy interview and said that he had Elijah Muhammad’s tentative consent for the book but Haley would have to discuss the matter with the Messenger. Haley went to Muhammad and was told, “Allah approves.”