by Mike Wallace
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The “economic plight of the Negro” was a relatively new theme for King, and it would soon become his top priority. During the last two years of his life, the focus of his quest for equality and justice shifted more and more from racial matters to economic issues. Those were the concerns that brought him to Memphis in the spring of 1968. That city’s striking sanitation workers had reached out to King for support, and he had responded. It was there that he was shot and killed while leaving his motel for an early dinner. Given all that he accomplished, I’ve always found it hard to believe that at the time of his death, he was only thirty-nine years old.
I’ve had the privilege of interviewing many public figures over the years, and on more than one occasion, I’ve been asked which one I admired the most. The first time that question was put to me, I gave it considerable thought, because several worthy candidates came to mind. The answer I eventually settled on was Martin Luther King, Jr.
Some of my reasons for citing King were predictable enough. He was a man who devoted his life to making America live up to its heritage as the land of the free, a country where “liberty and justice for all”
was not just an empty slogan. He had the courage of his convictions, and he acted on them. From the bus boycott in Montgomery, where it all began, to the last demonstrations on the streets of Memphis, King not only preached nonviolence, he practiced it, even though the protests he led frequently put him in harm’s path. Given all the risks he took, it’s hardly surprising that his life came to a violent end.
But for me, King’s most impressive moment came about a year before he was killed, when he took a controversial stand on an issue that was not directly related to civil rights. In early 1967, he spoke out publicly against President Johnson’s war policies in Vietnam. He condemned the U.S. presence there as immoral and argued vigorously that the resources being used to fight that war should be chan-
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neled into the social goals of the Great Society programs. King’s decision to break with Johnson on the war was made with considerable anguish, for no one had a more profound appreciation than King of all that LBJ had done to advance the cause of civil rights. King’s public opposition to the war was another sign that he was determined to expand his leadership beyond the sphere of the civil rights movement, and more than anything else, that heroic stand crystallized my immense regard for Martin Luther King, Jr.
In 1994, I was the correspondent on a profile of King that was part of the 20th Century series that CBS News produced for A&E. In my close to that broadcast, I offered this tribute to the man I continue to admire more than any other public figure who rose to prominence during my lifetime:
“Martin Luther King’s moral passion and his ability to inspire others with his extraordinary eloquence left an indelible mark on America. And his premature death left a void in our history that has never really been filled. Like Washington and Lincoln, he was one of the very few Americans who, in the context of his time, could truly be called the indispensable man.”
M a l c o l m X
T H E C A L L F O R B L A C K P O W E R and other militant battle cries that swept across the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s startled and frightened many white Americans. If some of us were less alarmed, it was probably because we recognized that the outburst of black rage was not a new phenomenon. In many ways, it echoed the harsh and inflammatory rhetoric I first encountered back in 1959.
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At that time, America’s racial climate was still fairly placid. Yes, the civil rights movement was under way, but it was just gathering steam for the major offensives to come. In addition to my interview show on Channel 13, I anchored a broadcast called News Beat, which had the distinction of being New York’s first half-hour evening news program. All the other nightly newscasts, local and network, were still locked into the fifteen-minute format that had been in effect throughout the 1950s.
So that was my professional domain in the spring of 1959, when I met with a black reporter named Louis Lomax. He had come to my office with a proposal that began with a question: “Mike, what do you know about the Black Muslims?”
I told him I had never even heard the term. Nor, I felt certain, had any of my white colleagues and acquaintances. Remember, in those days most blacks still preferred to be called Negroes, and Moslems—
spelled with anO, not a U—were Arabs who lived mainly inthe Middle East. Lomax promptly enlightened me: “The Black Muslims are black separatists. They’re a hate group. They hate white people.”
He went on to say that the Black Muslims were “totally opposed to integration” and therefore had nothing but contempt for the civil rights movement. He described them as a rapidly growing army that already had recruited more than two hundred thousand African-Americans into its ranks. I scoffed at that claim, insisting that such a visibly large and angry force would have attracted some attention from the press. I had not seen one story about the so-called Black Muslims in any major newspaper or magazine.
“That’s right!” Lomax declared. “The white press isn’t covering this story because the white press can’t get near these people. And that’s what I want to talk to you about.”
He proposed that we collaborate on a documentary about the
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Black Muslims, and it led to one of the most explosive pieces I’ve ever been involved in. Lomax did most of the reporting, and I anchored the Channel 13 broadcast, which we called “The Hate That Hate Produced.” The title sounds like tabloid hype, but the story more than lived up to its billing. Our report included film coverage of a Muslim rally steeped in an atmosphere of pure venom. One speaker after another condemned Caucasians as “white devils” who, down through the centuries, had committed every crime imaginable against black men and women. There were also interviews with the leader of the movement, Elijah Muhammad, and its New York minister, Malcolm X, who told Lomax that “the white man was the serpent in the Garden of Eden. By nature he is evil.” Moreover, in his interview with Lomax, Muhammad predicted that within a decade a “general insurrection” of black Americans would erupt and inflict “plenty of bloodshed.”
Nothing quite like it had ever been broadcast or published (at least not in the mainstream press), and when we aired “The Hate That Hate Produced,” we struck more than a few nerves. Moderate Negro leaders, like my friend Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, charged that we had grossly exaggerated the size and significance of the Black Muslims. Even more censorious were most of the reviewers, who accused us of sensationalism and fearmongering. Our response to these criticisms from the power centers of the white media was a de-fiant challenge: “All right, don’t take our word for it. Go see for your-selves.” And they did. Over the next few months, The New York Times, Newsweek magazine, and other influential voices in American journalism published reports on the Black Muslims that verified the essence of what we had aired.
The Muslim who emerged from our documentary as the star of the movement (formally known as the Nation of Islam) was not its
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titular leader. Elijah Muhammad was a remote and rather shy man who, in his rare public appearances, did not come across as all that articulate and forceful. The man who did possess those qualities in great abundance was the movement’s most visible and vocal spokesman, Malcolm X, an ex-convict who had converted to the Nation of Islam while serving time for burglaries. Malcolm had a magnetic presence, and even though he railed against white America in a calm, even-tempered manner, the edge to his voice revealed the depth and passion of his beliefs. When he appeared on television and vowed that black separatism and other Muslim goals would be achieved “by any means necessary,” there was no mistaking the resolve and sense of menace in his message.
S
ince I was manifestly one of the “white devils,” neither Muhammad nor Malcolm would consent to be interviewed by me. Without Louis Lomax or another black reporter, we wouldn’t have gotten the story. In time, Malcolm became more accessible to the mainstream media, and I was one of the first white television reporters to interview him. Although he never confirmed this in so many words, I suspected that he had come to appreciate all the hoopla our broadcast had generated for him and the Muslims. I did a number of stories on Malcolm over the next few years, first at Channel 13 and later at CBS
News. He proved an excellent source of information and insights about the black community, and however hostile his feelings were toward white people in general, I always thought he played fair in his dealings with me. In fact, there gradually formed between us a mutual respect, even a kind of friendship, although I didn’t fully realize how mutual it was until I read in the autobiography he wrote with Alex Haley that he regarded me as one of the few white reporters he could trust.
As time passed, Malcolm toned down his harsh views to the
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point where he was no longer driven by a visceral hatred of white America. The decisive change in his outlook occurred during his 1964 pilgrimage to Mecca, where he worshipped side by side with devout Muslims who were white. When he came home from that journey, Malcolm renounced the racism that he had been preaching for the past several years, and I asked him about the dramatic shift in his attitude when I interviewed him on the CBS Morning News in the early summer of ’64.
W A L L A C E : Then the white man is no longer the devil and evil?
M A L C O L M X : The Holy Koran teaches us to judge a man by his conscious behavior, by his intentions. So I judge a man by his conscious behavior. I am not a racist. I don’t subscribe to any of the tenets of racism.
W A L L A C E : And so you feel that there are good whites and good blacks and bad whites and bad blacks?
M A L C O L M X : It’s not a case of being good or bad blacks and whites. It’s a case of being good or bad human beings.
Even before his epiphany in Mecca, Malcolm had experienced a sharp rift in his relationship with Elijah Muhammad. The split was attributed largely to the resentment Muhammad and some of his top deputies felt about all the prominence Malcolm enjoyed in the media. He was widely viewed as the chief spokesman for the movement, and that did not sit well with other Muslim leaders. By March 1964
the discord had become so severe that Malcolm broke away from the Nation of Islam and, later that year, formed a rival group called the Organization of Afro-American Unity.
But the rupture in the relationship between the two Muslim leaders had to do with a lot more than jealousy, as I learned when
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I talked to Malcolm in June 1964. He had come to my office to discuss the interview I had in mind for the Morning News, and when I asked him about Muhammad, he suddenly glowered and said, “Mike, he is not the man he’s cracked up to be. His morals aren’t what he would have you believe. This man Muhammad who paints himself as an ascetic, who paints himself as a holy prophet of God, is a lecher. I’m telling you, this man Muhammad is a lecher!”
“Oh, Malcolm, come on,” I replied. “Be serious.”
“I am serious. I can tell you that he takes girls as secretaries, girls within the movement, and gets them pregnant, and then farms them and their children out. Elijah Muhammad is the father of several children by several different teenage girls.”
Needless to say, I found that hard to believe; yet even before I had a chance to ask if he had any proof to back up his allegation, he volunteered to telephone one of the girls Muhammad had impreg-nated and let me listen in on their conversation. The call was made, and I heard the young woman confirm Malcolm’s story. He also agreed to disclose what he knew when I talked to him on-camera.
Suddenly, the interview I’d been planning now promised to have a lot more relevance than the change in Malcolm’s attitude toward white folks. When we did the interview and I asked him about his former leader’s lechery, he did not hesitate to repeat and elaborate on what he had told me in the privacy of my office.
M A L C O L M X : He made six sisters pregnant. They all had children. Two of those six had two children. One of those two is having a child right now. I am told that there is a seventh sister who is supposed to be in Mexico right now, and she’s supposed to be having a child by him.
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W A L L A C E : Do you feel perhaps that you should now take over the leadership of the Black Muslims?
M A L C O L M X : No. I have no desire to take over the leadership of the Black Muslims, and I have never had that desire. . . .
W A L L A C E : Are you not perhaps afraid of what might happen to you as a result of making these revelations?
M A L C O L M X : Oh, yes. I probably am a dead man already.
He made that observation in such a calm, matter-of-fact tone that I assumed he was merely being metaphorical. But in retrospect, I’m convinced that he knew then what fate had in store for him. In February 1965—about eight months after our interview—Malcolm X
was shot and killed while addressing a meeting of his followers at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights. His three assailants were later identified as Black Muslims. Like Martin Luther King, Jr., he was gunned down in his prime; it is a morbid coincidence that both of these charismatic black leaders were assassinated at the age of thirty-nine. The bitter irony, of course, is that unlike King, who was slain by a white man, Malcolm was murdered by members of his own race and adherents of the faith he had done so much to propagate.
Posterity has been kind to Malcolm, who went on to acquire more stature in the years since his death than he ever enjoyed during his lifetime. One of the more ambitious homages to him was Spike Lee’s feature film Malcolm X, which starred Denzel Washington.
When that movie was released in 1992, I did a retrospective piece on Malcolm for 60 Minutes. Among the people I interviewed was Alex Haley, the author of Roots and the coauthor of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Haley had also engaged in extensive conversations with Martin Luther King, Jr., so I asked him how the two leaders viewed each other.
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H A L E Y : I didn’t know Dr. King as well as I knew Malcolm by any means, but I did do a rather lengthy Playboy interview of Dr. King. He would sort of hedge around awhile, and it might be forty-five minutes before he would say, in his very casual sort of southern way, “Well, what’s brother Malcolm saying about me these days?” And then I would go back to New York.
Malcolm, unlike Dr. King, the first thing out of his mouth was
“What did he say about me?” It was so interesting.
W A L L A C E : Were they jealous of each other?
H A L E Y : I wouldn’t say jealous, because I think both had a very distinct sense that they were both working toward the same objective, but different paths.
W A L L A C E : Opposite sides of the same coin.
H A L E Y : Yes, exactly.
Toward the end of that 1992 story, I said that “today his message touches young blacks in ways that even Martin Luther King’s message never touched,” and when I interviewed Spike Lee, I asked him why more recent black leaders had failed to measure up to the standards set by Malcolm.
“Well,” he replied, “I don’t want to name names. But the black masses do not feel like these other guys are doing what needs to be don e. . . . But Malcolm speaks to them.”
Taking that as our cue, we concluded the piece with an excerpt from a speech Malcolm gave when he was at the height of his combative power:
“We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by
any means necessary.”
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L o u i s F a r r a k h a n
O N E O F T H E M A N Y B L A C K Americans who answered the evangelical call to join the Nation of Islam was a young calypso singer from Bostonwho billed himself as “The Charmer.” By all accounts, he had talent as well as charm, and in later years he would sometimes claim that if he had pursued a musical career, he might have become another Harry Belafonte. He was formally known in those days as Louis Eugene Walcott, but that lasted only until 1955, when, at the age of twenty-two, he became a Black Muslim and changed his name to Louis X. The minister who guided and nurtured his con-versionto the Nationof Islam was Malcolm X, and Louis X soonbe-came on
e of his most devoted acolytes. In1956, onMalcolm’s recommendation, he was appointed minister of the Muslim mosque in Boston, and not long after that, he adopted yet another name—
Louis Farrakhan.
He continued to revere Malcolm as his mentor and role model until 1964, the year Malcolm broke away from the Nation of Islam.
In that internal dispute, Farrakhan chose to pledge his allegiance to the movement’s leader, Elijah Muhammad, and as a reward for his loyalty, he was appointed minister of the New York mosque shortly after Malcolm was killed in 1965. From that power base, he steadily strengthened his position within the Black Muslims, and after Muhammad died, Farrakhan took over the leadership of the Nation of Islam in 1978.
Throughout his public ministry, Farrakhan did his best to present himself as another Malcolm X. There’s no denying that his inflammatory attacks on white Americans were reminiscent of his mentor’s
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