Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  Ten days earlier, Malcolm had retreated overnight from Miami to placate the frightened, irascible boxing promoter Bill MacDonald, who, rightly fearing that Clay’s mismatched, half-sold title fight stood to lose money, confronted the challenger with rumors of his connections to unpatriotic, anti-white Muslims. “Don’t start hitting me with the Constitution!” MacDonald shouted at Clay’s representatives. “This is the South.” With hints of the truth already seeping into the news, MacDonald briefly canceled the fight for fear that Clay’s open association with the notorious Malcolm X would ruin him. To revive the bout in crisis, Malcolm left town on MacDonald’s reluctant agreement that he could return for the actual event on February 25.

  In a straw poll, all but three of fifty-eight ringside reporters anticipated a swift knockout by the ferocious champion, Sonny Listen, who had flattened his previous three opponents in the first round. Mindful of the weak box office and lackluster competition, editors of the New York Times sent a feature writer rather than a sports reporter to Miami, with instructions to learn in advance where Clay might be sent for hospital repairs. Instead, Clay’s jubilant leaps and his manic, trademark shouts that he was the greatest and prettiest clashed with stony disbelief—even charges of fraud—when Liston did not answer the bell for the seventh round, and shock soon spilled beyond the world of boxing. The new champion spurned a lavish victory party at the Fontainebleau Hotel to disappear that night across Biscayne Bay into Negro Miami, telling confidants he wanted to spare reporters the “heart attack” of discovering that his idea of celebration was to retreat into Malcolm X’s motel room for vanilla ice cream and Muslim prayer. (Informants soon told the FBI that Malcolm hosted singer Sam Cooke and pro football star Jim Brown, too, stirring fears that the Muslims were infiltrating black entertainment as a whole.) The next morning, after stuffing cotton into his doorbell to ward off those who had tracked him there by daybreak, Clay did appear for a tumultuous press conference, newly subdued and accompanied by Malcolm X. As he made his way through the crowd to leave, someone blurted out the accusing question: “Are you a card-carrying member of the Black Muslims?”

  “Card-carrying? What does that mean?” Clay replied. His comments, while generally friendly to world Islam (“Followers of Allah are the sweetest people in the world. They don’t carry knives”), were evasive enough to contain the story another day (“Muslim Story Irks Cassius”).

  Outside the Chicago Coliseum that afternoon, a long line of Muslims and a few white reporters stretched along South Wabash Avenue for the strict security search to gain entry to the annual Savior’s Day convention. Malcolm X, who had presided the previous year, was conspicuously absent and unmentioned under edict of silence. In his place, Louis X of Boston introduced a procession of ministers for speeches of tribute to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad: James X of Newark gave thanks for being lifted from the gutter, Lonnie X of Washington for lessons of congruity between life, Islam, and mathematics. Minister Louis “whipped the crowd of 4,000 into hysteria in preparation for Mr. Muhammad’s speech,” according to Mike Handler’s eyewitness account in the back pages of the New York Times, and the appearance of the frail Muhammad in his velvet fez touched off bedlam. “I have been given the keys to heaven,” he declared in an asthmatic wheeze, and he electrified his audience by announcing that Cassius Clay indeed was his follower. Together with Allah, said Muhammad, he had caused the young boxer to win the world crown because of his Muslim faith.

  Muhammad’s statement was on the news wires before reporters in Miami found champion Clay at breakfast with Malcolm X on Thursday, two mornings after the fight. Flushed into the open, Clay used one of Malcolm’s animal metaphors to speak glowingly of his conversion. “A rooster crows only when it sees the light,” he said. “Put him in the dark and he’ll never crow. I have seen the light and I’m crowing.” All day long, his words stunned the sportswriters like blows to the solar plexus, knocking them from traditional pugilist banter on bums and heroes. Malcolm X interrupted to defend Clay,* and the champion himself tried to deflect indignant questions about anti-white religion by stressing his preference for racial separation and his deep personal fear of the civil rights movement. “I don’t want to be blown up,” he said. “I don’t want to be washed down sewers. I just want to be happy with my own kind.” Flustered sportswriters insisted that Clay was ruining himself, and predicted correctly that boxing would move to revoke his title.

  Malcolm returned to New York on the wave of Clay’s triumph, only to collide with Captain Joseph on his homecoming from the Chicago convention. On the last day of February, the two old colleagues were careful to discuss their differences privately in a car. Joseph objected to a fresh story in the New York Times, “Malcolm X’s Role Dividing Muslims,” saying that Malcolm could not hope for reinstatement while he expressed disloyalty to Elijah Muhammad. They argued over motivation and responsibility. Joseph did not contest Malcolm’s facts, conceding that the minister of meticulous “homework” might be correct in his charges of corruption, but, as a soldier, Joseph demanded that Malcolm sacrifice to help their leader. “Now’s the time to stand with the man,” he said, insisting that the Nation was nothing without Muhammad.

  “Aw, man, the Nation is finished,” Malcolm replied. “You can forget about it.”

  Captain Joseph glared at his former teacher, but said politely, “I don’t agree with you.”

  Within a day or two, Lukman X, a distraught member of Malcolm’s Temple No. 7 came to him with news that Captain Joseph had ordered him to wire Malcolm’s car with a bomb. Lukman confessed the plot instead. Malcolm knew that Lukman, who claimed to have fought with Fidel Castro in the Cuban revolution, had the background in demolitions for the assignment, but he also knew that it made him suspect as a possible police agent. If Malcolm believed Lukman, did Joseph really intend to kill him, or could he have assumed that Lukman would inform Malcolm? Was the order a warning, or a test to see whether Malcolm would report the threat to his despised superiors in Chicago, as required by the Nation’s rules?

  The new heavyweight champion checked into Harlem’s Hotel Theresa on Sunday afternoon, March 1, and went straight into private conference there with Malcolm X. Although he arrived grandly in a chauffeur-driven Cadillac, Clay complained bitterly that he had been barred from restaurants and restrooms during his two-day drive (being afraid of airplanes) from Miami through the segregated South. He later composed some playful verse about his humiliation: “Man, it was really a letdown drag/For all those miles I had to eat out of a bag.” Malcolm tried to soften the naive Clay’s introduction to hidden dangers within the authoritarian sect, and suggested that it might be possible to fight against segregation and still preserve the independence of Muslim culture. Overnight, he leaked word to the Negro press that Clay might join him on such a course, which went against Elijah Muhammad’s teaching of aloofness from a doomed white world.

  Crowds mobbed them on a night stroll through Times Square. “Malcolm X got more requests for his autograph than I did,” a beaming Clay told reporters. “He’s the greatest.” Malcolm took Clay to look for a permanent home on Long Island, near his in Queens. On Wednesday, when Malcolm guided Clay on a tour of the United Nations, admiring dignitaries and employees swept past security guards to engulf them. Clay pronounced himself champion not only of the United States but of the whole world, including Africa and the globe’s 750 million Muslims. Malcolm X fielded questions about American race relations. Reporters said the two of them caused the greatest buzz in U.N. hallways since Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had pounded his shoe against capitalism in 1960.

  The whirlwind association of Malcolm X with Cassius Clay, while muffled generally in the press, drew the wrath of Elijah Muhammad. From his winter home in Phoenix, he sharply contradicted reports that Malcolm’s suspension was nearly over, as Malcolm implied breezily in his public appearances. “I’m holding him down until he proves he can keep his mouth shut,” Muhammad told Captain Joseph. He scoffed at the rumors that
Malcolm planned to create a new organization, saying he never could finance one—not with his proposed African imports company or the “many little things going on up his sleeve.” Muhammad prescribed a gentler approach to the young heavyweight champion: Joseph should inform Clay that the Nation would supply another Muslim escort in Malcolm’s place. This proved a difficult assignment, and when Malcolm took Clay to the United Nations a second time on Friday, March 6, announcing there that he was granting Clay his “X,” Elijah Muhammad intervened with a statement recorded over the telephone to Chicago for broadcast that same night. He renamed Clay “Muhammad” after the original prophet of Islam and himself, and “Ali” after a commanding general of the Third Caliphate.

  This radio announcement, which so jolted Malcolm X, was only one of several blows that weekend. Elijah Muhammad extended his suspension indefinitely in a scolding formal letter, and he sent Minister Louis X of Boston, who had been showcased in Chicago as Malcolm’s replacement, to teach on Sunday at New York Temple No. 7. Nearly a thousand turned out to hear him, and Captain Joseph reported that he and other captains rousted large congregations elsewhere that stood to give Elijah Muhammad emphatic vows of allegiance “regardless of circumstances.”

  Malcolm called reporters that same Sunday to announce that he was leaving the Nation of Islam. While professing loyalty to the teaching of Elijah Muhammad, he said he needed greater political freedom “to cooperate in local civil rights actions in the South and elsewhere.” He asserted that the nonviolent civil rights movement had run its course. “There can be no revolution without bloodshed,” Malcolm told reporters, “and it is nonsense to describe the civil rights movement in America as a revolution.”

  THE EXIT STATEMENT made crossover headlines on Monday, March 9, putting Malcolm X for the first time on page one of the New York Times, alongside the news from Washington—“Debate on Civil Rights Bill Opening in Senate Today.” He reclaimed his public voice just as heightened sensitivity fragmented racial news. “Now It’s a Negro Drive for Segregation,” announced one of the national news magazines, suggesting that Negroes might be changing their minds about the civil rights bill. Malcolm tried to explain himself to those left hostile or captivated, sincerely or disingenuously confused, by introduction to his novel doctrines. “See, the mistake that the whites make, especially the white liberals, they throw that at me as if I am against integration,” he told a New York television audience. “My contention is that America is against integration. But they’re hypocrites. They pose as being for integration while they practice segregation.”

  Malcolm suffered the sharpest, most immediate rebukes from those who best understood his language. Although he publicly urged all Muslims, including the new heavyweight champion, to remain loyal to Elijah Muhammad, he ran afoul of Muhammad’s teaching that Islam required absolute submission to him. “You don’t just walk away from the sect of Islam as a deviater or hypocrite,” Muhammad told a reporter who called him in Phoenix, “and someone weep and cry over it.” In a fury, Muhammad called Captain Joseph with orders that Malcolm “must give up everything he has that belongs to Islam,” including his house.

  Told that week of the wrathful notices being prepared inside the New York temple, Malcolm drafted a contorted defense. He presented Muhammad and himself as common victims of evil conspiracy by middlemen—Captain Joseph, Raymond Sharrieff, and National Secretary John Ali—and went so far as to describe his resignation as an act of loyal sacrifice. In order to “preserve the faith your followers have in you and the Nation of Islam,” he told Muhammad in a two-page telegram, Malcolm had assumed blame for scandal and corruption that rightly belonged to the conspirators. “You are still my leader and teacher,” he wrote, “even though those around you won’t let me be one of your active followers or helpers.”

  Captain Joseph led a grim delegation to Malcolm’s house in Elmhurst, bearing a notarized letter dated Tuesday, March 10. Glumly, but without protest, Malcolm surrendered some of the temple valuables, including papers of incorporation and securities from the Nation’s national treasury, but he balked at the demand that he vacate his premises. During the ensuing argument, some of Joseph’s subordinates were visibly conflicted by personal sympathy for Malcolm as their fallen mentor. Maceo X Owens, the temple secretary who had prepared the letter of notice, had insisted on one conciliatory sentence: “If you continue to use the Nation’s name on your car, then the Mosque will have to take possession of the car, which we do not want to do because this car is your personal property.” Owens felt that Malcolm had left the title in the Nation’s name to set an example of fealty, but when Malcolm pressed a similar claim for the house, Joseph insisted that the Nation would sue if necessary.

  Being stripped swiftly of defenses, Malcolm fought back through white newspapers. On Thursday morning, March 12, he took a tiny entourage and a stack of printed handouts to a jammed press conference at the Tapestry Suite of the Park Sheraton Hotel in midtown Manhattan. His purpose was “to clarify my own position in the struggle,” he told reporters, in a statement nevertheless littered with mixed signals. While he was creating a new Muslim Mosque Inc. as a base for his followers, Malcolm said he did not want to compete with his teacher, Elijah Muhammad. Moreover, recognizing that most people might be put off by Islam, he promised to make room at his mosque for secular members. He wanted to find common ground with civil rights leaders for what promised to be an explosive year (“As of this minute, I’ve forgotten everything bad that the other leaders have said about me,” he announced with a broad smile, “and I pray that they can also forget the many bad things I’ve said about them”), but he rejected their goal of integration along with their prevailing tactic of nonviolence. “It is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks,” he asserted. Citing Birmingham and Danville among ugly spectacles of unpunished violence the previous year, Malcolm called for mobile rifle clubs to defend the life and property of Negroes wherever the authorities failed.

  Malcolm’s words about armed defense jumped above the muddle of sectarian politics. “His Theme Now Is Violence,” warned U.S. News & World Report. “The Ominous Malcolm X Exits from the Muslims,” said Life. In a scalding editorial, the New York Times called Malcolm an “embittered racist” and an “irresponsible demagogue” who threatened the precarious chance for integration. The Times tried to dismiss him as an unfit subject—“Malcolm X will not deceive Negroes in New York or elsewhere”—but its news pages reported the stir of controversy: “Negroes Ponder Malcolm’s Move”/“Dr. King Urges Nonviolence.” King and the established leaders sounded ponderous against Malcolm’s avenging swagger. “It is regrettable that Malcolm X has publicly confessed to so negative and desperate a course of action,” King said in a statement released during his next trip through New York. “I must honestly say that this new turn of events is not so much an indictment against him as it is against a society whose ills in race relations are so deep-rooted that it produces a Malcolm X.”

  Whether they stirred fascination or contempt, papers of all kinds approached Malcolm X carefully across the divide of race. The Pittsburgh Courier and New York Times alike treated his troubles with the Nation of Islam as a conventional power struggle over spoils of succession. Only baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson tried to see in Malcolm the schisms of a newborn religion colliding with the intermingled love and war of the movement era. Disparaged by Malcolm as a tool of the white man, Robinson struck back at a vulnerable spot. “Whom do you think you are kidding, Malcolm, when you say that Negro leaders ought to be ‘thankful’ that you were not personally present in Birmingham or Mississippi?” Robinson asked in his newspaper column. Against Malcolm’s provocative implication that he would have been—and still might become—a prowling wolf of retribution, Robinson threw up his past performance. “I think you would have done exactly what you did after your own Muslim brothers were shot and killed in Los Angeles,” he wrote. “You left it to the law to take its course.”<
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  Robinson charged, and Malcolm X cheerfully agreed, that the emerging public sensation was largely a creation of the white press. “White colleges flood him with speaking engagement offers,” Robinson complained. “You can count on one hand Negro colleges which have invited him, if there are any.” Some Negro newspapers reported with gleeful irony that Georgia Senator Richard Russell emerged as the first major public figure to defend the Black Muslims and to oblige the heavyweight champion by using the name “Muhammad Ali” in public. Russell praised Ali for the courage to criticize integration in the face of humiliation and insult (“He will never be invited to the White House”), and castigated fellow senators for holding hearings on his fitness for the ring. Mischievously, he used the taunts being thrown at Southerners—“so intolerant, so narrow-minded, so bigoted”—to chastise the World Boxing Association for efforts to strip Ali of his title, observing tartly that boxing routinely embraced low-life criminals of “no religion at all.”

  Most white papers left these volatile comments unmentioned, preserving Russell as a statesman of decorum, just as they avoided notice of the Racial Relocation Commission. On March 16, in his second major speech of the civil rights debate, Russell proposed an amendment that would resettle families massively until racial proportions were equalized among the fifty states. Alabama would export 637,263 Negroes, while California and Alaska would import 776,445 and 16,976 respectively, according to a large map Russell placed in the rear of the Senate chamber. “I have grappled with this problem and studied it, to the very best of my ability, over a long period of years…” he declared. “I favor inflicting on New York City, the city of Chicago, and other cities the same condition proposed to be inflicted by this bill on the people of the community of Winder, Georgia, where I live.” Russell defended his amendment against objections that it was preposterously unconstitutional and impractical, like schemes for a separate black nation. “I was never more serious in all my life,” he assured the Senate.