Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  TWO QUICK-WITTED FBI agents slipped into Malcolm’s Tapestry Suite press conference on March 12, disguised as journalists. For the record, they asked pointed questions about revolution and civil war (“I don’t think I’m dumb enough to advocate armed revolt,” Malcolm replied), but their primary mission, for which they later received commendation from FBI headquarters, was to photograph the Muslim entourage under pretext of news. The New York FBI office knew already that Muslims willing to associate openly with Malcolm were scarce. Of twenty-two faces surreptitiously photographed at the press conference, Bureau agents identified only four as known Muslims—three bodyguards and James 67X (the sixty-seventh “James” granted the Nation’s “X”), who had served as a lieutenant under Captain Joseph.

  Those absent were more significant. Less than a week after deferring to Malcolm at the United Nations, the heavyweight champion recoiled from mentioning his name. “You just don’t buck Mr. Muhammad and get away with it,” Muhammad Ali told a startled Alex Haley. “I don’t want to talk about [Malcolm] no more.” Elijah Muhammad had sent a high-ranking delegation from Chicago to envelop Ali with a new identity, total business management, and the promise of a readymade wife to be selected from the Messenger’s eligible granddaughters. Malcolm, deprived of Ali’s public glamour, also found himself without visible support from fellow ministers in the Nation of Islam. None of his four trusted assistants stood with him at the break.

  Pressure fell heavily on the ministers as second-level opinion leaders, and Captain Joseph prodded the New York assistants to denounce Malcolm from the temple rostrum as a hypocrite. To protect himself, Malcolm campaigned to undo years of resolute indoctrination from his own mouth. The assistants had been inclined to see his suspension as the result of friction with Captain Joseph—the soldier grown resentful of the minister’s overbearing independence, the minister annoyed by Joseph’s ties to Chicago as guarantor of the revenue stream. It did not occur to them that scandalous, deadly grievance ran directly to the august Elijah Muhammad, whom none of the assistants had ever met in person, until Malcolm began taking them one by one to the hideaway attic of his home to sample detailed “insurance” tapes about sexual and financial corruption.

  For Assistant Minister Benjamin 2X, the precisely dictated revelations caused prolonged dizziness and sharp pangs of nausea, recalling the impact six years earlier of Malcolm’s lecture on the sewer-like digestive tract of the pig. Benjamin had discovered himself physically unable to put pork into his mouth at dinners with friends, and had returned to Temple No. 7 for Malcolm’s history lecture on Egypt and the land of Ur. Thunderstruck to hear that Africans had been something other than potboiling savages with bones in their noses, he persevered through ten rejected applications to gain his 2X from Elijah Muhammad. Malcolm had invited Benjamin to join the Wednesday evening public speaking class, where he not only conquered a childhood stutter but devoured books beyond the voluminous reading list, beginning with The Story of the Moors in Spain by Stanley Lane Poole and The Crusades by Harold Lamb. Possessed, Benjamin had worn out library cards at the Manhattan public library on Fifth Avenue. He copied scholarly articles and prepared class reports on shortwave radio broadcasts from mainland China. He quit his job as a shipping clerk for Vanguard Records and hired out as a live-in doorman, enabling him to study feverishly at his post.

  At the end of 1958, Malcolm sent Benjamin out into Harlem with three props: a stepladder, a Bible, and a banner depicting the choice between the American and Islamic flags. He climbed the ladder to preach at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 125th Street, in front of the Chock Full ’O Nuts store where Jackie Robinson worked as a coffee spokesman. Like his contemporaries who passed the test as “ladder men” to become Muslim ministers, Benjamin eventually drew large crowds of “mentally dead” Negroes with spirited sermons asserting that he could answer any question from the Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s complete body of knowledge. Malcolm sometimes observed from the fringe. “Never repeat anything you hear me say unless you confirm that it’s true,” he instructed sharply, and he maintained an exacting, hidden distance from his assistants even as they founded new mosques together. Through sectarian study, they developed a more priestly version of the discipline that Captain Joseph instilled with martial drills and enforced quotas for newspaper sales.

  Against Malcolm’s secret revelations, Captain Joseph assured Elijah Muhammad that he was maintaining Benjamin 2X as a spy within Malcolm’s camp at the Hotel Theresa. He conceded that Malcolm maintained counterspies, but boasted that even in his strongholds Malcolm attracted only the “weak ones” looking for an excuse to smoke cigarettes and vent their petty complaints. Elsewhere, Muhammad’s officials felt secure enough to banish any Muslim associated with Malcolm X, and the FBI wiretaps picked up only one fence-sitting minister brazen enough to fight back. “As far as being a leader, they can have that,” he shouted over the phone to Chicago on March 17. “As far as coming to the temple, they can have that, too. But when they start saying, ‘don’t you come by here looking for no money,’ they gonna be in trouble! Do you hear me?” The renegade demanded his regular cut of the newspaper sales and refused to be treated like an innocent to the Nation’s secrets. “You ain’t dealing with no baby or with no faithful believer,” he growled. “I used to be a faithful believer. I’m just here now trying to get understanding…. I’m one of the ones threatening to kill people, beat up brothers for throwing the paper [Muhammad Speaks] in the trash.”

  On March 18, Malcolm X lectured again at Harvard University, where he fended off questions about violent revolution by stating that America recognized upheaval and suffering “only when the white man himself bleeds a little.” Two professors argued dryly that the notoriously poor record of third-party movements in American politics weighed heavily against his agenda of black nationalism. Immediately after the lecture, and again a few days later, Malcolm ventured into the Boston ghetto to keep clandestine appointments at the Original Pastry Shop and other Muslim spots along Blue Hill Avenue. He recruited there among prescreened favorites from the first congregation he had founded for Elijah Muhammad, Temple No. 11, likening his desperate mission at times to the Christian Apostle Paul’s fateful journey to confront Caesar in Rome.

  From Phoenix, where word of the Boston soundings reached him overnight, Elijah Muhammad denounced “that no-good, long-legged Malcolm.” He told Minister Louis X of Boston and other officials that the Nation must make examples of the bad ones and cut the heads off hypocrites. Muhammad told John Ali and Captain Joseph that if the courts could not stop Malcolm from slandering his private life, then the Nation must “tell ours” to do so. He ordered them to file eviction papers for Malcolm’s house.

  Malcolm X, while not privy to what was being said in the opposing camp, recognized that his protégé Louis X made a convincing show of loyalty to Elijah Muhammad and that the shifting Muslim conspiracies crackled with potential violence. Returning from Boston to New York, he called reporters with accusations so sensational that only Harlem’s Amsterdam News picked them up for the Saturday, March 21, edition: “Malcolm X Tells of Death Threat.” The story burned as a silent fuse in the regular Sunday evening service at Temple No. 7. Assistant Minister Benjamin 2X gripped his chair on the rostrum while Assistant Minister Henry X repeated the prescribed banishments on Malcolm X. For the third week, Henry X read from the New York Times article on Malcolm as the wedge of schism. He cried out that the Nation must shun slack talk from Malcolm the hypocrite, lest it destroy the faith that was raising them all from the gutter.

  “Excuse me, brother minister, may I say a word real quick?” Benjamin 2X interrupted. He rose as mildly and routinely as possible, leaving Henry no choice but to surrender the microphone. The entire congregation fell silent. Benjamin temporized with metaphorical remarks about two planes sitting in a hangar, one about to take off, and Captain Joseph nodded ominously to his squadrons before Benjamin pulled out the Amsterdam News.

  “Are you going to say it
in the name of Allah?” Joseph called out loudly from the floor.

  The question froze Benjamin at the microphone. To say yes was to begin the obedient litany about the Honorable Elijah Muhammad as His Messenger; to say no was to confess heresy in advance. Benjamin hesitantly tried to compromise, beginning, “As a Muslim…”

  Captain Joseph bellowed his question again. His troops took it up as a chant, but opponents answered with shouts of, “Let him speak!” As some members gasped in horror, Benjamin shouted a question over the sound system: “If I can believe the New York Times, which is the devil’s newspaper, and what it said about Minister Malcolm, then can I believe what the Amsterdam News, which is a black newspaper, said about Captain Joseph sending Lukman to Malcolm’s house to put a bomb in his car?”

  Joseph’s security detail converged on the rostrum, enabling Henry X to snatch back the microphone. “If you’re not going to say it in the name of Allah,” he told Benjamin over the booming speakers, “then you’re not going to say it at all!” He kept repeating this above the bedlam. Benjamin yelled that Malcolm only wanted a chance to bring his case before the members, and more than two hundred listeners—about a third of the attendance—stalked out of the temple behind him.

  Captain Joseph, while counting Benjamin 2X as the first minister to break to Malcolm’s side, assured Elijah Muhammad that Temple No. 7 had foiled the attempted coup. Most of those who left were merely put off by the chaos, he said, but he did complain that things were happening too fast for outsiders to keep up. The loyal members of Temple No. 7 were being harassed mistakenly on the street as followers of Malcolm X, for instance—mostly by young white police officers whose hostility had been roused by recent publicity about the strange association of Muslims with championship boxing. The previous Friday night at Madison Square Garden, when fans had showered the new heavyweight champion with angry boos instead of the customary tribute, resentment seemed triggered by his demand to be introduced as Muhammad Ali instead of Cassius Clay, as Garden management insisted was his rightful name.

  With strange new Muslim influences bouncing between sports and civil rights news, Malcolm’s internal struggle confused the FBI’s intelligence experts as well as the public. When J. Edgar Hoover ordered his Chicago office to make up its mind whether Malcolm X was or was not independent of Elijah Muhammad, the agent in charge of Chicago replied that the wiretaps themselves were contradictory. “As the Bureau can imagine, these conversations are extremely difficult to monitor and are even more difficult to make sense from and to intelligently record,” he cabled FBI headquarters on March 25. “Muhammad, at his best, is very difficult to understand.” Some reports ascribed to Malcolm about forty converts from Temple No. 7 (“five or six of them had guns”), some twenty-six, and others next to none. The Chicago agent was clearer that Elijah Muhammad would disdain Malcolm’s request to defend himself before assembled peers within the Nation. “I do not have a court,” Muhammad declared on his wiretapped phone. “I am the court.”

  19

  Shaky Pulpits

  DURING THE PRELUDE to an evening service on March 22 in Jackson, Mississippi—far from the chaotic split inside Temple No. 7—twenty-four young boys and girls were seated in front pews as prospective new members when an integrated group of five slipped quietly through a side door of Galloway Memorial United Methodist Church, a grand white structure of fluted columns (“the Cathedral of Mississippi Methodism”) across from the state Capitol. Alarmed ushers trotted down the aisles to intercept them, and, hoping to minimize commotion in the sanctuary, took the visitors silently by the arms toward the exit. “I am from India,” cried out Madabusi Savrithri, a diminutive new Ph.D. from Syracuse University and interim professor at Tougaloo. When the ushers shoved more firmly to remove her, Savrithri asked in protest what they would think if their women or their missionaries were manhandled on a visit to India.

  Galloway’s new pastor, Rev. W. J. Cunningham, worried especially that this latest expulsion took place in front of his impressionable young church candidates on Palm Sunday. He had walked into race trouble the previous fall, knowing that his predecessor had resigned over the congregation’s explicit enforcement of segregated services. (“It is not unChristian that we prefer to remain an all-white congregation,” the official board resolved by a vote of 184-13.) Warning that he would not preach segregation, Cunningham reached an understanding with determined church elders to cover their differences within a reconciling Christian purpose. He never mentioned integration from the Galloway pulpit—to the point of avoiding inflammatory words such as “brotherhood”—but conflict burrowed into his ministry. While lawyers and politicians helped fend off abstract questions, such as whether trespass charges against integrated worshippers rested on church or state initiative,* Cunningham had to decide whether to laugh when his ushers jokingly dubbed themselves “The Color Guard.” Every tangible presence—a Negro seeking communion, a furtive huddle of elders, a motion about race in some committee—produced what Cunningham would recall in his memoirs as “tension so thick you could pick it up with your hands…” and “so high you could scrape it off the ceiling.”

  For Reverend Edwin and Jeannette King, tension at Galloway Memorial had become a familiar experience over the nine months since King had been stripped of Methodist credentials and had run for lieutenant governor on the integrated Freedom Ticket. On Palm Sunday, escaping this time with physical eviction instead of arrest, they pushed on to a second rejection at St. Luke’s Methodist. With numerous prior convictions trailing behind in appellate courts, the Kings discussed between them signs of a cumulative emotional toll, called “burnout” in movement slang. Idealism was wearing thin as a substitute for normality, especially after March 15, when the public announcement of Freedom Summer aroused little response.

  As with Allard Lowenstein the previous summer, Edwin King grasped for hope in the quixotic schemes of pilgrim visitors. On cue from Bob Moses, who cherished dreams of acquiring a “Freedom Radio” station for the movement, he joined a media reformer in a dangerous gamble. Everett Parker, a professor at Yale Divinity School and part-time producer of educational television shows, brought to the United Church of Christ a specialty in broadcast law and religion. For thirty years, since his 1935 dissertation on the original Federal Communications Act (back when stations banned all advertisement during family listening hours between seven and eleven o’clock, and when NBC introduced the National Radio Pulpit as the first network program) Parker had published rearguard legal studies against rampant commercialism that obliterated, in his opinion, the public trust concept of the law. At the request of Andrew Young, his former colleague at the UCC in New York, Parker had undertaken to shame the Birmingham television stations into fairer coverage of the 1963 civil rights movement, and in early March of 1964, he activated at Tougaloo College the first stage of his revolutionary scheme.

  Trained volunteers stealthily moved batteries of television sets, reel-to-reel recorders, and Parker-designed log books into designated monitoring homes, where primary and secondary teams matched sound recordings to formularized observations of all 7,186 minutes of the program week on Jackson television stations. The tabulated results showed, for instance, that the NBC affiliate WLBT never referred to any Negro civic event during an aggregate fifteen minutes and fifty-five seconds of public service announcements, never showed a Negro congregation in church services nor a Negro face on local shows, including Romper Room, Today in Jackson, and Teen Tempo. This was the accepted landscape of television almost everywhere, but the survey also logged the occasional use of the epithet “nigger” by two of the station’s political commentators, and counted sixteen enthusiastic promotions for the segregationist literature at the White Citizens Council bookstore inside the WLBT station, run by its manager.

  Parker and allied lawyers prepared a petition for the FCC to block license renewal on ground that the hostile, systematic exclusion by WLBT of nearly half the viewing audience (Negroes) violated legal obligati
on to broadcast in the public interest. Precedent had evolved so heavily against such a claim that the FCC allowed complaints only from rival broadcasters, and recognized no standing for public representatives to contest a license on any basis. Perpetual renewal had turned the free, three-year public license into permanent property that could be trafficked and inherited confidently, like peerages of fantastic value. (The small-market WLBT license was worth about $12 million to the Dallas-based insurance company that owned it.) On this structure rested many postwar American fortunes, including a small one for President Johnson’s family in Texas, and Parker fully realized that any wisp of challenge would draw the concerted wrath of broadcast powers everywhere.

  Mississippi’s NAACP counsel advised state chairman Aaron Henry to avoid Parker’s WLBT petition for fear of signing his own death warrant. Henry signed anyway, on the slim chance that the meticulous documentation might ameliorate news coverage of the movement. From such a beginning, even Parker could not imagine a twenty-year legal odyssey that would shake the foundations of broadcast regulation and make Aaron Henry himself the millionaire chairman and largest shareholder of WLBT. Rev. R. L. T. Smith, whose congressional campaign Bob Moses had managed in 1962, held fast as the second petitioner, but Tougaloo College dropped out when officials learned of a bill in the Mississippi legislature to revoke its charter. In a futile effort to save college president Daniel Beittel’s job, Edwin King stepped forward as a substitute white petitioner, signing as campus chaplain of the United Church of Christ at Tougaloo. For King, the risk of media persecution seemed remote and superfluous. He was more than consoled by the upcoming visit of celebrity ministers that Easter Sunday, with their promise to relieve King and his wife of integrated witness in Jackson’s mainstream churches.