Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  Malcolm X turned the question around. “The only way you can determine that,” he replied, “is to take a Negro child who is only four years old. Can he escape—though he’s only four years old—can he escape the stigma of segregation?”

  Warren tried another tack. “Let’s put the Negro child in front of the truck,” he supposed, “and put a white man there who leaps, risks his own life, to save the child.”

  However noble the deed, Malcolm replied, “that same man would have to toss that child back into discrimination, segregation.”

  “But what is your attitude toward his moral nature?” asked Warren.

  “I’m not even interested in his moral nature,” said Malcolm. “Until the problem is solved, we’re not interested in anybody’s moral nature.”

  Malcolm’s refusal to open a door for individual absolution deeply affected Warren, who, for all his introspections since the 1920s on the American experience of race, still craved the possibility of simple innocence. “There is something of that little white girl in all of us,” he wrote. “Everybody wants to be loved…. But Malcolm X, even now, will have none of this. That stony face breaks into the merciless, glittering leer, and there is not anything, not a thing, you—if you are white—can do, and somewhere deep down in you that little girl is ready to burst into tears.”

  Warren sizzled with fury on the written page. He transformed Malcolm three times into a looming vision of evil itself—as vivid as his quoted passages from Joseph Conrad, and also, unintentionally, as cartoonish as a fairy-tale villain. Warren described what he saw: Malcolm’s “pale, dull yellowish face that had seemed so veiled, so stony, as though beyond all feeling, had flashed into its merciless, leering life—the sudden wolfish grin, the pale pink lips drawn hard back to show the strong teeth, the unveiled glitter of the eyes beyond the lenses, giving the sense that the lenses were only part of a clever disguise, that the eyes need no help, that they suddenly see everything.”

  “I MUST BE HONEST,” Malcolm told Alex Haley, admitting that he found no one in America to share his rush of inspiration since the hajj. He alone could make an appeal to the United Nations sound exciting—the idea struck most who heard it as diversionary or anemic—and even the Muslims who clamored around his hotel headquarters were largely deaf to ideas from Mecca. His lieutenant James 67X seethed against Malcolm’s revised teaching on white people, because he wanted only to purify Elijah Muhammad’s doctrine from sexual and financial corruption. Some refugees from the Nation looked for Malcolm to duplicate Captain Joseph’s enforcement of moral order—three-day fasts, rigid sobriety, strict separation of the sexes—while allowing them to freelance in politics. Others reveled in the new freedom to have a date without approval from their Muslim captain, or to smoke a cigarette, but expected to serve in a Malcolm X militia that would show Martin Luther King how to strike fear in segregationists. Either way, James 67X despaired of establishing security or discipline while overrun by reporters, glamour-seekers, curious students, gangsters, religious sectarians, and a wide assortment of secular radicals—many white, nearly all non-Muslim. For Benjamin 2X, the thrill of serving as interim spokesman gave way to aimlessness. Malcolm’s caretakers struggled over the content of an interim program, and those attending one meeting puzzled over an introductory presentation on yoga.

  Malcolm quickly abandoned his floundering disciples again. In Chicago on May 23—only two days after returning from abroad—he headlined a public debate in the Civic Opera House before a racially mixed audience of nearly two thousand, and appeared with celebrities on columnist Irv Kupcinet’s television show. He ridiculed the suggestion that Americans need only follow the example of bridge expert Oswald Jacoby, who proudly claimed not to have noticed that one of his card-playing partners was a Negro. He shocked polite optimists by disdaining American history since the first colonial landings as an exercise in “your white nationalism, which you call democracy.” When he lapsed from confrontation to a humbler description of his isolation in Mecca—“I was worried because I couldn’t communicate”—his television hosts cut to their next guest, film star Olivia de Havilland.

  A new public face partly emerged in Chicago. Malcolm refined his scorn for the civil rights bill by arguing that it mistakenly assumed a foundation of basic human rights. “I very much doubt that you can make a citizen out of anyone you don’t regard as a human being,” he said. Instead of defending racial separation, Malcolm presented integration and separation as alternative methods to gain what Negroes “really want—recognition and respect as human beings.” Caught reverting to Elijah Muhammad’s separationist metaphor of white America as a sinking ship, he confessed in debate that he was not sure how to find a floating log for escape in mid-ocean, or where he might hope to sail one. Most notably, Malcolm seldom mentioned the Nation of Islam—omitting both his veiled criticisms and his habitual mantra of tribute to “the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.” His purpose was to demonstrate a fearless independent drawing power in Muhammad’s home city, and from there to sound out the terms of separation from the Nation. He offered to quit fighting the eviction suit and give up his home as part of a comprehensive agreement. “I want to settle the situation quietly, privately, and peacefully,” he told the Negro press.

  Malcolm’s mission collided with a hostility that had intensified rather than cooled while he was abroad. From Los Angeles, where thirteen Muslims remained on criminal appeal from the Stokes trial, the temple captain informed Chicago of the prevailing rage against Malcolm’s reported “conversion” from the Nation’s teachings on white devils. Supreme Captain Raymond Sharrieff replied that Malcolm’s mind had been turned from true Islam, and that “if Allah pleases him to live, he will come back crawling.” To stamp out Malcolm as the personification of a whole cluster of heresies, Elijah Muhammad himself told not only his followers but his printers and other non-Muslim contractors to have no dealings with Malcolm. He ordered his temples to retrieve into active membership all those Muslims being shunned on “time-out” suspension for infractions of his rules. This defensive measure insulated from recruitment all those Elijah called “the weak ones”—Muslims with a continuing hunger for sectarian reinforcement in every aspect of daily life, from diet and entertainment to belief, but lacking complete submission. However, the amnesty also removed ostracism as a principal tool of discipline. In its place, the Nation further adapted the quasi-military regimen that Elijah Muhammad first had instituted to train his Fruit of Islam for self-defense against white devils. Specialized enforcement squads, expanded since the Stokes violence to collect revenue quotas on newspaper sales, now expanded again on the captains’ orders to inflict corporal punishment and intimidation upon dissenters from Elijah Muhammad.

  Malcolm verified personally in Chicago that Wallace Muhammad, the one friend he knew to be committed to the reform of the Nation toward hajj Islam, lived under siege within his own family. Young Chicago Muslims, including Wallace’s nephew Hassan Sharrieff, carried guns to protect Wallace from threat of attacks. Earlier in May, when Wallace had told a delegation of troubled Muslims from his former temple the truth about his father’s deviations as he knew them, a running war of fistfights and ambushes broke out in Philadelphia between those who could and those who could not accept their report. Similar battles loomed in cities where Malcolm’s personal following among Muslims was strongest—New York, Chicago, Boston, and Los Angeles. From Boston, Minister Louis X continued to excoriate Malcolm for his “evil and vicious attack on the Messenger,” branding him a renegade false prophet who was “trying to lure us into following him.” Writing in Muhammad Speaks, Louis called down upon his former teacher the cursed lament of the biblical Cain: “Everyone that sees me shall slay me.”

  Against this torrent of dogma from the Nation, Wallace Muhammad cautiously explored the idea of forming an embryonic community of American-born hajj Muslims by leading a secession that would be parallel to Malcolm’s, only quieter. But Wallace warned Malcolm from harrowing experience in
Chicago that his family was resolved to wipe out Muslim opposition. This left Malcolm and Wallace all but helpless—branded enemies by a war chorus of former colleagues and loved ones, while cut off from whites, Negro Christians, and the Muslims abroad. Their isolation from the Nation galled them because they understood it so clearly. Exaggerations once designed to uproot white control had become tools to bury Negro minds again. Small corruptions—the semidivinity of Elijah as the Messenger, the forced extraction of revenue—slipped from doctrine to convenience to self-protection, until the Nation’s leaders preyed upon the blind loyalty they demanded. Malcolm retreated to New York. Sometimes he counseled peace toward Muslims who repeated the Nation’s formularized threats against him, saying they were not in control of their own thoughts. Under pressure, he also exploded with agonized regret. “We had the best organization the black man’s ever had,” he snapped, adding what was for him a rare and profane epithet: “Niggers ruined it!”

  Malcolm seized a moment of calm to look through his Africa photographs as treasures of a vanished dream. “You know,” he said wistfully to Benjamin 2X, “if it wasn’t for you all here in this country, I would have stayed there, in Ethiopia.” While he could not accept a permanent exile for survival, he swiftly let go of any hope that he could begin a “reform” denomination of American Islam peaceably. The bellicose Nation offered Malcolm X only the exit of surrender. He could crawl, renouncing any claim to speak as a Muslim, and work the fringes of the civil rights movement with a wholly secular message, essentially bluffing vigilante action. Malcolm gagged on this option. In exchange for suppressing or repudiating his own hajj beliefs, he would gain not even a guarantee of safety. Stripped of Muslim company and defenders, he would remain an admitted apostate to the Nation and, for its army of robots, an irresistible object lesson.

  He decided instead to fight from the inside. Cornered and disorganized, having lost ground by absenting himself in the vain hope of a truce, Malcolm saw only a desperate chance to puncture the mystique of Elijah Muhammad by publicly denouncing him. His strategy amounted to stirring up a nest of honeybees while shouting that their queen was defective.

  Malcolm knew better than to move tentatively. By the first of June, less than two weeks after his return, he dispatched Jamex 67X to locate the two women encamped near Elijah Muhammad’s home in Phoenix, Arizona, where they were begging for family support. Operating as Malcolm’s spy behind enemy lines, James implored Evelyn Williams and Lucille Karriem to sign notarized affidavits for what they had confirmed to Malcolm and Wallace Muhammad—that Elijah had impregnated them and four others who worked as his secretaries, then humiliated them before the membership of the Nation as harlots and tramps. The women allowed photographs of themselves and their children to be taken, but wavered between resentment and fear, whereupon James put them on the telephone to New York. “Mister Muhammad will be brought to justice,” Malcolm X assured Lucille Karriem, who was expecting her third child by the Messenger, “and if you and Evelyn speak up, Allah will reward you.”

  Government surveillance lagged just behind. FBI intelligence experts, having noticed months earlier that Malcolm no longer showed up on their Nation of Islam wiretaps, had gained Robert Kennedy’s approval for the first intercept on Malcolm X himself at the Elmhurst home he still occupied under threat of eviction. Technicians finished the June 3 installation just in time to overhear the first barrage of battle communications. Malcolm told a friend that he was “a trapeze artist” trying to leap into public view with the Muhammad sex scandal before the Nation could kill him.He told an ally in Los Angeles that the Nation’s temples were “pumping these brothers with poison and trying to get a shot at me.” One confidant reported that newspaper editors were afraid to print stories about scandals involving Elijah Muhammad and told of hearing an official of the Nation say that Malcolm, “being black in America,” could never protect himself. “Well, we’ll see,” replied Malcolm. While railing against the press—its insatiable interest in rhetoric about hatred and violence against whites, as contrasted with what he called a “blackout” on his Africa trip and his deadly dispute with the Nation—Malcolm vowed to break through. “I know how to do it,” he said. “With Allah’s help, I’ll do it.” Of Elijah Muhammad he said, “the only way to end this is to expose him,” and he called New York police to report an attempt on his life.

  FBI SUPERVISORS shrugged off Malcolm’s alarms as “just another effort…to obtain publicity,” and refrained from notifying other federal agencies or local police departments. Here and elsewhere across a vast range of secrets, government officials made use of selective and idiosyncratic interpretations. During his exclusive June 4 interview with author William Manchester on the Kennedy assassination, J. Edgar Hoover minimized the FBI’s record of contact with Lee Harvey Oswald, including its relatively benign prior assessment of Oswald as a kookish nonspy, then abruptly preempted any suggestion of corresponding lenience toward Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. With his aide Deke DeLoach looking on, Hoover expounded on the nature of Khrushchev’s “very cold and evil mind” to the nonplussed author. “The Director told Manchester that he had always felt it better to kick individuals like Khrushchev on the shins once in a while rather than to boot-lick them,” DeLoach wrote in his memcon. “The Director explained that Khrushchev was basically an oriental, and that individuals opposing orientals usually lost face in the oriental’s opinion when fear or trepidation was shown.”

  Under Hoover’s orders, the FBI’s intelligence division had just completed a security review of the National Council of Churches that assigned its leaders to a category similar to Oswald’s—shady and suspect, but not “under Communist Party domination or control.” In sharp contrast, officials at the Justice Department were portraying the National Council leaders as stabilizing heroes at the forefront of an approaching racial confrontation in the South. From John Doar up through Burke Marshall to Nicholas Katzenbach and Attorney General Kennedy, and from there over to the White House, memos warned of a buildup in Klan terrorism against Negroes, especially in Mississippi. For political balance, Katzenbach described the student leaders planning Freedom Summer as hotheads and provocateurs at the opposite extreme, and praised the adult church leaders under Robert Spike for trying to “turn the students who will be in Mississippi to some sort of useful and productive activity.”

  The motive behind this careful posturing was to enlist and assist President Johnson in the delicate task of maneuvering Hoover’s FBI toward greater vigilance and protection for civil rights workers. Burke Marshall, who undertook a brief trip to Mississippi so that he could pretend to discover the looming emergency for himself, gave Robert Kennedy a briefing paper drafted consciously “to avoid as much as possible any appearance of criticism of the Bureau’s handling of specific investigations.” The collaborators from the Justice Department recommended that Kennedy ask Johnson to describe the ominous Klan conspiracies to Hoover as a threat analogous to the Communist menace, cajoling the Director to fight it with the spy tactics that had proved so “spectacularly efficient” against the American Communist party.

  On June 4, meeting alone with President Johnson as White House reporters speculated furiously about deals being made for the Democratic campaign ticket, Robert Kennedy outlined the Mississippi dilemma. He said that Mississippi police and sheriffs were believed to instigate criminal violence, “or at the very least to tolerate it,” and he impressed Johnson with his command of details: a recent upsurge of some forty racially motivated arrests, beatings, and bombings in a climate of impugnity for segregationist violence, with Byron de la Beckwith recently freed after his second mistrial for killing Medgar Evers and state officials rallying citizens against a pending “invasion” by integrationist college students.

  Kennedy found Johnson consumed by real Communist threats, not mirages meant to influence Hoover. Secretary McNamara had just delivered a gloomy report from the new American commander in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, and Ambassador L
odge was coming home from Saigon to pursue the Republican presidential nomination. Johnson described his frustrations so strongly that Robert Kennedy did not press his risky and complex strategy for mobilizing the FBI in Mississippi. Instead, Kennedy volunteered to replace Lodge personally in Saigon as coordinator of the American war effort, acknowledging later to Johnson in a handwritten note that Vietnam “is obviously the most important problem facing the United States.”

  THE FBI steered its own course on race relations for another three weeks. From the Atlanta wiretaps, agents had learned in advance that Martin Luther King would be returning to California for six days of speeches and fund-raising at the end of May. Headquarters ordered the San Francisco office to prepare bugs for King’s room at the Sheraton Palace Hotel. Wiretaps also alerted the FBI to negotiations for King to rent a summer beach cottage near St. Augustine, Florida, where he addressed a mass meeting on the night of May 26. Inside a packed First Baptist Church, where some children held banners reading, “Let Freedom Ring with Dr. Hay-ling,” King exhorted a crowd that cheered every gesture and cue of his long-awaited appearance: “You are proving to be the creative spiritual anvils that will wear out many a physical hammer.” By call and response of shouted acclamation, King extracted promises of steadfast nonviolence through hardships—stonings, arrests, attacks by police dog. “If they shoot at you,” he cried, “will you still remain nonviolent?”

  The next day, on his way to California, King stopped off in New York to address the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Through wiretaps on Clarence Jones and Bayard Rustin, FBI analysts confirmed that King was meeting occasionally with a new advisory board called his Research Committee, formed largely at the initiative of corporate lawyer Harry Wachtel. Some members of his board joked that it took nearly a dozen senior men to replace the wisdom King missed from his nightly phone conversations with Stanley Levison. Others tended to fret over the greater consequences of rash mistakes now that King was a force near the center of national politics. Bayard Rustin urged King to avoid the advance publicity over the Freedom Summer in Mississippi, arguing that unstructured and immature SNCC leadership threatened to undermine political alliances. Wachtel and Clarence Jones thought King’s nonviolent philosophy was growing stale and insipid to Northern tastes, endangering financial contributions. They wanted something dramatic—an advance since Birmingham—but they also worried about any gamble that might belittle King or backfire in violence before the civil rights bill passed.