Dick Gregory - For those who STILL don't know what really happened to Malcolm X. Respect!
- Thread starter kefta
- Start date
Link?
Dick Gregory.
Interesting...
Exactly what I mean that was pure awesoneness.
That and francis cress welsing crush a racist eugenicist was the greatest events I ever witnessed on tv.
Big up to gil noble and tony brown
http://www.alex-haley.com/alex_haley_black_merchants_of_hate.html
Black Merchants of Hate (January 26, 1963)
Here is an excerpt from Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable: "The Saturday Evening Post published Alex Haley and Alfred Balk's collaboration Black Merchants of Hate on January 26, 1963, giving the story six full pages and including numerous illustrations. The article brought into stark relief the tensions simmering between Malcolm and the Chicago headquarters, and for anyone paying close attention it marked the shift in public perception of both the Nation and Malcolm in the previous two years.
"The article differed from Mr. Muhammad Speaks in several significant ways, opening with the dramatic story of Johnson X Hinton's beating and the provocative response led by Malcolm. It briefly covered Elijah Muhammad's personal history and role within the sect, whose national membership it estimated at the absurdly low figure of five to six thousand, with another fifty thousand sympathizers. Haley and Balk emphasized that the Nation of Islam was never part of the larger Muslim world: 'Muhammad himself has no known tie with orthodox Islam.' But the greatest discontinuity from the initial article was the coverage given to Malcolm, whom the authors moved to center stage, succinctly charting his father's terrifying death, the vices and crimes of Harlem's Detroit Red—incorrectly placing his incarceration 'at the age of 19'—and his ultimate salvation as an NOI zealot:
"Articulate, single-minded, the fire of bitterness still burning in his soul, Malcolm X travels the country, organizing, encouraging, trouble-shooting . . . While Muhammad appears to be training his son Wallace to succeed him when he retires or dies, many Muslims feel that Malcolm is too powerful to be denied the leadership if he wants it.
"By building up Malcolm's role at Muhammad's expense, and suggesting a possible internal conflict, Black Merchants of Hate fostered even greater jealousy and dissent within the NOI's ranks: exactly what the FBI had hoped for when it agreed to feed information to Balk. Still, the piece was so successful that Haley, who had begun conducting interviews for Playboy magazine, proposed Malcolm as his next subject, and the two men met for several days in the winter of 1963 at the NOI's restaurant in Harlem to generate material."
Black Merchants of Hate By Alex Haley and Alfred Balk
Fanatic and well disciplined, Negro "Muslims" threaten to turn resentment against racial discrimination into open rebellion.
One pleasant spring evening a few years ago in New York's swarming Negro ghetto, Harlem, a policeman broke up an argument in an old, time-honored way: He clubbed one of the participants over the head and hauled him to the station. There the man was cursed, insulted and beaten until his face and body were bloody.
Up to this point the incident was not unique; police brutality, especially to Negroes, is an old story. But what happened next had never happened before, and it not only shocked the police of New York City but left a deep and lasting impression on law-enforcement officers throughout the country.
The victim of the clubbing belonged to a tightly knit Negro extremist sect known as the Black Muslims. As he was being dragged to the station, a fellow member was racing to alert his "brothers." Within minutes, over 100 sect members were lined up outside the doors of the police station. They were young and muscular, dressed uniformly in dark clothing, only a star-and-crescent ring or lapel pin breaking the black pattern. Their hair was close-cropped. They were intense, silent.
When the injured man was taken to a hospital, they followed. Soon the crowd had grown into a mob of 800, some of them teen-agers with zip guns. There were low, angry mutterings. Police were hesitant to try to disperse the mob, fearing an outbreak. "We'd better talk to Malcolm X," a policeman said.
A meeting was hastily arranged in the office of Negro newspaper editor James Hicks; present were three police officials and a tall, light-skinned Negro, Malcolm X, the sect's local leader. "That crowd's ready to explode," one police official told him. "Will you use your influence against violence?"
"Guarantee that our brother will get medical treatment," Malcolm said tersely. "Pledge that the men who beat him will be punished."
The police gave him their promise. Then, assured by Hicks that their word could be trusted, Malcolm did something which witnesses still recall with disbelief. He strode to the head of the angry, impatient mob, stood silently, and then flicked his hands. Within seconds the street was empty.
"No man," a policeman said after seeing this, "should have that much power."
This is only one of many incidents that dramatize the awesome discipline and power of this militant, semisecret, anti-white, anti-Christian sect. Led by Georgia-born Elijah Poole, a 65-year-old self-styled "Messenger of Allah" who calls himself "Elijah Muhammad," The Muslims (pronounced Moose-lums) have become the most explosive force in the American civil-rights struggle.
Most Negro extremists can muster only handfuls of people who convene on street corners or in storefront halls. Elijah Muhammad has spoken to as many as 10,000 cheering Negroes at hate-inciting rallies in New York, Boston, Washington, Philadelphia, Detroit, Los Angeles and other cities. Their next rally, this one their lavish annual convention, will be held February 26 in Chicago's 6,300-seat Coliseum.
Who are the Black Muslims? Are they, as one columnist described them, "the Mau Mau of the American Negro world," and therefore a dangerous threat to our society? Or has the menace of this group been exaggerated?
We were assigned by The Saturday Evening Post as a biracial team to find out. For this report we interviewed dozens of civic, governmental and law-enforcement officials, both white and Negro. We talked to leaders of the Negro community. We questioned Black Muslims and their high officials. We gained admission to Muslim temple services and mass rallies. What we learned revealed several widely held misconceptions about the group—some heartening, some deeply disturbing.
To begin with, the Muslims sneer at the main objective of most Negroes: peaceful integration. "There will never be anything more than tokenintegration," says Elijah Muhammad. "It's a white man's trick to keep the black man enslaved."
Muslims demand racial separation in exclusively Negro states—large areas of our country from which white men would be driven and Negroes would take control. They openly criticize the men who are leading the fight for Negro rights. Among their most hated targets are Nobel Prize-winning diplomat Ralph Bunche, the Rev. Martin Luther King and U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Thurgood Marshall. Muslims sneeringly call Marshall "The Ugly American."
Moreover the Muslims openly demonstrate their contempt for Negro groups like the N.A.A.C.P., the sit-in demonstrators and the Freedom Riders. They deride students like James Meredith, who attempt to integrate Southern schools. "Why should any black man lower himself to try and get into a second-rate university?" one Muslim asked us.
Another major Muslim goal is to turn Negros away from Christianity, which they call "a white man's religion used to enslave the black man." In at least two cases, in Arizona and New Jersey, Muslims have recruited entire congregations of Christian sects by converting the minister. Says Elijah Muhammad: "I'm doing all I can to make the so-called Negros see that the white race and its religion, Christianity, are their open enemies."
"One thing everyone should understand," a member of a Chicago police undercover unit told us, "is that Elijah 'Muhammad' Poole is not just a run-of-the-mill rabble rouser, nor is his organization just an innocuous regional sect. This man is creating a mass movement on a national scale."
This became immediately clear. Though the Muslims refuse to release membership figures, it is known that Muhammad has an organized following in 80 cities and avid supporters among Negro inmates of at least two dozen state and Federal prisons. The sect owns stores, restaurants and other property in such cities as Chicago, Detroit, New York and Washington, D.C.
In two cities it operates its own accredited schools—in Detroit, a nine-grade "University of Islam" for 140 students, and in Chicago a 12-grade "University" for 430. Muslims further "educate" their following through a tabloid newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, and hate filled magazines and pamphlets; 50 small radio stations across the country carry broadcasts by Muhammad.
As part of their goal of separating themselves entirely from "the white man's society," the Muslims call themselves "The Nation of Islam" and have their own flag, an Islamic star and crescent. They also have their own police force, powerful, judo-trained guards known as "The Fruit of Islam."
Muslims refuse to vote, and most refuse to report for military service. At this writing the oldest of Muhammad's six sons, Wallace, age 28, is in prison on a charge of draft evasion.
The Muslim law also requires that members abandon use of their legal last name. It is, Muhammad maintains, a repugnantly symbolic "slave name," inherited from "slavemasters" who exploited earlier generations of Negroes. Instead, Muslims use an "X", which stands for "true identity unknown." If there is more than one member in a temple with the same first name, the second to join is known as "2X." In Harlem, we talked to a member of the Muslim temple named Frank 7X.
The Muslims' mass rallies are perhaps the most spectacular and frightening events they stage, reminiscent in some way of the huge meetings at which Hitler screamed his doctrines of Aryan supremacy. We attended their latest rally in Philadelphia last October. Three hours before meeting time at the Philadelphia Arena a vanguard of 40 charter buses and caravans of cars began arriving from as far away as Boston and Atlanta. Most passengers wore the Muslim "uniform"—for men, dark suits and dark shoes; for women, Arabic-type white robes and kerchiefs.
Fruit of Islam guards patrolled the doors outside. Before being admitted, everyone—including a dozen reporters and photographers—was lined up against a wall and searched.
"What is the reason for this," we asked a guard. He looked at us warily. "We have many enemies," he said.
Inside the Arena approximately 5,000 men and women were seated—segregated by sex as Elijah had ordered. In front of them blared a banner: There Is No God But Allah, Muhammad Is His Apostle. Guards were everywhere.
The crowd was strangely silent. Suddenly applause erupted from one corner of the vast hall.
Elijah Muhammad had arrived. He was a short, rather unimpressive-looking man, slight and light-skinned. He wore a dark suit, bow tie and black-embroidered fez. His face showing no expression, he moved quickly to the speaker's platform.
As soon as he was seated the introduction began. "A man who has seen God," he was called, "a man who has heard God, the boldest black man in America, the smartest black man in America, the most powerful black man in America!"
During the introduction the tiny Muhammad sat impassively. Then, as he rose to speak, he seemed transformed. His movements became abrupt, jerky. He stared piercingly at his audience, spitting out his words in harsh, thin tones.
The Black race, he began, was "Original Man," created 66,000,000,000,000 years ago. Adam was grafted from a black man 6,000 years ago by a black scientist. Thus whites were weaker. They were, in fact, devils. They had kidnapped Negroes from a high civilization in Mecca, enslaved them, brainwashed them into a false sense of inferiority, and made them worship a white Jesus. But the Nation of Islam, he said, would rise again. Whites were corrupt; their civilization was doomed.
"Get away from them!" he shouted. "They wasn't taught to do good! They was taught to do evil! They was taught to hate you and me! Stand up and fight the white man!" "We are the victorious people! We will rule!"
"Prophet!" cried a voice. "Messenger!" screamed another. "Teach us!" The crowd began applauding wildly. Some shook their fists in the air. It was an unforgettable performance.
But it is not only in such mass rallies that Muslims demonstrate their remarkable dedication, discipline and solidarity. They also subscribe to a puritanical personal code—they eat only one meal a day, abstain from alcohol and tobacco, and the women use no cosmetics. Gambling, narcotics and sexual promiscuity are prohibited. Muslims are urged to marry within their race, preferably within their faith. They dress neatly, practice a ritualistic politeness, refrain from raucous laughter or loud talk.
Muslims stick together
Muslims pledge one tenth to one third of their income to the movement. They patronize its business or those owned by Muslims. They face east and pray to Mecca three times daily and refrain from eating pork or anything cooked with pork. They are required to attend services regularly at a Muslim "temple" or "mosque." In most temples, decorations include a painting of a Negro hung from tree limb, a replica of an American flag captioned, Slavery Suffering and Death, and an Islamic star and crescent proclaiming, Freedom, Justice, and Equality. Large letters demand, Which Will Survive the War of Armageddon?
"Shocking as this sounds to many people," says Negro scholar Dr. C. Eric Lincoln of Clark College in Atlanta, "to Negro masses who live in big-city ghettoes it has undeniable appeal."
"They are uneducated, unskilled, isolated by poverty and discrimination from the common values of society. They are strangers in their own country, shunned by successful whites and Negroes alike. They see no hope of improvement. Then they hear the voice of Elijah 'Muhammad,' challenging them to recover their self-respect, urging them to repudiate the white man's religion and culture, daring them to believe in race pride and black supremacy. And they not only listen, they act."
Perhaps typical of the Muslim leadership in terms of his background and bitterness is a lanky, energetic, good-looking man named Malcolm Little, once known in Harlem as "Big Red." One of 11 children of an uneducated Baptist preacher, Little was born in Omaha 37 years ago. He lived in crowed, crime-ridden racial ghettos in Omaha, Lansing, Michigan, Boston and New York. He has bitter memories of each.
When Malcolm was six his father, whom a group of whites considered "too aggressive in racial matters," was found under a Lansing streetcar, "his head bashed in and his body mangled. After that we almost starved."
Little left home and school after the eighth grade to become a waiter on a railroad dining car. Bored and frustrated, he soon gravitated to Harlem as a numbers runner, then a hustler of bootleg whiskey and dope. Prominent whites paid "Big Red" large fees to be squired to vice in Harlem. White police demanded bribes which he peeled from the $1,000 bankroll he always carried.
Then, in 1946, at the age of 19, he was convicted of grand larceny in Boston, and a white judge sentenced him to 10 years in prison. While in jail, he learned of Poole's doctrine. "When I heard the white man was a devil," he told us, "it clicked."
Articulate, single-minded, the fire of bitterness still burning his soul, Malcolm X travels the country—organizing, encouraging, trouble-shooting in local Muslim organizations. He appears on radio-TV interviews and speaks and debates on street corners, in Muslim temples and on college campuses. Malcolm X and his wife, a former nurse, are so dedicated to militant accomplishments of Muslim goals that they named one daughter Attila (for the leader of the Huns) and another Qubillah (after Kublai Khan). While Muhammad appears to be training his son Wallace to succeed him when he retires or dies, many Muslims feel that Malcolm is too powerful to be denied the leadership if he wants it.
But as remarkable and typical as Malcolm's transformation has been, law-enforcement officials feel that the dedicated Muslim may be a worse threat to society than the criminal. "There is no way to measure the long-term effect of the race hatred they preach," a New York police official told us.
Equally insidious, we were told repeatedly, are the results of Muslim teachings about violence. Although Muslims profess to abhor violence, pointing to their regulations against carrying weapons, they are often in the thick of it. When a riot in Los Angeles last April resulted in the gunshot death of one person and the wounding of 14 others, Muslims were involved. When twin riots partially wrecked a youth reformatory outside Washington, D.C., last summer, Muslims were prominent. Prison riots involving Muslims have broken out in California, Michigan, Maryland and elsewhere.
A look at Muslim statements shows what inspires this violence. "We must take things into our own hands," Muhammad said in one speech. "We must return to the Mosaic law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. What does it matter if ten million of us die?"
Malcolm X is even more provocative on the subject. "If anyone attacks you," he told one audience, "lay down your life! If anyone so much as touches your finger, his place is in the graveyard!"
"I got a wire from God"
Malcolm shocked even sympathetic Negroes with a statement made last June after receiving a message that 121 white civic and cultural leaders from Atlanta had been killed in the crash of a chartered airliner outside Paris.
"I would like to announce a very beautiful thing that has just happened," he told his audience. "I got a wire from God today . . . . Somebody came and told me that He really had answered our prayers in France. He dropped an air plane out of the sky with over 120 white people on it . . . . we will continue to pray and we hope that every day another plane falls out of the sky."
How does this fanatical doctrine fit in with the tenets of the orthodox Muslim faith, which has 500,000,000 followers throughout the world?
"Elijah Poole's teachings, his dogma and doctrine of hatred, are utterly non-Muslim," says Ahmad Kamal, a recognized authority on the faith who has written a noted pilgrimage guidebook and heads the worldwide Islamic relief agency, Jami'at al Islam. "It is anti-Muslim. We feel a great compassion for all Negroes who have been duped by the Black Muslims."
Muhammad himself has no known tie with orthodox Islam. One of 13 children of a rural Baptist preacher, he worked as a Georgia field hand, on railroad gangs, at a sawmill, in a brickyard and in factories in Detroit. Apparently, he had his first experience with this twisted form of Muhammadanism when he met a silk peddler named W. D. Fard in Detroit about 1930. Fard claimed to have come from Mecca. If indeed he did, he made two recorded stopovers: one in California, where as "Wallie Ford" he was sentenced to San Quentin State Prison on a narcotics charge: and then in Chicago, where a cultist known as Noble Drew Ali suggested that Fard become a "Prophet of Islam." Ali gave Fard the concept of a "Nation of Islam," and terminology like "so-called American Negroes."
In 1931 in Detroit Poole helped Fard found Temple of Islam No. 1, the Fruit of Islam Guard, and the first University of Islam. Fard bestowed on Poole, the name "Muhammad" and the title, "First Minister of Islam." When Fard disappeared in 1934, Poole took over the sect.
Today, despite the Spartan discipline which governs the lives of the mass of Muslims, Elijah Poole is reaping the benefits of his life of struggle. He and his Georgia-born wife Clara commute between an 18-room mansion in Chicago and a four-bedroom winter home, complete with a swimming pool, in Phoenix. All eight of their children have positions in the movement, and all are apparently dedicated to their father's extremism. In a visit to his Chicago home, the Negro member of our team noted that Muhammad's fanaticism extends even to the symbolic use of brown bread instead of white and of African coffee packaged by a Muslim in New Jersey.
Like most racists, Poole believes unshakably in the righteousness of his cause and the inevitability of his eventual triumph. When asked about planned investigations into his movement by Congress, the FBI, and local, state and Federal tax officials, Poole replied stubbornly, "Let them come. I have all I need. I have the truth!"
What is the truth? Just how strong are the Black Muslims?
To begin with, most published reports number Muslim membership as between 100,000 and 250,000. This, authoritative sources, told us, is vastly exaggerated. Actually, of approximately 20,000,000 American Negroes, only a hard core of 5,500 to 6,000 have actually become temple members. This figure, of course, does not include an estimated 50,000 others who are sympathetic.
The Muslims' financial power also is exaggerated. Their businesses, though clean and well-run, are low-profit neighborhood enterprises. Most are owned by the members, not by the movement. The total amount of aggregate property accumulated by the sect is only a fraction of that owned by the late Daddy Grace or Father Divine.
The Muslims have found that prisons and slums are their most fertile breeding ground. It is hopeful to note that whenever there is strong Negro leadership and good race relations in a community, the sect has flopped miserably.
"The average Negro," says noted Negro psychologist Dr. Kenneth Clark of New York City, "readily realizes that there is no point in talking about whether the Negro wants to integrate in America. He has no choice. He is involved with America—inextricably so—and America with him"
How important are they?
Like counterpart white supremacist groups the Black Muslims are not on the Attorney General's subversive list. Federal investigators report no evidence of foreign domination.
Of what significance, then, are the Muslims? "In this difficult period of social transition," says Burke Marshall, Assistant U.S. Attorney General for Civil Rights, "no group with this discipline and dogma can be ignored." In the event of real trouble, says Los Angeles police chief William Parker, "they could become the shock troops in a conflict between races."
On the other hand, some authorities believe that, unintentionally, the Muslims have had some good effects. Says Ralph McGill, famed publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, "Now that real Negro extremists have appeared, possibly there will be an end to irresponsible charges that moderate, responsible organizations like the N.A.A.C.P. and the Urban League are unreasonable—or, more absurdly, 'Communist-run.' "
Little Rock's, Harry S. Ashmore, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editor and a practical expert in race relations, puts it this way: "The Black Muslims are a warning to which churches, community leaders and public officials had better pay heed. That is, that the masses of Negro people no longer are willing to stand still, that injustice has been done, and change is going to come. The only question is, will the change come through men and women working together regardless of race, or will the field be left to extremists?"
"The Black Muslims and White Citizens councils offer one answer. Let us hope that responsible Americans will begin working for another." ~ Alex Haley and Alfred Balk.
Black Merchants of Hate (January 26, 1963)
Here is an excerpt from Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable: "The Saturday Evening Post published Alex Haley and Alfred Balk's collaboration Black Merchants of Hate on January 26, 1963, giving the story six full pages and including numerous illustrations. The article brought into stark relief the tensions simmering between Malcolm and the Chicago headquarters, and for anyone paying close attention it marked the shift in public perception of both the Nation and Malcolm in the previous two years.
"The article differed from Mr. Muhammad Speaks in several significant ways, opening with the dramatic story of Johnson X Hinton's beating and the provocative response led by Malcolm. It briefly covered Elijah Muhammad's personal history and role within the sect, whose national membership it estimated at the absurdly low figure of five to six thousand, with another fifty thousand sympathizers. Haley and Balk emphasized that the Nation of Islam was never part of the larger Muslim world: 'Muhammad himself has no known tie with orthodox Islam.' But the greatest discontinuity from the initial article was the coverage given to Malcolm, whom the authors moved to center stage, succinctly charting his father's terrifying death, the vices and crimes of Harlem's Detroit Red—incorrectly placing his incarceration 'at the age of 19'—and his ultimate salvation as an NOI zealot:
"Articulate, single-minded, the fire of bitterness still burning in his soul, Malcolm X travels the country, organizing, encouraging, trouble-shooting . . . While Muhammad appears to be training his son Wallace to succeed him when he retires or dies, many Muslims feel that Malcolm is too powerful to be denied the leadership if he wants it.
"By building up Malcolm's role at Muhammad's expense, and suggesting a possible internal conflict, Black Merchants of Hate fostered even greater jealousy and dissent within the NOI's ranks: exactly what the FBI had hoped for when it agreed to feed information to Balk. Still, the piece was so successful that Haley, who had begun conducting interviews for Playboy magazine, proposed Malcolm as his next subject, and the two men met for several days in the winter of 1963 at the NOI's restaurant in Harlem to generate material."
Black Merchants of Hate By Alex Haley and Alfred Balk
Fanatic and well disciplined, Negro "Muslims" threaten to turn resentment against racial discrimination into open rebellion.
One pleasant spring evening a few years ago in New York's swarming Negro ghetto, Harlem, a policeman broke up an argument in an old, time-honored way: He clubbed one of the participants over the head and hauled him to the station. There the man was cursed, insulted and beaten until his face and body were bloody.
Up to this point the incident was not unique; police brutality, especially to Negroes, is an old story. But what happened next had never happened before, and it not only shocked the police of New York City but left a deep and lasting impression on law-enforcement officers throughout the country.
The victim of the clubbing belonged to a tightly knit Negro extremist sect known as the Black Muslims. As he was being dragged to the station, a fellow member was racing to alert his "brothers." Within minutes, over 100 sect members were lined up outside the doors of the police station. They were young and muscular, dressed uniformly in dark clothing, only a star-and-crescent ring or lapel pin breaking the black pattern. Their hair was close-cropped. They were intense, silent.
When the injured man was taken to a hospital, they followed. Soon the crowd had grown into a mob of 800, some of them teen-agers with zip guns. There were low, angry mutterings. Police were hesitant to try to disperse the mob, fearing an outbreak. "We'd better talk to Malcolm X," a policeman said.
A meeting was hastily arranged in the office of Negro newspaper editor James Hicks; present were three police officials and a tall, light-skinned Negro, Malcolm X, the sect's local leader. "That crowd's ready to explode," one police official told him. "Will you use your influence against violence?"
"Guarantee that our brother will get medical treatment," Malcolm said tersely. "Pledge that the men who beat him will be punished."
The police gave him their promise. Then, assured by Hicks that their word could be trusted, Malcolm did something which witnesses still recall with disbelief. He strode to the head of the angry, impatient mob, stood silently, and then flicked his hands. Within seconds the street was empty.
"No man," a policeman said after seeing this, "should have that much power."
This is only one of many incidents that dramatize the awesome discipline and power of this militant, semisecret, anti-white, anti-Christian sect. Led by Georgia-born Elijah Poole, a 65-year-old self-styled "Messenger of Allah" who calls himself "Elijah Muhammad," The Muslims (pronounced Moose-lums) have become the most explosive force in the American civil-rights struggle.
Most Negro extremists can muster only handfuls of people who convene on street corners or in storefront halls. Elijah Muhammad has spoken to as many as 10,000 cheering Negroes at hate-inciting rallies in New York, Boston, Washington, Philadelphia, Detroit, Los Angeles and other cities. Their next rally, this one their lavish annual convention, will be held February 26 in Chicago's 6,300-seat Coliseum.
Who are the Black Muslims? Are they, as one columnist described them, "the Mau Mau of the American Negro world," and therefore a dangerous threat to our society? Or has the menace of this group been exaggerated?
We were assigned by The Saturday Evening Post as a biracial team to find out. For this report we interviewed dozens of civic, governmental and law-enforcement officials, both white and Negro. We talked to leaders of the Negro community. We questioned Black Muslims and their high officials. We gained admission to Muslim temple services and mass rallies. What we learned revealed several widely held misconceptions about the group—some heartening, some deeply disturbing.
To begin with, the Muslims sneer at the main objective of most Negroes: peaceful integration. "There will never be anything more than tokenintegration," says Elijah Muhammad. "It's a white man's trick to keep the black man enslaved."
Muslims demand racial separation in exclusively Negro states—large areas of our country from which white men would be driven and Negroes would take control. They openly criticize the men who are leading the fight for Negro rights. Among their most hated targets are Nobel Prize-winning diplomat Ralph Bunche, the Rev. Martin Luther King and U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Thurgood Marshall. Muslims sneeringly call Marshall "The Ugly American."
Moreover the Muslims openly demonstrate their contempt for Negro groups like the N.A.A.C.P., the sit-in demonstrators and the Freedom Riders. They deride students like James Meredith, who attempt to integrate Southern schools. "Why should any black man lower himself to try and get into a second-rate university?" one Muslim asked us.
Another major Muslim goal is to turn Negros away from Christianity, which they call "a white man's religion used to enslave the black man." In at least two cases, in Arizona and New Jersey, Muslims have recruited entire congregations of Christian sects by converting the minister. Says Elijah Muhammad: "I'm doing all I can to make the so-called Negros see that the white race and its religion, Christianity, are their open enemies."
"One thing everyone should understand," a member of a Chicago police undercover unit told us, "is that Elijah 'Muhammad' Poole is not just a run-of-the-mill rabble rouser, nor is his organization just an innocuous regional sect. This man is creating a mass movement on a national scale."
This became immediately clear. Though the Muslims refuse to release membership figures, it is known that Muhammad has an organized following in 80 cities and avid supporters among Negro inmates of at least two dozen state and Federal prisons. The sect owns stores, restaurants and other property in such cities as Chicago, Detroit, New York and Washington, D.C.
In two cities it operates its own accredited schools—in Detroit, a nine-grade "University of Islam" for 140 students, and in Chicago a 12-grade "University" for 430. Muslims further "educate" their following through a tabloid newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, and hate filled magazines and pamphlets; 50 small radio stations across the country carry broadcasts by Muhammad.
As part of their goal of separating themselves entirely from "the white man's society," the Muslims call themselves "The Nation of Islam" and have their own flag, an Islamic star and crescent. They also have their own police force, powerful, judo-trained guards known as "The Fruit of Islam."
Muslims refuse to vote, and most refuse to report for military service. At this writing the oldest of Muhammad's six sons, Wallace, age 28, is in prison on a charge of draft evasion.
The Muslim law also requires that members abandon use of their legal last name. It is, Muhammad maintains, a repugnantly symbolic "slave name," inherited from "slavemasters" who exploited earlier generations of Negroes. Instead, Muslims use an "X", which stands for "true identity unknown." If there is more than one member in a temple with the same first name, the second to join is known as "2X." In Harlem, we talked to a member of the Muslim temple named Frank 7X.
The Muslims' mass rallies are perhaps the most spectacular and frightening events they stage, reminiscent in some way of the huge meetings at which Hitler screamed his doctrines of Aryan supremacy. We attended their latest rally in Philadelphia last October. Three hours before meeting time at the Philadelphia Arena a vanguard of 40 charter buses and caravans of cars began arriving from as far away as Boston and Atlanta. Most passengers wore the Muslim "uniform"—for men, dark suits and dark shoes; for women, Arabic-type white robes and kerchiefs.
Fruit of Islam guards patrolled the doors outside. Before being admitted, everyone—including a dozen reporters and photographers—was lined up against a wall and searched.
"What is the reason for this," we asked a guard. He looked at us warily. "We have many enemies," he said.
Inside the Arena approximately 5,000 men and women were seated—segregated by sex as Elijah had ordered. In front of them blared a banner: There Is No God But Allah, Muhammad Is His Apostle. Guards were everywhere.
The crowd was strangely silent. Suddenly applause erupted from one corner of the vast hall.
Elijah Muhammad had arrived. He was a short, rather unimpressive-looking man, slight and light-skinned. He wore a dark suit, bow tie and black-embroidered fez. His face showing no expression, he moved quickly to the speaker's platform.
As soon as he was seated the introduction began. "A man who has seen God," he was called, "a man who has heard God, the boldest black man in America, the smartest black man in America, the most powerful black man in America!"
During the introduction the tiny Muhammad sat impassively. Then, as he rose to speak, he seemed transformed. His movements became abrupt, jerky. He stared piercingly at his audience, spitting out his words in harsh, thin tones.
The Black race, he began, was "Original Man," created 66,000,000,000,000 years ago. Adam was grafted from a black man 6,000 years ago by a black scientist. Thus whites were weaker. They were, in fact, devils. They had kidnapped Negroes from a high civilization in Mecca, enslaved them, brainwashed them into a false sense of inferiority, and made them worship a white Jesus. But the Nation of Islam, he said, would rise again. Whites were corrupt; their civilization was doomed.
"Get away from them!" he shouted. "They wasn't taught to do good! They was taught to do evil! They was taught to hate you and me! Stand up and fight the white man!" "We are the victorious people! We will rule!"
"Prophet!" cried a voice. "Messenger!" screamed another. "Teach us!" The crowd began applauding wildly. Some shook their fists in the air. It was an unforgettable performance.
But it is not only in such mass rallies that Muslims demonstrate their remarkable dedication, discipline and solidarity. They also subscribe to a puritanical personal code—they eat only one meal a day, abstain from alcohol and tobacco, and the women use no cosmetics. Gambling, narcotics and sexual promiscuity are prohibited. Muslims are urged to marry within their race, preferably within their faith. They dress neatly, practice a ritualistic politeness, refrain from raucous laughter or loud talk.
Muslims stick together
Muslims pledge one tenth to one third of their income to the movement. They patronize its business or those owned by Muslims. They face east and pray to Mecca three times daily and refrain from eating pork or anything cooked with pork. They are required to attend services regularly at a Muslim "temple" or "mosque." In most temples, decorations include a painting of a Negro hung from tree limb, a replica of an American flag captioned, Slavery Suffering and Death, and an Islamic star and crescent proclaiming, Freedom, Justice, and Equality. Large letters demand, Which Will Survive the War of Armageddon?
"Shocking as this sounds to many people," says Negro scholar Dr. C. Eric Lincoln of Clark College in Atlanta, "to Negro masses who live in big-city ghettoes it has undeniable appeal."
"They are uneducated, unskilled, isolated by poverty and discrimination from the common values of society. They are strangers in their own country, shunned by successful whites and Negroes alike. They see no hope of improvement. Then they hear the voice of Elijah 'Muhammad,' challenging them to recover their self-respect, urging them to repudiate the white man's religion and culture, daring them to believe in race pride and black supremacy. And they not only listen, they act."
Perhaps typical of the Muslim leadership in terms of his background and bitterness is a lanky, energetic, good-looking man named Malcolm Little, once known in Harlem as "Big Red." One of 11 children of an uneducated Baptist preacher, Little was born in Omaha 37 years ago. He lived in crowed, crime-ridden racial ghettos in Omaha, Lansing, Michigan, Boston and New York. He has bitter memories of each.
When Malcolm was six his father, whom a group of whites considered "too aggressive in racial matters," was found under a Lansing streetcar, "his head bashed in and his body mangled. After that we almost starved."
Little left home and school after the eighth grade to become a waiter on a railroad dining car. Bored and frustrated, he soon gravitated to Harlem as a numbers runner, then a hustler of bootleg whiskey and dope. Prominent whites paid "Big Red" large fees to be squired to vice in Harlem. White police demanded bribes which he peeled from the $1,000 bankroll he always carried.
Then, in 1946, at the age of 19, he was convicted of grand larceny in Boston, and a white judge sentenced him to 10 years in prison. While in jail, he learned of Poole's doctrine. "When I heard the white man was a devil," he told us, "it clicked."
Articulate, single-minded, the fire of bitterness still burning his soul, Malcolm X travels the country—organizing, encouraging, trouble-shooting in local Muslim organizations. He appears on radio-TV interviews and speaks and debates on street corners, in Muslim temples and on college campuses. Malcolm X and his wife, a former nurse, are so dedicated to militant accomplishments of Muslim goals that they named one daughter Attila (for the leader of the Huns) and another Qubillah (after Kublai Khan). While Muhammad appears to be training his son Wallace to succeed him when he retires or dies, many Muslims feel that Malcolm is too powerful to be denied the leadership if he wants it.
But as remarkable and typical as Malcolm's transformation has been, law-enforcement officials feel that the dedicated Muslim may be a worse threat to society than the criminal. "There is no way to measure the long-term effect of the race hatred they preach," a New York police official told us.
Equally insidious, we were told repeatedly, are the results of Muslim teachings about violence. Although Muslims profess to abhor violence, pointing to their regulations against carrying weapons, they are often in the thick of it. When a riot in Los Angeles last April resulted in the gunshot death of one person and the wounding of 14 others, Muslims were involved. When twin riots partially wrecked a youth reformatory outside Washington, D.C., last summer, Muslims were prominent. Prison riots involving Muslims have broken out in California, Michigan, Maryland and elsewhere.
A look at Muslim statements shows what inspires this violence. "We must take things into our own hands," Muhammad said in one speech. "We must return to the Mosaic law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. What does it matter if ten million of us die?"
Malcolm X is even more provocative on the subject. "If anyone attacks you," he told one audience, "lay down your life! If anyone so much as touches your finger, his place is in the graveyard!"
"I got a wire from God"
Malcolm shocked even sympathetic Negroes with a statement made last June after receiving a message that 121 white civic and cultural leaders from Atlanta had been killed in the crash of a chartered airliner outside Paris.
"I would like to announce a very beautiful thing that has just happened," he told his audience. "I got a wire from God today . . . . Somebody came and told me that He really had answered our prayers in France. He dropped an air plane out of the sky with over 120 white people on it . . . . we will continue to pray and we hope that every day another plane falls out of the sky."
How does this fanatical doctrine fit in with the tenets of the orthodox Muslim faith, which has 500,000,000 followers throughout the world?
"Elijah Poole's teachings, his dogma and doctrine of hatred, are utterly non-Muslim," says Ahmad Kamal, a recognized authority on the faith who has written a noted pilgrimage guidebook and heads the worldwide Islamic relief agency, Jami'at al Islam. "It is anti-Muslim. We feel a great compassion for all Negroes who have been duped by the Black Muslims."
Muhammad himself has no known tie with orthodox Islam. One of 13 children of a rural Baptist preacher, he worked as a Georgia field hand, on railroad gangs, at a sawmill, in a brickyard and in factories in Detroit. Apparently, he had his first experience with this twisted form of Muhammadanism when he met a silk peddler named W. D. Fard in Detroit about 1930. Fard claimed to have come from Mecca. If indeed he did, he made two recorded stopovers: one in California, where as "Wallie Ford" he was sentenced to San Quentin State Prison on a narcotics charge: and then in Chicago, where a cultist known as Noble Drew Ali suggested that Fard become a "Prophet of Islam." Ali gave Fard the concept of a "Nation of Islam," and terminology like "so-called American Negroes."
In 1931 in Detroit Poole helped Fard found Temple of Islam No. 1, the Fruit of Islam Guard, and the first University of Islam. Fard bestowed on Poole, the name "Muhammad" and the title, "First Minister of Islam." When Fard disappeared in 1934, Poole took over the sect.
Today, despite the Spartan discipline which governs the lives of the mass of Muslims, Elijah Poole is reaping the benefits of his life of struggle. He and his Georgia-born wife Clara commute between an 18-room mansion in Chicago and a four-bedroom winter home, complete with a swimming pool, in Phoenix. All eight of their children have positions in the movement, and all are apparently dedicated to their father's extremism. In a visit to his Chicago home, the Negro member of our team noted that Muhammad's fanaticism extends even to the symbolic use of brown bread instead of white and of African coffee packaged by a Muslim in New Jersey.
Like most racists, Poole believes unshakably in the righteousness of his cause and the inevitability of his eventual triumph. When asked about planned investigations into his movement by Congress, the FBI, and local, state and Federal tax officials, Poole replied stubbornly, "Let them come. I have all I need. I have the truth!"
What is the truth? Just how strong are the Black Muslims?
To begin with, most published reports number Muslim membership as between 100,000 and 250,000. This, authoritative sources, told us, is vastly exaggerated. Actually, of approximately 20,000,000 American Negroes, only a hard core of 5,500 to 6,000 have actually become temple members. This figure, of course, does not include an estimated 50,000 others who are sympathetic.
The Muslims' financial power also is exaggerated. Their businesses, though clean and well-run, are low-profit neighborhood enterprises. Most are owned by the members, not by the movement. The total amount of aggregate property accumulated by the sect is only a fraction of that owned by the late Daddy Grace or Father Divine.
The Muslims have found that prisons and slums are their most fertile breeding ground. It is hopeful to note that whenever there is strong Negro leadership and good race relations in a community, the sect has flopped miserably.
"The average Negro," says noted Negro psychologist Dr. Kenneth Clark of New York City, "readily realizes that there is no point in talking about whether the Negro wants to integrate in America. He has no choice. He is involved with America—inextricably so—and America with him"
How important are they?
Like counterpart white supremacist groups the Black Muslims are not on the Attorney General's subversive list. Federal investigators report no evidence of foreign domination.
Of what significance, then, are the Muslims? "In this difficult period of social transition," says Burke Marshall, Assistant U.S. Attorney General for Civil Rights, "no group with this discipline and dogma can be ignored." In the event of real trouble, says Los Angeles police chief William Parker, "they could become the shock troops in a conflict between races."
On the other hand, some authorities believe that, unintentionally, the Muslims have had some good effects. Says Ralph McGill, famed publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, "Now that real Negro extremists have appeared, possibly there will be an end to irresponsible charges that moderate, responsible organizations like the N.A.A.C.P. and the Urban League are unreasonable—or, more absurdly, 'Communist-run.' "
Little Rock's, Harry S. Ashmore, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editor and a practical expert in race relations, puts it this way: "The Black Muslims are a warning to which churches, community leaders and public officials had better pay heed. That is, that the masses of Negro people no longer are willing to stand still, that injustice has been done, and change is going to come. The only question is, will the change come through men and women working together regardless of race, or will the field be left to extremists?"
"The Black Muslims and White Citizens councils offer one answer. Let us hope that responsible Americans will begin working for another." ~ Alex Haley and Alfred Balk.
i don't have a link fam (most web links suck) , but a few antiquarian book stores may possess an old copy of that magazine or a decent public library has it on microfilm.
my bad, it's the may, not april 1963 issue of playboy.
actually, haley first became interested in the black muslim movement in a 1959 interview he did with them.
it's was printed in the 'readers digest' magazine of that year.
my bad, it's the may, not april 1963 issue of playboy.
actually, haley first became interested in the black muslim movement in a 1959 interview he did with them.
it's was printed in the 'readers digest' magazine of that year.
pEACe!
RFLMAO
It seem like I don't ever have time to read all of what I want...
The Undiscovered Malcolm X: Stunning New Info on the Assassination, His Plans to Unite the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist Movements & the 3 'Missing' Chapters from His Autobiography
On this the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, we spend the hour with historian Manning Marable who has spent a decade working on a new biography of Malcolm X. He is one of the few historians to see the three missing chapters from "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" that he says paint a very different picture than the book with Alex Haley and Spike Lee’s film. Marable has also had unprecedented access to Malcolm’s family and documents that shed new light on the involvement of the New York Police, the FBI and possibly the CIA in Malcolm X’s assassination. Manning today called on the federal government to release all remaining classified documents on Malcolm X. [includes rush transcript]
AMY GOODMAN: We will be joined by Professor Marable in just a moment, but first we begin with Malcolm X himself in words recorded just a months before he was assassinated. It was January 1965, he gave this speech entitled "Prospects for Freedom."
MALCOLM X: When this country here was first being founded, there were 13 colonies. The whites were colonized. They were fed up with this taxation without representation. So some of them stood up and said, liberty or death. I went to a white school over here in Mason, Michigan. The white man made the mistake of letting me read his history books. He made the mistake of teaching me that Patrick Henry was a patriot and George Washington — wasn’t nothing non-violent about old Pat or George Washington. Liberty or death was what brought about the freedom of whites in this country from the English. They didn’t care about the odds. Why, they faced the wrath of the entire British Empire. And in those days, they used to say that the British Empire was so vast and so powerful, the sun would never set on it. This is how big it was, yet these 13 little scrawny states, tired of taxation without representation, tired of being exploited and oppressed and degraded, told that big British Empire, liberty or death. And here you have 22 million Afro-Americans, black people today, catching more hell than Patrick Henry ever saw. And I’m here to tell you, in case you don’t know it, that you got a new–you got a new generation of black people in this country, who don’t care anything whatsoever about odds. They don’t want to hear you old Uncle Tom handkerchief heads talking about the odds. No. This is a new generation. If they’re going to draft these young black men and send them over to Korea or South Vietnam, to face 800 million Chinese. If you are not afraid of those odds, you shouldn’t be afraid of these odds.
AMY GOODMAN: Malcolm X, a month before he was assassinated. It was January 1965 at a speech he gave in New York, sponsored by the Militant Labor Forum. This is Democracy Now! We’re joined by Professor Manning Marable, one of America’s most influential and widely read scholars, professor of history and African American Studies at Columbia University, founding director of the Institute for Research in African American studies, again working on a new biography of Malcolm X. Welcome to Democracy Now!
MANNING MARABLE: Thank you. It’s always great to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: It is great to be with you. Why don’t you summarize for us — I mean, you have been studying Malcolm X for more than a decade now–what you think are the most explosive findings and then throughout the hour, we will tease them out and talk about them.
MANNING MARABLE: I think that Malcolm X was the most remarkable historical figure produced by black America in the 20th century. That’s a heavy statement, but I think that in his 39 short years of life, Malcolm came to symbolize black urban America, its culture, its politics, its militancy, its outrage against structural racism and, at the end of his life, a broad internationalist vision of emancipatory power far better than any other single individual, that he shared with Du Bois and Paul Robeson a pan-Africanist internationalist perspective. He shared with Marcus Garvey a commitment to building strong black institutions. He shared with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a commitment to peace and the freedom of racialized minorities. He was the first prominent American to attack and to criticize the U.S. role in Southeast Asia, and he came out four-square against the Vietnam War in 1964, long before the vast majority of Americans did. So that Malcolm X represents the cutting edge of a kind of critique of globalization in the 21st century. And in fact, Malcolm, if anything, was far ahead of the curve in so many ways.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then when we come back, we are a going to talk about The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the missing chapters, and where they are, which you have got a chance to see excerpts of.
MANNING MARABLE: That’s right.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to talk about how the autobiography was written, and the F.B.I., their relationship with Alex Haley. We will talk about these things and more in just a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We spend the hour today on Malcolm X, today the 40th anniversary of his assassination. Our guest is Columbia University Professor Manning Marable, writing a biography of Malcolm X, and also the editor of the magazine Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society. The winter 2005 issue, photograph of Malcolm X on the cover, and that’s what the whole issue is devoted to, with a major article by Professor Marable. Let’s talk about The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
MANNING MARABLE: Okay. The — most people who read the autobiography perceive the narrative as a story that now millions of people know, and it was — it’s a story of human transformation, the powerful epiphany, Malcolm’s journey to Mecca, his renunciation of the Nation of Islam’s racial separatism, his embrace of universal humanity, of humanism that was articulated through Sunni Islam. Well, that’s the story everybody knows. But there’s a hidden history. You see, Malcolm and Haley collaborated to produce a magnificent narrative about the life of Malcolm X, but the two men had very different motives in coming together. Malcolm did — what Malcolm did not know is that back in 1962, a collaborator of Alex Haley, fellow named — a journalist named Alfred Balk had approached the F.B.I. regarding an article that he and Haley were writing together for The Saturday Evening Post, and the F.B.I. had an interest in castigating the Nation of Islam, and isolating it from the mainstream of Negro civil rights activity. So consequently, a deal was struck between Balk, Haley and the F.B.I. that the F.B.I. provided information to Balk and Haley in the construction of their article, and Balk was — Balk was really the interlocutor between the F.B.I. and the two writers in putting a spin on the article. The F.B.I. was very happy with the article they produced, which was entitled, "The Black Merchants of Hate," that came out in early 1963. What’s significant about that piece is that that became the template for what evolved into the basic narrative structure ofThe Autobiography of Malcolm X.
AMY GOODMAN: Did Alex Haley know about this relationship?
MANNING MARABLE: There is no direct evidence that Haley sat down with the F.B.I. Nevertheless, since Balk was the co-author of the piece and it was Balk who talked directly with the F.B.I. —
AMY GOODMAN: Did Haley know —
MANNING MARABLE: One can assume that Haley was involved in it.
AMY GOODMAN: Did Haley at least talk to Balk about — did he know about Balk’s relationship with the F.B.I.?
MANNING MARABLE: One can assume that Haley did because Haley and Balk co-authored the piece, traveled throughout the United States together and collected material together to form an article that they co-authored. It would be highly unlikely that Haley did not know.
AMY GOODMAN: Then the writing of the autobiography, Alex Haley and Malcolm X’s relationship. How did they do it?
MANNING MARABLE: Over a period of —
AMY GOODMAN: And why did Malcolm X choose him?
MANNING MARABLE: Over a period of about year-and-a-half, Malcolm and Haley agreed to work with each other. They met usually after a long business day that Malcolm put in very tired. He would get there at about — either at Haley’s apartment or they would meet at then Idyllwild Airport at a hotel, and Malcolm would be debriefed by Haley. He would talk, Haley would take notes. Malcolm had a habit of scribbling notes in small pieces of paper that Haley would surreptitiously pick up at the end of their discussions. Malcolm’s objective was actually to reingratiate himself within the Nation of Islam, that because he had emerged by the early 1960s as a very prominent figure outside of the N.O.I., there were critics within the organization that were saying to the patriarch of the N.O.I., the Honorable Elijah Mohammad, that Malcolm planned to take over the organization, which was not true. But nevertheless, Malcolm felt that if he could make a public — a prominent public statement to show his fidelity to the Honorable Elijah Mohammad that that might win him back in the good graces of the organization. But there were internal critics, sharp critics, who were very opposed to him, and who were very — some of them were members of Elijah Mohammad’s family, such as Herbert Mohammad, Raymond Shareef, who was the head of the Fruit of Islam, the brother-in-law of — the son-in-law of Elijah Mohammad. They isolated Malcolm X and kept him out of the newspaper of the organization Mohammad Speaks for over a year, which is kind of curious. He was the national spokesperson of the N.O.I., and he wasn’t represented in their own newspaper for over a year. Haley’s objective was quite different. Haley was a republican. He was an integrationist. He was very opposed to black nationalism. His objective was to illustrate that the racial separatism of the N.O.I. was a kind of pathological or a kind of — it was the logical culmination of separatism and racial isolationism and exclusion. He wanted to show the negative aspects of the N.O.I.'s ideology, Yacub's history, and all of the ramifications of racial separatism that he felt were negative, and that Malcolm, being as charismatic as he was, a very attractive figure, nevertheless, he embodied these kind of negative traits. Haley felt he could make a solid case in favor of racial integration by showing what was — to white America — what was the consequence of their support for racial separatism that would end up producing a kind of hate, the hate that hate produced, to use the phrase that Mike Wallace used in his 1959 documentary on the Nation of Islam. So, the two men for very different reasons came together. What is striking is that from almost from the very beginning of certainly by September and October of 1963, as the book was being constructed, that Haley was vetting — asking questions to the publisher and to the publisher’s attorney regarding many of the things that Malcolm was saying. He was worried that he would not have a book that would have the kind of sting that he wanted. He was also concerned, to use Haley’s phrase, about the purported anti-Semitism of Malcolm X, and so he began to rewrite words or passages in the book without Malcolm’s knowledge. And Haley, in his own — this is prior to emails — Haley had a tendency to write even more frequently and voluminously to his agents and his editors than he did putting pen to paper in his own books. So that one finds in Haley’s archives, or the archives of Anne Romaine, who was going to be his biographer until her tragic death in 1995, one finds a copious series of notes from Haley to his editors and attorneys regarding the construction of the autobiography itself. He wanted to steer the book to accomplish his political goals, as well as Malcolm’s goals.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, Professor Marable, you went to the Haley collection.
MANNING MARABLE: That’s right.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about that experience and how difficult it is, really, to get original information about Malcolm X, and the Haley example is just one.
MANNING MARABLE: That’s right. One of the striking things about doing research on Malcolm X, and I believe that most Malcolm X researchers could tell you their own stories, is that there’s this paradox of the absence of critical information. Malcolm X is a person who has inspired — he has been the muse of several generations of black cultural workers, artists, poets, playwrights. There are literally a thousand works with the title Malcolm X in them. There are over 350 films and over 320 web-based educational resources with the title Malcolm X, yet the vast majority of them are based on secondary literatures, that is, not on primary source material. In the case of Alex Haley, Haley’s material is located at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, primarily. But there are a whole series of elaborate steps that one has to —- has to encounter in order to even begin to do research. There’s an attorney. If you want to photocopy material from that archive, you have to get permission from the attorney beforehand. You have to name the exact pages you want to photocopy before you can photocopy them. So that there are a whole series of steps. You can only use a pencil rather than a pen to copy down material, etc. It’s a laborious process, and it takes a long time just to do a small amount of research. Fortunately, Anne Romaine, who was appointed by Haley just before his death to be his own biographer -—
AMY GOODMAN: She was a folk singer?
MANNING MARABLE: That’s right. A folk singer and a skillful historian, even though she was not formally trained in the field. She collected her own parallel archive to Haley, and without Anne Romaine’s archive, which is also at the University of Tennessee — well, I should — let me put it in a positive light, with that archive, we have gained extensive knowledge about how Haley and Malcolm actually worked and how the book, the autobiography, was constructed. The raw material for chapter 16, a lot of that material, is actually in Romaine’s archives, not in Haley’s, which is interesting.
AMY GOODMAN: Hmm.
MANNING MARABLE: That’s right. But what is most interesting about the book is that as I have read it over the years, something — something was odd to me. It’s like — you know, Malcolm broke with the N.O.I. in March 1964, and in that last 11 chaotic months, he spent most of the time outside of the United States. Nevertheless, he built two organizations in the spring of 1964. First, Muslim Mosque Incorporated, which was a religious organization that was largely based on members of the N.O.I. who left with him. It was spearheaded by James 67X or James Shabazz, who was his chief of staff. Then secondly was the Organization of Afro-American Unity. This was an organization that was a secular group. It largely consisted of people that we would later call several years later Black Powerites, Black nationalists, progressives coming out of the Black freedom struggle, the northern students’ movement, people — students, young people, professionals, workers, who were dedicated to Black activism and militancy, but outside of the context of Islam. There were tensions between these two organizations, and Malcolm had to negotiate between them and since he was out of the country a great deal of the time, it was rather difficult for him to do so. It seemed rather odd that there’s only a fleeting reference to the OAAU inside of the book that’s supposed to be his political testament. I wondered about this. It seemed like something was missing. Well, as a matter of fact, there is. Three chapters. Those three chapters really represent a kind of political testament that are outlined by Malcolm X, and to make a long story short, they’re in a safe of a Detroit attorney by the name of Greg Reed. He purchased these chapters in a sale of the Haley Estate in late 1992 for the sum of $100,000. Since that time, no historian, or at least I suppose I’m the exception, very few people have actually had a chance to see the raw material that was going to comprise these three chapters. The missing political testament that should have been in the autobiography, but isn’t.
AMY GOODMAN: And what is he doing with them?
MANNING MARABLE: Well, they’re sitting in his safe. And, I guess the conundrum — I’m not an attorney or a person who does intellectual property — but my understanding of the situation is that he owns the property, but he doesn’t own — he owns the physical texts of these chapters, but Mr. Reed does not own the intellectual property, the content of these chapters, so he cannot publish them.
AMY GOODMAN: Is this the same attorney Reed who is involved with, perhaps, a lawsuit to do with Rosa Parks?
MANNING MARABLE: That’s right. It’s the same one, with the trial with the hip-hop group that’s based in Atlanta, and Gregory Reed —.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Outkast?
MANNING MARABLE: That’s right, with Outkast. In fact, I was even — I think even Reed sent something to me asking me to be a — to give testimony in this trial, which I promptly said, thanks, but no thanks.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s because Outkast used in their music, they use Rosa Parks’s words, her own voice?
MANNING MARABLE: That’s right.
AMY GOODMAN: How does the family of Rosa Parks feel about this?
MANNING MARABLE: I cannot really say. I just know what I have seep on the media. I know that they weren’t very happy about this.
AMY GOODMAN: Happy about —
MANNING MARABLE: About Greg Reed’s representation, but —
AMY GOODMAN: So, he’s not representing them.
MANNING MARABLE: Well, again, I cannot really characterize what is going on with that lawsuit, because I’m not really a party to it.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, you are the only historian who has seen excerpts of the attorney Reed, the three chapters that he has in his safe?
MANNING MARABLE: I cannot say that for certain.
AMY GOODMAN: One of the few.
MANNING MARABLE: One of — I could say that very few people have seen it. Reed, after a series of conversations — Reed said he would allow me to see this. This was about two years ago. I flew out to Detroit. I asked when could I come over to the office, and he said, no, let’s meet at a restaurant, which struck me as rather odd. We met at a restaurant. He came with a briefcase, and he opened the briefcase and he showed me the manuscripts. He said, I’ll let you take a look at this for about 15 minutes. Well, that wasn’t very much time. I was deeply disappointed, nevertheless, in that 15 minute time, looking at the content, because I’m so familiar with what Malcolm wrote at certain stages of his own life and development, it became very clear that there’s a high probability he wrote this material sometime between August or September 1963 to about January 1964. Now, this is a critical moment in his development. In November 1963, he gives his famous message to the grassroots address in Detroit, which really kind of marks off the real turning point in his own development. But I would argue that equally important is a brilliant address he gives in Harlem in mid-August of 1963, which actually is one of my favorite addresses by Malcolm, which actually is superior in my judgment to the message to the grassroots address, where he lays into a critique of what then is being mobilized, the march on Washington, D.C., the pinnacle of the civil rights movement. Malcolm envisions a broad-based pluralistic united front, which is spearheaded by the Nation of Islam, but mobilizing integrationist organizations, non-political organizations, civic groups, all under the banner of building black empowerment, human dignity, economic development, political mobilization. He’s already envisioning the N.O.I. playing a role cooperatively with integrationist organizations. I believe that if we could see the chapters that are missing from the book, we would gain an understanding as to why perhaps — perhaps — the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the New York Police Department and others in law enforcement greatly feared what Malcolm X was about, because he was trying to build a broad — an unprecedented black coalition across the lines of black nationalism and integration. And in way, it presages 30 years ahead of time, the Million Man March.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Marable, we have to break. When we come back, I want to ask more about the chapters and also about the assassination of Malcolm X, 40 years ago today.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Professor Manning Marable of Columbia University, and long time now writing the biography of Malcolm X, which I see has just been bought by a publisher, and is going to be coming out in few years.
MANNING MARABLE: That’s right, with Viking Penguin. That’s right.
AMY GOODMAN: More on these three chapters, what you saw in the restaurant, and then let’s talk about the assassination of Malcolm X.
MANNING MARABLE: Alright. I think that Malcolm was envisioning, even while he was in the Nation of Islam, a black nationalist progressive strategy toward uniting black people across ideological, class lines, denominational religious lines, Christians, as well as Muslims, to build a strong movement for justice and for empowerment. And I think that that is what frightened the FBI, and that is what frightened the CIA. That is what they had to stop, and if one thinks about it, those listeners and our viewers who know the history of COINTELPRO, the counter intelligence program of the FBI that occurred in the 1960s and 70s, that in 1965 or 6, that J. Edgar Hoover wrote an infamous memo called the Black Messiah Memo. He said, "We must stop the rise of a black messiah." That was the concern that the FBI had more than anything else. Either Malcolm or Martin could have played the role of a unifier, but it was — Malcolm as long as he remained within the Nation of Islam, talking to the converted, he did not represent a fundamental threat to the American government. But when he began to talk about uniting the very fractious civil rights movement, when he talked — when he began to negotiate with people like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin and Martin and others, keep in mind that several weeks before Malcolm’s assassination, he went to Selma, Alabama. Dr. King was imprisoned during the mobilization. He went to Mrs. King, and he told Coretta that, you know, that even though we’re very different people, that we’re really about the business of the same struggle. We just use different tactics. And I want you to understand, and I want you to convey to your husband that I deeply respect what he is doing. So, Malcolm had a clear vision and an understanding that we were — that he was a part of a broad freedom struggle. As his vision became more internationalist and pan-African, as he began, especially in 1964, after seeing the example of anti-colonial revolutions abroad and began to articulate and incorporate a socialist analysis economically into his program, he clearly became a threat to the US state.
AMY GOODMAN: And explain how events led to this day, 40 years ago, the assassination of Malcolm X.
MANNING MARABLE: I believe that the evidence will show that there was not so much a conspiracy, but a convergence of interests with three different groups that had an interest in eliminating his voice and his vision. The first group, obviously, is theNYPD, the New York Police Department. They had their own red squad, which was calledBOSS, the Bureau of Special Services. They had managed to infiltrate Malcolm’s organization and the nation of Islam. And, of course, the FBI. There were over 40,000 pages of FBI documents of which only about half are currently available to scholars and researchers. I think that this 40th anniversary of the assassination is a good opportunity for us to say that now is the time to declassify allFBI material on Malcolm X. There really is a need for us to challenge the US government for its refusal to open up its own archives 40 years after the death of Malcolm. All of that material should be made available to all researchers and all scholars and to the family of Malcolm X. So that — I believe that the FBIclearly was concerned, wanted to monitor and disrupt Malcolm wherever possible. Gene Roberts, one of Malcolm’s chiefs of security, was an NYPD undercover cop. He later went on to bigger things by being a disruptive force inside of the Black Panther Party. So, that’s one element. A second element was the Nation of Islam. Lynwood X, who was one of the leaders of the New Jersey mosques of the Nation of Islam, was at the Audubon Ballroom sitting on the first row. He came in early to observe the events on the 21st of February. He was taken aside by Benjamin 2X, close associate of Malcolm and also Reuben X, Reuben X Francis, who was the chief of security. Lynwood said he just wanted to check out what Malcolm had to say. But my sense is that perhaps his role was more complicated than simply that of a bystander. We know from Talmadge Hayer, one of the men who carried out the assassination, who was shot by Reuben X as he tried to flee the Audubon after shooting Malcolm X, we know that Hayer confessed years later to his Imam in prison that there had been a walk-through a week prior to February 21st at the Audubon Ballroom. So, there was deep knowledge on the part of members of the Nation of Islam regarding the planning, in sight of the OAAUand the Muslim Mosque Incorporated regarding the events at the Audubon. They knew when they were going to be there, they knew what the schedules were. How did they know this? Well, in part because they had informants inside of the organization, and in part because, obviously, they had information that hardly anybody else had. They also knew something else clearly, that on the day of the assassination, and here we get to the third group — I think the third group are elements within Malcolm’s own entourage. Elements within Malcolm’s own entourage, some of them were very angry with some of the changes that had occurred with Malcolm. One source of anger, curiously enough, was that — was the tension between MMI andOAAU, that the MMI, the Muslim Mosque Incorporated, these were women and men who had left the Nation of Islam out of loyalty to Malcolm, but then Malcolm continued to evolve rapidly. He never renounced and never stepped away from a strong commitment to black nationalism and black self-determination. That’s absolutely clear if you do any analysis of his speeches. But what is clear is that he incorporated within the framework of black nationalism a pan-Africanist and internationalist perspective. In doing so, he began to reassess radically earlier positions sexism and patriarchy. He began to break with notions of sexism that he had long held as a member of the Nation of Islam, and began to advance and push forward women leadership in the OAAU. MMIbrothers were very resistant to women such as Lynn Shiflet and others who emerged as leaders within the OAAU, so one of the tensions that occurred was around gender equality and gender leadership inside of Malcolm’s entourage.
AMY GOODMAN: Then, that day, there was the presence, or lack of presence, of theNYPD.
MANNING MARABLE: That’s right. TheNYPD was ubiquitous. They were always around Malcolm. Whenever Malcolm spoke, there would be one or two dozen cops all over the place. On this day, the cops were nowhere to be seen. The cops later explained that they had been pulled off the Audubon in order to go across the street. Normally, they were in a command center on the second floor adjacent to the large ballroom in the building. On this day, there were only two cops at moment of the shooting inside of the building, but they were as far away as possible from the site of the ballroom. The man who actually apprehended Talmadge Hayer, the only shooter who was shot at the site, Thomas Hoy, was actually driving by by accident. So, clearly, they had been pulled off the case.
AMY GOODMAN: He was an off duty cop.
MANNING MARABLE: That’s right. Why did the cops disappear quite literally? Then there were other kind of curious things. There was a complete failure of protection of the principal. The MMI brothers, who provided security for Malcolm had been trained by Malcolm himself that inside of the Nation of Islam, whenever there is a diversion, you protect the principal. The principal, in this case Malcolm, clearly was not protected on February 21st. First off, nobody was checked for weapons as they came in. Now, of course, people know that over the last several months prior to February 21st, 1965, theOAAU and MMI tried to get away from the old practices of checking people at the door for weapons. They wanted people to feel more comfortable. But the guards themselves did not carry weapons. Now, Malcolm’s home had just been firebombed a week before. The guards didn’t carry weapons. Malcolm had insisted that the guards not carry firearms that day. I have asked James Shabazz, I’ve asked other people who are members of theOAAU, Herman Ferguson and others, what led to that disastrous decision? James Shabazz said to me with a shrug, you just didn’t know Malcolm. Malcolm was adamant, and that whatever Malcolm wanted, that’s what we just did. But I said, this is highly irresponsible considering that there were death threats that were constant, that there was FBI surveillance and disruption, and that none of you carried weapons? Well, that’s not quite true, because we later learned from unredacted FBI files, that we have discovered and that we have archived in the municipal archives here in the city of New York, that there were at least, according to the district attorney, at least three undercover cops who were at the ballroom that day. We know one of their names. We know that —
AMY GOODMAN: What’s his name?
MANNING MARABLE: Well, we know that Gene Roberts, who was depicted giving mouth to mouth resuscitation to Malcolm —
AMY GOODMAN: We only have a minute.
MANNING MARABLE: Was an undercover cop, but who were the others? Two of the three men, who were imprisoned, Norman Butler and Robert 15x Johnson, convicted and given life sentences, I’m absolutely convinced were innocent. The real murderers of Malcolm X have not been caught or punished. I think that now is the moment for us to rededicate ourselves to learning the truth about what happened on February 21st. The place to begin is to make all evidence public, and we have to begin with the federal government, and the FBI.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Manning Marable, I want to thank you very much for being with us.
MANNING MARABLE: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Marable is writing a biography of Malcolm X that will come out in a few years, has a major piece in his magazine, Souls, a critical journal of black politics, culture and society. Tonight, we’ll be at Columbia University talking more about his investigation. Thank you very much.
MANNING MARABLE: Thank you, Amy.
if folks really knew what the cia was about...
it and everyone associated with them burnt down to
the ground, spit on and burnt again....
throw mossad in that equation as well..
it and everyone associated with them burnt down to
the ground, spit on and burnt again....
throw mossad in that equation as well..
Damn.
Bookmarked
Bookmarked
they took credit like jesse pinkman
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