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I’d never met a white person, South or North, who did not feel comfortably superior to every Negro, no matter the rank or station. Conversely, no Negro I’d met or heard of had ever felt truly equal to whites. For all their polemical posturing, not even Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., or the great Richard Wright, with all his crossed-up feelings, had liberated themselves from the poisoned weed of black self-loathing with its deeply entangled roots in the psyche.3
To correct this condition, the black man could either work on the outer manifestations of discrimination—as did Martin Luther King—or change himself from within, through transformation. Malcolm took the latter course, both in teaching and in his personal life on this planet. He underwent a dramatic conversion, from street criminal to devoted moralist and revolutionary.
King offered racists the other cheek, Malcolm the back of his hand. Freedom was so important to him that Malcolm counseled risking all, except one’s sense of self-respect, in the fight. Nonviolence, he taught, unduly narrowed an oppressed people’s options. “We have to change our minds about each other,” Malcolm said often to his followers.5
“The American negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium for conveying bolshevism to America,” President Woodrow Wilson reportedly told his personal physician, Dr. Cary Grayson. “The French people have placed the negro soldier in France on an equality with the white man,” Grayson wrote in his diary, adding that President Wilson stated, “And it has gone to their heads.” 21
The Omaha police later verified that the kingpin of the local Irish crime syndicate, one Tom “Pick-Handle” Dennison, had in several other instances paid whites in blackface to attack white women, not unlike Agnes Loebeck, in order to embarrass Mayor Smith and city hall.
This Hollywood portrayal of the Klan as noble saviors of white America was so popular that President Wilson, a native Virginian with ingrained racist views, screened The Birth of a Nation in the White House; it was the first movie ever shown there and a political nod to Southern racist supporters.
During the night of fireworks on November 15, 1915, this band of fierce and fearsome Georgians reconstituted the Ku Klux Klan as a secret organization of native-born “Protestants, white, gentile Americans.”
“White supremacy is our slogan and we are going to rule this country without the aid or consent of the Negro,” wrote the Klan leader. As a warning for families such as the Littles, the letter continued, “We are checking up on you [Negroes]. . . . Omaha comes next.” UNIA leader Marcus Garvey used the Klan letter, along with the 1919 Omaha riot, to make his case that America would brutally defend white supremacy at all cost.3
Already, some two generations out of slavery, when statistically they had been three-fifths of a person, “Negroes” conducted an unrequited love affair with the republic that had, reluctantly at best, freed them in 1863. They fought in U.S. wars and paid taxes. They rendered cheap labor on railroads and docks, in factories, private kitchens, and cotton fields. Although fulfilling the obligations of citizenship, Negroes were systematically denied the benefits.
“Segregation is not humiliating, but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen,” President Wilson told the delegation from the National Independent Equal Rights League during its November 12, 1914, visit.
“Liberate the minds of men and ultimately you will liberate the bodies of men.”
Fard Muhammad,
Malcolm’s behavior in prison began to prefigure, and to prepare him for, his role as the Nation of Islam’s most gifted and successful proselytizer and demander of justice. After converting several other inmates to his newly embraced religion, he started agitating for Muslim religious rights in prison, such as food that met dietary restrictions and cells that faced east to facilitate prayer. And in an early instance of his internationalist bent, he even threatened to appeal for help to the global community of Islam. His quests brought newspaper coverage, which was unwelcome to the prison
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The U.S. government essentially ran a two-tier program, encouraging a permanent Negro underclass of renters while operating the FHA-backed suburban home ownership program to stimulate a dramatic growth of the white middle class.
“Another cause [of the Negro migration] was lynching. It was found that where there had been a lynching, the people who were reluctant to leave at first left immediately after this.”
Elijah Muhammad
When Medgar Evers was shot and killed outside his Jackson, Mississippi home by a Klansman on June 12, 1963, Jeremiah X, who had met with his good friend Evers two weeks earlier, rushed to the house to get the story for Muhammad Speaks.
So, apparently, did Elijah Muhammad. He no longer trusted Malcolm to represent him in further negotiations with the white racist groups in the South. After praising Malcolm faintly for his handling of the Klan initiative, he damned him by abruptly banning him from the South altogether. All follow-up meetings were assigned to Jeremiah, who was instructed to break off communications with his old friend in order to execute the Black Muslims’ Southern strategy.
And seven days before his death, Malcolm confessed that the Muslims “had to try and silence me because of what they know that I know. . . . There are some things involving the Black Muslim movement which, when they come to light, will shock
Our goal has always been the same. The approaches are different . . . it is anybody’s guess which of the “extremes” in approach to the black man’s problem might personally meet a fatal catastrophe first—nonviolent Dr. King or so-called violent me.1 —MALCOLM X
The root of segregation, if not of racism itself, at one level rested upon the white South’s perception of a need to prevent the procreative coupling of white women and black men at all cost. At another level, of course, segregation allowed the dominant white group, with access to national power, to deprive Negroes of their fair share of economic resources needed to reap the full benefits of citizenship.
Muslims sought to separate from white Americans and set up a black nation on land due them after centuries of slavery and exploitative low wages in the Americas. Although the specifics of the land issues were vague and changed over time, Elijah Muhammad was unwavering in his demand that blacks must separate from whites—physically, socially, spiritually, and in every way imaginable.
Segregation, Malcolm maintained, was not ordained by God but created by white men. “The masses of white people don’t want Negroes forcing their way into their neighborhoods, and the masses of black people don’t think it’s any solution to force ourselves into the white neighborhood.” 8 The solution to segregation, he told the Cornell audience, was for blacks to separate—not segregate—themselves from the whites in America.
Reverend King had committed the unpardonable Bureau sin of criticizing the FBI by suggesting that its agents were complicit with Southern sheriffs and politicians in defending outlawed segregation. Publicly Hoover slammed King as the “most notorious liar” in the country.58 Clandestinely, he stepped up the pursuit of King as the latest in a long list of black leaders to be “neutralized” or “destroyed.”
The Nobel Peace Prize—which Hoover coveted for himself—was the last straw!59 The enraged director was determined to use any means necessary, not only to prevent the civil rights leader from accepting the prize in Oslo but also to destroy him in the process.
The ultimate secret plan to stop King from getting the Nobel Prize was a psychological operation with a lethal goal. Scrutinizing Time’s profile of King, which called him “the unchallenged voice of the Negro people,” 60 Hoover took serious note of its assertion that King, in his preteen years, had twice attempted suicide by jumping out of a second-story window. Weeks before King was to receive the prize, Hoover ordered that an obscene surveillance tape and a scurrilous letter be sent anonymously to the minister’s Atlanta office. The thinly veiled suggestion in the error-strewn letter was that
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“All segregation statutes are unjust,” King said often, “because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.”
The belief that Fard was Allah Himself and Elijah his Messenger was as fundamental a religious tenet for the cult as the holiness of Jesus is for Christianity.
“But [NOI officials] knew that they had no intention of him ever coming back. They wanted him out of the way. It wasn’t long before they made it known that they wanted him dead. Several members of the family were saying it.”
In the final, transformative year of Malcolm’s life, when he spent months traveling in the Mideast and Africa, one of his main goals was to get at least one African nation to charge the United States with human rights violations in the United Nations.
Osman respectfully introduced himself as a brother Muslim but said some of Malcolm’s talk was “contrary to the Islam I believe in.” Color, race, and nationality have no standing in Islam, said the young man from Sudan, so a blanket condemnation of whites was anti-Islamic.
“We don’t like what’s being done to the African Americans, but it doesn’t seem wise to raise, say, in the United Nations that sort of thing.” Meddling in U.S. internal affairs would invite other countries, including the United States, to interfere in the affairs of Ghana. “Certainly, Kwame would say it. I mean, he wouldn’t hide his feelings on that issue,” said Botsio, who was not present at the meeting.20
The New York Times reported that U.S. officials had begun to pay attention to Malcolm’s African campaign: “Officials said that if Malcolm succeeded in convincing just one African Government to bring up the charge at the United Nations, the United States Government would be faced with a touchy problem.”
“Now, they are using the same tactics that’s used by the Ku Klux Klan,” Malcolm declared. “When the Klan bombs your church, they say you did it. When they bomb the synagogue, they say the Jews bombed their own synagogue.” The reference to the white knights, so much the terror still of blacks in the South, was a calculated tactic employed to expose the broader, secret relationship that Elijah Muhammad had established over the years with the Klan.
“When I came back home, I called the police department,” he said. “I told my staff people that ‘I just think I saw a dress rehearsal for this man’s assassination.’ I told them I think it’s going to go down.” 21 One of Roberts’s supervisors confirmed his warning to the department and the account became another of the clear warning signs—unheeded.
After the young cop’s warning about Malcolm’s imminent assassination, the police department reacted by sharply reducing the uniformed presence in front of the ballroom. Roberts would be even more troubled a week later by the inordinately long time the department took to answer the emergency call to take Malcolm to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.
They chastised Roberts sternly for trying to save the life of this particular black leader. Although they would deny any involvement in Malcolm X’s assassination, New York police officials disassociated themselves from Roberts’s attempt to save him. This cold-blooded fact—not previously reported—raises stronger questions about charges that the police could have prevented the attack had they heeded Roberts’s warning that an assassination attempt appeared to be imminent.
William Bradley was the most cold-blooded of all on the Newark squad. Street legend had it that he was trained as a killer when he served as a Green Beret in the Army. As recently as the beginning of the twenty-first century, Bradley still enjoyed a reputation on the streets of Newark as a “lethal” man with a silent ferocity to be avoided at all cost.
“The hit against Malcolm X was never discussed, but the shooters gained great respect in the goon squads.”
His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will. —BARACK OBAMA1
As a Black American I do feel that my first responsibility is to my 22 million fellow Black Americans who suffer the same indignities because of their colour as I do. I don’t believe my own personal problem is ever solved until the problem is solved for all 22 million of
