The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X

by Les Payne

“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 lynching of Will Brown was witnessed by one fourteen-year-old who would grow up to become a leading Hollywood actor, portraying quiet, “quintessentially American heroes.” His movie roles included Young Mr. Lincoln, as well as the juror who saves a Latino man from an all-white jury’s death sentence in Twelve Angry Men. Henry Fonda recalled that as a teenager he peered down at the handiwork of his neighbors that night from the second-floor window of his father’s printing shop. “My hands were wet and there were tears in my eyes,” the adult Fonda said of this incident of his childhood. Presumably, the youngster never left his perch for the hours-long lynching episode, reportedly standing the entire time alongside his father, William. “When it was all over, we went home . . . All I could think of was that young black man dangling at the end of [a rope].” 35

“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. When Trotter disputed Wilson’s claim that federal employees were racially separated to avoid friction, the president, as widely reported in The New York Times and elsewhere, cited Trotter’s “tone” and dismissed the delegation leader. “Your manner offends me,” Wilson muttered.

“The [UNIA] emphasis was on ‘Black,’” recalled Thurgood Marshall, the nation’s first Supreme Court justice of his race. When they “would parade up Seventh Avenue,” Marshall recalled years later, “if my brother and I were out there in the street, we had to get off the street. Right in the middle of Harlem. I mean, no light-skinned Negro was allowed around.”

“You say in effect to the KKK: All right!” Pickens wrote in a sharp rebuttal to Garvey. “Give us Africa and we will in turn concede you America as a ‘white man’s country!’ In that you make a poor deal: for twelve million people you give up EVERYTHING, and in exchange you get NOTHING. For the Klan has nothing to ‘give up’ in Africa. It does not own or control one square inch of Africa. But the Negro American citizen has everything to give up in America. You might as well tell the Klan: We will give up all our homes, our rights, our lives, our past and our future in our native land, provided the Klan will give us a free and undisputed title to the moon!”28

Starting in the 1920s, as the white flight of largely European immigrants yielded to the influx of Americans from the South, central Harlem began to experience a sustained cultural renaissance that defined a new and optimistic “black aesthetic.” Writer and professor Alain Locke, the first African American Rhodes Scholar, became the architect of this largely literary “spiritual awakening” when he edited the 1925 anthology The New Negro and enticed the publishing industry to explore this “exotic” new market. Noted critic H. L. Mencken declared Locke’s book of essays “a phenomenon of immense significance,” with the Negro writers presented in The New Negro taking “a fierce sort of racial pride” in a declaration of independence.5 Key writers of this intellectual movement, which became known as the Harlem Renaissance, included James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, and Countee Cullen. The fine-arts aspect of the movement was represented by such painters as Archibald Motley, Palmer Hayden and Aaron Douglas and the sculptors Augusta Savage and Richmond Barthe. And running parallel to the intellectual renaissance were the jazz artists who were staging their own creative, cultural movement.

It would also take decades for Mormons to concede that Joseph Smith took unto himself at least thirty-three wives, some of them as young as fourteen, others already married to other men.4 While some might consider such behavior deviant, in many respects these homegrown religions follow the general pattern of those widely accepted as mainstream.

“Never give meat to a baby; always give them milk, and you’ll never lose them,” Malcolm had advised his brother Philbert on his method of recruiting Muslim followers. “That is the KEY in setting up new temples . . . one of the hindrances of the past in trying to propagate Islam, we over-taught the lost-found, giving them meat that they just could not digest, thereby making many rebellious and go back just because once we got them to open their mouths (minds) we started giving them too heavy a food that they could not digest (see) yet.” 9

Malcolm could not shake the notion that Elijah Muhammad’s secret instructions to meet with the Klan, at bottom, pointed toward an unholy alliance. At a more personal level, he was deeply troubled by the possible effect of his mission on the memory of his very own father who had been killed, he believed, by this self-same terrorist group. The Messenger’s overture to the Klan began to tug at the cult leader’s hold over Malcolm, like a crowbar prying loose a nail driven deep. It would prove to be a major turning point in the relationship between the two strong men, both reacting to a powerful enemy. Meanwhile, a shaken Malcolm decided to soldier on to the Atlanta meeting, determined to exploit every inch of wiggle room within the bounds of the Messenger’s marching orders. But the blind and faithful disciple had begun to doubt.

Even then, as when California cops shot and killed his friend Ronald X Stokes outside the Nation of Islam mosque in Los Angeles in 1962 (an incident discussed in more detail in the next chapter), the Messenger would not allow the Fruit of Islam (FOI) to move against white transgressors. As he boiled over the Stokes incident, Malcolm began recounting his secret Atlanta meeting with the Klan. It likely moved him to question the contradiction of Muhammad’s policy of nonengagement with other Negroes while he worked out business deals with murderous Southern racists.

While it could be said that King dedicated his lifework to hammering away at the segregator’s “false sense of superiority,” Malcolm, under the influence of Elijah Muhammad, worked single-mindedly to help Negroes, the segregated, overcome their “false sense of inferiority.”

The Ronald Stokes affair in 1962 had left its mark. On April 27, two Los Angeles police officers confronted two Muslim men near Temple No. 27, an encounter that quickly escalated into a battle between dozens of police and Muslims from the mosque. During the melee, police shot seven Muslims, killing one: Stokes, a mosque stalwart and friend of Malcolm, who was shot in the heart, allegedly while his hands were raised. (A coroner’s inquest would rule it justifiable homicide.) In synch with the young Turks who were hungry for revenge, Malcolm wanted to direct a little action at the Los Angeles policemen who had killed his friend and fellow Black Muslim. An eye for an eye was the doctrine long taught, and if a Muslim were attacked, Malcolm preached that it would be “a head for a head, and a life for a life.” Such teachings had been the magnet for a loose cadre of hard-core, action-oriented men. They suffered through the hours of classroom sessions on religious dogma for the thrill of the whack and tumble on the karate mats. These specially trained FOI squad members enjoyed the discipline of cracking heads when the word was given. Such orders, for the most part, had been restricted to dishing out corporal punishment to members who abused their spouses, misappropriated group funds, or otherwise violated temple rules.

The inaction of the Messenger in the Stokes affair struck Malcolm as indifference, if not cowardice. He reasoned that it was not strictly speaking a religious issue.

The Stokes affair nonetheless loosed a string of temple disaffection by younger men longing for action. Faced with charges that the Muslims talked tough but did not act even when police killed their followers, Malcolm increasingly talked even tougher as he made his rounds. Peppering his speeches with fewer remarks like “the Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us . . . ,” he sometimes sounded more like the black nationalist revolutionary the FBI made him out to be. Gone were the cocksure assertions of the Muslim faith as droplets of doubt began to appear. Negroes, he now maintained, were only “inclined in the direction of” Elijah Muhammad. Still, Malcolm kept up the front even as he empathized with the perplexed men who began to fall away from the rolls of the Nation.

John Lewis, the civil rights leader and future congressman, was traveling in Africa that fall of 1964 with other members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He found that even politically aware young people there knew little about the American civil rights movement, but they knew about Malcolm. “As soon as we were introduced to someone, the first thing he would ask was ‘What’s your organization’s relationship with Malcolm’s?’”32

The police deception onstage by Gene Roberts was only a prelude to a broad pattern of official cover-ups that has allowed the assassination of Malcolm X—one of the most notorious U.S. crimes in the latter half of the twentieth century—to go unresolved for more than fifty-five years.

Roberts was sure he had never before seen the three shooters at the Audubon. His testimony—that the shooters were complete strangers to a trained police observer—could have dispelled the prosecution’s charge that the other shooters were Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson, both members of the Harlem mosque whom Roberts knew. At the trial, several other witnesses testified against Butler and Johnson, and both men were convicted along with Hayer. Butler served twenty years in prison, and Johnson twenty-two years, for Malcolm’s murder. Although Roberts gave eyewitness accounts to his superiors at police headquarters, he was never called to testify at the murder trial. Instead, he remained undercover to spy on several other black nationalist groups in New York City, including the aforementioned Black Panthers. By this and other covert means, the government convicted only one of the three actual shooters: Hayer. The other two shooters, along with the conspirators who threw the smoke bomb and helped distract Malcolm’s attention by shouting a ruse, never came to trial. The prosecution of the case was itself a distraction from the truth about the murder of Malcolm X. It was a case study in covering the tracks of the police, the federal government, and the FBI—a whitewash.

Benjamin 2X knew that Butler and Johnson were not present in the ballroom when Malcolm was assassinated. But in the charged atmosphere following his mentor’s murder, and with the men of Temple No. 7 celebrating the hit, Benjamin 2X was evasive during police questioning, allowing the two enemies who had been indicted to twist in the wind. He was the one man who could have positively stated whether or not Butler and Johnson were in the hall. The district attorney did not call him to testify—nor did the defense.

Until 1963 his followers practiced iron discipline, mainly because all of us believed in the infallibility and high moral character of Elijah himself, but when his own son Wallace Muhammad exposed Elijah Muhammad as a very immoral man who had deceived and seduced seven of his young secretaries, fathering at least 10 illegitimate children by them, the moral discipline of the entire movement decayed and fell apart.