Wilfred, in whom he confided, may have conveyed his brother's discontent to Minister Hassan; or perhaps, with his eye for identifying talent, Elijah suggested a new assignment for his young disciple. When in early 1953 Malcolm was approached about becoming an NOI minister, he must have felt profound relief, as well as justifiable pride, yet he also recognized that the inner council surrounding Elijah demanded humility. He duly responded that he was “happy and willing to serve Mr. Muhammad in the lowliest capacity,” reluctantly agreeing to deliver a brief talk to Temple No. 1 about “what Mr. Muhammad’s teachings had done for me.” The lecture went off well, and as a follow-up he gave another, devoted to “my favorite subject . . . Christianity and the horrors of slavery.” He came to look back nostalgically on these early efforts as the beginnings of his life as a minister.
The Massachusetts Parole Board certified Malcolm’s discharge from parole on May 4, 1953; Michigan’s discharge followed shortly thereafter. Malcolm X—as he was now known within the Nation of Islam—was free to travel throughout the United States. One day that same month, during his work shift, he was pulled off the production line by his supervisor. Waiting to see him was an FBI field agent, who ordered Malcolm to accompany him to his supervisor’s office. Once there, he was asked why he had not registered for the Korean War draft. Malcolm was aware that Elijah Muhammad had encouraged the evasion of the draft during World War II, but instead of citing the Messenger ’s example, he informed the agent that he had just been released from prison and thought that former prisoners were not allowed to register. He was allowed to leave, and a few days later registered at the local Selective Service office, claiming conscientious objector status. According to FBI records, he wrote that his country of citizenship was Asia. He also asserted that his “mental attitude and outlook in general regarding war and religion” merited “disqualification from military service.” On May 25 he was given a physical exam for the draft and failed: the subject “had [an] asocial personality with paranoid trends.”
That summer, Malcolm became Detroit Temple No. 1’s assistant minister. He was already commuting regularly between Detroit and Chicago, where he was preparing for the ministry, much of his tutelage being directly under the supervision of Elijah Muhammad. “I was treated as if I had been one of the sons of Mr. Muhammad and his dark, good wife Sister Clara,” Malcolm recalled fondly. “In the Muslim-owned combination grocery-drug store on Wentworth and 31st Street, Mr. Muhammad would sweep the floor or something like that . . . as an example to his followers.” Malcolm relished the opportunity to ask questions of the man he believed to embody perfection. “The way we were with each other,” he recalled, “it would make me think of Socrates on the steps of the Athens marketplace, spreading his wisdom to his students.”
In June, Malcolm quit his job at Gar Wood and began working full-time for the Nation of Islam. Technically, NOI clergy were not employees; the income they received from temple offerings was deemed an informal contribution for voluntary services. Throughout the remainder of that year, Malcolm continued to steer scores of fresh converts into Detroit’s temple. He also gained confidence in his ability to speak in public, lecturing on a range of topics. By late 1953, Elijah Muhammad decided that his protégé should be promoted to minister and be assigned to establishing a temple where the Nation of Islam had few followers. Boston was the logical choice: Malcolm had lived there for several years and had numerous relatives and old friends in the city. One NOI member who lived in the city, Lloyd X, agreed to house him and invite small groups to his home to hear the young minister. Years later, Malcolm could recall the appeal he delivered to one such gathering in early January 1954. What he could not have known was that within his audience was an FBI informant. The fact that the Boston field office of the FBI thought it prudent to conduct surveillance even of tiny NOI gatherings, in their homes, reveals just how potentially dangerous the sect was believed to be.
Within the Nation of Islam, each successful temple had four decision-making officers who exercised authority over routine activities, though always under Muhammad’s autocratic guidance: the minister, the temple’s secretary-treasurer, the women’s captain of Muslim Girls Training (MGT), and the men’s captain, the head of the Fruit of Islam (FOI). These personnel were frequently selected directly by the national secretariat in Chicago, which in effect included Muhammad, national captain of the Fruit of Islam Raymond Sharrieff, Sharrieff’s wife and Muhammad’s daughter, national MGT captain Ethel Sharrieff, and the national secretary-treasurer; indirectly, Elijah Muhammad, Jr., Herbert Muhammad, and other relatives were involved in the process. At local levels, the minister was the public face of the temple, the Nation of Islam’s chief representative to the outside world. Internally, his role was pastoral. But in terms of how the temple functioned as a social organization, as a kind of secret society whose borders had to be policed constantly, no one was more important than the Fruit of Islam captain. Forever on the lookout for acts of disobedience or disloyalty, his disciplinary rod was essential in maintaining a well-run temple.
Although Malcolm’s initial activities focused on Boston, he traveled up and down the East Coast and as far west as Chicago. Sometime that first January back east, he went to several meetings at New York City’s tiny Temple No. 7 in Harlem. In February he served as a guide for pilgrims coming to Chicago to attend the Nation of Islam’s major annual event, the Saviour’s Day convention, celebrating the birth and divinity of its founder, Wallace D. Fard. This marked the first time that the young apprentice took the stage as a featured speaker before a national audience. FBI surveillance indicated that he “spoke against the ‘white devils’” and encouraged “greater hatred on the part of the cult towards the white race.”
By late February, Malcolm’s recruitment efforts had been so successful that there were sufficient converts to create a new temple in Boston, No. 11. At one of his larger public gatherings, he was delighted to see Ella, but she remained a stubborn holdout against the Nation’s call. With its focus on recruiting prisoners and the poor, the Nation didn’t fit with her notions of black middle-class respectability, and she was skeptical of Muhammad’s claim to be Allah’s Messenger. Knowing Ella’s stubborn temperament, Malcolm doubted that his words would ever change her negative view of the Nation. “I wouldn’t have expected anyone short of Allah Himself to have been able to convert Ella.” During this time, it’s possible that Malcolm also reconnected with his former girlfriend Evelyn Williams, who continued to harbor deep feelings for him. She subsequently joined the NOI, and when Malcolm moved to New York later that year, she followed him there.
His next assignment, as minister of Philadelphia’s temple, required both diplomacy and a firm administrative hand. The temple was run by Willie Sharrieff (no relation to Raymond). Malcolm spoke at one of its meetings, informing his stunned audience that he had been authorized to “shake things up.” Along with Isaiah X Edwards, the minister of Baltimore’s temple, he had conducted a preliminary investigation of the temple’s affairs. The day before the meeting, March 5, Sharrieff had been removed from his position. Eugene X Bee, who had been appointed Fruit of Islam temple captain as well as assistant minister by Sharrieff, was also dismissed. Malcolm assumed the titles “teacher” and “acting minister.” To consolidate his position, he led or participated in a series of eight temple meetings throughout the last three weeks of March.
Malcolm’s progress was carefully monitored by the FOI’s supreme captain, Raymond Sharrieff. In 1949, Sharrieff had married Muhammad’s second oldest child, Ethel, and before long exercised administrative authority that went well beyond the Fruit of Islam, overseeing the Nation’s growing real estate and commercial ventures in Chicago. For years, the Nation of Islam had lacked a substantial institutional presence in many key cities, but its failure to grow was now shown not to have been due to a lack of interest in its message but to poor local leadership. In Detroit, Malcolm had exposed Lemuel Hassan as, at best, a mediocre minister. By 1957 Hassan w
ould be reassigned to the less prestigious temple in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Malcolm’s brother Wilfred elevated to become minister of Detroit’s Temple No. 1, second in status only to Chicago. Malcolm’s rise and Hassan’s demotion infuriated Hassan’s brother, James X, who was the assistant minister of Chicago Temple No. 2, as well as assistant principal of the University of Islam. James’s hostility toward Malcolm would, within several years, be shared by most of the Nation of Islam’s ruling elite in Chicago.
Both Muhammad and Sharrieff may also have worried that Malcolm, still only twenty-nine, might be moving too quickly. One of them initiated the order in early 1954 to Joseph X Gravitt to travel first to Boston, then to the Philadelphia temple, to aid in the reconsolidation of both temples’ Fruit of Islam as their new captain. Joseph’s immediate supervisor, however, was not to be Malcolm, but Sharrieff.
Joseph’s presence in Philadelphia afforded Malcolm the rare luxury of having occasional mornings and afternoons off, and whenever he could he explored sites such as the city’s art museum and libraries. Most of his time, however, was taken up by his administrative duties throughout the Northeast, which kept him constantly in transit. His absence required Joseph to speak frequently at Philadelphia’s Temple No. 12. The subject of one May 1954 speech was “the duty of Muslims to take the heads of four devils for which they will win a free trip to Mecca.” He explained that this meant “the bringing of a lost Muslim into the Nation of Islam and thereby cutting off a devil’s head.” Such hell-and-damnation rhetoric lacked even the sophistication of the young Malcolm, but in an organization that lived by disclipline such a no-nonsense manner had its advantages.
Side by side, both living in Philadelphia (Malcolm in a rented flat at 1522 North Twenty-sixth Street), the two men seemed an unlikely duo, but over these months they formed bonds of trust and codependence. Malcolm was six feet, three inches tall and weighed no more than 170 pounds; he was youthful, passionate, constantly in motion, intent on honing his language. Joseph, at five feet, six inches, possessed a muscular build, and was small but very tough at 145 pounds; he was quiet and cautious, yet volatile. As in Boston, much of the credit for getting the Philadelphia temple in order went to Malcolm, and indeed in June, in recognition of his outstanding efforts, Muhammad named him the new minister of Harlem’s Temple No. 7. Yet during the two and a half months after Joseph’s arrival in Philadelphia, Malcolm had participated in only four local meetings: Joseph had absolutely been in charge, both as head of the Fruit of Islam and as substitute minister. In the Autobiography, Malcolm is silent about Joseph’s contributions.
In less than a year, Malcolm had gone from line worker at Gar Wood to full minister of the Nation of Islam in one of the most important black centers in the United States. He was keenly aware of the challenge ahead of him. He would later recall, “Nowhere in America was such a single temple potential available as in New York’s five boroughs. They contained over a million black people.”
Sometime in June 1954, Malcolm relocated to New York City. For another three months he continued to serve as the principal minister in both Harlem and Philadelphia, but he devoted most of his time trying to make sense of the situation in New York. His first step was to appoint a man named James 7X as his assistant minister, but not until August was Joseph X transferred to New York, to join him at Temple No. 7 as its FOI captain.
Malcolm found himself with a membership that numbered only a few dozen people. Even that figure is an informed guess: neither he nor any other NOI minister ever revealed publicly the actual numbers, in part because they were so low. From 1952 to early 1953, there were probably fewer than one thousand members throughout the country.
Malcolm found to his dismay that Harlem’s Temple No. 7 was even more disorganized than Philadelphia. For six months he labored to reproduce the growth he had created in Boston and Philadelphia, but without success. The Autobiography offers several explanations. First, Harlem was still filled with ex-Garveyites and a variety of aggressive nationalist groups all pushing their agendas. “We were only one among the many voices of black discontent,” Malcolm noted. “I had nothing against anyone trying to promote independence and unity among black men, but they still were making it tough for Mr. Muhammad’s voice to be heard.” He also mentioned the social apathy and lack of political awareness to which Harlem blacks seemed to have succumbed. “Every time I lectured my heart out and then asked those who wanted to follow Mr. Muhammad to stand, only two or three would . . . sometimes not that many.”
The challenges were more complicated than he was willing to admit. The postwar economic boom had left much of African America behind. The conditions of Harlem’s tenements had deteriorated significantly from the neighborhood’s more glorious times in the 1920s. Many buildings were vermin- and rat-infested; it was not unusual even along major thoroughfares for disgruntled tenants to throw their garbage into the streets. Asthma, drug addiction, venereal disease, and tuberculosis were rampant. In 1952, for example, central Harlem’s tuberculosis mortality rate was nearly fifteen times that for nearly all-white Flushing, Queens.
Despite these problems, in the decade after World War II Harlem had also developed a small, status-conscious black middle class that was wealthier and politically more influential than during the depression. New York City’s farther suburbs were still largely segregated, but slowly middle-class blacks began to move to the outer boroughs of the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn. The number of black professionals grew, but many were still only beginning to escape from the ghettos of Harlem and Brooklyn.
The heavy concentration of black voters in Manhattan also led to expanding political power. The 1953 election of Harlem resident Hulan Jack as the first black president of the borough of Manhattan symbolized that growing clout. Constantly pushing Harlem’s political agenda was of course Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., who by the time of Malcolm’s return had been in Congress for a decade. In March 1955, Powell called for a boycott of Harlem savings banks that “practice ‘Jim Crow-ism’ and ‘economic lynching.’” He urged Abyssinian Baptist Church’s fifteen thousand members to withdraw their funds from white-owned banks and transfer them to either the black-owned Carver Federal Savings in Harlem or the black-owned Tri-State Bank in Memphis, Tennessee. At the national level, he disrupted the Democratic Party’s presidential campaign for Adlai Stevenson by his surprise endorsement of Dwight Eisenhower, who in the election that November received nearly 40 percent of the African-American vote nationally. Powell’s justification was the domination of Southern “Dixiecrats” who controlled the Democratic Party in Congress. He explained, “This does not necessarily mean a shift to the Republican party. It does mean that the Negro people are standing up as American men and women, thinking for themselves and voting as independents.” Malcolm probably admired the black congressman’s feisty independence from the Tammany Hall Democratic Party machine. Powell’s model of political independence, as a black man who could not be dominated by whites, would influence how Malcolm defined independent politics after his departure from the Nation of Islam.
Harlem was also a common site for many civil rights protests. One of the largest, soon after Malcolm’s arrival, occurred on September 25, 1955. More than ten thousand people gathered at the Williams Institutional Church on Seventh Avenue at West 132nd Street to denounce the acquittal by an all-white jury of two white men accused of murdering Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black boy in Mississippi. The rally demanded that President Eisenhower “convene a special session of Congress and . . . recommend the immediate passage of a Federal anti-lynching bill.” Abyssinian’s associate pastor, the Reverend David N. Licorish, who represented Powell, called upon blacks to protest in Washington, D.C. The NAACP leader, Roy Wilkins, urged black New Yorkers to address racial discrimination in the city.
Far from being a community overwhelmed and silenced by the weight of racial oppression, Harlem continued to be a lively political environment. The level of participation was high and in full evidence: public rallies,
boycotts, and fund-raisers were common. Street philosophers and orators would climb up ladders placed along major thoroughfares, primarily 125th Street, and declaim their ideas to passersby. The Nation found it difficult to make headway, largely because its appeal was apolitical; Elijah Muhammad’s resistance to involvement in political issues affecting blacks, and his opposition to NOI members registering to vote and becoming civically engaged, would have struck most Harlemites as self-defeating.
Many in the neighborhood had already been introduced to a more orthodox Islam through the extensive missionary activities of the Ahmadiyya Muslims. The sect had won the respect of many blacks through its vigorous opposition to legal segregation and its criticism of Christian denominations for accepting Jim Crow. In 1943, for example, the Ahmadis’ Moslem Sunrise had characterized Detroit’s race riot as a “dark blot on this country’s good name.” The colored world would recognize “that black-skinned people are killing and being killed by white-skinned people in free America.” Five years later, the magazine published a survey of nearly 13,600 Presbyterian, Unitarian, Lutheran, and Congregational churches documenting that only 1,331 of them had any nonwhite members. Racism within Christian churches led many African-American artists, writers, and intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s to consider converting to some version of Islam. Recruiting was particularly effective in the bebop world. A key figure was Antigua-born Alfonso Nelson Rainey (Talib Dawud), onetime member of Dizzy Gillespie’s band. Dawud’s own conversion persuaded tenor saxophonist Bill Evans to become a Muslim, acquiring the name Yusef Lateef; his conversion was followed by Lynn Hope’s (Hajj Rashid) and drummer Kenny Clarke’s (Liaqat Ali Salaam). Based in Philadelphia, Dawud developed a working relationship with Harlem’s International Muslim Brotherhood, throughout which a supportive network was established linking largely black masjids in Providence, Washington, D.C., and Boston. Dozens of other popular jazz artists became associated with Ahmadi Islam, including Art Blakey, Ahmad Jamal, McCoy Tyner, Sahib Shihab, and Talib Dawud’s wife, the vocalist Dakota Staton (who changed her name to Aliyah Rabia after conversion). Even those who did not formally convert, like John Coltrane, were heavily influenced by the Ahmadiyya.