But if Muhammad still believed Malcolm to be trustworthy and dependable, the Chicago headquarters saw an opportunity in Malcolm’s frequent absences from New York, and John Ali began contacting Joseph directly on mosque matters. On April 25, Chicago had also widely circulated a letter bearing Elijah Muhammad’s signature and calling upon “all Ministers, Secretaries, and Captains . . . to get our paper, Muhammad Speaks, into the hands of our poor, blind, deaf, and dumb brothers and sisters . . . .” The paper, the letter stated, “will get to people who will not speak to us in the public; it will convert behind the door a hundred of our people to our one from the Speaker's Stand!” It was an unmistakable attack on Malcolm. Meanwhile, the information blackout of Malcolm in the paper itself became virtually complete.
The Washington Post reported Malcolm’s new appointment to the D.C. mosque, describing him as “the No. 2 man of the Black Muslim sect.” For Malcolm, the expanded responsibilities opened new doors; here was a chance to transplant much of the community building he had been pushing in New York to another city. Already the Nation had found great success in Harlem with several of their black improvement projects, most notably in combating juvenile delinquency. Washington’s desolate ghettos, in no better shape than Malcolm had found them during his Detroit Red years, offered an attractive new proving ground. He would also now be operating in the nation’s capital, close to the power center. At a press conference in Washington’s National airport, Malcolm insisted that he was not second in command, that the Nation did not “preach hatred of white people,” and that he intended to hold a series of blacks-only meetings over a four-week period to examine the causes and cures for black street crime in the nation’s capital.
On the same day that Malcolm had returned from Phoenix to begin dealing with the rumors surrounding Elijah Muhammad, the landscape of the Black Freedom Movement entered a tumultuous phase, sending tremors throughout the country. On April 3, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the SCLC began the long and devastating sit-in campaign to break segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. More than any previous protest, Birmingham focused the eyes of the nation on the civil rights struggle, as over the course of five weeks more than seven hundred nonviolent protesters, many of them children, faced arrest and jail time. Black newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier and the Los Angeles Herald-Dispatch reacted with cautious optimism; the public outcry over the protesters’ brutal treatment at the hands of Birmingham police chief Bull Connor and his men had set the gears of Washington turning, and talk of new civil rights legislation percolated beyond the capital. More than ever, the time seemed ripe for action, yet Malcolm knew that with tensions between himself and Chicago still unresolved, his options remained limited. Several reporters had heard rumors that Malcolm was planning to go to Birmingham, although he himself announced that he would travel there only on the direct orders of Muhammad, or at the invitation of NOI regional leader, minister Jeremiah X. Asked about the protests, Malcolm chose to address King’s tactics rather than his goals: “I’ll say this, if anybody sets a dog on a black man, the black man should kill that dog—whether he is a four-legged dog or a two-legged dog.”
Despite his extensive travels, Malcolm kept a close eye on the legal struggles of the Los Angeles mosque. The trial of fourteen Muslims stemming from the mosque raid began on April 8, 1963. Thirteen were tried on felony assault and resisting arrest with force. The Los Angeles Times reported that “members of the cult, the men dressed in neat dark suits, and the women in ankle-length, flowing dresses and white or pastel-colored scarves, quickly filled . . . 200 seats. Four additional bailiffs were assigned to the courtroom to maintain order and numerous policemen and deputy sheriffs, in plain clothes and uniforms, circulated in a dense crowd outside.” The prospective jurors sitting in the courtroom audience were given flyers by NOI members, detailing examples of police brutality. Judge David Coleman instructed prospective jurors that they should disregard the content of the flyers, explaining, “I am not too critical of the distribution of the leaflets . . . because I realize there is a great deal of interest in this trial and there is a great deal of emotion involved.ʺ On April 25, 1963, an all-white jury of eleven women and one man was sworn in.
As the trial began, the Muslim women asked the bailiffs to arrange a separate seating area for them, segregated from white spectators. The bailiffs consented, and a separate section was created for the women. The judge, however, put a halt to the racially designated seating, ordering that all seating would be allotted on a first-come, first-served basis. Malcolm arrived back in Los Angeles and attended the trial on May 3, insisting that “the defendants are not getting a fair trial.” The district attorney had “scientifically eliminated” blacks from the jury, Malcolm declared. During a recess, Malcolm sought out Donald L. Weese, the police officer who had killed Stokes, and provocatively took several photos of him. The unstated implication was that they might be used by Fruit members to identify him on the street, to launch their retaliation. One day, among the hundreds attending the proceedings was George Lincoln Rockwell, who informed the press that most blacks “are in complete agreement with the Muslims and their ideals, just as most of the white people of the country are in agreement with the Nazis.”
As the trial progressed, the prosecution made a vigorous case against the Muslims. Defense attorney Earl Broady was so frustrated by Judge Coleman’s constant overruling of his motions of objection that at one point he simply sat with his head in his hands for five minutes. When queried by reporters, Broady replied, “No, I’m not ill. I just thought I might lose my temper.” Malcolm made the local news again by claiming that he and another Muslim had been held at gunpoint upon his arrival: “They [the police] tried in every way to provoke us into an offensive act . . . so they would have a reason to shoot us.” On May 4, Malcolm addressed an audience of about two hundred at the Elks Lodge in South Central Los Angeles. Outside, two black men, one of whom was the actor Caleb Peterson, the head of the Hollywood Race Relations Bureau, began picketing against the Muslims. A tense confrontation took place in which the other integrationist picketer, Phil Waddell, was punched in the face by a Muslim. The police were called, but on their appearance Malcolm warned them, “If you don’t get these pickets away from here, I will not be responsible for anything that happens to them.” The pickets decided they had made their point, and beat a hasty retreat.
Final arguments were made on Friday, May 25, with the jury beginning its deliberations the next Monday. After setting a new Los Angeles court record for longest deliberations, on Friday, June 14, the jury found that nine of the defendants were guilty of assault charges; two men were acquitted, and the jury failed to reach unanimous verdicts on two others. On July 31 four of the convicted Muslims received prison terms of one to five years. The other convicted Muslims received probation, with one being sentenced to serve time in the county jail. The day after the sentences were handed down, three female jurors and three alternates told the media they did not believe “justice was done.” The women had met secretly with the judge on July 6 to lobby for leniency for the convicted Muslims. One juror announced that she planned to testify at the prisoners’ probation hearing on their behalf. Despite their convictions, the Muslims had made an effective and convincing case that the LAPD had employed excessive force in the mosque incident, generating sympathy even among whites.
Long before the resolution of the Los Angeles trial, Malcolm was back on the East Coast. He returned to Washington, D.C., to make what was to have been his maiden appearance before a congressional committee. Several newspaper reports on the success of the Nation’s juvenile delinquency programs had found their way to the desk of Congresswoman Edith Green of Oregon, and she had subsequently invited Malcolm to explain these initiatives to the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Education and Labor, which she chaired, on the morning of May 16. For reasons that remain unclear, his appearance was canceled. Instead, he met privately with Green for two hours. When the Capitol Hill media learned about
his presence, a press conference was hastily arranged outside Green’s office shortly after midday. Malcolm attributed the hearing’s cancellation to “some segment of the power structure,” but he also used the opportunity to criticize Kennedy’s handling of the Birmingham crisis. “President Kennedy did not send troops to Alabama when dogs were biting black babies,” he observed. “He waited three weeks until the situation exploded. He then sent troops after the Negroes had demonstrated their ability to defend themselves.”
During the previous few years, Malcolm’s criticism of Kennedy had grown sharper and more frequent, despite Elijah Muhammad’s requests that he avoid targeting the president. Malcolm frequently attacked Kennedy by mentioning his religion, much as his opponents had during the election. For the Nation, Kennedy’s Catholicism served as easy shorthand for the antagonist, racist Christianity of whites that was soon to be supplanted by Islam. Malcolm also saw Kennedy as a liberal, and attributed to him all the disingenuousness he perceived in that ilk. During the fifties, Malcolm had not shied from denouncing the conservative Eisenhower, but never with quite the same intensity or general tone of ill regard. Kennedy was also popular among blacks, though the Nation saw this sentiment as misguided, and Malcolm believed he could bolster the Nation’s separatist position by working to increase doubts about Kennedy’s sincerity. On May 12 he attended an NOI meeting of four hundred people held at WUST Radio Music Hall, using the occasion to pillory both Kennedy and Alabama’s segregationist governor, George Wallace, as “the fox versus the wolf.” “Neither one loves you,” he warned. “The only difference is that the fox will eat you with a smile instead of a scowl.”
From his new position in Washington, Malcolm pushed for expanding the NOI's access to America’s prisons. The issue was not altogether new for him. After all, his very first political actions had come during his own prison tenure; this experience, and the understanding that poor blacks in prison were prime conversion targets for the NOI, led him to focus more on his efforts in this area. A year before, he had become involved with the case of five African Americans at the Attica state prison in upstate New York. Converting to the NOI while behind bars, the men demanded the right to hold religious services. The state commissioner of corrections rejected their request, calling the NOI a hate group. The prisoners filed a civil suit in federal court, and throughout their hearing were chained inside the courtroom—an example of excessive coercion that caused Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., to question the practice against felons. Malcolm testified as an expert witness for the Nation. “Muhammad never taught us to hate anybody,” he informed the court. When the judge inquired whether he could attend an NOI religious service, Malcolm responded, “Whites never come to our religious services. Many whites have a guilt complex about the race issue and think that when Negroes come together hate is discussed. The Muslim who has proper religious training and guidance gets along better with whites than Negroes who are Christians.” His testimony rarely mentioned Elijah Muhammad by name, placing emphasis instead on the obligations of his faith: “The only way that we can be recognized as a righteous people, we must abstain from alcohol, nicotine, tobacco, narcotics, profanity, gambling, lying, cheating, stealing . . . all forms of vice.”
That same year, a federal judge had ruled that NOI member William T. X Fulwood had the constitutional right to attend religious services at the Lorton Reformatory, located in Virginia. Black prisoners all over the country were eagerly joining the NOI and demanding their right to religious services. Malcolm and Quinton X Roosevelt Edwards of Mosque No. 4 had conducted a service at Lorton back in May. In June, however, corrections officials turned down Malcolm’s request to continue services there, saying that he was a convicted felon and an “incendiary” who disrupted prison life. The D.C. branch of the American Civil Liberties Union at once took up the issue.
The oppressive reality of prison had a clear effect on Malcolm’s rhetoric, to the point where he began using it as a metaphor for the condition of being black in America. During an interview with psychologist Kenneth Clark on June 4, he asserted that the NOI was not a Black Muslim religion, saying, “We are black people who are Muslims because we have accepted the religion of Islam.” Malcolm then asserted that all black Americans, regardless of their religious views, were in effect prisoners under a racist system. Increasingly, a growing majority of blacks saw themselves as “inmates”; the American president, Malcolm added, was “just another [prison] warden.”
As the summer began, black Americans experienced twin polarities of joy and devastation. First, President Kennedy, ignoring his advisers, went on television and announced to the country the broad outlines of his new civil rights legislation. Then, a few hours later, a sniper assassinated NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi. With each new piece of news, the stakes grew higher, fueling black hopes and, in many places, white animosity.
Malcolm’s extensive engagement with the civil rights movement, and the well-publicized public protests by Mosque No. 7, had inspired Muslims in other cities to become involved in protests, but Chicago headquarters was anxious to quell the new mood. On June 21, Raymond Sharrieff warned a crowd in Chicago: “The whites are watching the Muslims to see what kind of stand they will take on demonstrations. . . . The NOI stands on total separation.” Therefore, “peaceful demonstrations” could accomplish nothing. Sharrieff informed Mosque No. 2 that he had been “shocked and surprised that some of the FOI want to take part in the so-called peaceful demonstrations by the so-called Negroes,” predicting that after his fellow blacks suffered mistreatment by the police and were “lied to” by King, “the so-called Negroes will be easy to get for Islam.” He then threatened, “If this is not plain enough for you, let me put it more clearly to you. Do not participate in any way in these demonstrations. If you are caught, you will wish you were dead.”
By the early sixties, some brothers inside the Nation were almost impossible to control. To a man, they were enthusiastic, loyal, and devoted, yet their propensity for violence and lockstep obedience to the Nation’s rigid chain of command made them useful tools only so long as they could be tethered. Gladly willing to sacrifice their lives for the NOI's cause, these men had become familiar faces to passersby in Harlem, Detroit, Miami, and Chicago, aggressively hawking Muhammad Speaks on street corners, in driving rain and freezing snow. Veteran captains like Joseph closely studied them and channeled their energies into the martial arts. The most aggressive were selected for the task of disciplining NOI members who had committed an infraction that required penitence. Louis X's brother, based in New York, was soon recruited into the secret “pipe squad” inside Mosque No. 7, although to Louis its disciplinary actions seemed excessive. “If a brother committed adultery, he would get time out, but the brothers would go by and visit him and beat him down. And this was sanctioned,” he recalled. Over the years, a “thuggish kind of behavior” was institutionalized under the leadership of NOI's most influential captains, such as Joseph in New York, Clarence in Boston, and Jeremiah in Philadelphia. Matters frequently got out of hand. “Carelessness in what you say to somebody,” explained Farrakhan, “could lead to harm and hurt to people who disliked Elijah Muhammad, whatever their reason.” As a lieutenant, Thomas 15X Johnson was expected to perform disciplinary duties. “Say a brother got caught smoking a cigarette. [The lieutenants] would throw him down a flight of stairs,” he explained. If someone “disrespected the captain [Joseph] on their way out [of the mosque], he would have an'accident’ and he would just fall down the stairs.” Joseph almost always gave his disciplinary orders to a first lieutenant, who communicated what was to be done to the group of fellow lieutenants, or other FOI “enforcers.” NOI members who became victims of assaults “didn’t deserve to be beat up,” Farrakhan confessed. “They didn’t deserve to be blinded. They didn’t deserve even to be killed.”
The ministers occupied a difficult position when it came to discipline. As the de facto head of a mosque, a m
inister needed to know what was happening with his members, yet the unpleasant, often criminal nature of the punitive violence made it sensible to maintain a degree of deniability. In the vast majority of cases, ministers like Malcolm were deliberately kept ignorant of the actions of enforcers. “Whatever took place, we had a policy : don’t let the minister know,” said Thomas 15X. “Don’t involve him in this . . . because that puts him in a bad position.” Years later, Farrakhan implied that Malcolm had carefully insulated himself from direct involvement but was fully aware of the crimes being committed. He recalled saying to Malcolm, “Look, do you realize that when a man who is taught that this black man is his brother, and we’re giving a law to put him out the society, and then he’s visited, with every blow that you hit that man in the head, you’re killing the love that was in you for your brother?” Malcolm listened, then chided him, saying, “Brother, you’re just spiritual.” Louis took this to mean that the Nation needed men who were religiously oriented, but also men who would resort to violence without remorse to maintain discipline. If murder became necessary to set an example, so be it.