By the time of his recruitment trip to Boston, Malcolm had made his decision to undertake the pilgrimage to Mecca. The chance for spiritual purification at this juncture of great change and uncertainty seemed too important to pass up. It was likely during his time in Boston that Malcolm visited Ella and asked her to loan him the money, some thirteen hundred dollars, that he would need to make the pilgrimage. Despite all the trouble they had given each other since he had moved in with her as a teenager, she agreed.
On March 26, Martin Luther King, Jr., was on Capitol Hill with plans to discuss the stalled 1964 civil rights bill with Senators Hubert Humphrey, Jacob Javits, and others. The moment caught King at a difficult time, when even close aides like James Bevel were warning that “people are losing faith . . . in the nonviolent movement.” When King moved to a conference room off the Senate floor to discuss developments with the press, Malcolm, who was also visiting that day, slipped in to listen. After the conference, the men left through separate doors, but as King was walking along the crowded Senate gallery observing the filibuster of pro-segregationist senators, he encountered Malcolm and several aides. Malcolm probably was not eager for an informal encounter, much less a staged photograph. It was James 67X who had cleverly set up the entire affair, pushing his boss around a marble column until he and King suddenly stood facing each other. A photographer in the gallery took a photo of them shaking hands, which would come to symbolize the two great streams of black consciousness that flourished in the 1960s and beyond. It was the only time the two men ever met.
Yet the handshake also marked a transition for Malcolm, crystallizing as it did a movement away from the revolutionary rhetoric that defined “Message to the Grassroots” toward something akin to what King had worked his entire adult life to achieve: improvement in the black condition through changing the American system. Three days after the meeting, Malcolm gave a speech at the Audubon Ballroom before six hundred people that served as a foundation for a more famous address he would give a week later. Though the announced topic, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” seemed incendiary, at its core the speech actually contained a far more conventional message, one that had defined the civil rights movement as far back as 1962: the importance of voting rights. In the speech, Malcolm emphasized that all Harlemites, and by extension blacks everywhere, had to register as voters. Gone was the old Nation of Islam claim that participation in the system could have little effect. Now Malcolm called for a united black front that would seek to wrest control of blacks’ economic and political future. “Unity is the right religion,” he insisted. “Black people must forget their differences and discuss the points on which they can agree.” He also questioned the ability of the civil rights movement to compensate blacks for “three hundred ten years of unpaid slave labor.” What was most significant was his shift from the use of violence to achieve blacks’ objectives to the exercising of the electoral franchise. By embracing the ballot, he was implicitly rejecting violence, even if this was at times difficult to discern in the heat of his rhetoric.
The next day he sat down for an interview with the Militant, the newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party. For decades, the SWP had promoted revolutionary black nationalism. Leon Trotsky himself had believed that Negro Americans would be the vanguard for the inevitable socialist revolution in the United States. Malcolm’s separation from the Nation of Islam and his endorsement of voter registration and mass protest by African Americans seemed to Trotskyists a move toward socialism.
By the time Malcolm arrived at the Cory Methodist Church in Cleveland on April 3 to address a major public rally hosted by the local CORE chapter, he had refined “The Ballot or the Bullet” into a formidable piece of oratory. Much of the Cleveland CORE group had embraced Malcolm as a movement leader, and a crowd of between two and three thousand people, including many whites, packed the church. The format of the evening’s program was a dialogue between Malcolm and his old friend Louis Lomax. Lomax spoke first, presenting a pro-integrationist civil rights message that won respectful applause from the audience. Malcolm’s talk drew from his recent Audubon addresses, yet ultimately cohered into something greater, a fierce commentary on the lay of the land. On the one hand, the speech caught the mood of black America as it slowly shifted from a belief in the efficacy of nonviolence into a general state of dissatisfaction and impatience with the civil rights movement. In early 1964, as SNCC and CORE began to take more militant positions, the atmosphere of race politics grew heavier with the possibility of violence; indeed, within six months race riots would break out in black neighborhoods throughout the Northeast. “Now we have the type of black man on the scene in America today,” Malcolm told the crowd, “who just doesn’t intend to turn the other cheek any longer.” In raising the specter of the “bullet,” he acknowledged that it would take great effort to pull the country from the path to catastrophe. Yet in discussing the “ballot,” he held out hope that such a change was possible.
The first part of Malcolm’s lecture made an appeal for black unity despite ideological quarrels. “If we have differences,” Malcolm argued, “let us differ in the closet; when we come out in front, let us not have anything to argue about until we get finished arguing with the man.” This sentiment directly contradicted the “Message to the Grassroots,” which had ridiculed King and other civil rights activists. For Malcolm, a precondition for unity was finding a secular basis for common ground, which is why he also strove to decouple his identity as a Muslim cleric from his political engagements. “Just as Adam Clayton Powell is a Christian minister,” Malcolm observed, he himself was a Muslim minister who was committed to black liberation “by whatever means necessary.” Malcolm then pivoted to denounce both major political parties as well as the U.S. power structure, which continued to deny most blacks a real chance at voting. Malcolm had come to see the vote as a necessary tool if black Americans were to take control of the institutions in their communities. He reminded his audience of the power that a black voting bloc could have in a divided country, claiming that “it was the black man’s vote” that secured the Kennedy-Johnson ticket victory in the previous presidential election. But he impressed on the crowd that of voting or violence, the United States was sure to get at least one. The writing was on the wall, with young black boys in Jacksonville throwing Molotov cocktails in the streets. “It’ll be Molotov cocktails this month, hand grenades next month, something else next month,” he assured the crowd. “It’ll be ballots, or it’ll be bullets.” Yet as ominous as this message sounded, it still represented a step back from the brink of inevitable violence suggested in “Message to the Grassroots.” The ballot offered a way out: Malcolm was suggesting that if the federal government guaranteed full voting rights for African Americans nationwide, it could avoid a bloody conflagration. What was also significant about the address was what was now missing: no longer did Malcolm claim that Elijah Muhammad possessed the best program addressing blacks’ interests.
The small cadre of Trotskyists at the Cory Methodist Church were thrilled with Malcolm’s presentation, which seemed to confirm their own theory that revolutionary black nationalism could be the spark for igniting a socialist revolution in the United States. The Militant’s coverage of the Cleveland event highlighted approvingly Malcolm’s castigation of “the Democratic party; the 'con game they call the filibuster,’ and the ‘white political crooks’ who keep the black man from control of his own community.” At times in the talk, Malcolm appeared to move away from a race-based analysis toward a class perspective. “I am not antiwhite,” Malcolm insisted. “I am antiexploitation, antioppression.” The Militant mentioned Malcolm’s support for the creation of a black nationalist party and his call for a “black nationalist convention by August [1964], with delegates from all over the country.”
Malcolm’s lecture was tape recorded, and soon thousands of record copies were being distributed. Second only to “Message to the Grassroots,” “The Ballot or the Bullet” would become one of Malcolm’
s most widely quoted talks. The FBI monitored the lecture, and appeared to recognize Malcolm’s new appeal to a growing number of whites. The Bureau focused on two of his central arguments: that the civil rights bill being filibustered before the Senate either would not be passed or, if signed by President Johnson, would not be implemented; and that African Americans should initiate gun clubs. “It is lawful for anyone to own a rifle or a shotgun and it is everyone’s right to protect themselves from anyone who stands in their way to prevent them from obtaining what is rightfully theirs,” Malcolm was reported to have said.
By the beginning of April 1964, Malcolm eagerly looked forward to leaving the country; several days after the Cleveland speech, he purchased a plane ticket to travel throughout the Middle East and Africa, with tentative stops including Lagos, Accra, Algiers, Cairo, Jeddah, and Khartoum. If the trip promised spiritual restoration, it also offered a practical respite, giving him at least a month away from his increasingly combative relationship with the Nation and its representatives. The break was much needed. After his March 9 split, he had spent the rest of the month watching tensions escalate. Elijah Muhammad had pressured two of Malcolm’s brothers, Philbert and Wilfred, ministers of the mosques in Lansing and Detroit respectively, to publicly denounce him as a hypocrite and a traitor. Worse, the Nation soon took aim at Malcolm’s refuge. The day after Handler's Times article appeared announcing the split, Captain Joseph had turned up at the Elmhurst home demanding the Mosque’s incorporation papers and other valuables, which Malcolm reluctantly turned over. On the last day of March, attorney Joseph Williams, on behalf of Mosque No. 7 secretary Maceo X Owens, filed papers in Queens County demanding the eviction of Malcolm and his family from the house. Outraged, Malcolm secured Harlem civil rights attorney Percy Sutton to oppose the suit, but the squabbling soon left him drained and dispirited. His heart was not in the fight. As April unfolded, he seemed disconnected from these legal proceedings, and he focused on the journey that lay ahead.
A little more than a week before his scheduled departure, the MMI held an evening forum at the Audubon, featuring Malcolm and North Carolina civil rights leader Willie Mae Mallory. Mallory’s participation directly associated Malcolm with the incendiary exile Robert Williams, author of Negroes with Guns and an early proponent of black armed self-defense. Malcolm insisted that the Black Freedom Movement had to refocus from a quest for “civil rights” to a demand for “human rights,” as defined by international law. Again, he stressed the necessity of the vote. The New York FBI office estimated the audience at five hundred. “He cited past lynchings of Negroes in America in accusing the government of genocide,” it reported.
On April 8, at New York’s Palm Gardens, Malcolm delivered a lecture that sharply broke with the NOI mold. The public lecture had been sponsored by the Militant Labor Forum, the nonpartisan outreach group of the SWP. In theory he was speaking to an eclectic group of nonaligned activists, independent Marxists, and black nationalists, but in reality it was a mostly Marxist audience with many of Malcolm’s core followers also in attendance.
Malcolm was also preparing his associates for his extended leave, authorizing James 67X to serve as the MMI's acting chairman and to answer all communications and correspondence. Despite all the last-minute arrangements that needed his attention, he agreed to fly to Detroit once again to address a GOAL (Group on Advanced Leadership) rally. The speech would pressure his already tight schedule, but he recognized that Detroit offered a fertile ground for the message he had been cultivating in “The Ballot or the Bullet.” In the years since he had delivered his monthlong series of sermons at Mosque No. 1 in 1957, the city had continued to develop as a national center for black working-class militancy. Black membership in the city’s chapter of the United Auto Workers union had exploded, and as in many other Midwestern cities, the heavy industrial base and de facto segregation produced a mass of militant workers living in impoverished, rundown ghettos. Already the seeds had been planted for the violent discontent that would seize the city by the end of the decade. Malcolm had registered the broad impact of Detroit in his “Message to the Grassroots” address in November 1963, but now his renewed emphasis on class exploitation and the plight of the black working class made for an even more natural fit with the mood of the city’s black community. As he sought a larger national constituency, he could ill afford to pass up a high-profile speaking engagement before such a promising audience.
GOAL booked the King Solomon Baptist Church in the Northwest Gold-berg neighborhood for Malcolm’s speech, but when the church leaders discovered that Malcolm would be the featured speaker, an ad hoc coalition of black ministers tried in vain to block his appearance. Despite their efforts, more than two thousand people came out to listen. Drawing on many ideas from the speeches in New York and Cleveland, Malcolm offered perhaps the most refined version of “Ballot” he would ever give; the audio recording that has survived of this speech shows Malcolm at the height of his powers as an orator. In this version, he moved the section on black nationalism front and center, giving one of the most trenchant exegesis of this political philosophy ever set down. Speaking in the urgent tones and pulsing rhythms of a jazz musician, Malcolm told the crowd that he was “a black nationalist freedom fighter.” Again he urged his supporters “to leave their religion at home in the closet,” because the goal was to unite all African Americans regardless of their religious views behind the politics of black nationalism. As in his Cleveland address, Malcolm placed great importance on blacks’ electoral empowerment. “[If] Negroes voted together,” he insisted, “they could turn every election, as the white vote is usually divided.”
Beneath the rhetoric, there was a glaring inconsistency in his logic. Malcolm was encouraging African Americans to vote, even to throw their weight behind either major party; yet simultaneously he accused both major parties of racism, incapable of delivering fairness to blacks. “I’m one of the twenty-two million victims of the Democrats—the Republicans—of Americanism,” he declared. The African American who habitually voted for the Democrats “is not only a chump but a traitor to his race.” Malcolm, in effect, was promoting electoralism but in practical terms gave blacks no effective means to exercise their power. Who were they supposed to vote for if no one on the ballot could bring any real relief?
Home from Detroit the morning of April 13, Malcolm barely had time to bid his wife and followers good-bye before catching a flight to Cairo that evening. He flew under the name Malik el-Shabazz. When Malcolm disembarked in Cairo the following night, he noticed several dark-complexioned airline staff at the terminal; they would have “fit right into Harlem,” he noted in his diary.
During the next two days in Cairo, Malcolm relished life as a tourist, as he had in 1959. Free from the ever present worries about the Nation, his fragile housing status, and the pressures of organization building, he allowed himself to evaporate into a state of rest, though the journey ahead would present its own challenges. On Thursday, April 16, he happened to meet and befriend a group of hajjis about to set off on their pilgrimage to Mecca. Since that was also his intended destination, they agreed to accompany each other to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the official center of embarkation for the hajj. Malcolm knew that to enter the Holy City of Mecca he would have to establish his religious credentials as an orthodox Muslim before the tribunal known as the “Hajj Court.” Arriving late Friday, a day when the Hajj Court was closed, Malcolm secured a bed in a dormitory housing hundreds of international hajjis. Throughout most of the following day, he was unsuccessful in securing a firm date and time for his Hajj Court appearance. The failure put him in a difficult position. To be considered official, the hajj must be completed within a set range of dates, beginning on the eighth day of the Dhu al-Hijjah, the twelfth month of the Islamic calendar; in 1964, this fell on April 20. To delay much longer in Jeddah would mean missing the start, which would technically make his completion of the rituals an umrah instead of an official hajj, as had happened with Elijah M
uhammad’s pilgrimage years earlier. Frustrated, Malcolm then remembered something that might be of help. While he had prepared for his trip, Dr. Shawarbi had given him a book, The Eternal Message of Muhammad by Abd al-Rahman Azzam. Inside, Shawarbi had written the name and telephone number of the author's son, who lived in Jeddah. Malcolm asked someone to dial the number for him, and shortly afterward Dr. Omar Azzam showed up at Malcolm’s dormitory. Within minutes Malcolm’s personal items were packed and the two men were driven to the residence of Azzam’s father. The elder Azzam allowed Malcolm to stay in his own well-appointed suite at the Jeddah Palace hotel. That night, Malcolm dined with the Azzams, explaining his situation, and they agreed to assist him in securing permission to participate in the hajj.
The next day, Malcolm, accompanied by Abd al-Rahman Azzam, stood before Sheikh Muhammad Harkon of the Hajj Court, humbly petitioning the body to allow him access to Mecca. Malcolm had already been introduced to Sheikh Harkon during his 1959 visit and had even enjoyed tea in the judge’s home, yet to gain approval he would have to convince him that he had left behind the heretical ideas of the Nation of Islam. Azzam spoke on his behalf, assuring the sheikh that Malcolm was a widely known and respected Muslim in the United States and that he was a sincere proponent of Islam. What proved to be even more persuasive was the supportive intervention of Muhammad Abdul Azziz Maged, the deputy chief of protocol to Saudi prince Muhammad Faisal. Malcolm’s acquaintanceship with the Azzams had tipped him into royal circles, as Abd al-Rahman’s daughter was married to Prince Faisal’s son. Maged’s endorsement of Malcolm meant the case was immediately approved, and soon Prince Faisal himself sent word to Malcolm that he had “decreed that I be a guest of the state.”
Malcolm’s undertaking of the hajj marked his formal entrance into the community of orthodox Islam, placing him in a tradition of pilgrims that stretched back thirteen hundred years, linking him with fellow sojourners of every nationality, ethnicity, and class background imaginable. As the hajj is one of Islam’s five pillars, all Muslims are obligated to complete it if able to do so; the essence of this pilgrimage ritual is a representation of episodes from the lives of Abraham (also Ibrahim), Hagar, and Ishmael (also Ismail). The most dramatic event is the tawaf, in which thousands of pilgrims circumambulate the Kaaba, the ritual site that symbolizes the spiritual center of the Islamic faith. As they circle the Kaaba, pilgrims attempt to touch or kiss it as a sign indicating the renewal of their covenant with Allah. The hajj also includes the say, the running of pilgrims between two small hills, replaying Hagar's desperate search for water for her son, Ismail; drinking water from the well of Zamzam; prayer on the plains of Arafat; and then walking to the valley of Mina to replay Ibrahim’s ordeal of nearly sacrificing his son Ismail. The hajj purges all previous sins of the pilgrim, and often coincides with major changes in an individual Muslim’s life, such as marriage or retirement. To Malcolm, his departure from the Nation of Islam was an ideal moment for spiritual reexamination and renewal, fitting well with the purpose of the hajj.