Malcolm X

  In the fall of 1964, probably because of his relationship with Betty, Charles Kenyatta felt bold enough to publicly challenge James 67X's leadership. The basic criticisms leveled against James were that he was secretive, dictatorial, and a closet communist—a Marxist who dishonestly presented himself as a black nationalist. Because of his administrative responsibilities, he had alienated many members; his unambiguous dislike of Shifflett and the OAAU guaranteed that he would have few allies in that organization. By contrast, Kenyatta maintained cordial relations with OAAU members and attended some of their events. As the power struggle between the two men became public, MMI members were divided. But old habits die hard. The NOI tradition of allowing the minister, or supreme leader, to make important decisions led the majority of MMI members to defer any judgments about the leadership until Malcolm’s return. Still, the long summer of disunity had left members of both groups with frazzled nerves and little sense of direction. Adding to their anxiety were the continuing conflicts with the Nation of Islam. Malcolm’s departure from the United States had done little to reduce the Nation’s vitriolic campaign against him and his defenders. Everyone craved Malcolm’s return, but feared that it would trigger a new escalation of violence.

  By the beginning of November 1964, Malcolm had been away from the United States for four months. He was aware of the dissension and near collapse of his fledgling organizations. Undoubtedly, he missed his wife and children. Yet he had successfully fashioned a new image, another reinvention, on the African continent. No other private citizen from America, devoid of title or official status, had been welcomed and honored as Malcolm had been. Instead of being projected as a racist zealot, as was still too often the case in the American press, he was identified by African media as a freedom fighter and Pan-Africanist. But it was not the flattery that affected Malcolm; it was the romance with Africa itself, its beauty, diversity, and complexity. It was the African people who had embraced Malcolm as their own long-lost son. It must have been difficult to leave all of this behind, by returning to the United States and facing the death threats and escalating violence he knew was sure to come.

  The final leg of his African tour brought him back to Ghana, and to the expat community for whom he had only grown in stature in the months since his last visit. Maya Angelou, Julian Mayfield, and others met him at the Accra airport on November 2, and soon various expats were once again competing with one another for his time and attention. The next day Malcolm enjoyed seeing Angelou, spending the morning together and dining at the home of the intellectual Nana Nketsia with about half a dozen artists and writers. He also spent several hours with Shirley Du Bois, by then the executive director of Ghanaian television, and together they toured Ghana’s national television and radio stations. Perhaps his looming return to the United States had made him restless, because during this time he found himself unable to sleep through the night, turning to sleeping pills for relief. Yet he was also exhausted, worn down from weeks of grinding international travel. He had loosened his rules about alcohol despite the Muslim restrictions against it; after a newspaper interview, he had grown tired, and noted in his diary that he’d had a rum and Coke in an attempt to wake up. He would have more to keep his thoughts filled soon enough, when news reached him that Lyndon Johnson had buried Goldwater in a landslide victory in the U.S. presidential election, capturing 96 percent of the black vote.

  Shirley Du Bois, Julian Mayfield, and Malcolm sat down for a quick lunch with the Chinese ambassador before meeting with President Nkrumah in the early afternoon on November 5. Their talk once again went unrecorded, but its content might be gleaned from Malcolm’s speeches about the United Nations during the rest of his trip. Part of Malcolm’s agenda for returning to Accra was to promote the development of the OAAU on the African continent, and in the expat community his ideas, especially that of bringing U.S. race issues before the UN, were met with great excitement. “The idea was so stimulating to the community of African-American residents,” recalled Angelou, “that I persuaded myself I should return to the States to help establish the organization.” Maya’s decision to return home to help Malcolm won her immediate status among the expatriates. “My friends,” Maya remembered, “began to treat me as if I had suddenly became special. . . . My stature had definitely increased.”

  On Friday, November 6, a delegation of admirers, including Shirley Du Bois, Nana Nketsia, Maya Angelou, and others, bid Malcolm a bon voyage. As his plane departed for Liberia, the reality of leaving Ghana sank in and he grew sad as he reflected on how much he had come to cherish the community there. As he watched Maya and another African-American female expatriate “waving ‘sadly’ from the rail,” he characterized Maya and her friend as “two very lonely women.” Arriving in Monrovia, Liberia, at about noon, Malcolm attended a dance held at city hall, then went out to a country club. After some sightseeing and a cocktail party the next day, Malcolm spent several hours being wined and dined—and being challenged in vigorous debate with expatriates and others about the role of Israel in Africa. Members of the Liberian elite made the case that African-American “technicians and of other skills” needed to migrate to Liberia, yet, like any other ruling class, they were candid about their determination to hold on to power. Black Americans would be welcomed to Liberia, “but we don’t want them to interfere with our internal political structure. Our fear is that they may get into politics.”

  On the morning of November 9 Malcolm visited the Liberian executive mansion, where he was introduced to members of the cabinet; however, President William Tubman was “too busy” to meet him. Malcolm then headed to the airport to depart—after three packed days he was off to Conakry, Guinea. Arriving in the early evening, he was driven much to his amazement to President Sékou Touré’s “private home, where I will reside while in Conakory [sic]. I’m speechless! All praise is due Allah!” He was allocated three personal servants, a driver, and one army officer.

  As Malcolm sought to process this extraordinary recognition of status, he reflected on how he had changed in the past few months: “My mind seems to be more at peace, since I left Mecca in September. My thoughts come strong and clear and it is easier to express myself.” Paradoxically, he then added, “My mind has been almost incapable of producing words and phrases lately and it has worried me.” What he appears to be saying is that his Middle East and Africa experiences had greatly broadened his mind, yet his limited vocabulary of black nationalism was insufficient to address the challenges he so clearly saw confronting Africa. Malcolm sensed that he needed to create new theoretical tools and a different frame of reference beyond race.

  Malcolm was chauffeured around Conakry like a visiting head of state the morning after his arrival there. A quick visit at the Algerian embassy caused him brief embarrassment, due to the enthusiastic reception he received there. “It is difficult to believe that I could be so widely known (and respected) here on this continent,” Malcolm later reflected. “The negative image the Western press has tried to paint of me certainly hasn’t succeeded.” That evening he was finally introduced to President Touré, who enthusiastically embraced him. “He congratulated me for my firmness in the struggle for dignity.” They agreed to meet for lunch the next afternoon. That night Malcolm went to a nightclub, but perhaps because Guinea was an overwhelmingly Muslim country, he wisely stuck with coffee and orange juice.

  At his lunch with President Touré and several other international guests the next day, Malcolm noted that Touré “ate fast, but politely, and several times added food to my plate.” After several guests had left, Touré returned to the topic that had animated him at their encounter the night before, the quest for “dignity.” Malcolm knew about the president’s extraordinary history—as a trade union militant and anti-French revolutionary, the sole leader in Francophone Africa to defy De Gaulle by rejecting union with metropolitan France in 1958. To Touré dignity meant African self-determination, concepts very close to his own new lexicon of Pan-Africanism. “We are aw
are of your reputation as a freedom fighter,” Touré told Malcolm, “so I talk frankly, a fighting language to you.”

  Over the next several days Malcolm experienced a series of travel mishaps; unbeknownst to him his flight out of Conakry had been rescheduled, and he had to spend an extra night there. On his flight to Dakar on November 13 one brother recognized Malcolm, “and it was all over the airport” that the black American Muslim was present once he’d arrived. Travelers came up requesting autographs. He continued on, with a brief transfer stop in Geneva and then Paris, where he spent the night at the Hôtel Terminus St. Lazare. Malcolm flew to Algiers the next morning, but the visit was not productive. The French language barrier, Malcolm lamented, was so “tremendous” that it was almost impossible to communicate effectively. With his crisscross flight pattern continuing, Malcolm arrived in Geneva on the morning of November 16. His objective was to make contact with the city’s Islamic Center and to deepen his links to the Muslim Brotherhood. That afternoon, he had a surprise encounter with a young woman named Fifi, a United Nations secretary and Swiss national who had worked with Malcolm in Cairo. She met him at his hotel, chatting with him for hours and truly surprising him by saying that she “is madly in love with me and seems willing to do anything to prove it.” Malcolm slept late the next day, then went shopping, buying a new overcoat and suit. Dr. Said Ramadan of the Islamic Center came by, taking Malcolm first to his mosque, then to dinner with several guests. When Malcolm returned to his hotel at about nine p.m., “Fifi was knocking on my door as I came up the stairs.” She joined him in his room and left a couple hours later. Uncharacteristically, Malcolm did not record in his diary what transpired between the two of them; based on the diary, Fifi appears to be the only female he admitted to his private space during his entire time abroad. After her departure, Malcolm subsequently left the hotel and took a brief walk in the rain, “alone and feeling lonely . . . thinking of Betty.”

  He arrived in Paris on November 18, checking in to the Hôtel Delavine, where he would stay for a week (despite receiving an invitation to visit London) to address a crowd at the Maison de la Mutualité five days later. His international reputation preceded him, and though his appearance at the Mutualité was not widely covered by the U.S. press, one reporter recalled, “There wasn’t a square inch of unoccupied space in the meeting room.” Those who arrived late stood or sat on the floor. Malcolm’s formal remarks were supposed to address the theme “The Black Struggle in the United States,” but as he confessed in his diary, he seemed to lack mental focus in the formulation of new political ideas, especially in the aftermath of Johnson’s presidential victory. Instead, the substance of his remarks consisted of responses to questions. From the beginning, he veered ideologically to the left. When asked, “How is it possible that some people are still preaching nonviolence?” he responded with an attack on King, saying, “That’s easy to understand—shows you the power of dollarism.” It was the “imperialists” who “give out another peace prize to again try and strengthen the image of nonviolence.” His trip to Africa and the Middle East also seemed to have revived his inflammatory anti-Semitic views. “The American Negroes especially have been maneuvered into doing more crying for the Jews than they cry for themselves,” he complained, going on to present a fictive history of progressive Jews and claiming, incorrectly, that they had not participated as Freedom Riders. “If they were barred from hotels they bought the hotel. But when they join us, they don’t show us how to solve our problem that way.”

  Yet in other ways Malcolm had become more tolerant. He announced his new views about interracial romance and marriage: “How can anyone be against love? Whoever a person wants to love, that’s their business.” And he presciently speculated that in a multicultural future it was conceivable that “the black culture will be the dominant culture.” The day after his speech in Paris, November 24, 1964, Malcolm X finally arrived home in New York City; but his homecoming this day coincided with the killing of sixty white hostages during a joint Belgian-American rescue attempt staged against Congolese rebels in Stanleyville. As he disembarked at John F. Kennedy airport, about sixty supporters displaying signs reading “Welcome Back, Brother Malcolm” greeted him. He wasted no time in accusing both the U.S. government and the Congolese regime of Moise Tshombe for their responsibility in the Stanleyville slaughter. It was “Johnson’s financing of Tshombe’s mercenaries,” Malcolm declared, that had produced such “disastrous results.” Once more tempting fate, he described the U.S. involvement in the Congo as “the chickens coming home to roost.”

  CHAPTER 14

  “Such a Man Is Worthy of Death”

  November 24, 1964-February 14, 1965

  At the OAAU Homecoming Rally for Malcolm on November 29 at the Audubon Ballroom, Charles 37X mingled in the modest crowd of three hundred, shaking hands and displaying his usual charm and good cheer. No one had yet told Malcolm, still freshly arrived, about the rumors concerning Betty and his duplicitous lieutenant. James 67X, however, did know. In October, hoping to ease tensions over leadership of the MMI in Malcolm’s absence, he had traveled to Boston and spent several days as a houseguest of Ella Collins, where he met with MMI supporters. During his stay, Ella told him about the gossip. In its way, the news of Charles and Betty’s liaisons helped settle him, perhaps because it gave him something he could use to his advantage if the power struggle escalated further. As it was, he took the opportunity to reassert his leadership through magnanimity. On October 18 he and Benjamin 2X held an MMI meeting in Harlem, where they encouraged members to attend an OAAU rally scheduled for later that day. Two nights later, he held a further meeting at his West 113th Street apartment, to discuss the formation of an MMI judo program. The participants, who included Reuben Francis, had been some of his staunchest critics; this overture to his opponents may have quelled their worries. Toward Kenyatta himself, James displayed generosity, inviting his rival to speak at events. By the time of the Audubon rally, James had largely reestablished his leadership role in the MMI.

  Even so, members of the OAAU and MMI were excited about having Malcolm back. Arguments and feuds that had threatened to destroy both organizations could now be resolved. Both groups had closely followed Malcolm’s itinerary and adventures from abroad, the honors bestowed upon him by such worthies as Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere, Sékou Touré, and Prince Faisal, all of which was in part a recognition of their efforts. Yet the changes he had clearly undergone during the trip produced conflicting reactions among his followers. The OAAU had approved of Malcolm’s political evolution and of the frequent comments he had sent to M. S. Handler for publication in the Times. For the MMI, however, the question to be answered was whether Malcolm X was still their Malcolm—a committed black separatist who espoused the core ideas he had promoted as a Nation of Islam minister. Many had agreed with Herman Ferguson in seeing Malcolm’s May press conference comments offering an olive branch to whites as a kind of necessary smoke screen, but the news of him from Africa conveyed only further movement in a more inclusive direction. The MMI, its heels dug in on race issues, saw little to approve of in the deeper change in their leader's philosophical outlook. James 67X, for one, was glad that Malcolm “had not changed his position one whit” after his second African sojourn. And even after he came back, James said with relief, “he would refer to certain people as devils.”

  Yet his separatism-minded supporters could not have been pleased with the undercurrent of his speech at his Audubon homecoming. He was introduced there by Clifton DeBerry, the Socialist Workers Party 1964 presidential candidate. After touching briefly on current events in Stanleyville, Malcolm spent the bulk of the talk recounting his trip, going country by country and focusing on the African continent’s unprecedented social change. “This is the era of revolution,” he proudly announced, taking the opportunity to draw negative contrasts between the nonviolent civil rights leaders in the United States and the African revolutionaries who were seeking to overthrow co
lonial dictatorships. “Whenever you hear a man saying he wants freedom, but in the next breath he is going to tell you what he won’t do to get it . . . he doesn’t believe in freedom.” Yet in espousing the necessity for a Pan-Africanist approach, Malcolm once again made an important distinction between whites who “don’t act all right” compared to antiracist whites. “When I say white man, I’m not saying all of you,” he explained, “because some of you might be all right. And whichever one of you acts all right with me, you’re all right with me.” His point left little room for interpretation of his changing values: all whites weren’t “devils”; many were antiracist and sympathetic to the black struggle, while African leaders like Tshombe may have been black but were a threat to blacks’ interests. The message cost him further support among those who wished for a hard line when it came to race.

  From Africa, Malcolm had contacted James 67X to help arrange a brief lecture tour in Britain, for which he would depart on November 30 and return on December 6—once again setting off abroad after he had barely settled back in the United States. Early on his day of departure he set aside time to contact patrons and colleagues in the Muslim world, where he was involved in a delicate balancing act. During his trip he had courted and received sponsorship from both the Muslim World League in Mecca and the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs in Cairo, an arm of Nasser's government. These groups shared a deep commitment to Muslim ideals but otherwise could not have been more different, with the Saudi Muslim World League’s conservatism and staunch anticommunism putting them at odds with Nasser, who by then had made Egypt practically a client state of the Soviet Union. The schism required Malcolm to become a pluralist in the Muslim world, an approach that had produced real breakthroughs during his travels. While he had been in Mecca, the Muslim World League had agreed to assign Sheikh Ahmed Hassoun to the New York Muslim community, and now Malcolm wrote the league’s secretary-general, Muhammad Surur al-Sabban, to express his appreciation. His letter, however, was actually a cover under which to bring up a delicate issue. Malcolm had returned home to find the MMI virtually broke, with no funds to pay Hassoun’s salary or to cover the cost of his lodgings. He blamed the lack of resources on the split with Elijah Muhammad: “We represent the Afro-American Muslims who have broken away from the Black Muslim Movement. We had to leave all our treasures behind.” Estimating that it would cost four hundred to five hundred dollars for Hassoun’s monthly living expenses, he did not ask for funds directly, but obliquely requested “instructions on how to solve this problem.”