Malcolm X

  Life on the railroads influenced Malcolm in other ways. The sounds of the trains have been woven into the fabric of jazz, blues, and even rhythm and blues. As the writer Albert Murray has observed, railroads have long been a central metaphor in African-American folklore because of the nineteenth-century abolitionists’ Underground Railroad that spirited thousands of enslaved blacks to freedom. Malcolm’s Harlem style helped him meet and learn from the jazz musicians who were his marijuana customers. More important, the experiences on the railroad began Malcolm’s love affair with travel itself, the excitement and adventure of encountering new cities and different people. These trips provided an essential education about the physical vastness and tremendous diversity of the country; they also provided lessons in the conditions in which blacks lived and worked. He saw some cut off from any hope, and others squandering their privileges, opportunities, and gifts. As he looked around Washington, Boston, and New York, the seeds of his later antibourgeois attitudes were sown.

  His siblings continued writing to him, but his replies became sporadic. Reginald and Hilda both sent letters asking for money, although they knew that Malcolm was hardly making enough money to support himself. Bea’s occasional gifts of cash augmented his meager wages, but went only so far. Several tailoring establishments sent him bills for clothing he had obtained on credit, but he had no intention of paying. One or more creditors turned over their claims to the Boyle Brothers collection agency, which threatened legal action. Before he was fired, Malcolm was even behind in his dues to the Dining Car Employees Union.

  In late 1942, he returned to Lansing to show off his new appearance, and had the satisfactory effect of shocking his family. “My conk and whole costume were so wild that I might have been taken as a man from Mars,” he recalled. Attending a neighborhood hop at Lincoln High School, he showed off his dance steps before admiring crowds, a true celebrity. Without a hint of embarrassment, he even signed autographs for admiring teenagers with the bold signature “Harlem Red.”

  Malcolm’s autobiography implies that his trip home was brief—Harlem, after all, had become the center of his new life—but he actually stayed in Lansing for at least two months. His evenings were spent pursuing a number of different women. During the day he was scrambling to find money—for himself and his family, which had continued to struggle financially in his absence. For a few weeks he worked at Shaw’s jewelry store, then at nearby Flint’s A/C spark plug company. But his return home was also about receiving family validation and support. Still a teenager, Malcolm depended on the love of his siblings. He didn’t expect them to understand Harlem’s jazz culture or his zoot suit costumes, but he needed them to recognize that he had become successful. He finally returned to Harlem in late February 1943. Once again he was hired by the New Haven Railroad, only to be fired seventeen days later for insubordination.

  Malcolm wrote in his autobiography that he’d stopped seriously looking for work after 1942 and had instead devoted himself to increasingly violent crime. He dated his employment at Small’s Paradise from sometime in mid-1942, just after he had turned seventeen, till early 1943. Yet either his memory was faulty or he was at work on his legend, because he was still in Lansing at that time. His job at Small’s actually began in late March 1943 and was terminated less than two months later, when he asked an undercover military detective posing as a Small’s patron “if he wanted a woman”—prompting arrest for solicitation, and another firing.

  From 1942 to 1944, he worked sporadically at a much less glamorous site, Jimmy’s Chicken Shack, a late-night Harlem hot spot for black artists and entertainers. Even washing dishes, he was in esteemed company: Charlie Parker had done the same in the thirties when Art Tatum held court at the piano. Clarence Atkins, Malcolm’s close friend at that time, recalled that Malcolm was “flunking for Jimmy . . . doing anything, like washing dishes, mopping floors, or whatever . . . because he could eat, and Jimmy had a place upstairs, over the place where he could sleep.” One of his fellow employees was a black dishwasher, John Elroy Sanford, who had aspirations to be a professional comedian. Both Malcolm and Sanford had red hair, and to distinguish the two Sanford was called “Chicago Red,” referring to his original hometown. Since no one had even heard of Lansing, Malcolm was eager to be known as “Detroit Red.” Years later, Sanford would become famous as the comedian Redd Foxx.

  The Detroit Red of the Autobiography is a young black man almost completely uninterested in, even alienated from, politics. Yet the childhood lessons of black pride and self-sufficiency had not been entirely abandoned. Malcolm spoke frequently about black nationalist ideas at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack. “He would talk often,” Atkins explained, “about how his father used to get brutalized and beat up on the corner selling Marcus Garvey’s paper, and he would talk a lot about Garvey’s concepts in terms of how they could benefit us as a people.”

  During his time in Harlem, Malcolm was not directly involved in activities that could be described as political—rent strikes, picketing stores that refused to hire Negroes, registering black voters, and so forth. Yet to his credit, even at this stage in his life he was an extraordinary observer of people. In his description of one of his early forays into Harlem, he mentions the presence of communist organizers: “Negro and white canvassers sidled up alongside you, talking fast as they tried to get you to buy a copy of the Daily Worker: ‘This paper's trying to keep your rent controlled. . . . Make that greedy landlord kill them rats in your apartment. . . . Who do you think fought the hardest to help free those Scottsboro boys?’” Longtime Harlem residents had schooled Detroit Red about the neighborhood’s racial demography, an urban transformation that he later characterized as the “immigrant musical chairs game.” His own telling of that shift captured both the directness and the broad strokes of his style. New York’s earliest black neighborhoods, he explained, had been confined in lower Manhattan. “Then, in 1910, a Negro real estate man somehow got two or three Negro families into one Jewish Harlem apartment house. The Jews fled from that house, then from that block, and more Negroes came in to fill their apartments. Then whole blocks of Jews ran . . . until in a short time, Harlem was like it still is today—virtually all black.”

  Malcolm’s impressions about the origins and evolution of black Harlem were only partially accurate. He correctly noted blacks’ northward movement within the island of Manhattan, but missed the larger forces that prompted it. At the heart of every community are its social institutions; black Harlem was formed largely from the migration of venerable black churches and organizations from lower Manhattan to above 110th Street. St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, founded in 1809 and a central institution for the African-American middle class, left Manhattan’s Tenderloin district on West 34th Street and constructed a beautiful new church—in early Gothic style—on West 134th Street in 1909. Abyssinian Baptist Church, also founded in the early nineteenth century, moved to West 138th Street in 1923, where it became for several decades the largest Protestant congregation in America. Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church had existed for a century prior to its relocation to 60 West 132nd Street. Many of these churches made large profits when they sold their downtown locations, and the relative cheapness of land in Harlem allowed them to buy up not only sites for new churches but also large blocks of real estate that were then rented out to Negroes who followed them north.

  Public and privately owned apartment complexes also were centers of social interaction and cultural activity in the neighborhood. One prime example was the Dunbar Apartments, built in 1926-27 by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Opened in 1928 and located between Seventh and Eighth avenues at West 149th and 150th streets, the Dunbar Apartments were designed as the first housing cooperative for blacks. The residences claimed many famous tenants, including Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Paul and Eslanda Robeson, and W. E. B. and Nina Du Bois. Harlem’s famous YMCA, a center for public lectures and cultural events, was located on West 135th Street and opened in 1933. These and hundreds of other
institutions were part of the cultural bedrock of black Harlem.

  Equally important to Harlem was the racial transformation of New York City. In 1910, only 91,700 blacks lived in metropolitan New York; 60,500 African Americans resided in Manhattan, of whom only 14,300 had been born in New York State. The great majority of blacks had been Southern born. With the onset in 1915 of the Great Migration from the rural South, hundreds of thousands of blacks began to make their way to Gotham. The city’s total black population steadily increased: 152,500 in 1920; 327,700 in 1930. The Census Bureau estimated that 54,724 black New Yorkers in 1930 were foreign born. Much of this increase was confined to the Harlem ghetto. In 1910, Harlem’s total population regardless of race was 49,600. In 1920, Harlem’s population was 73,000, of which about two-thirds were black. By the 1920s, Harlem became the urban capital of the black diaspora, a lively center for the extraordinary flowering of literature, plays, dance, and the arts, a period that would come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. Harlem’s music, jazz, traversed the Atlantic, found a loving home in Paris, and became a global expression for youth culture.

  Malcolm could not have lived in Harlem during World War II without being deeply affected by its turbulent history and cultural activities. By any standard, it had by 1940 become the cosmopolitan center for black political activity, not only in America but worldwide. Roughly one-quarter of its black population consisted of Caribbean immigrants, nearly all of whom had established political associations, parties, and clubs of all kinds. One of the most influential West Indian politicians, Hulan Jack, originally from St. Lucia, had been elected to represent the neighborhood in the New York State Assembly in 1940. Harlem was also the national center of black labor activism, headed by A. Philip Randolph, who began his legendary career as a public orator even before Garvey’s arrival in the United States. Thousands of Harlem residents were active members and supporters of the Communist Party; figures like Claudia Jones and Benjamin Davis, Jr., were widely respected and popular leaders.

  Despite the demise of the Garvey movement, Harlem’s militancy had grown more intense, chiefly through the Depression-era 1930s and largely in response to social inequalities the black community was no longer willing to tolerate. For example, black workers in public laundries routinely earned three dollars per week less than whites performing identical work. Employment discrimination was rampant. One 1920-28 survey of 258 Harlem businesses employing more than 2,000 workers found that only 163 employees were black, and all held low-wage jobs. As the depression deepened, joblessness soared. Black youth unemployment for the period was estimated at well above 50 percent. In 1935, the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA), which had determined that the cost of living for a New York City household at “maintenance level” was $1,375 annually, estimated the average black family’s income at $1,025.

  The economic pressure exerted by these conditions found a release as black citizens began to organize in protest. In 1931, the Harlem Housewives League initiated a campaign at local chain stores, insisting that they employ African Americans. Many former Garveyites joined the movement, urging blacks to support a “buy black” effort. In 1932, the Harlem Labor Union was created, which picketed white-owned stores that refused to hire blacks. A year later, the newly formed Citizens’ League for Fair Play, a popular coalition including women’s groups and religious and fraternal organizations, demanded greater black employment in business. In March 1935, such protests sparked a riot along 125th Street, involving several thousand people. Dozens of white-owned stores were looted; fifty-seven civilians and seven police officers were injured, and seventy-five people, mostly African Americans, were arrested on charges ranging from inciting to riot and malicious mischief to felonious assault and burglary. The NYPD’s brutal treatment of the rioters was subsequently documented by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s Commission on Conditions in Harlem. Its report found that police had made “derogatory and threatening remarks”; one officer shot and killed a young black man, without warning, while another “called to arrest an unarmed drunk, hit the drunk so hard that he died.”

  The commission’s report included recommendations for improving conditions, and the liberal LaGuardia administration sought to defuse the escalating racial tension by implementing many of them. From 1936 to 1941, the mayor’s administration backed the construction of two new schools, the Harlem River Houses public housing complex, and the Women’s Pavilion at Harlem Hospital. But LaGuardia’s concessions did little to alter the widespread residential segregation, poverty, and discontent among Harlem’s working class. When in 1938 the Supreme Court declared that public picketing of private business establishments over “racially based complaints” was constitutional, a new round of protests ensued. A “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” coalition quickly won major concessions; within several years about one-third of all clerks and white-collar employees in Harlem were African Americans. In parallel efforts, blacks won concessions to work as telephone repairmen and operators, to drive buses for the Fifth Avenue and New York Omnibus companies, and to hold white-collar positions at Consolidated Edison.

  Through these struggles Harlem established a dynamic model of social reform and urban protest that would be repeated across America. Mass agitation, mostly by grassroots associations, culminated in a series of well-publicized demonstrations, followed by urban insurrection. A liberal government, supported by white and black elites, subsequently granted major concessions in the form of hospitals, public housing, and expanded opportunities in both the public and private sectors. This in turn spawned new African-American victories within electoral politics, the courts, and government. These key tactics, which would become the protest strategy during the civil rights movement, were developed in Harlem a generation before.

  The primary political beneficiary of these struggles and reforms was the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., a man who would later become Malcolm’s ally and occasional rival. Born in 1908, he was the handsome son of the powerful pastor of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. The junior Powell followed his father into the ministry, but his interests were not chiefly spiritual. In 1931, he led a protest at New York City’s Board of Estimate that successfully halted the exclusion of five African-American physicians from Harlem Hospital. Seven years later, he helped launch the Greater New York Coordinating Committee for Employment, which used pickets and nonviolent protests to secure jobs. Succeeding his father as Abyssinian’s pastor in 1937, Powell possessed a strong religious constituency as well as a growing army of political supporters. Ideologically and politically, he was a pragmatic liberal, at the national level endorsing Roosevelt’s New Deal, while in Harlem working with the Communist Party and supporting LaGuardia’s reelection campaign in 1941. That same year, Powell started the People’s Committee, a Harlem-based organization of eighteen hundred campaign workers and eight offices dedicated to electing him to the city council. Powell’s challengers on his left and right, American Labor Party candidate Dr. Max Yergan and Republican candidate Channing Tobias, pulled out of the contest in his favor. LaGuardia endorsed him, and the two liberals campaigned together—and both won.

  On the city council, Powell consistently fought for Harlem’s interests. When Yergan, a history instructor at the nearly all-white City College located in West Harlem, was not reappointed, Powell introduced a resolution that outlawed racial discrimination in academic appointments. In May 1942, his organization sponsored a mass rally at the Golden Gate Ballroom to protest against the NYPD's beating and killing of a black man, Wallace Armstrong. The next year, when the LaGuardia administration granted the navy permission to establish training facilities for the racially segregated Women’s Reserve (WAVES) at Manhattan’s Hunter College and Walton High School, Powell denounced the action.

  Powell’s bold position was embraced by civil rights organizations, black labor, and the Communist Party. His fierce opposition to Jim Crow, moreover, was in harmony with the black press’s “Double V” campai
gn of 1942–43, which called for victory over fascism abroad and racial discrimination at home. In response to blacks’ modest gains in employment, thousands of white workers participated in “hate strikes” during the war years, demanding exclusion of Negroes, especially in skilled positions. In July 1943, for example, white racists briefly paralyzed part of Baltimore’s Bethlehem Shipyards. In August the following year, white streetcar drivers in Philadelphia, outraged at the assignment of eight black motormen, staged a six-day strike. In response, Roosevelt dispatched five thousand troops and issued an executive order placing the streetcar company under army control.

  None of the meaning of these events was lost upon African Americans, many of whom began to question their support for America’s war effort. Years later, James Baldwin recalled, “The treatment accorded the Negro during the Second World War marks, for me, a turning point in the Negro’s relation to America. . . . A certain hope died, a certain respect for white Americans faded.” Although the vast majority of blacks still supported the war, a militant minority of young African-American males refused to register for the draft; others sought to disqualify themselves due to health reasons or other disabilities.