After a relatively calm period in black-white relations—or perhaps better put, one with a less aggressive push by blacks for equality—a new era was opening, characterized by black resistance and militancy. The Negro March on Washington and the civil rights rallies and demonstrations led by Powell in Harlem provoked fear and reaction among whites. Government authorities tried to derail the burgeoning movement by restricting the freedoms or activities of African Americans and to impose Jim Crow even in cities and states without legal racial segregation laws. Some targets were auspiciously outside politics—most notably, in Harlem, the world famous Savoy Ballroom.
Since its grand opening in 1926, the Savoy, located on Lenox Avenue between 140th and 141st streets, had quickly become the most significant cultural institution of Harlem. The great ballroom contained two large bandstands, richly carpeted lounges, and mirrored walls. During its heyday, about seven hundred thousand customers visited each year. Frequent white patrons included Orson Welles, Greta Garbo, Lana Turner, and even the rising Republican star Thomas E. Dewey. In a period when downtown hotels and dance halls still remained racially segregated, the Savoy was the center for interracial dancing and entertainment.
On April 22, 1943, the Savoy was padlocked by the NYPD, on the grounds that servicemen had been solicited by prostitutes there. New York City’s Bureau of Social Hygiene cited evidence that, over a nine-month period, 164 individuals had “met the source of their [venereal] disease at the Savoy Ballroom.” These alleged cases all came from armed services or coast guard personnel. Bureau officials offered absolutely no explanation as to how they had determined that the servicemen contracted diseases specifically from Savoy hookers. The appellate division of the New York State Supreme Court ruled unanimously to uphold the police action, with Mayor LaGuardia declaring that he was powerless to stop the ballroom from being closed down.
The Savoy remained closed throughout the summer of 1943. On October 15, the police announced that the establishment’s license had been renewed, and a “grand reopening” took place the following week. For Malcolm, the whole episode was clear evidence of the limitations of white liberalism’s racial tolerance: “City Hall kept the Savoy closed for a long time. It was just another one of the ‘liberal North’ actions that didn’t help Harlem to love the white man any.”
Meanwhile, plans were afoot downtown for a major urban development project that was designed to exclude black New Yorkers entirely. Only weeks after the Savoy’s closing, the LaGuardia administration made public its agreement with Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to construct Stuyvesant Town, a semipublic housing complex located on the east side of Manhattan by Gramercy. Metropolitan Life had received generous tax exemptions, eminent domain authority, and control of tenant selection. When the company admitted that it would bar black tenants, blacks and many white liberals were outraged. Powell accused LaGuardia of once again capitulating to racism. His newspaper boldly editorialized, “Hitler won a victory in New York City.” At one rally attracting twenty thousand protesters, Powell demanded LaGuardia be impeached. Not until 1944 did LaGuardia broker a compromise. Stuyvesant Town was constructed under the original terms; however, the mayor signed Local Law No. 20, barring all racial discrimination in tenant selection in future housing projects constructed under the city’s authority.
In Detroit, the hub for Malcolm’s family, escalating racial tensions erupted in a massive riot on June 20, 1943. In only its first six hours, the toll from Detroit’s unrest was thirty-four deaths, seven hundred injured, and two million dollars worth of property damage. Five thousand federal troops had been sent in to patrol the streets; military vehicles were assigned to escort trolley cars and buses. New York City’s authorities should have recognized that the conditions for a similar insurrection were ripe in Harlem. The neighborhood’s turn duly came on August 1, when a policeman shot a black serviceman in uniform. Within minutes, rioting erupted; white-owned businesses were attacked throughout the neighborhood—along 125th Street and on Harlem’s major north-south boulevards, Lenox, Seventh, and Eighth avenues, north from Central Park up to 145th Street. Before midnight, 1,450 stores had been vandalized, 6 people killed, 189 injured, and more than 600 blacks arrested. Significantly, unlike the 1935 riot, eyewitness accounts described the rioters as both middle class and low income. Even one police report recognized that: “Those actually committing malicious acts of violence were irresponsible, ignorant individuals. [But] the probability is that many decent citizens were in various groups, who in the most instances are intelligent and law abiding, and while not actually taking part in the physical disturbances, aided and abetted indirectly.”
The afternoon of the riot, Malcolm was walking south on St. Nicholas Avenue when he encountered blacks running uptown “loaded down with armfuls of stuff.” Along West 125th Street, he discovered, “Negroes were smashing store windows, and taking everything they could grab and carry—furniture, food, jewelry, clothes, whisky.” Within an hour, the NYPD had dispatched what appeared to be “every New York City cop” into Harlem. Malcolm went on to describe the semicomic scene of NAACP leader Walter White accompanying Mayor LaGuardia, driving along 125th Street in a bright red fire car appealing to blacks to “please go home and stay inside.”
The real world finally intruded into Malcolm’s life in the spring of 1943: he was called up for duty in the U.S. Army.
While the majority of African Americans had patriotically pledged their services since the first days of war, there had always been a vocal minority who saw little reason to enter a segregated service to fight in a white man’s war. By 1943–44, dissent among blacks within the armed forces had escalated. Hundreds of black soldiers were simply going AWOL. When the military induction notice addressed to Malcolm arrived at Ella’s house in Boston, she informed the authorities that her half brother no longer resided there. Malcolm did eventually receive the notice, deciding that he would avoid service by any means necessary.
In his autobiography, he recalled with approval Shorty Jarvis’s attitude: “Whitey owns everything. He wants us to go and bleed for him? Let him fight.” Malcolm may have heard about the well-publicized case of Winfred W. Lynn, an African American who had refused to be inducted because he opposed racially segregated military units. Lynn had lost the case, but his protest provoked widespread sympathy.
Writing about the day of his scheduled induction at Local Draft Board #59 on June 1, 1943, Malcolm recalled, “I costumed like an actor . . . I frizzled my hair up into a reddish bush of conk.” He addressed one white soldier, sitting at the receptionist desk, as “Crazy-o.” Eventually pulled from the induction line, the zoot-suited hustler was interrogated by a military psychiatrist to determine his fitness to serve. Malcolm rambled incessantly before whispering in the psychiatrist’s ear, “I want to get sent down South. Organize them nigger soldiers, you dig? Steal us some guns, and kill us crackers!” The medic, stunned, uttered, “That will be all,” later marking him as 4-F, unfit for duty. “A 4-F card came to me in the mail,” Malcolm concluded triumphantly, “and I never heard from the Army anymore.”
A subsequent FBI report released in January 1955 gave the official version of Malcolm’s rejection: “The subject was found mentally disqualified for military service for the following reasons: psychopathic personality inadequate, sexual perversion, psychiatric rejection.”
Harlem’s racial grievances—employment discrimination, widespread lack of jobs, the closing of the Savoy, the Stuyvesant Town agreement, and the August 1943 race riot—color all of Malcolm’s actions concerning his military induction. He was pushed in new directions largely by external events. Malcolm’s zoot-suited performance at the induction center was a different version of his Sandwich Red routine on the railroad. Both were examples of buffoonery, designed to achieve, respectively, financial reward and a permanent deferment from military service; both directly repudiated the forward, militant, and assertive model of his father. Though he had objected in principle to going to war, his
choice of method for avoiding service was pointedly the opposite of actually embodying that principle.
Malcolm had learned well how to play the role of the clown or buffoon, but this pose was beginning to come up against his slowly forming new political attitude. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.’s leadership during these years had deeply impressed him, reminding him of the more positive heritage of active engagement once practiced by his parents. What made Earl Little and Powell different from Detroit Red, or other tricksters, was their sense of responsibility to others within their community, and to African Americans generally. The trickster or hustler “getting over” was the ultimate opportunist who would use others to achieve his own ends. Malcolm would soon have to choose which model of black masculinity he would claim.
The Autobiography’s narrative suggests that, in 1944–45, Malcolm had ceased seeking legitimate work and had graduated from small-time street hustling into burglary, armed robbery, and prostitution, in order to pay for what was becoming a regular drug habit. The narrative’s key character during this destructive phase is appropriately called “Sammy the Pimp,” later identified as Sammy McKnight. As Malcolm would have it, over a six-to-eightmonth period he pulled a series of robberies and burglaries outside New York City. During one heist, the robbery encountered “some bad luck. A bullet grazed Sammy. We just barely escaped.” Malcolm subsequently described his involvement in the numbers racket: “My job now was to ride a bus across the George Washington Bridge where a fellow was waiting for me to hand him a bag of betting slips. We never spoke. . . . You didn’t ask questions in the rackets.” He also claimed to work as a “steerer” in Times Square, making connections with potential johns and placing them with white and Negro prostitutes working out of Harlem apartments. Through these criminal activities, Detroit Red was witnessing what he viewed as the filth and hypocrisy of the white man.
Without question, some elements of Detroit Red’s gangster tale are accurate. But if by 1944 Malcolm had graduated from marijuana to cocaine, as seems possible, he probably was in no condition to engineer a series of wellexecuted burglaries without at some point being discovered. An investigation of the NYPD’s arrest record for Malcolm Little years later failed to turn up any criminal charges or arrests.
Clarence Atkins, Malcolm’s friend, asserted, “He was never no big-time racketeer or thug.” A more realistic appraisal of his criminal activity speculates that Malcolm and Sammy may have occasionally burglarized “Harlem’s popular nightspots, such as LaFamille,“ and subsequently “divide[d] the spoils.” Crimes of this nature, during the racially segregated 1940s, were frequently not taken seriously by the nearly all-white NYPD, and Malcolm’s possible burglaries could well have escaped police attention. But the politics of race that underscore the entire Autobiography’s narrative are careful to place the most nihilistic, destructive aspects of Malcolm’s criminal history well outside Harlem. Perhaps this explains Malcolm’s description of his string of successful burglaries in 1944 as taking place in New York City’s nearly all-white suburbs. His role as a steerer for prostitutes also usually occurred in Times Square, not on 125th Street.
What seems plain is that between 1944 and 1946 Malcolm Little was struggling to survive. His sporadic work at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack had dried up, leaving him to find other ways to scrape by. Reginald Little, who had visited his brother on several occasions in 1942–43, had left the merchant marine and by that time settled in Harlem, where Malcolm set him up in a “legal” con operation. “For a small fee, Reginald obtained a 'regular city peddler's license,’” Malcolm wrote. “Then I took him to a manufacturers’ outlet where we bought a supply of cheap imperfect ‘seconds’—shirts, underwear, cheap rings, watches, all kinds of quick-sale items.” Reginald then sold this merchandise, giving buyers the impression that the goods had been stolen. If approached by the police, Reginald could simply produce his peddler's license and sales receipts from the purchase of the goods. This gambit was a classic grifter's short-con, manipulating the expectations of the victim to profit from a perfectly legitimate transaction. Malcolm’s efforts to shield his younger brother from serious criminality revealed the continued responsibility he felt toward his siblings. But it also suggests that he was never himself a hardened criminal.
As the war continued to drag on overseas, it had a powerful if unanticipated impact upon black culture in cities back home—and particularly in music. Big band jazz and swing music’s enormous popularity among white middle-class Americans during the war years had brought it from the margins of entertainment to wide prominence in mainstream popular culture. Around 1943, however, there was a precipitous drop in popularity for swing bands and their showmanship. It was a consequence of both practical concerns and aesthetic ones. Many big bands lost their best musicians to the armed forces. Gasoline was rationed, making it difficult for thirty-piece orchestras to travel. Then, in 1942, the Musicians Union initiated a strike because its members did not receive royalty payments when their records were played on the radio. In solidarity, union members boycotted record production until September 1943, and the lack of new big band singles sapped the genre’s popularity. But the production strike gave artists the space for experimentation and innovation. It was the younger black musicians, the hepcats, who broke most sharply from swing, developing a black-oriented sound at the margins of musical taste and commercialism.
A new sound developed in dark Manhattan, in smoky late-night sessions. Musicians no longer attempted to present themselves as entertainers. They limited the time of songs by stripping down the melodic form, emphasizing improvisation as well as complex chord changes and complicated beats. When this music, which came to be called bebop, was reproduced on records after the strike, the sound seemed bizarre, almost alien to some jazz enthusiasts. But the new movement’s key artists, such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk, were constructing an experimental form in a radically different environment from the Depression-era thirties that had fostered swing. Bebop reflected the anger of the zoot-suiters and the enterprise of black artists who opposed mainstream white culture. These musicians sought to create a protest sound that could not be so easily exploited and commodified.
Many who favored the radical new jazz coming from Harlem nightclubs described the 1943 insurrection as another “zoot suit riot.” The term had become a common metaphor for black activities that seemed subversive to white order. One zoot-suiter who had taken part in the Harlem riot linked black resistance to the U.S. war effort with urban unrest: “I’m not a spy or a saboteur, but I don’t like goin’ over there fightin’ for the white man—so be it.” Even African-American social psychologist Kenneth Clarke characterized the new militancy he had observed in Harlem as “the Zoot Effect.” As the critic Frank Kofsky observed of the bebop movement, “Jazz inevitably functioned not solely as music, but also as a vehicle for the expression of outraged protest.”
Malcolm was thoroughly immersed in this world, and well aware of the new sound and its implications—the frisson of outsiders shaking up mainstream culture. Like the zoot-suiters, beboppers implicitly rejected assimilation into standards established by whites and were contemptuous of the police and the power of the U.S. government over black people’s lives. Both sought to carve out identities that blacks could claim for themselves. Jazz artists recognized the parallels and, not surprisingly, later became Malcolm’s avid supporters in the 1960s. His version of militant black nationalism appealed to their spirit of rebellion and artistic nonconformity.
One major lesson Malcolm absorbed from the jazz artists’ performances in the forties was the power of black art to convey celebrity status. Young Malcolm wistfully dreamt about the adoration of the crowd. In Harlem, he would escort Reginald backstage to join the artists and the musicians at the Roxy or the Paramount, intimating that they knew who he was. “After selling reefers with the bands as they traveled, I was known to almost every popular Negro musician around New York in 1944-45,” he would boast. In July 1944, he
even found work at the Lobster Pond nightclub on Fortysecond Street. The proprietor, Abe Goldstein, is identified as “Hymie” in the Autobiography: “Red, I’m a Jew and you’re black,” he would say. “These Gentiles don’t like either one of us.”
Hymie paid me good money while I was with him, sometimes two hundred and three hundred a week. I would have done anything for Hymie. I did do all kinds of things. But my main job was transporting bootleg that Hymie supplied, usually to those spruced-up bars which he had sold to someone.
What the Autobiography fails to reveal is that Detroit Red, under the stage name Jack Carlton, was allowed to perform as a bar entertainer. At last, on a lighted nightclub stage, Malcolm could display his dancing ability; he even sometimes played the drums. The stage name was his way of honoring his late half brother, Earl, Jr., who had performed as Jimmy Carlton. It isn’t clear whether Goldstein paid Malcolm primarily to entertain or to transport illegal alcohol (if his account is true). But in October 1944, Malcolm was fired. A few years later, on the occasion of another arrest, Goldstein described his former employee as “a bit unstable and neurotic but under proper guidance, a good boy.”
Unemployed and desperate, and probably nursing a drug habit, Malcolm soon drifted back to Boston, and to Ella. He may have reasoned that, given her own continuing illegal activities, she could hardly turn her back on him, and he tried to convince her that he would turn over a new leaf and return to the upright upwardly mobile life she still thought to be her own destiny. To demonstrate his sobriety, in late October he obtained a menial job at a Sears Roebuck warehouse. The wages were a paltry twenty dollars a week, and the work strenuous. Malcolm had never been physically strong; years of alcohol addiction and cocaine use could not have helped. Over a six-week period, he failed to get to work six times. By Thanksgiving, he had had enough, and quit. In desperation, he stole a fur coat from Ella’s home, pawning it for five dollars. The coat belonged to Ella’s sister, Grace; Ella was so outraged that she summoned the police. Malcolm was duly arrested and taken to jail. The Roxbury court gave him a three-month suspended sentence, with probation to last one full year. This was Detroit Red’s first offense to result in arrest and conviction. He was nineteen years old.