American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [32]
We’ve come a long way since those days in terms of race relations, but in the 1960s integration was still only beginning—the Voting Rights Act hadn’t even become law when Malcolm X was alive. Those were the years of the Freedom Riders getting the crap beat out of them when they rode buses into the South, and “Bull” Connor fire-hosing African-Americans down in Birmingham, and James Meredith having to walk a National Guard gauntlet just to enroll at the University of Mississippi. It was a tempestuous period in our history, and Malcolm X was right at the forefront.
The FBI had been watching Malcolm as far back as 1950, when he was still in prison for grand larceny and first discovered the Nation of Islam [NOI].3 When he was paroled after serving six years, he soon became a leading spokesman for Elijah Muhammad. In 1957, when the police beat a Black Muslim badly in Harlem and reluctantly agreed to hospitalize him thanks to Malcolm X’s insistence, with a simple wave of his hand Malcolm had stopped what might have been a bloody riot of some 2,600 people. “No man should have that much power,” a police inspector said.4 Not surprisingly, the FBI’s COINTELPRO agents were soon all over him. After Hoover learned that Malcolm would be Elijah Muhammad’s likely successor, one COINTELPRO file said bluntly: “The secret to disabling the [NOI] movement, therefore, lay in neutralizing Malcolm X.”5
In 1958, a fellow named John Ali was an adviser, friend, and housemate to Malcolm X. Five years later, he became National Secretary of the Black Muslims. When Elijah Muhammad left Chicago and moved to Phoenix because of his failing health, John Ali took over handling the group’s finances and administration. At the same time, unbeknownst to the Muslims, he was working closely with the FBI. The main man he was keeping an eye on was Malcolm X.6
Isn’t it interesting that for many of our public figures who’ve been killed—I’m thinking of John Lennon, Malcolm X, and Dr. King—they all seem to be under surveillance first and then assassinated later. Viewing it from a military standpoint, that would be the Standard Operating Procedure you’d expect: heavy surveillance to learn how you live, what way would be best to do it, how do we set up the patsy and get away with it? Look at it this way—if they’re following these people around, wouldn’t it turn up that somebody else was doing the same thing? But turning up the killers never seems to happen, does it?
By 1963, Malcolm was being pushed out of the Muslim hierarchy. The FBI, using informants and wiretaps to keep up with the rift, started spreading tales about Elijah Muhammad having affairs with young women—The FBI pretending it was Malcolm X doing the rumormongering. After Malcolm made comments about “chickens coming home to roost” following Kennedy’s assassination, Elijah Muhammad seized the opportunity to suspend him for 90 days. At that point, FBI agents came around with a bribe offer that Malcolm refused. Not long after that, he was warned about a plot to wire his car to blow up as soon as he started the engine.
On March 8, 1964, Malcolm X announced he was leaving the NOI and founding a new mosque in New York. A few weeks later, he and Martin Luther King met for the one and only time in Washington, where they were both attending a Senate hearing on civil rights legislation. They spent time together on the Capitol steps, finding common ground. King said soon after that, unless Congress moved quickly, they could expect that “our nation is in for a dark night of social disruption.”7 Malcolm X was saying: “We need to expand the civil-rights struggle to a higher level—to the level of human rights.”
Then he went off to Mecca. While he was gone, the NYPD’s unit