Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [102]
In June 1960, the committee sponsored Williams’s first trip to Cuba, and the following month organized an African-American delegation, which he led. Its members included Mayfield, playwright/poet LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), historian John Henrik Clarke, and Harold Cruse. Even for bitter anticommunists like Cruse, the experience was inspirational. “The ideology of a new revolutionary wave in the world at large,” he observed, “had lifted us out of anonymity of lonely struggle in the United States to the glorified rank of visiting dignitaries.” But Cruse struggled to maintain his objectivity—much as Malcolm did under similar circumstances several years later when he visited Africa. To Cruse the fundamental questions to be answered were, “What did it all mean and how did it relate to the Negro in America?” A significant lesson, he wrote, reflecting the increasingly militant feelings among black activists, was “the relevance of force and violence to successful revolutions.”
As the civil rights movement adopted an increasingly confrontational approach involving a mix of protest and politics, Malcolm and the NOI watched from a distance. Holding fast to its doctrine of strict separatism, the Nation had little to contribute to the dialogue over how best to change the existing order. Many of the Nation’s leaders did not truly understand the growing civil rights struggle; they were still convinced that they should distance themselves from anything controversial or subversive. Yet when it came to competing for the minds of black Americans, the issue-based platforms and forceful personalities within the Black Freedom Movement presented a direct challenge to the NOI. The positive press coverage received by King and other civil rights leaders gave them a relevance to political realities that the NOI lacked.
In a letter written in April 1959 to James 3X Shabazz, the newly appointed minister of Temple No. 25 in Newark, Muhammad expressed concern about “the all too frequent clashes with Law Enforcement Agents that we, the Believers of Islam, are being involved in.” He was troubled by the confrontation in Malcolm’s home between the NYPD and the NOI members, as well as by the publicity surrounding the subsequent trial. “Whenever an officer comes to serve a notice or to arrest you, you should not resist whether you are innocent or guilty,” he instructed. “We must remember that we are not in power in Washington, nor where we live, to dictate to the authorities. . . . Lawyers, bonds and fines are expensive, and being beat up and bruised is too painful to bear for nothing.” Allah would ultimately punish those who had mistreated his followers. “But, remember that you should not be the cause for them to take the opportunity to mistreat you, since you now know that the devil has no Justice for you.”
Privately, Malcolm disagreed. The extensive press coverage around the trial of the Molettes, Minnie Simmons, and Betty, he thought, generally presented the Nation of Islam in a favorable light. “If it had not been for the on-the-spot reporting of the Amsterdam News from the very beginning of the case,” he wrote in a public letter, “these innocent people would now be behind bars.” He astutely linked the NOI’s confrontation with the police to the larger struggle for civil rights and the need for a crusading African-American press. Some of “Malcolm’s Ministers” inside the NOI surely felt the same way.
He was looking beyond the NOI, to non-Islamic black Americans, and making overtures to blacks outside the Nation—as indeed he had done for several