Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [109]
Kunstler pressed Malcolm right away. “Roy Wilkins, the executive director of the NAACP, has described your Temple of Islam as being no better than the Ku Klux Klan. You think this is an adequate comment?” Malcolm at once characterized Wilkins’s comment as ignorant: “I very much doubt, if Mr. Wilkins was familiar with Mr. Muhammad and his program, that he would make such charges.” When Kunstler grew agitated and cited press accounts of NOI members calling whites “inhuman devils,” Malcolm defended the cause of “racial extremism” by framing it as a form of exceptionalism common to religious groups. Catholics and Baptists, he pointed out, both claimed the only way to get to heaven was through membership in their respective churches. “And Jews themselves for thousands of years have been taught that they alone are God’s chosen people . . . I find it difficult for Catholics and Christians to accuse us of teaching or advancing any kind of racial supremacy or racial hatred, because their history and their own teachings are filled with it.”
Whether or not 1960 proved to be the year of the American Negro, it saw Malcolm finding an audience beyond the black community, and his fame growing. He tried hard to maintain a regular presence at Mosque No. 7, but his speaking engagements continued at a rapid clip. In March, he lectured to students from Harvard, Boston, and MIT at a seminar hosted at Boston University. His formal remarks lasted barely ten minutes; the question and answer exchange went on for more than two hours. He also delivered a lecture at an NAACP-sponsored event at Queens College in May, significant because it marked the first time that the civil rights organization had provided a platform to a black leader who so sharply opposed its policies.
However, the most important address he gave that year was on May 28 at the Harlem Freedom Rally, which the NOI organized with more than a dozen other local black groups. The rally was held at the intersection of Harlem’s West 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, where an estimated four thousand people attending the five-hour-long program were packed in shoulder to shoulder in the streets and along the sidewalks. Before the rally started, loudspeakers blared out Louis Xʹs calypso song “A White Man’s Heaven Is a Black Man’s Hell.” When Malcolm took to the stage, he delivered a speech that departed from his typical remarks of the time. He made a consciously broad appeal, focusing not on the NOI but on “the black people of Harlem, the black people of America, and the black people all over this earth.” At times, he even sounded King-like: “We are not here at this rally because we have already gained freedom. No! We are gathered here rallying for the freedom which we have long been promised, but have as yet not received.” Throughout his remarks, he used the racially inclusive language of the civil rights cause—“freedom,” “equality,” and “justice”—as the framework for building an all-black militant coalition based in the Harlem ghetto. Negroes aligned with the NAACP and National Urban League would find it difficult to argue against such rhetoric, which had neatly appropriated their own.
A central purpose of the rally, Malcolm told his audience, was to listen to a variety of African-American leaders, including some “who have been acting as our spokesmen, and representing us to the white man downtown.” He offered no criticism of moderates, instead emphasizing the necessity for Harlem’s blacks to overcome the divisions in their community. His emphasis on the need for a united front projected an image of pragmatism and moderation, a remarkable turn for a man who only months earlier had attacked integrationist leaders as Uncle Toms. The speech met with tremendous success and was largely responsible for transforming Malcolm into a respected political leader in Harlem’s civic life. Whether the NYPDʹs BOSS division knew ahead of time about his intentions, it assigned six detectives to attend the rally. One, a black officer named Ernest B. Latty, was apparently