Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [110]
As Malcolm’s schedule of media appearances, college lectures, and speeches grew throughout 1960, so did criticism of him within the NOI. To demonstrate his loyalty, he attended many of Muhammad’s public talks, while keeping track of local mosques and devoting himself to Mosque No. 7 at all hours. He also promoted a cult around Muhammad, suggesting that the “apostle” could commit no sins or errors of judgment. “If you look at the development of the Nation of Islam,” Louis Farrakhan explained, “it was Brother Malcolm who started referring to Elijah as ‘the Honorable’ Elijah, and who started making us say—over and over again—‘Messenger Elijah Muhammad taught me’ or ‘Messenger Elijah Muhammad teaches us.’ He was driving the point home that Elijah Muhammad was a messenger of God.”
Malcolm’s high profile continued to generate speaking invitations at major universities, which introduced him to a significantly larger—and whiter—audience than any of his coworkers inside the Nation. FBI informants even reported that Malcolm might run for public office. On October 20, at Yale Law School auditorium, he was matched with Herbert Wright, the NAACPʹs national youth secretary. Before a standing-room-only crowd, Wright predictably promoted the cause of racial integration, calling for the use of “litigation, education, and legislation” to achieve reforms. Malcolm rejected this in favor of the total separation of the races. At the end of the debate, NOI members circulated among the throng of white students, selling records featuring “A White Man’s Heaven Is a Black Man’s Hell.” The debate with Wright represented, on balance, a retreat from the positions favoring civil rights that Malcolm had expressed at the Harlem rally only months before. The emphasis on strict racial separation probably was prompted by Malcolm’s desire to make a clear distinction with the NAACP in front of a mostly white audience.
The brutal pace of travel continued throughout the second half of 1960. Although NOI-related business consumed most of his energies, Malcolm continued to look for ways to reach a wider public. The radio interviews and debates reached a largely intellectual and middle-class audience. What he was looking for was a way to establish himself on a par with other national and international leaders.
As fate would have it, an opportunity to crash international headlines came gift wrapped from the Cuban Revolution. In September 1960, Cuban prime minister Fidel Castro traveled to New York City to attend the United Nations General Assembly. Across Harlem, news of his impending trip set off great excitement among leaders of the local black left. They quickly arranged a welcoming committee, which Malcolm joined. When the Cuban delegation arrived, it checked in to the well-appointed Shelburne Hotel on Lexington Avenue at 37th Street. Tensions soon ran high: the Cubans already felt insulted by the State Department, which had confined the eighty-five-member delegation’s freedom of travel to Manhattan Island. Then a dispute arose over the bill at the Shelburne, with an outraged Castro accusing the hotel of making “unacceptable cash demands.” At first, he threatened to move his entourage to Central Park. “We are mountain people,” he explained proudly. “We are used to sleeping in the open air.” United Nations secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld scrambled to secure lodgings for them at the midtown Commodore Hotel, but he was too late: Malcolm and the Harlem welcoming committee had swooped in and invited the Cubans to stay at the Hotel Theresa, at Seventh Avenue and 125th Street. The eleven-story hotel had three hundred guest rooms; the new guests reserved forty of them, in addition to two suites, one of which was for Fidel.
A Washington Post writer speculated that “Castro, who has made overtures to U.S. Negro leaders to support his left-leaning