Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [115]
Malcolm himself seems to have viewed the entire affair with distaste, as he complained about it afterward to Elijah Muhammad and did not publicly admit his role until years later. Even then, he worked to distance himself, claiming that he had no knowledge about NOI-Klan contacts after January 1961, though this seems highly unlikely. Jeremiah X, who was actively involved in the Klan negotiations, participated in a daylight Klan rally in Atlanta in 1964, receiving the public praise of Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard Robert M. Shelton.
To sit down with white supremacists to negotiate common interests, at a moment in black history when the KKK was harassing, victimizing, and even killing civil rights workers and ordinary black citizens, was despicable. Malcolm’s apologetics about negotiating with white racists were insufficient. He had also told the Klansmen that “the Jew is behind the integration movement, using the Negro as a tool.” He had to know that this overture would be used to undermine the struggle for blacks’ equal rights, that Klansmen and white supremacists were committed to murdering civil rights leaders in the region. Malcolm’s uncritical adoption of Elijah Muhammad’s conservative, black separatist policies had led him to an ugly dead end.
CHAPTER 7
“As Sure As God Made Green Apples”
January 1961-May 1962
Betty was suffering. For the three weeks prior to the birth of Qubilah, Malcolm had been traveling. On the day of her birth itself, he had devoted most of his time to the mass trial of members from Mosque No. 7. Now her husband was once again away. Within weeks, she would pack up Attallah and Qubilah and journey south to North Philadelphia, this time seeking temporary refuge at the home of her birth father, Shelman Sandlin.
As Malcolm waited in Atlanta to negotiate with the Ku Klux Klan, he worried that relations with Betty might have reached a point of no return. On January 25, 1961, they spoke by phone, but their conversation only troubled him further. Later that day he decided to write to her. Malcolm observed that his wife had undergone a meaningful change of character during recent weeks. Perhaps expressing his appreciation for the strength and sacrifices Betty had made, especially during her pregnancy and Qubilah’s birth, Malcolm conveyed his love for her. In an act of uncharacteristic generosity—for him—he even stuffed forty dollars into the envelope with the love letter.
These expressions of affection probably were insufficient to reassure Betty about his love. She had come to resent the fact that for Malcolm, the work of the Nation always came first—the letter had even included a request for Betty to iron out details about the possibility of an NOI show at Carnegie Hall. With little in the way of an emotional connection to build from, inviting his spouse to share in his duties for the NOI may have been his way of trying to bridge the distance between them.
If the great difficulties Malcolm encountered with Betty ever led him to wonder whether he’d made the right choice of partners, he must have been surprised to learn, sometime in late 1959, that Evelyn Williams, the woman he had turned away, was pregnant. Unmarried, she had been working for only a short time in the secretarial pool at the Nation’s Chicago headquarters, and her scandalous condition brought upon her the full weight of the NOIʹs draconian policy of punishment and scorn. Yet what no one including Malcolm knew, and would not know until 1963, was that the unborn child’s father was none other