Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [122]
Several days after the UN riot, Maya Angelou and an associate contacted the NOI to arrange a meeting with Malcolm. The two went uptown to the NOI restaurant and met the minister in a rear room. “His aura was too bright and his masculine force affected me physically,” Angelou recalled years later. ʺA hot desert storm eddied around him and rushed to me, making my skin contract, and my pores slam shut. . . . His hair was the color of burning embers and his eyes pierced.” As representatives of the Cultural Association of Women of African Heritage, the women explained, they had been involved in the UN demonstration, but had not anticipated thousands of protesters turning out. Malcolm responded that the Muslims had not been involved in the protest. “You were wrong in your direction,” Malcolm said, chastising his guests. United Nations demonstrations “and carrying placards will not win freedom for anyone, nor will it keep the white devils from killing another African leader.” Angelou had anticipated receiving Malcolm’s endorsement of the protest and tried hard not to display her disappointment. But then, surprisingly, Malcolm’s voice softened, she remembered, “and for a time the Islamic preacher disappeared.” Malcolm warned the women that conservative African-American leaders would be used by the white power structure to denounce them as “dangerous and probably communists.” He promised that he would make a statement to the press describing the demonstration as “symbolic of the anger in this country.” Although Angelou left feeling the “fog of defeat,” her encounter with Malcolm struck her to the core. She would eagerly renew her acquaintance with him several years later, after she had moved to Ghana.
Throughout mid-1961, Malcolm would devote more time to his pastoral duties in Mosque No. 7. Lecturing there on July 9, for instance, he explained the Nation’s official interpretation of what would unfold during the final days. “In the next war, the War of Armageddon,” he predicted, “it will be a race war and will not be a ʹspooky war.’ ” Using a blackboard, he explained why the ideals of freedom, justice, and equality were impossible to achieve under the “American flag.”
He was also actively involved with many of the business-related aspects of the NOI. For instance, Elijah Muhammad wrote Malcolm in March asking whether C. Eric Lincoln’s book The Black Muslims in America should be carried by the Nation despite its criticism of the sect. The book’s publisher had agreed to sell five thousand copies at “a very good commission to the Muslims.” But Elijah also stressed in his letter, ʺTHIS IS NOT TO BE MENTIONED IN PUBLIC.ʺ Astutely, he realized that the deal was good business if not good publicity. Apparently the sale agreement went ahead and the NOI duly sold discounted copies of the book.
On August 11, Malcolm unexpectedly received a telegram from labor leader A. Philip Randolph: “I am appointing you to the Ad Hoc Working Committee of Unity for Action. First meeting scheduled for 3 p.m., Monday, August fourteenth, 217 West 125th Street.” Nothing in Randolph’s communication indicated what the committee’s agenda might be, or who else had been invited.
At the time, Randolph was a lion of the civil rights effort and, even at age seventy-two, had lost little of his enthusiasm for leading the charge; he remained the most powerful black labor leader in the United States. Still based in Harlem, he had seen the fight shift in recent years from demanding more black jobs at businesses on 125th Street to seeking full representation for blacks within the political system. Such an effort required a united front from Harlem’s black community, and Randolph knew that Malcolm represented an increasingly significant constituency. But his admiration for Malcolm likely had an ideological component. Almost fifty years before, Randolph had introduced newcomer Marcus Garvey to a Harlem