Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [129]
Most studies devoted to Malcolm X ignore or do not examine the connections between the NOI and the American Nazi Party. Even the scholar Claude Andrew Clegg, who is highly critical of Muhammad’s decision to allow Rockwell to speak in 1962, argues that the Nazi leader “was a sort of bugbear that Muhammad used to scare blacks into the NOI.ʺ This underestimates the common ground involved. In the April 1962 issue of Muhammad Speaks, Muhammad praised Rockwell as a man who had “endorsed the stand for self that you and I are taking. Why should not you applaud?” The Nazis “have taken a stand to see that you be separated to get justice and freedom.” For several years, Rockwell continued to endorse the NOIʹs program. At an address in October 1962, for example, he stated: “[Elijah Muhammad] is a black supremacist and I’m a white supremacist: that doesn’t necessarily mean we gotta kill each other.”
Dining with the devil requires more than a long spoon. Like the tête-à-tête with the Klan, the NOIʹs public identification with the Nazis undermined Malcolm’s efforts to reach out to moderate audiences, people who might have agreed with his critique of American racism but rejected his solutions. This was the challenge he faced when he again confronted Bayard Rustin, on January 23, 1962. The debate was held at Manhattan’s Community Church, a liberal east side congregation. The topic—“Separation or Integration?”—should have favored Rustin. The audience consisted largely of white liberals who strongly supported civil rights. However, Malcolm astutely did not condemn all whites as “devils,” emphasizing instead the negative effects of institutional racism on the black community. His arguments were persuasive to many whites in the audience. Rustin was forced to complain that too many whites in the gallery, including some of his own friends, were applauding Malcolm’s statements more vigorously than the Negroes in the audience: “May I explain the process. . . . It is, my friends, that many white people love to hear their kind damned to high water while they sit saying, ‘Isn’t it wonderful that that nice black man gives those white people hell? But he couldn’t be talking about me—Iʹm the liberal.’”
Malcolm’s lectures and sermons in early 1962 rarely mentioned the core values of the Nation’s theology, and increasingly he was pulled into larger debates over the political future of black America. Probably to silence his critics within the NOI, he tried to give more attention to organizational matters. In January, both he and Joseph visited Mosque No. 23 in Buffalo, New York. And at the end of the same month he supervised the NOIʹs sponsorship of an African-Asian Bazaar at Harlem’s Rockland Palace. He also continued to use his speeches to build up the cult around Elijah Muhammad. The Messenger appreciated such labors on his behalf; yet before long, Muhammad’s opinion began to shift. He read the transcripts and recordings from Malcolm’s speeches and could see the political direction of his increasingly famous ministerʹs mind. He decided to tighten the reins.
On February 14, Muhammad wrote Malcolm formally about his schedule. ʺ[W]hen you go to these Colleges and Universities to represent the Teachings that Allah has revealed to me for our people, do not go too much into the details of the political side; nor into the subject of a separate state here for