Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [135]
CHAPTER 8
From Prayer to Protest
May 1962-March 1963
Within days of his return from Los Angeles, Malcolm began to quietly pursue a strategy of limited political engagement. His muzzling by Elijah Muhammad continued to rankle, as did Muhammad’s belittling theory about Ronald X Stokes’s death resulting from his submission to the authorities. Before leaving Los Angeles on May 22, Malcolm had told an electrified crowd that Stokes “displayed the highest form of morals of any black person anywhere on this earth,” and he arrived in New York a few days later feeling charged with purpose. Though Muhammad had restrained him from coalition building with non-Muslim moderates in Los Angeles, on Malcolm’s home turf he held much greater latitude. On May 26, Mosque No. 7 organized a rally in front of the Hotel Theresa. The press release advertising this event linked the “cold-blooded murder of Ronald T. Stokes and the shooting of seven other innocent, unarmed Negroes” in Los Angeles with the Freedom Riders in Alabama and the then current mass desegregation campaign led by King in Georgia. Malcolm invited the two candidates competing for Harlem’s congressional seat to attend, Powell and attorney Paul Zuber, and he called for all Harlem leaders to support a coalition against police brutality. He was challenging Elijah Muhammad and his Chicago superiors by carrying out in New York the civil rights approach he had planned for Southern California.
Malcolm’s critics in the Nation of Islam took this as proof that he had become mesmerized by the media, diverting his attention from religious matters into the dangerous realm of politics. Even Los Angeles minister John Shabazz, whose mosque stood at the center of the political maelstrom and who was presently a defendant in the LAPDʹs criminal suit against the Muslims, kept to the party line. In a June 1962 letter addressed to “Brother Minister” and copied to Malcolm, Shabazz argued that excessive force by the police could not be ended primarily through politics: The letter declared that “a religious solution will fit the problem of Police Brutality.”
Undaunted, Malcolm’s frustration pushed him forward, yet it soon led him to make a misstep that put him sharply on the defensive. On June 3 an airplane crashed in Paris, killing 121 well-to-do white citizens of Atlanta; given its timing, Malcolm found the tragedy too tempting a target. Before an audience of fifteen hundred in Los Angeles, he described the disaster as “a very beautiful thing,” proof that God answers prayers. “We call on our God—He gets rid of 120 of them.” The following month, the press picked up the statement, and many prominent Negroes wasted little time in denouncing both Malcolm and the NOI. Dr. Rufus Clement, president of Atlanta’s University Center, described Malcolm’s remarks as “unchristian and inhuman,” while NAACP leader Roy Wilkins referred to the crash as “a mass tragedy,” adding in bewilderment, “Even when Negroes had their most violent [white] enemies against them, they did not descend to any glad feelings over death.” But the most eloquent—and damning—statement came from Martin Luther King, Jr., who sought to reassure white Americans “that the hatred expressed toward whites by Malcolm X [was not] shared by the vast majority of Negroes in the United States. While there is a great deal of legitimate discontent and righteous indignation in the Negro community, it has never developed into a large-scale hatred of whites.” Above all, Malcolm’s statement was a public relations disaster. It made it much easier for Negro moderates in groups like the NAACP and National Urban League to refuse to cooperate with the NOI, and it almost certainly increased the level of FBI infiltration. It was probably even what prompted the Bureau