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By Root 1904 0

Speaks sparked an already disgruntled Boston membership to open revolt. About fifty black businessmen—small merchants and entrepreneurs mostly—had joined the mosque in part for their enthusiasm for Louis X. They didn’t mind the weekly payments to sustain officials’ salaries and to cover administrative costs. But they balked when told they were each to sell two hundred copies of Muhammad Speaks at fifteen cents per issue, and that they’d be responsible for a full financial account whether or not the papers were sold. Elijah Muhammad, Jr., by then the FOIʹs assistant supreme captain, flew to Boston to quell potential dissent, warning Boston’s Fruit that “if you don’t want to sell the paper, then don’t even bother to come in here. I’m the judge tonight, and you are guilty.” He even reminded members “that in the old days recalcitrant brothers were killed.”

The threats and physical intimidation backfired. Within days, forty-two men, all businessmen, resigned from the mosque. Faced with shrinking membership and commensurately shrinking income, Louis X announced a “general amnesty” and invited all those who had left the mosque to attend a meeting. He promised them that the newspaper quotas would no longer be enforced, and that Clarence was out. But when the Chicago headquarters learned about Louis’s leniency, he was overruled. Two days later, Louis spoke to the entire mosque: “Some of you seem to have misunderstood me.” Upon learning that nothing had changed, Barnette immediately walked out, never to return to the mosque. But matters weren’t finished as far as Captain Clarence was concerned. Months later, as Barnette and another ex-Muslim drove past the mosque on a busy Roxbury street, a pink Cadillac pulled from the curb and cut in front of Barnette’s car. Six or more Muslims rushed both sides of Barnette’s blocked automobile, pulling the two men out. In plain daylight and in public, Barnette and the second man, John Thomas, were punched, kicked, and stomped repeatedly. Barnette suffered a broken ankle, a fractured vertebra, fractured ribs, damaged kidneys, and internal bleeding, placing him in the hospital for a week. “I believe we were beaten as punishment for quitting and also as a warning to keep our mouths shut,” he said.

In New York, where Malcolm and Joseph exerted a firmer grasp on the membership, such troubles were largely avoided. Instead, increased salesmanship of Muhammad Speaks drew hassles from local cops. On July 2, Malcolm addressed Mosque No. 7, warning that if police bothered the NOI for selling the paper, then members should do what the officers instructed. But he also suggested that Muslims had a legal right to sell their publication, as guaranteed by the Constitution. He went on to predict, “The time will come when the Muslims will not be able to leave their homes.” NOI members should never carry weapons, he explained, but “if attacked, self-defense is granted throughout the world.”

A week later, he flew to Chicago to participate in a rally featuring Elijah Muhammad, at which the Nation would unveil the two pieces of literature that would later come to define it. Although the NOI had grown rapidly, it had not participated in the desegregation struggles across the South that had won the respect and admiration of people throughout the world. To blacks, it was abundantly clear what groups like the NAACP and CORE wanted; the NOI, by contrast and largely by design, had no clear social program that realistically could be implemented. Since it was unlikely that blacks could seize a separate territory for themselves inside the United States, what did the NOI propose to do? For as much as Muhammad disliked and discouraged Malcolm’s inclinations toward activism, he was not a fool when it came to surveying the landscape of black politics and calibrating the NOIʹs place within it.

By the middle of 1962, CORE had come to national prominence for its Freedom Rides, and King was back in Albany, Georgia, where he was leading a desegregation campaign that found him briefly jailed until the chief of police released him to