Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [139]
The next month, together with a large group of Muslims, Malcolm packed a hearing room in the Los Angeles County Superior Court to express support for the NOI members who had been indicted for assault on April 27. Through repeated entreaties, he had convinced Earl Broady, a criminal attorney and former Los Angeles police officer, to represent the thirteen Muslims facing charges. Race promised to play a prominent role in determining the course of the case. The FBI agent monitoring the proceedings noted, “It is understood that these defendants would argue that there was an improper[ly] impaneled jury because of the lack of sufficient numbers of Negroes.”
For several days in mid-August, Malcolm visited St. Louis for a local NOI rally. Although he spoke, most attention was focused on Muhammad, who was promoted as the featured speaker. Sometime during this visit, Muhammad expressed concern to Malcolm about recent damage to the NOIʹs image. He was especially agitated about Malcolm’s university lectures, which he felt “gained no converts and only provided an opportunity for the NOI to be blasted in public.” Malcolm had little choice except to cancel all his remaining college appearances. Internal FBI documents establish that the Bureau almost immediately knew about these cancellations; someone with direct access to the highest level inside the NOI was providing information to the agency. The most likely such person was national secretary John Ali; all business-related correspondence and ministers’ weekly reports went across Ali’s desk. Ali personally knew, and could demand the firing of, every local mosque’s secretary. The FBI would have easily recognized the value of his strategic place inside the Nation’s hierarchy.
While Malcolm was in St. Louis, he kept an interview appointment with a white journalist who had recently caught his attention with a series of thoughtful pieces on the city’s somewhat sleepy mosque. Peter Goldman was a news writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, a conservative newspaper that also had on its editorial staff a young Patrick Buchanan. Goldman’s interest in the NOI went back two years to his postgraduate fellowship at Harvard in 1960, where he had started reading Lincoln’s The Black Muslims in America and then had seen Malcolm’s remarkable debate with Walter Carrington at Sanders Theatre. Though Goldman had become a liberal integrationist in college, going so far as to join CORE and attend local sit-ins in the fifties, Malcolm’s performance in the debate profoundly affected him. Goldman was stunned by both the man and his message, and he was especially impressed by Malcolm’s bearing, recalling it as “both soldierly and priestly. His carriage was amazing.” He also was struck by the NOI members who accompanied Malcolm: “There were members of the Brothers of Islam in the hall, a protective presence, and as I left, I could see them spotted around the nearby campus. There’d be a guy standing under a tree with the narrow tie and the sort of Ivy League suit (and bald head).”
When Goldman returned to St. Louis and landed at the Globe-Democrat, he quickly began writing about the local mosque, and though his series’ chief effect was probably