Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [140]
An interview was arranged through the local mosque, to take place at the Shabazz Frosti Kreem, an NOI-affiliated luncheonette in the North Side ghetto. Goldman was extremely nervous: “I was then prisoner to all the white liberal views of the world, of race in America, including the view that the locus of tragedy was the American South, that Jim Crow was the central struggle.” Helen Dudar, Goldman’s wife and also a journalist, accompanied him to the meeting, and together they waited outside the luncheonette for their subject to arrive. After a few minutes a car pulled up, with Malcolm sitting “sort of jackknifed in the backseat.” As soon as he got out, Goldman recalled, “Just from the moment you saw him, [you felt] this incredible presence.” The three of them, accompanied by the local minister, Clyde X, went inside and sat at a table. Malcolm quickly gravitated to the jukebox. Dropping in a coin, he chose Louis Xʹs “A White Man’s Heaven Is a Black Man’s Hell.”
To Goldman’s surprise, the interview lasted nearly three hours. Malcolm “told us perfectly pleasantly that whites were inherently the enemies of Negroes; that integration was impossible without a great bloodletting and was undesirable anyway; [and] that nonviolence—‘this mealy-mouth beg-in, wait-in, lead-in kind of action’—was only a device for disarming the blacks and, worse still, unmanning them.” Although Malcolm was impressive, Goldman remained a committed liberal who struggled to overcome his ideological prejudices to write about the Nation fairly.
Over the next three years, Goldman conducted at least five lengthy interviews with Malcolm. They spoke over the telephone on individual stories frequently. Sometimes Goldman was simply seeking a publishable quote; but he sensed that for some reason he had become part of “a relatively small target group of media people whom [Malcolm wanted to] seduce.ʺ These were the journalists Malcolm trusted “to get the serious message out.” For most people, however, his normal approach was “the cocked fist . . . It was very easy to scare the pants off most white reporters . . . Their attention span was the quote—the most inflammatory quote you can put on the air, and Malcolm liked to serve those up.” But Goldman also sensed that Malcolm knew, deep down, “if you create an atmosphere of threat, a sense of threat . . ., never throw the punch, because if you throw the punch, people will be out on the street dying.” So he was never an “advocate of suicidal activity,” still believing “the threat was useful.”
Another journalist who would have a profound impact on Malcolm’s life and legacy was Alex Haley. Born in 1921, Haley had just retired after twenty years’ service in the U.S. Coast Guard. A liberal Republican, Haley completely rejected the racial separatism and intolerance of the NOI. He believed the Nation was the consequence of mainstream America’s failure to assimilate Negroes into the existing system. Yet in the wake of the publicity surrounding The Hate That Hate Produced in 1959, Haley drafted a short article about the group, “Mr. Muhammad Speaks,” that was published in the March 1960 issue of Reader’s Digest. Although Haley had characterized the Nation as a “potent, racist cult,” NOI leaders generally praised the article’s objectivity. The essay focused primarily on Elijah Muhammad’s history and leadership of the sect; Malcolm was mentioned but only as a secondary figure. In 1962, Haley contacted the NOI again, requesting its cooperation for a longer story to be published in the widely read Saturday Evening Post. It would be coauthored with a white journalist, Alfred Balk, who had apparently been recruited to convince white readers that the piece reflected an integrationist viewpoint, despite the fact that Haley himself