Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [147]
The address also showcased his evolving ideas about race. For decades, the NOI had preached that the ethnic identity of black Americans was Asiatic, descendants of the lost tribe of Shabazz that had its origins in the Middle East. But now Malcolm affirmed the common cultural heritage that united Africans with African Americans. “The man that you call Negro is nothing but an African himself,” he explained. “The unity of Africans abroad and the unity of Africans here in this country can bring about practically any kind of achievement or accomplishment that black people want.” During the question and answer period, Malcolm also denounced South African apartheid, making a sharp distinction between that system and the separatism advocated by Muhammad. Once more, he criticized COREʹs James Farmer for his marriage to a white woman, quipping that it “almost makes him a white man.” He turned finally to the Jewish people as an appropriate role model for black empowerment. “Whenever the Jews have been segregated and Jim Crowed, they haven’t sat-in,” he insisted. “They usually go and use the economic weapon.”
The mosque assault in Rochester animated Malcolm, as it provided a counterpoint and companion piece to the legal proceedings unfolding against the Muslims in Los Angeles. Preliminary hearings had begun there at the end of 1962, and the trial itself was scheduled for the upcoming spring. But the high profile of the Los Angeles case meant that Malcolm had little room to maneuver or make way on his protest plans; Muhammad and his Chicago lieutenants would be watching. In Rochester, however, deep in upstate New York, he could be more vocal. On January 28 he addressed an audience of four hundred at the city’s university, where his speech moved him even closer to openly promoting equality over racial separation. “Americans have come to realize that the black man is capable of doing things equal to him,” he told his largely student audience. “But they are not fully prepared to accept that the black man can take a role in political and economic society.” Without acknowledging his shift, Malcolm had drawn closer to both Rustin and Farmer. If African Americans received the full measure of their constitutional rights and equal opportunities across the board, could racism be abolished? In the Rochester talk, Malcolm answered: no race problem would exist in the United States “if the Negro could ‘speak as an American.’ ”
He seemed more than ever of two minds, pulled both by his loyalty to Muhammad and by a need to engage in the struggle. Having just ventured to discuss the role of the black man in society, he quickly shifted gears. On February 3, during an interview broadcast on radio and television, he again pressed Elijah Muhammad’s plan for a separate black state inside the United States. Then, turning back to protest ten days later, he led a Manhattan street demonstration of about 230 Fruit of Islam members to denounce police harassment. The police had cautioned him that protest rallies were illegal in Times Square and that he and his men would be subject to arrest. Malcolm replied that he was going to walk through Times Square as an individual, which was his constitutional right. If others voluntarily walked in file behind him, that was not his responsibility. No one was arrested.
Word soon reached him that twelve of the Muslims jailed after the police raid on Rochesterʹs mosque were planning a hunger strike, and he quickly came to their support. He informed the press that the protesting Muslims were prepared to fast “until they die.” Alluding to the Black Freedom Movement, he boasted that soon “Rochester will be better known than Oxford, Mississippi,” the Southern town where thousands of angry whites erupted in street violence attempting to halt the desegregation of Ole Miss. The very next day, February 16, the Rochester Times reported that twelve of the thirteen prisoners had been released, pending