Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [148]
The Saturday Evening Post published Alex Haley and Alfred Balk’s collaboration “Black Merchants of Hate” on January 26, 1963, giving the story six full pages and including numerous illustrations. The article brought into stark relief the tensions simmering between Malcolm and the Chicago headquarters, and for anyone paying close attention it marked the shift in public perception of both the Nation and Malcolm in the previous two years. The article differed from “Mr. Muhammad Speaks” in several significant ways, opening with the dramatic story of Johnson X Hinton’s beating and the provocative response led by Malcolm. It briefly covered Elijah Muhammad’s personal history and role within the sect, whose national membership it estimated at the absurdly low figure of five to six thousand, with another fifty thousand sympathizers. Haley and Balk emphasized that the Nation of Islam was never part of the larger Muslim world: “Muhammad himself has no known tie with orthodox Islam.” But the greatest discontinuity from the initial article was the coverage given to Malcolm, whom the authors moved to center stage, succinctly charting his fatherʹs terrifying death, the vices and crimes of Harlem’s Detroit Red—incorrectly placing his incarceration “at the age of 19”—and his ultimate salvation as an NOI zealot:
Articulate, single-minded, the fire of bitterness still burning in his soul, Malcolm X travels the country, organizing, encouraging, trouble-shooting . . . While Muhammad appears to be training his son Wallace to succeed him when he retires or dies, many Muslims feel that Malcolm is too powerful to be denied the leadership if he wants it.
By building up Malcolm’s role at Muhammad’s expense, and suggesting a possible internal conflict, “Black Merchants of Hate” fostered even greater jealousy and dissent within the NOIʹs ranks: exactly what the FBI had hoped for when it agreed to feed information to Balk. Still, the piece was so successful that Haley, who had begun conducting interviews for Playboy magazine, proposed Malcolm as his next subject, and the two men met over several days in the winter of 1963 at the NOIʹs restaurant in Harlem to generate material.
As Saviourʹs Day 1963 approached, Malcolm found himself increasingly at odds with Muhammad’s children and John Ali. Paranoid that the gravy train afforded them by the flow of tithe money to Chicago might be disrupted if Muhammad died, they had not been reassured by the tone of “Black Merchants of Hate.” By late 1962, the tales of their fatherʹs sexual adventures had reached New York City and the West Coast, further complicating matters and heightening their suspicions of Malcolm. For his part, Malcolm pretended that he knew nothing about the rumors, desperately hoping that somehow they would go away. In past years, he had traveled to Chicago a week or more in advance of Saviourʹs Day to prepare for the celebration, but now the antiharassment campaign in New York kept him mercifully busy. Meanwhile, NOI officials announced that the chronic illnesses of Elijah Muhammad had forced the patriarch to cancel his own appearances; Chicago headquarters reduced the program to one day, February 26, and placed Malcolm in charge. The absence of Muhammad and the shortened program reduced the turnout to three thousand NOI faithful, but the crowd still buzzed with whispers of impropriety. Muhammad’s illness surely made it ill-advised for him to fly up from Phoenix, but his decision to skip Saviourʹs Day was also partially motivated by a desire to discourage mosques from sending large delegations and to limit the discussions of swirling rumors. He also may have been reacting to the uninvited presence in Chicago of several unwed mothers of his illegitimate children.