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By Root 1806 0

that the mosque’s secretary had been a jazz piano player, and he also nurtured a deep respect for the strict disciplinarian Captain Joseph, but as far as he was concerned, Malcolm was the “boss of the bosses.” What he appreciated most was Malcolm’s approach in tutorials with the junior ministers. “It was a one-way street. He did the talking; we did the listening.” Malcolm always insisted that his students be thoroughly prepared before giving a lecture. Never shoot from the hip, he cautioned; always state the subject of a talk clearly at the beginning. “He would always talk about how you have to remember and do the loop in your subject and bring the people back.” By 1963 Larry was sometimes given the responsibility of introducing his mentor at events. “There [was] a joke in the ministry class that when Malcolm walked onto the rostrum—say, if I was opening up for him—he would say, ‘Make it plain.’ He would sit down, you know, and he would sit there for a minute and let you make your point; he’d smile and maybe applaud. Then he’d say, ‘Make it plain.’ That was the signal: close out and bring him on.”

In May, Alex Haley’s Playboy interview with Malcolm hit the newsstands, further bolstering his national profile. On the one hand, the interview benefited from having been mostly conducted before Malcolm’s confrontation with Muhammad, yet the timing of its appearance hardly endeared him further to the Chicago headquarters. In the introduction, Haley presented Malcolm as standing “on the right hand of God’s Messenger” in the NOI, wielding “all but absolute authority over the movement and its membership as Muhammad’s business manager, trouble-shooter, prime minister and heir apparent.” Throughout the interview, however, Malcolm tried to express total devotion to Muhammad, explaining, “[T]o faithfully serve and follow the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is the guiding goal of every Muslim. Mr. Muhammad teaches us the knowledge of our own selves and of our own people.” One innovative argument Malcolm did advance was that the NOI had “the sympathy of ninety percent of the black people” in the United States. “A Muslim to us is somebody who is for the black man; I don’t care if he goes to the Baptist Church seven days a week.” This merger of religious, political, and ethnic identities empowered Malcolm to speak on behalf of millions of non-Islamic African Americans.

Malcolm used the interview to make a number of arguments guaranteed to offend white middle America. When asked about his plane crash comments, he replied, “Sir, as I see the law of justice, it says as you sow, so shall you reap . . . We Muslims believe that the white race, which is guilty of having oppressed and exploited and enslaved our people here in America, should and will be the victims of God’s divine wrath.” The interview also contained several anti-Semitic slurs. “The Jew cries louder than anybody else if anybody criticizes him,” Malcolm complained. “The Jew is always anxious to advise the black man. But they never advise him how to solve his problem the way the Jews solved their problem.” Through their economic clout, he observed, Jews owned Atlantic City and Miami Beach, and not only these. “Who owns Hollywood? Who runs the garment industry, the largest industry in New York City? . . . When there’s something worth owning, the Jew’s got it.” He went on to argue that Jewish money controlled civil rights groups like the NAACP, pushing Negroes into adopting a strategy of integration that was doomed to failure. His comments would be deemed so controversial, he said, that Playboy would never print them in their entirety. Haley felt vindicated, however, when the magazine indeed printed the interview exactly as transcribed: “[Malcolm] was very much taken aback when Playboy kept its word.”

That same month, following the publication of the interview, Haley contacted Malcolm with a new proposition—to tell his life story in a book. “It was one of the few times I have ever seen him uncertain,” Haley recalled. Malcolm asked for some time to consider the idea, but just two days later