Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [160]
In the wake of his desegregation victory in Birmingham, Martin Luther King, Jr., also favored placing greater pressure on the Kennedy administration. For more than a year, he and the SCLC had pushed for a presidential order outlawing segregation. At first, King supported the tactics of simultaneous demonstrations to take place all over the country, but in the end was persuaded to support the Washington march. The more conservative wing of the black freedom struggle, the NAACP and National Urban League, was at best cool. Roy Wilkins demanded that Rustin be fired as coordinator because of his homosexuality and record of arrests. A compromise was reached, with Randolph accepting the public role of march chairman and Rustin, as vice chair, functioning essentially as executive director. The Kennedy administration was also deeply unhappy, fearing that the presence of several hundred thousand demonstrators on the National Mall might invite widespread violence. But Rustin recruited hundreds of out-of-uniform African-American police, who would be deployed as a barrier between the marchers and the mostly white D.C. police and National Park Service officers. As the project gathered momentum, some of the mobilization’s more radical demands were jettisoned to accommodate the support of organized labor and white liberal religious groups. The expanded presence of whites was just enough to convince a reluctant Kennedy administration to offer its endorsement.
Although the Nation of Islam was firmly opposed to the march’s integrationist goals, it would have been impossible for Malcolm not to have been affected by such an unprecedented mobilization. For one thing, Rustin’s headquarters was in Harlem—on West 130th Street. Throughout the summer, the black press speculated on whether the march would be successful, both in terms of turnout and in its ability to change Washington priorities. Despite the NOIʹs ban on participation in such demonstrations, Mosque No. 7 continued to be involved in similar activities. On June 29 it sponsored another major street rally, at the corner of Lenox Avenue and West 115th Street. The NOIʹs press release targeted “the Uncle-Tom Negro leaders” for doing little to halt “the dope traffic, alcoholism, gambling, prostitution, and other forms of organized crime . . . destroying the very moral fiber of the Black Community.” Despite such strident attacks, Malcolm extended speaking invitations to NAACP head Roy Wilkins, National Urban League director Whitney Young, COREʹs James Farmer, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Only Powell seems to have responded, indicating that business commitments made it impossible for him to address the rally. The program brought out about two thousand people. The attitude of the NYPD was that of mild harassment, and FOI members were dispatched to the rooftops to observe both crowd and cops.
On July 13, Mosque No. 7 threw a large banquet to celebrate a formal visit from the youngest son of Elijah Muhammad, Akbar Muhammad, and his wife, Harriet. The couple was in the process of returning home after a two-year stay in Cairo, where the twenty-five-year-old Akbar had been a student of Islamic jurisprudence. His arrival pleased Malcolm. After Wallace, Akbar had come to be counted first among Malcolm’s allies in Muhammad’s family. The youngest of the Messengerʹs children, he found that his time in the Middle East had accomplished for him what prison had done for Wallace: basically, completely disabuse him of any belief in his fatherʹs peculiar brand of Islam. Two days after his arrival in New York, the NOI held another public rally, drawing a crowd of four thousand, and Akbar was invited to speak. His talk had been advertised as a “Special Report on Africa for the People of Harlem, but once on his feet he called for a comprehensive united front of African Americans.” “We must have unity among Negroes,” he told the crowd. “It is time for all of us—CORE, the