Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [161]
Akbar then made an extraordinary comment, sending murmurs through the crowd and certainly drawing Malcolm’s complete attention. “I don’t hate any man because of the color of his skin,” he declared. “I look at a man’s heart, I watch his actions, and I make my conclusions on the basis of what he does, rather than how he looks.” Listening to the speech, Louis Lomax recalled that Malcolm had preached a similar approach several years earlier, but he had also continued to denigrate King and other civil rights leaders. Akbar Muhammad’s address marked a potential schism. Here was a son of the Messenger, the one who had most thoroughly immersed himself in the world of orthodox Islam, offering a clear refutation of the very foundation of the Nation’s theology. Akbar’s position, said Lomax, “reflects the Arabs’ involvement with black unity throughout the world. . . . Malcolm X is closer to Elijah Muhammad, in terms of just what the American Negro should do, than is Elijah’s own son.” Akbarʹs emergence meant that “the Black Muslims will become more ʹIslamicʹ and more ‘political’ in the days just ahead.”
Though Akbarʹs speech challenged Nation of Islam orthodoxy far more directly than Malcolm had ever dared, Malcolm was well aware that the NOIʹs pace of Islamization had to be accelerated. He had been forced to continue his public defense of the Nation’s religious legitimacy, as more and more orthodox Muslims came forward to challenge the sect’s racial exclusivity. On July 15, the Chicago Defender published a story on Egypt’s powerful Muslim League, which “flatly disagrees with the anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-Jew, and anti-integration preachments of America’s Black Muslims.” The story also cited complaints from the Jami’at al-Islam Humanitarian Foundation of the United States, whose director, Ahmad Kamal, characterized Elijah Muhammad’s views as “anti-Muslim.” To this, Elijah Muhammad responded personally and forcefully: “Neither Jeddah nor Mecca have sent me! I am sent from Allah and not from the Secretary General of the Muslim League. There is no Muslim in Arabia that has authority to stop me from delivering this message that I have been assigned to.”
As the summer progressed, Malcolm stepped up his involvement with on-the-ground demonstrations in support of civil rights. On July 22 he attended the picketing of a Brooklyn hospital construction site by more than a thousand workers who charged racial discrimination in the building industry. Hundreds of picketers began blocking huge construction trucks beginning at seven a.m. and the demonstration continued for nine hours; although the protesters observed nonviolent tactics, three hundred of them were dragged away by police. Malcolm carefully stood across the street, but he shook hands and expressed his support with participants. When asked by journalists why he wasn’t directly involved, he evaded the issue: “It would not be fair. You would see a different situation here. We would never let these policemen put us into those paddy wagons.” Joining him at a second demonstration was playwright/actor Ossie Davis, who briefly blocked the access of one construction truck. Malcolm brought along a 35-millimeter camera and busied himself taking photographs. “If there were no captions for these pictures, you’d think this was Mississippi or Nazi Germany,” he informed one New York Times reporter. “Only difference between the Gestapo and the New York police is that this is 1963.” Five days later, he turned up at a civil rights rally in Brooklyn that brought out more than three hundred people. Addressing the crowd, Malcolm