Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [168]
During the question and answer period following his short lecture, Malcolm was asked about discrimination in Cuba. He observed that “Castro has made a great accomplishment and contribution” toward the achievement of greater equality for blacks. But the Cubans generally “don’t refer to themselves either as white people or Black,” just as people. The same thing held true for Muslims: “When you become a Muslim, you don’t look at a man as being black, brown, red, or white. You look upon him as being a man.” This interpretation directly contradicted NOI theology. On another issue, Malcolm was asked, “Why can’t a Negro infiltrate the political machine and use power politics to his own end?” His reply was again at odds with the NOIʹs position: “If he studies the science of politics, he probably would.” There were some African-American elected officials who effectively represented “the Black masses. . . . Adam Powell is one of the best examples.”
For a week, he traveled throughout California. In Los Angeles, at the Embassy Auditorium, an audience of two thousand heard him deliver his blistering “Farce on Washington” speech. Malcolm accused the demonstration of being “instigated by the white liberals to stem the real revolution, the black revolution.” On October 18, Malcolm returned to New York, where he delivered a talk at Mosque No. 7 on “the condition of Negroes on the West Coast.” In mid-October, Lonnie X Cross, who had been an undergraduate classmate of James 67X while at Lincoln University, was appointed the new minister of Mosque No. 4 in Washington, D.C., allowing Malcolm to relinquish his responsibilities there. Lonnie had joined the Nation only eighteen months earlier, and in September had resigned his faculty position as chairman of the mathematics department at Atlanta University to give “full time to the truth of Mr. Elijah Muhammad.”
On October 29, Malcolm traveled to Hartford, Connecticut, where student groups at the University of Hartford had invited him to speak. Interest expressed in the visit was so strong that his talk, which had originally been set for the two-hundred-seat Auerbach Auditorium, was moved to an open-air arena accommodating seven hundred people. Buffeted by cold winds, Malcolm addressed his audience, saying, “Maybe some of what I have to say will make you hot.” Much of what he said repeated his lecture at Berkeley. On November 5 he traveled to Philadelphia to address the local NOI mosque. Four days later, Malcolm engaged in a public dialogue with James Baldwin. Hardly a week went by without Malcolm making at least three public appearances, often more.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the success of the March on Washington generated great dissension inside the Black Freedom Movement. The suppression of John Lewis’s controversial speech highlighted the deeper issues that divided black activists, and as 1963 wore on, the split between the conservative old guard and the militants bubbled to the surface. Those increasingly influenced by Malcolm’s black nationalism included sections of CORE, progressives in several Christian denominations, and secular activists from colleges, labor unions, and in Northern inner-city communities. When Detroit’s Council for Human Rights began planning a Northern Negro Leadership Conference, many representatives of these independent, radical, and black nationalist groups were excluded from the program. In response, the charismatic minister the Reverend Albert B. Cleage, Jr., withdrew from the Northern Negro Leadership Conference and announced the holding of a second, more militant meeting that same weekend in Detroit. This insurgent gathering was largely put together by a Detroit network, the Group on Advanced Leadership (GOAL), which included two independent Marxists, James and Grace Lee Boggs. A former Trotskyist, Grace Lee Boggs had for years been an associate of the celebrated Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James, and