Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [191]
In his efforts to establish himself as a solo force, he cast a wide intellectual net, swinging from powerful arguments on the importance of black nationalism to occasional expressions of support for desegregation. On March 14 he attended a meeting in Chester, Pennsylvania, of East Coast civil rights leaders, including the most prominent public school desegregation leader in metropolitan New York, the Reverend Milton Galamison; the comedian and social activist Dick Gregory; and the Cambridge, Maryland, activist Gloria Richardson. Only weeks earlier, he had still been in the Nation of Islam routinely denouncing integration, yet here he was embracing efforts to promote school desegregation and improvements in the quality of blacks’ public education. It marked an early, tentative concession to the idea that perhaps blacks could someday become empowered within the existing system. That same day he had given an interview to the Amsterdam News, during which he accused the Nation of attempting to murder him, a reference to the plot cooked up by Captain Joseph that Anas Luqman had divulged. While these comments were certain to provoke an angry response from the Nation, they also afforded Malcolm some breathing room. With the threat made public, it would be harder for the NOI to move against him. Still, Malcolm’s assertions were probably not widely believed by most observers of the Nation. Up to 1964 the Nation’s routine violence and beatings of its members had largely escaped public scrutiny. It was also well known that the Fruit never carried weapons, and Malcolm’s reputation for hyperbole and extremism probably led police and most blacks to dismiss his claims.
On March 16, Muslim Mosque, Inc., became a legal entity, filing a certificate of incorporation with the County of New York, listing its address as Hotel Theresa, Suite 128, 2090 Seventh Avenue—in reality, a large room located on the hotel’s mezzanine. Two days later at Harvard University, Malcolm set to work defining the goals of the organization. The black man, he said, had to “control the politics in his own residential areas by voting . . . and investing in the businesses within the Negro areas.” African Americans had become “disillusioned with nonviolence” and were now “ready for any action which will get immediate results.” In these remarks stirred the beginnings of what would evolve a few years later into the Black Power movement. According to FBI surveillance, during the question and answer session at Harvard he was asked whether he was advocating bloody revolution. Malcolm said no, although he did note that the African American “has bled all the time, but the white man does not recognize this as bloodshed and will not until the white man himself bleeds a little.” It was not an endorsement of violence, but this statement and others like it made it difficult for critics to gauge whether his militancy was receding. The following day, he gave a lengthy interview to the African-American writer A. B. Spellman, which appeared in the independent Marxist journal Monthly Review that May, and once again he denied his advocacy of violence. Yet if he sought to avoid controversy in that respect, his comments in the interview concerning Jews did nothing to endear him to progressives. “We are not racists