Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [192]
Along with crafting the MMIʹs agenda, Malcolm also hoped to establish the organization’s legitimacy. In the Nation, he had represented a group that numbered between seventy-five thousand and one hundred thousand, but with the MMI he started virtually from scratch. It was probably for this reason that he exaggerated the group’s size when a few days later he appeared on the show Listening Post, hosted by Joe Rainey on WDAS in Philadelphia. When Rainey asked whether MMI was a nationwide organization, Malcolm grandly proclaimed that “student groups from coast to coast” had requested information on how to join up. Yet though the group struggled early to put members on its rolls, Malcolm himself continued to attract sizable crowds. On March 22 he was the featured speaker at an MMI-sponsored rally held at the Rockland Palace that drew one thousand people, a surprisingly large audience given Malcolm’s recent death threat charges. Reporters covering the event speculated that Malcolm was planning to form “a black nationalist army.”
The work of building any kind of army would promise to be slow and labored. By name and nature the MMI was a religious organization, which limited its growth to Muslims; Malcolm had yet to establish a secular branch that could gather non-Muslims around his cause, so he now looked to members of the Nation that he might peel away, despite urgent warnings by James 67X and others that he should avoid conflict with the Nation. Scheduled to appear on the Bob Kennedy show on Boston radio on March 24, Malcolm decided to drive up early. Accompanied by James 67X and probably also by Charles 37X Kenyatta, he held meetings with several NOI members, almost certainly to discuss potential recruitment. Though he risked trouble by poaching on Louis Xʹs grounds, the trip made strategic sense. Malcolm had established the Boston mosque himself, and Ella’s presence in the city gave him an especially strong foothold in a certain part of the black community.
The subject of discussion on Bob Kennedy’s radio program had originally been billed as “Negro—Separation and Supremacy,” but Kennedy wanted Malcolm to explain how he had changed his views since leaving the Nation of Islam. Here Malcolm was forced to negotiate difficult terrain. Despite all that had transpired, he felt a lingering loyalty to the man who, more than any other in his life, had fulfilled a paternal role, and he responded by reaffirming his spiritual and ideological fidelity to the Messenger. “Everything” he knew, he asserted without hesitation, was “a result of Elijah Muhammad’s doing.” To reconcile this statement with his break from the Nation, he went on to explain that only by establishing himself as an independent force could he implement Muhammad’s teachings. With only one exception, he avoided criticism of civil rights leaders. “Martin Luther King must devise a new approach in the coming year,” he predicted, “or he will be a man without followers.” Once again, he wallowed in the pose of racial avenger: “So far only the Negroes have shed blood, and this is not looked on as bloodshed by the whites. White blood has to be shed before the white man will consider a conflict as a bloody one.”
Yet at this moment, Malcolm struggled greatly to come to terms with just how he felt about the Messengerʹs teachings. Over the years, as his fidelity to the core NOI dogma had waned, he had grown more interested in orthodox Islam. In his role as national minister, he had responded to tens of letters, public and private, written by orthodox Muslims attacking the Nation on its core religious principles, and the steady drumbeat of scorn had not failed to challenge his assumptions about Islam and increase his curiosity. Now, without an organization to