Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [193]
Before his suspension the previous year, he had been back in contact with Dr. Mahmoud Shawarbi, the Muslim professor that he had first met in October 1960 at an NOI-sponsored event. They had kept in sporadic touch, but after Malcolm’s silencing their meetings became more frequent and intense. Malcolm’s expanded interest in orthodox Islam greatly pleased Shawarbi, and upon Malcolm’s departure from the Nation Shawarbi immediately began giving him instructional sessions in the proper Islamic rituals. He encouraged Malcolm’s trip and used his pull with the Saudis to pave the way for Malcolm through diplomatic channels; he also alerted his friends and associates in the Middle East about Malcolm’s upcoming visit to the region, requesting that they assist him.
Shawarbi was crucial to Malcolm’s development in other ways. Persistently, but without confrontation, he challenged Malcolm to rethink his race-based worldview, admitting that many orthodox Muslims also fell short of the color-blind ideals they professed. He finally convinced Malcolm that the Qurʹan, as conceived in the recitations of the Prophet Muhammad, was racially egalitarian—which meant that whites, through their submission to Allah, would become spiritual brothers and sisters to blacks.
By the time of his recruitment trip to Boston, Malcolm had made his decision to undertake the pilgrimage to Mecca. The chance for spiritual purification at this juncture of great change and uncertainty seemed too important to pass up. It was likely during his time in Boston that Malcolm visited Ella and asked her to loan him the money, some thirteen hundred dollars, that he would need to make the pilgrimage. Despite all the trouble they had given each other since he had moved in with her as a teenager, she agreed.
On March 26, Martin Luther King, Jr., was on Capitol Hill with plans to discuss the stalled 1964 civil rights bill with Senators Hubert Humphrey, Jacob Javits, and others. The moment caught King at a difficult time, when even close aides like James Bevel were warning that “people are losing faith . . . in the nonviolent movement.” When King moved to a conference room off the Senate floor to discuss developments with the press, Malcolm, who was also visiting that day, slipped in to listen. After the conference, the men left through separate doors, but as King was walking along the crowded Senate gallery observing the filibuster of pro-segregationist senators, he encountered Malcolm and several aides. Malcolm probably was not eager for an informal encounter, much less a staged photograph. It was James 67X who had cleverly set up the entire affair, pushing his boss around a marble column until he and King suddenly stood facing each other. A photographer in the gallery took a photo of them shaking hands, which would come to symbolize the two great streams of black consciousness that flourished in the 1960s and beyond. It was the only time the two men ever met.
Yet the handshake also marked a transition for Malcolm, crystallizing as it did a movement away from the revolutionary rhetoric that defined “Message to the Grassroots” toward something akin to what King had worked his entire adult life to achieve: improvement in the black condition through changing the American system. Three days after the meeting, Malcolm gave a speech at the Audubon Ballroom before six hundred people that served as a foundation for a more famous address he would give a week later. Though the announced topic, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” seemed incendiary, at its core the speech actually contained a far more conventional message, one that had defined the civil rights movement as far back as 1962: the importance of voting rights. In the speech, Malcolm emphasized that all Harlemites, and by extension blacks