Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [207]
Herman Ferguson, the Queens educator, soon became part of this new group. In Ferguson’s view, Malcolm had outgrown the Nation. “Long before I’d met Malcolm, [I felt] that he needed to break with the Nation of Islam because [it] held him back, his development.” What black nationalists like Ferguson were seeking was an “alternative to integration” and to Dr. King. “I didn’t know what would happen when he [Malcolm] left, but I had made up my mind if he left the Nation of Islam . . . that I would join up with anything that Malcolm did,” Ferguson said.
From the beginning, there were tensions and rivalries between the former Black Muslims in Muslim Mosque, Inc., and the secular activist newcomers like Shifflett and Ferguson. The MMI brothers and sisters “felt they owned him,” Ferguson complained. James 67X, Benjamin 2X Goodman, and the others had joined MMI “with the knowledge that the Nation of Islam would not be friendly toward them,” Ferguson went on. “So they felt, to a great extent, responsible for Malcolm and his safety.” In the weeks following the split, rallies at the Audubon featured MMI brothers who carried weapons while protecting Malcolm. “Their rifles and shotguns were carried openly,” Ferguson remembered. At the time, he convinced himself that this display of force was necessary: “I felt very proud that these were black men . . . escorting our leader out of the building, that he was safe, he had these weapons. . . . As far as I was concerned, [this] is the way that the movement would have to go.” Yet this aggressive stance ultimately provoked greater ire from the Nation and increased its members’ desire for retaliation. Nation members were not permitted to carry firearms; despite the small size of Muslim Mosque, Inc., three dozen well-armed men constituted a genuine threat to the much larger Mosque No. 7.
As Malcolm’s secular organization took shape, it drew in members, like Ferguson, who had been waiting for Malcolm to form a group distinct from the Nation. One of the recruits was, in fact, one of his oldest supporters. In Boston, it had been nearly five years since Ella had bitterly broken with Louis X and the local NOI mosque. She probably felt vindicated by her brotherʹs decision to leave the sect, and their relationship grew closer during this time. Her immediate concerns were to help Malcolm overcome his financial fears and personal doubts through this transition. When Doubleday’s promised advances fell behind due to the slow progress of the book, Ella subsidized her brother and his family. The money she lent him for his hajj had been intended to finance her own pilgrimage, but evidently the sacrifice made sense to her. Ella would later insist that, far from desiring the opportunity to experience the hajj, her brother initially resisted going. Supposedly, in an emotional midnight conversation she forced a tearful Malcolm to concede that the Nation of Islam would never readmit him.
A number of progressive African-American artists, playwrights, and writers also welcomed Malcolm’s departure from the Nation and anticipated his entry into civil rights causes. Actor and playwright Ossie Davis was one of the most prominent. Davis occupied a peculiar position within the Black Freedom Movement, not unlike that of James Baldwin—an artist who had credentials among integrationists and black separatists alike. Davis had served as master of ceremonies at the 1963 March on Washington, but in Malcolm he saw a proponent of the black class struggle, an advocate “for connecting with people out in the street, drug addicts, criminals, and hustlers—these were folks outside the middle class, people that Dr. King certainly couldn’t relate to.”
I remember walking on the street with Malcolm, and people would come up to him and he’d respond to them, and I would respond to them in a different way. While some would be chastising him, Malcolm always had something positive to say. Malcolm was an expert on the damage that slavery and racism had done to the black man’s image of himself. He was equally expert in what had to