Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [208]
For his part, Malcolm had loved Davis’s 1960 play Purlie Victorious, which used comic stereotypes to make sharp criticisms of racism, and over the next few years the two men continued to run into each other at demonstrations. By 1964 Malcolm was on a first-name basis with Davis and his actor activist wife, Ruby Dee. Ruby’s brother, Tom Wallace, was so influenced by Malcolm that he joined the Nation of Islam, and later Muslim Mosque, Inc.
Writers and journalists who knew Malcolm also generally welcomed his latest move. Peter Goldman continued to maintain close contact and came away impressed with the “complexity and sophistication of [his] political thought.” Like many observers during the months of Malcolm’s silencing, the writer had been unaware of any impending split. “I’d been hearing rumors about jealousy of Malcolm’s prominence,” Goldman recalled, “but I didn’t know it had come to any kind of crisis.” After the fact, though, he came to see the break as necessary to Malcolm’s intellectual evolution; leaving the Nation, combined with his excursions in Africa, had prompted him to think “black politically. I think his nationalism had been enriched by his travels.” The earlier Malcolm had preached a simplistic, “mom-and-pop . . . economic model.” By 1964, he had transformed himself, “moving, I think, probably closer to Pan-Africanism, certainly to a connection with the nonwhite majority of the world.”
Malcolm’s departure from the Nation changed much about his life, but it also affected the Nation in interesting ways. For some key players, the departure of Malcolm and his supporters expanded opportunities. Twenty-six-year-old Norman Butler, a veteran of the navy, for example, had been an NOI member for barely a year, but during that brief tenure he had established a reputation as a tough security man. Mosque No. 7 normally ran two weekly training sessions, including martial arts, for the Fruit of Islam. When one of Malcolm’s men left, Butler assumed control of the Tuesday morning session, with dramatic results. From a modest group of three to five, word of mouth grew the group to “seventy to eighty brothers [who] were coming out, because of how we were doing.” Soon, Butler recalled, the Tuesday morning Fruit group “got to selling over five thousand papers” per week. Though Malcolm had promoted him to the rank of lieutenant, Butler made no bones about choosing sides during the split. “[Malcolm] made himself large,” he remembered years later with resentment. “He kept himself in front of the New York Times.” This, to Butler, was the crux of the problem that led to Malcolm’s expulsion. “He was trying to be bigger than all the other ministers” and was guilty of going “outside of or beyond the teaching that the Messenger wanted taught, say[ing] things that the Messenger didn’t want said. That’s what the rub was.”
Yet for all those who developed negative opinions of Malcolm, many Nation members who had sided with Elijah Muhammad in the split nevertheless retained strong feelings of affection for their former national minister. “I was really a student of his,” said Larry 4X Prescott. “I loved him. I admired him. I wanted to be able to do what he was doing. And that’s what he encouraged.” Larry considered the silencing a kind of moral “test.” Both he and other assistant ministers “hoped and prayed that Malcolm would pass whatever trial that the leader had put on him.” It was only in late February when Malcolm returned from Florida and “talked about the fight and Muhammad Ali” that