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By Root 1995 0

its efforts in “cleaning up crime,” and said, “I frankly believe that what Mr. Muhammad teaches is 1,000 percent true. . . . I believe it more strongly today than I did ten years ago.” Why he should present himself as a faithful follower is puzzling, as he might have already guessed, or anticipated, that the Bureau would have infiltrated Muslim Mosque, Inc., and by this time would know something about the split. The most likely reason for his obfuscation is simpler. By going on record in support of the Nation, he may have been trying to lay the groundwork for his upcoming court case over the ownership of his home. Since Percy Sutton had contested legality of the Nation’s attempt at forcing Malcolm out of his East Elmhurst, Queens, parsonage, Malcolm’s legal strategy was to argue that the NOI had only suspended him; he was still the minister of Mosque No. 7 as well as the NOIʹs national minister. If he could establish a working relationship with the sect, then they might have success in arguing the right to the house in Queens.

Later that same day, Malcolm spoke at a public panel sponsored by the Trotskyist Militant Labor Forum. The forum was prompted by a series of newspaper articles about the supposed existence of a Harlem-based “hate gang” of young blacks who had been organized to kill whites. Malcolm took the opportunity to draw parallels between the legacies of European colonial rule he had seen in Africa with the system of institutional racism in the United States. Algeria under French colonial rule, he said, “was a police state; and this is what Harlem is. . . . The police in Harlem, their presence is like occupation forces, like an occupying army.” He also linked the African-American struggle to the Chinese and Cuban revolutions. “The people of China grew tired of their oppressors and . . . rose up. They didn’t rise up nonviolently. When Castro was up in the mountains in Cuba, they told him the odds were against him. Today he’s sitting in Havana and all the power this country has can’t remove him.”

Of even greater significance was the way in which the speech indicated a profound change in Malcolm’s economic program. For years, he had preached the Garvey-endorsed virtues of entrepreneurial capitalism, but here, when asked what kind of political and economic system he wanted, he observed that “all of the countries that are emerging today from under colonialism are turning toward socialism. I don’t think it’s an accident.” For the first time, he publicly made the connection between racial oppression and capitalism, saying, “It’s impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism.” Conversely, he noted, those who had a strong personal commitment to racial equality were usually “socialist or their political philosophy is socialism.” What Malcolm seemed to be saying was that the Black Freedom Movement, which up to that point had focused on legal rights and legislative reforms, would ultimately have to take aim at America’s private enterprise system. He drew an analogy to farm fowls to make his point: “It’s impossible for the chicken to produce a duck egg—even though they both belong to the same family of fowl. . . . The system in this country cannot produce freedom for an Afro-American. . . . And if ever a chicken did produce a duck egg, I’m quite sure you would say it was certainly a revolutionary chicken!”

The pro-socialist remarks were strikingly different from anything Malcolm had said before. While traveling through Africa, he had mentioned nothing about socialism and little about economic development. However, Nkrumah’s authoritarian regime in Ghana, the country that had most impressed him, was then embracing an economic alliance with the Soviet Union, and both Algeria and Egypt were already committed to versions of Arab socialism. These factors influenced his thinking, but perhaps weighing even more heavily was the Socialist Workers Party’s enthusiastic support for Malcolm himself. The Trotskyists perceived him as potentially the leader of an entirely new movement among Negroes, one