Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [216]
He also recognized that while Muslim Mosque, Inc., needed to be expanded to other cities to consolidate his followers among Muslims, his priority had to be the secular political organization that Lynne Shifflett and Peter Bailey had been quietly working to build for him. “Within the next eight days,” he promised in a May 30 interview, he would “launch an organization which will be open for the participation of all Negroes, and we will be willing to accept the support of people of all races.” The first goal of this new group would be to submit “the case of the American Negro before the United Nations.” What Malcolm envisioned with the United Nations was a strategic shift in civil rights activism within the United States. Instead of passing legislation reforms through Congress, he sought to present blacks’ grievances to international bodies in hopes of global intervention. Under the banner of human rights, issues that had long been perceived as domestic or parochial would be presented on a world stage.
He also appeared to offer an olive branch to the Nation of Islam over the issue of his Elmhurst home. A hearing on the case had been scheduled in Queens Civil Court for June 3, but now he told the Amsterdam News that if the officers of Mosque No. 7 allowed him to address their members and to defend himself against the charges, he was prepared to abide by the sentiments of the majority. If the NOI members asked him to move, “I’ll give the house up,” he vowed. “I want to settle this situation quietly, privately, and peacefully, not in the white man’s court, whom the Muslims preach is the devil.” But better than anyone else, he knew that the Nation was not a debating society with democratic procedures. He issued the appeal not because he expected reconciliation, but for public relations purposes: to illustrate a reasonable position to blacks outside the Nation of Islam.
Several days later, the Queens Civil Court postponed his eviction trial, and Malcolm once again complained to a reporter that this “should be brought before a Muslim court. . . . They are deviating from our religious principles by bringing me here.” Malcolm surely knew that the NOI, viewing him as a “heretic,” would never consent to resolve the dispute in a Muslim court. The fact alone that Malcolm had not purchased the property with his own funds made it extremely unlikely that he would prevail in court.
Meanwhile he continued to mobilize supporters for his new secular organization. Several weeks after returning from Africa, he assigned the task of drafting a founding document, the “Statement of Basic Aims and Objectives,” to a coterie of political activists, intellectuals, and celebrities, including novelist John Oliver Killens and historian John Henrik Clarke. Some of the working sessions of the group were held at a motel on West 153rd Street and Eighth Avenue, the northern boundary of Harlem. On June 4, Malcolm traveled to Philadelphia with Benjamin 2X Goodman, a guard named Lafayette Burton, and one other individual—probably James 67X—to attend several meetings, including one at a private home with seven other people, and another at a Philadelphia barbershop. His primary purpose was to consolidate his supporters in the city, with the immediate goal of starting a Muslim Mosque, Inc., branch there. But he also launched what could later be seen as the first salvo in a battle with the Nation of Islam that would soon grow into an all-out war. During these