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By Root 1939 0

On June 22 seventeen-year-old Bryan Kingsley, a Malcolm supporter, was loitering at the restaurant’s entrance, talking tough. Larry went outside and smacked the boy hard across the head before—along with other NOI members—he chased Kingsley down the street. The boy telephoned Tom Wallace, Ruby Dee’s brother and a strong advocate of Malcolm’s. Wallace drove his station wagon to the restaurant, pulled out a rifle, and confronted Larry and another NOI member. “Thomas and I [had] worked together, and I knew something about [his] character,” Larry 4X recalled in a 2006 interview. “I said, ‘Well, go ahead and shoot if you’re going to shoot me.’ ” Wallace warned him not to approach him, but Larry walked toward him, convinced he would not pull the trigger. When he got close enough, Larry grabbed the rifle and, turning the weapon butt-first, “beat him with it. And then I broke out all of his car windows.” His face shattered and bloody, Wallace filed charges with the NYPD, which arrested Larry; Larry in return filed assault charges against Wallace, who was also arrested. Both men were charged five hundred dollars bail, with their cases remanded to the Queens Criminal Court.

Malcolm was extremely disturbed by Wallace’s beating. From a personal perspective, it was a deep betrayal: Larry 4X had been one of his trusted protégés. Perhaps worse, the incident threatened to damage connections he needed for his political work, as Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee had become pivotal to his access to the black arts and entertainment community. To the Amsterdam News, Malcolm asserted that Muhammad was responsible for the escalating violence. “The followers of Elijah Muhammad,” Malcolm explained, “will not do anything unless he tells them to.”

Larry 4X clearly recalled his Queens Criminal Court appearance because he had “my suit on, and bow tie.” All the other prisoners began to laugh. “They said, ‘Look at this guy, and he’s clean as a pimp, and he has assaulted somebody!’” Soon after Larry was taken to court, Malcolm entered the chamber: “He came over to me,” Larry recalled. “He said—and this is the part where I have lost my respect for him—he said, ‘Larry, you’re dead.’ ” The court dismissed the charges against both men, but the damage was done. “That was the last time I had any words with Malcolm,” Larry stated. “Then things just got progressively worse.”

The beating of Tom Wallace and similar incidents in these weeks prompted Malcolm to issue an “open letter” of conciliation to Elijah Muhammad. Both groups, Malcolm wrote, needed to address the civil rights issues confronting Southern blacks. “Instead of wasting all this energy fighting each other we should be working in unity . . . with other leaders and organizations.” On the surface, it was an appeal for the feuding sides to end the violence, but to those in the Nation who could read between the lines, Malcolm’s letter was yet another provocation. The appeal asked Muhammad how, since the Nation had refused to use violence in response to “white racists” in Los Angeles and Rochester, it could employ violence against another Black Muslim group. Muhammad’s earlier failure to authorize retaliatory violence against excessive police force was still a sore point for many of Malcolm’s followers.

In the midst of the feuding, Malcolm managed to steer the Organization of Afro-American Unity to its triumphant public birth. At a major rally on June 28, a thousand people gathered at the Audubon Ballroom to celebrate the group’s official founding. Just over twenty blocks away, the Nation of Islam was holding its own rally before a crowd at least six times as large, but at the Audubon a pivotal event in black American history was unfolding, with the emergence of a militant black nationalist political group that had the potential for redefining both the civil rights mainstream and black electoral politics. And unlike the Nation of Islam or even Muslim Mosque, Inc., the Organization of Afro-American Unity was purely secular, which vastly expanded its potential reach. As Herman Ferguson recalled, “I felt that if