Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [228]
Stanford was also keenly tuned to Malcolm’s emotional state at the time. “The only time I ever saw Malcolm emotional, and in a sense irrational,” the younger man recalled, “was in his public actions against the NOI in June-July 1964.” These moves threatened to destroy a potential relationship with Stanford’s group. When Malcolm “accused Elijah of fornicating with his secretaries, [and] put it out in the street that he had illegitimate children,” RAM sharply dissented with his tactics. “Malcolm was very disturbed,” Stanford said, because, spiritually and personally, “he had not only misled people, but he had physically abused people for their violation of what he thought was Elijah’s policy. So he felt like the biggest fool on planet earth.”
Stanford claims that Malcolm finally agreed to some kind of association with RAM, and he ordered James 67X to serve as his liaison. However, Stanford was less successful in convincing him to relocate the OAAU. Malcolm was determined to “build a base” in New York, even though James and Grace Lee Boggs were urging him to relocate to Detroit, a city where he had thousands of enthusiastic supporters and where there was “more of the radical base.” RAM, Stanford explained, “wanted him to expand the OAAU all over the country because we felt that they couldn’t attack him if he had a national base.” But Malcolm would not budge. Perhaps he feared that if he moved his operations out of Harlem, the thousands of loyal Mosque No. 7 members would never allow him to reestablish a foothold there. By the 1960s Malcolm no longer lived in the Harlem community, yet Harlem remained the central metaphor for black urban America, and he understood that this sometimes magical, often tragic neighborhood’s fortunes were intertwined with his own.
By now, Malcolm had spent years under surveillance by both federal and local officials, but in the summer of 1964 the man listening on the other end of his wiretapped telephone would come to play an important, if hidden, role in Malcolm’s life. Gerry Fulcher had graduated from the city police academy less than two years earlier, and as a young Harlem-born cop he had internalized many of the racist, conservative views his father had held about blacks. “I was going to stop all crime in New York City . . . ,” he remembered about his attitude in the days fresh out of the academy. “I was going to be the supercop.” On his first day as a rookie officer, Fulcher and his partner were confronted by an African American who seriously injured Fulcherʹs fellow officer when the man hurled a chair at him. Fulcher managed to handcuff the suspect, and when his sergeant arrived at the scene, he gave a clear order: “I don’t want that nigger walking by the time you get back to the station house.” Fulcher may have been raw, but he wasn’t about to disobey. “So I, with the guy handcuffed, with his arms around his back, I beat the crap out of him,” he said. “And I was a hero.”
After one year on the streets, Fulcher advanced to detective and was transferred into the BOSS unit. By early 1964, he was given his first important assignment, the covert surveillance of Malcolm X. Fulcher had already decided that Malcolm was “one of the bad guys,” an opinion shared by many of his fellow cops. “The whole civil rights movement,” he would say later, “was considered a brand of communism in the cops’ mind back in those days.” Fulcher had Malcolm down as a “former junkie and a pusher, when he was called Big Red . . . we knew all that.” With his break from the Nation, Malcolm had become an even greater threat, the possible leader of civil unrest and black protest. From BOSSʹs perspective, all of Malcolm’s activities had to be closely monitored, which included the recruitment of black cops to join both Malcolm’s group and Mosque No. 7. Fulcherʹs assignment was no less invasive. A small room had been set up in the 28th Precinct station house with tape recording equipment connected