Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [242]
Throughout the summer, James and Benjamin tried gamely to fill the hole left by their absent leader. On July 5 Benjamin spoke at the second public rally of the OAAU, held at the Audubon; then, on July 12, he presided over an OAAU rally that attracted 125 people and featured guest speakers Percy Sutton and Charles Rangel, who urged the audience to promote voter registration. Almost by default, James became Malcolm’s emissary to the United States left. He addressed a meeting at Columbia University sponsored by the Trotskyist DeBerry-Shaw presidential campaign committee on July 23. About one week later he lectured at the Socialist Workers Party’s Militant Labor Forum in Manhattan, charging that the recent Harlem riot was being used as a pretext to “set down” the black community. As Malcolm’s absence grew longer, by late summer James finally began making major political and financial decisions without his input. In early August, when a cluster of supporters wanted to initiate an MMI branch in Philadelphia, he promised that any funds collected locally should remain there until the group “got on its feet.” James’s decision not only represented a sharp break from the Nation’s autocratic centralism, but it also fragmented the potential resources of pro-Malcolm forces.
As the summer rolled on, James found himself left with relatively few allies within the MMI because, ironically, members felt he had been excessively accommodating to the OAAU, allowing that group to usurp resources and space at MMI headquarters. James recalled, “We had a space, and men tend to be territorial. . . . And they came in and wanted to do things their way, or spoke to the brothers in a way that brothers were not accustomed to.” James believed that OAAU members saw themselves “as intellectually capable individuals who were taking over from these ex-criminals, these . . . nincompoops, and it caused resentment.” But if James bore the brunt of their anger, he was not the source of it. For that, the responsibility fell to Malcolm himself, and the changes he had made to his platform, by will or by concession, in order to broaden the appeal of his message. In separating his politics from religion, he had inadvertently undermined the political authority of the MMI. His determination to play a major role in the civil rights movement meant denouncing much of his old past and Nation of Islam beliefs, especially the forceful emphasis on class divisions within the black community. But the MMI was an embodiment of that past, and its members resented those middle-class, better-educated blacks who now pushed to encircle their minister. “The OAAU seemed to be treating us as last yearʹs news,” James reflected bitterly. “‘We are replacing them,’ see?”
James’s own Marxist take on the black community left him deeply skeptical of the OAAUʹs mission, a sentiment at odds with his responsibility to help the group get off the ground. For him, the OAAUʹs artists like Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, and its intellectuals like John Oliver Killens, represented the black petite bourgeoisie that Malcolm had once portrayed as part of the problem. “Their bread was buttered on the integrationist side,” he complained. “These were not people that were on welfare. They were middle class for America and upper middle class for black America. They didn’t have to wonder whether there was milk in the refrigerator.” James believed that Malcolm had created the OAAU primarily to serve as a platform to carry out his international objectives. “An African diplomat or African