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By Root 1726 0

their task was difficult. Nevertheless, they constantly denigrated Malcom and managed to identify scores of transgressions that supposedly had undermined the Nation of Islam. In the same issue, Minister Carl of Wilmington, Delaware, described Malcolm as a “shift-with-the-wind WEATHERCOCK.ʺ Captain Clarence 2X Gill of Boston also denounced Malcolm and all other hypocrites, adding, “May Allah burn them in hell.” On Malcolm’s return to the United States he was met with another Muhammad Speaks broadside, dated November 26, by Edwina X of the Newark mosque. For Edwina X, the struggle to defeat everything Malcolm represented was vital: “As in all great struggles for truth and freedom, there are the envious, the insincere and the hypocritical who will attempt to smear and wreck the work of a Divine leader. We have had such a hypocrite in the NOI in the form of one Malcolm X Little.” She then warned, “For one who has heard the truth and still wants to go astray—there is nothing but total destruction for such a defector.” Probably the single most influential attack appeared in Muhammad Speaks under the name Louis X on December 4. “The die is set, and Malcolm shall not escape, especially after such evil, foolish talk,” Farrakhan declared. “Such a man as Malcolm is worthy of death.” This code phrase was a call to arms within the sect.

On the street, safety soon proved elusive for Malcolm’s people in the MMI. In late October, Kenneth Morton, who had quit the mosque at the time of Malcolm’s departure, was ambushed by members of the Fruit in front of his Bronx home. He was so severely beaten in the head that he subsequently died from his wounds. Captain Joseph denied that Mosque No. 7 and its officers had had any involvement in Morton’s death, but no one in the MMI needed proof to convince them to keep a low profile. Benjamin 2X narrowly escaped a beating or worse at the hands of Malcolm’s former driver Thomas 15X Johnson and a group of Nation thugs who chased him for several blocks. Almost as much a target as Malcolm himself, James 67X avoided sleeping in the same place for more than a night, rotating between four apartments, including one kept by his former roommate Anas Luqman.

Despite this gathering storm, Malcolm did not curtail his public activities. In mid-December he took off several days to speak at Harvard Law School. His talk, “The African Revolution and Its Impact on the American Negro,” explained his ideas about Islam, drawing connections with Judaism and Christianity. He embraced the “brotherhood of all men,” he said, “but I don’t believe in wasting brotherhood on anyone who doesn’t want to practice it with me.” He drew again on a theme developed by Frantz Fanon, suggesting a link between the self-reinvention of black identity with the dismantling of racism. “Victims of racism are created in the image of the racists,” Malcolm argued. “When the victims struggle vigorously to protect themselves from violence of others, they are made to appear in the image of criminals, as the criminal image is projected onto the victim.” Liberation, he implied, was not simply political but cultural. His central point, however, was the necessity for blacks to transform their struggle from “civil rights” to “human rights,” redefining racism as “a problem for all humanity.” The OAAU favored getting “our problem before the United Nations,” but it also supported black voting and voter education.

As Christmas drew near, Malcolm was invited to appear at the Williams Institutional Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in Harlem, where the principal speaker was the Mississippi freedom fighter Fannie Lou Hamer. The crowd at the Williams was somewhat small, about 175 people, but Malcolm gave a spirited and provocative presentation. His explorations in the philosophy of social movements in recent months had brought him face-to-face with an old debate within the Western left over how human beings come to perceive themselves as social actors, asking whether an external force, such as a tightly organized party, is necessary to bring oppressed people to