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By Root 1771 0

world, enclosing your fatherʹs statements against you, claiming himself to be the Messenger of Allah and I am going to insist that they take a stand on your side.” Malcolm’s intervention was probably too manipulative, getting in the middle of the long-standing conflict between Akbar and his father. However, his basic threat—mobilizing international Islamic organizations to boycott the Nation of Islam—was no bluff. Nation headquarters genuinely feared that Malcolm could lead an international campaign that could effectively exclude it from being part of the ummah. Akbar and Wallace had been petulant in their criticisms of Elijah Muhammad, and little they had said actually threatened to damage the Nation. That was not true for Malcolm. The fatwa, or death warrant, may or may not have been signed by Elijah Muhammad; there is no way of knowing. It is far more likely that Muhammad, like the fabled King Henry II, announced no decision but made his feelings all too clear, allowing his underlings to take their own murderous initiative.

Despite his many other obligations, Malcolm continued to make time available for Alex Haley. The journalist now understood the importance of Malcolm’s most recent reinvention, and it required him to expand the length of the Autobiography. In an October 1964 letter to Paul Reynolds, Haley had estimated that the book would be ready to hand over to Doubleday by late January 1965. “I am a little put-out,” Haley pouted, that Malcolm “has rather crossed up the project by, one, staying away so long and, two, his new conversion.” But Haley recognized that Malcolm’s embrace of Islamic orthodoxy might, after all, be beneficial to increased book sales and “intense interest in the Moslem countries where he is viewed as the most famous Orthodox Brother in America.” On November 19, Haley contacted Reynolds again, “happy to report” that Malcolm would be returning to the United States within the week. “So I am going to be on a plane Monday, to be awaiting him, to get the information I’ll need to write new final chapters.” Haley thus met with Malcolm several times in December 1964 and January 1965, incorporating his new views into the final chapters of the Autobiography. Surprisingly little about the OAAU was mentioned in the new material, however. On February 14, Haley reported to Reynolds that he was “deep into winding up Malcolm Xʹs book. . . . You’ll have it prior [to] March . . . it’s a powerful book.”

Malcolm was increasingly a magnet for representatives of the freedom struggle, who no longer viewed him as a racial separatist. The end of 1964 marked a moment of convergence, when Malcolm’s move away from stark separatism brought him into alignment with elements of the civil rights movement that were growing increasingly radicalized. Had Malcolm continued to mainstream his views, it is unclear how he would have negotiated relations a few years later with the Black Panthers, a group born of much of the intellectual framework Malcolm had assembled in the early to mid-1960s. Yet in this moment, Malcolm found himself able to straddle both the most leftist elements of the struggle and the mainstream. Early in 1965, the Malcolm-minded Floyd McKissick took control of CORE from James Farmer, continuing the group’s decisive shift away from King’s nonviolent integrationist model. And in the months after Freedom Summer, SNCC, too, had splintered along similar lines, with the pacifist Bob Moses set against the increasingly radicalized Stokely Carmichael, who would subsequently join the Black Panthers and later form the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party. Near the end of 1964, a letter and attached money order had arrived at the OAAUʹs offices from future Panthers cofounder Bobby Seale, requesting a subscription to Blacklash.

Yet this period also saw Malcolm’s most concerted and successful effort to court the civil rights mainstream. Just before the new year, he received a delegation of thirty-seven teenagers from McComb, Mississippi, who had traveled to New York City on the sponsorship of the SNCC. Greeting the