Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [263]
The stop in Chicago was itself a bold provocation. Malcolm had come to the Nation’s base for the very purpose of further undermining its reach. He was there to be interviewed by the Illinois attorney general’s office, which was considering him as a witness in a legal case, Thomas Cooper v. State of Illinois. Cooper, a prisoner and follower of Elijah Muhammad at the Illinois state penitentiary, was suing the state on constitutional grounds, claiming that while incarcerated he had been restricted from obtaining a copy of the Qurʹan and other reading materials related to the Nation of Islam. As a witness, Malcolm was prepared to argue that the Nation was not a legitimately Islamic religious organization, and that therefore it did not merit access to penal institutions. His newfound hostility to the Nation’s religious activities inside prisons directly contradicted his extensive efforts to convert prisoners, going back to his own incarceration in the 1940s. But his opposition to the Nation was now so intense that he was willing to support the efforts of the Illinois attorney general to ban the Nation from access to those in the penal system. This purpose alone would have raised the Nation’s hackles, but Malcolm did not pass quietly through town. Instead, he devoted nearly ten full hours to television, radio, and newspaper interviews, including a taped appearance on the popular Kup’s Show on WBKB.
Though Malcolm returned safely to New York City on January 31, the incident in Los Angeles had left him shaken. That night he seemed subdued addressing an OAAU rally at the Audubon before a crowd of 550, an unusually large draw for the group. The next day, he gave a revealing interview to the Amsterdam News. “My death has been ordered by higher-ups in the movement,” he said of the NOI. He had become convinced that the greater the negative publicity concerning the Nation’s attempts to kill him, the safer he would be; if any harm came to him, he figured, law enforcement would immediately place members of the Nation under arrest. The statement, however, had no immediate effect. Two days later, after he appeared as a panelist on the TV show Hotline, on WPIX in New York City, with Ossie Davis, Jimmy Breslin, and others, Nation thugs swarmed Malcolm’s men outside the television studio, precipitating a violent brawl. Malcolm again escaped unharmed.
During these final days, many of Malcolm’s closest associates detected disturbing changes in his behavior and physical appearance. For years, Malcolm had come to public meetings and lectures impeccably dressed, always wearing a clean white shirt and tie. But now, he always seemed to be tired, even exhausted and depressed. His shoes weren’t shined; his clothing was frequently wrinkled. There was even “a kind of fatalism” in his conversations, observes Malcolm X researcher Abdur-Rahman Muhammad. In his personal exchanges with Anas Luqman during this time, Malcolm ruminated that “the males in his family didn’t die a natural death.” To Luqman, just before the assassination, the leader seemed to resign himself to his fate: “Whatever’s going to happen, is going to happen.” The disenchantment of Malcolm loyalists in their leader was also directly related to the confusion and alienation they felt about the new political directions they had been given. In practical terms, as Abdur-Rahman Muhammad explains, the ex-Black Muslims who had followed Malcolm into the MMI “didn’t sign up for orthodox Islam. They didn’t sign up for this OAAU thing. And they positively resented the fact that the OAAU seemed to be where Malcolm was putting all of his energy.”
Despite his growing uncertainty and bouts with depression, Malcolm steeled himself to press forward. On February 3 he took an early-morning flight from New York City, arriving in Montgomery, Alabama, around noon. An hour and a half later he was addressing three thousand students at Tuskegee Institute’s Logan Hall. The auditorium was so crowded that even before the formal program began hundreds had to be turned away. Malcolm’s title for the lecture, “Spectrum