Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [271]
That afternoon, Malcolm called Alex Haley to check in on the state of the manuscript. In a strange and timely coincidence, Haley told him that the completed autobiography would be mailed off to Doubleday by the end of the following week. As night fell, Malcolm dropped Betty off at the home of Tom Wallace, where he stayed and talked for several hours before leaving to check in to the midtown New York Hilton, paying eighteen dollars for a single room on the twelfth floor. He ate dinner at the hotel’s restaurant, the Old Bourbon Steak House, and returned to his room, remaining there until the next day. That evening, Sharon 6X may have joined him in his hotel room.
Later that night, several African-American men entered the Hilton lobby asking for Malcolm’s room number. Someone contacted the hotel’s head of security, who confronted the men. They promptly left.
The plans to murder Malcolm X had been discussed within the Nation of Islam for nearly a year before the morning of February 21, 1965. The delay in carrying out the crime had occurred for several reasons. First, up to the final days prior to the assassination Elijah Muhammad had not given an explicit order that his former national spokesman be killed, and for as much anger as had been stirred up against Malcolm in the preceding months, no one would actually take action without clear orders from on high. Second, although Malcolm was being pilloried as a heretic, he retained the respect and even love of a significant minority of NOI members. Some still recognized the contributions he had made to the sect, despite his errors. The best proof of his lasting legacy was the fierce jihad his enemies waged against him in every NOI mosque, month after month. Third, Malcolm made himself an elusive and difficult target by being out of the United States for twenty-four weeks from April to November 1964. An assassination attempt in an Islamic or African nation would have been unthinkable, even for the Nation of Islam. As long as he was abroad, he was safe.
From where the Nation stood in late 1964, the benefits of killing Malcolm outweighed the potentially significant costs. His involvement in publicizing the individual paternity cases of Evelyn Williams and Lucille Rosary, and his success in establishing MMIʹs connections with international Islamic organizations, had created a new and threatening situation. Some NOI officials fretted that the very legitimacy of the sect might be called into question; the defections of Wallace and Akbar Muhammad only reinforced these fears. They were now convinced that only Malcolm’s death would void the inroads he had made and allow them to once again grow membership and continue business unmolested.
Still, Elijah Muhammad knew that if Malcolm were to suffer a violent death, the Nation of Islam would immediately become the primary suspect. Killing him would almost certainly bring a local and perhaps even federal investigation down on the group, so the assassination’s architects within the Nation would need to devise a plan that could deflect attention from national headquarters such that it might plausibly deny any involvement. From this perspective, the year spent ginning up anger with the membership carried an added benefit: it would be easier to cast the killing as rogue members taking matters into their own hands.
They were helped in creating distance by the punishment structure that had developed within the organization, which had grown into a well-oiled machine as the Nation of Islam came to be dominated by fear and violence in the months after Malcolm’s departure. Most NOI members knew that disciplinary units and hit crews almost never carried out extreme actions in the cities where their mosques were located. In other words, Captain Joseph might authorize Harlem crews to attack Malcolm’s people, or to harass him, but not to commit homicide. Such extreme measures