Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [275]
On Friday, February 19, Maya Angelou arrived from Ghana, ready to volunteer for the OAAUʹs staff. She had heard about the firebombing and was so shaken that she phoned Malcolm while still at JFK airport. “They almost caught me,” he admitted to her. Malcolm offered to pick up Angelou at the airport, but she informed him that she planned to travel straight to San Francisco to see her family first. However, when she returned home, her mother cautioned her not to work with that “rabble-rouser.” “If you feel you have to do that—work for no money—go back to Martin Luther King,” her mother advised.
Although most Malcolmites thought the Nation of Islam was actively conspiring to kill their leader, many also suspected the U.S. government as being behind the murder attempts. “We all knew what was happening to black people, and [Malcolm] always talked about the government being involved in the problems we were having,” Herman Ferguson recalled. Malcolm supposedly had been worried that “the CIA was out to kill him” when he was abroad, and his rejection at French customs made him further suspect government meddling in his affairs. Ferguson felt that during the final weeks OAAU members did too little to protect Malcolm: “We didn’t pick up on the signs that we should have picked up on. . . . Like cannon fodder, people sat around and talked about the danger that Malcolm was in. It was just like, ‘The brother should be more careful.’ ” Several OAAU members had places in Manhattan that Malcolm could use as safe houses to spend the night. There was some discussion about assigning him drivers, but nothing was done about it. The drift toward disaster continued.
It is difficult to know what Malcolm may have contemplated as he pondered the likelihood of impending murder. For decades after the assassination, James 67X struggled privately with the question of whether his leader truly wanted to die. He had lived for over a year with death threats coming from the Nation, and in his final days he seemed of two minds, partly accepting of what he believed to be his fate and partly wishing or hoping that the problems might disappear and allow him to go back to a normal life. In his last week, he spent much of his time away from his family, so as not to put them in danger. He also appears to have traveled around without bodyguards, though he had long had either James 67X or Reuben X accompanying him wherever he went. He communicated infrequently, and sometimes it was impossible for MMI and OAAU members to reach him with information. As the world closed in on him, Malcolm, always an extremely private individual, kept his own counsel. He fought desperately to shield others’ doubts and fears.
That he continued to harangue the Nation even when he knew that doing so would leave little choice but to strike at him seems to suggest that on some level he may have been inviting death. As Malcolm became more aware of Islamic tradition in his last years, he probably learned about the third Shiite imam, Husayn ibn Ali, and his tragic murder. Husayn was the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, and the son of Ali ibn Abi Talib and Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad. After the murder of Ali and the abdication of his older brother, Hasan, Husayn became the object of allegiance for many Muslims. At Karbala in 680 CE in what today is Iraq, Husayn and a small band of supporters were attacked by religious opponents ; nearly all of them were killed or captured. Husayn died bravely and gloriously, so much so that his