Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [276]
Like Husayn, Malcolm made the conscious decision not to avoid or escape death. This he could have accomplished easily; had he remained in Africa for several years, the level of the Nation of Islam’s animosity surely would have diminished. That he chose to return to the United States meant he recognized the real possibility of being killed at any moment, even while asleep inside his home. If he did not desire death, he still seemed prepared to embrace it as an inevitable part of his personal destiny. Such an interpretation would help explain why Malcolm was so insistent that no one at the Audubon be searched and that none of his men except Reuben X carry weapons. By not checking for guns, Malcolm made the assassination more likely; by disarming his security personnel, he protected them from being targets in an exchange of gunfire as Malcolm’s murderers probably would not shoot unarmed security personnel. If anyone should die, Malcolm may have reasoned, let it be him.
Law enforcement agencies acted with equal reticence when it came to intervening with Malcolm’s fate. Rather than investigate the threats on his life, they stood back, almost waiting for a crime to happen. “They had the mentality of wanting an assassination,” said Gerry Fulcher of the NYPD brass, though it is unlikely that NYPD officers were directly involved in the murder. “They would want to keep their hands clean from the actual thing.” Fulcher knew that the NYPD and BOSS had placed Gene Roberts inside the MMI and OAAU, but they had also recruited other informants who provided the police with internal information. By early 1965, Fulcher had been taping conversations at the MMI and OAAU office for over nine months. After Malcolm’s return from abroad, Fulcher listened carefully to his arguments and became even more convinced that the police were making a big mistake about him. “This is a guy we should be supporting,” he concluded. One of the favorite topics for cops was “‘them niggers on welfare.’ [Malcolm] wants them off, too,” he argued. Malcolm “should have been a companion, not an enemy” of law enforcement, Fulcher insisted. “But they always viewed him like the enemy.”
By that time, however, Malcolm and the NYPD had already reached a practical détente. Even before leaving the Nation, Malcolm had developed what Peter Goldman called “distant cooperation” with the police, hoping to avoid the confrontations and shootings that had occurred in Los Angeles. He consequently informed the police whenever he was having public rallies, and ordered Reuben X Francis and other subordinates to share information with them. In 1964 and 1965, the NYPD regularly assigned between one and two dozen officers to the MMI and OAAU rallies held at the Audubon. Several would be stationed inside the building but rarely the Grand Ballroom, where the rallies were held. Most were positioned outside the building, either clustered around the entrance or standing across the street in the small neighborhood park. The detail’s commander and one or two other policemen sat in a glassed-in booth on the second floor, overlooking the entrances to the building’s two ballrooms, the Rose and the larger Grand.
Across the Hudson in Newark, the small assassination crew that had been formed in the spring of 1964 had fallen apart when Malcolm was out of the country. But after his return, the question of whether, and how, to commit the murder became active once again. Talmadge Hayer had several conversations with Ben Thomas and Leon Davis. Hayer later told Goldman that, since Ben was a mosque administrator, he naturally assumed from the outset that senior NOI officials had authorized the mission. “I didn’t ask a whole lot of questions,” Hayer explained. “I thought that somebody