Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [28]
Malcolm proved a quick study. He soon learned all about smoking “reefer”—marijuana cigarettes—hustling, petty thievery, and seducing fast women. Soon he had even mastered the economic fundamentals of the numbers racket. Every day, thousands of habitual bettors would place wagers on numbers, usually between 001 and 999. Numbers “runners,” in turn, would collect “policies”—bets on slips of paper—and take them to a central collection “bank.” The racketeers who ran the scam generally took at least 40 percent of the gross revenue, redistributing the remainder as daily winnings.
Malcolm’s obvious attraction to the ghetto’s underworld caused tensions back at his new home, and partially to placate Ella he found part-time employment as a shoeshine boy at the Roseland Ballroom. It was at the Roseland that he began to develop his lifelong fascination with black celebrities—men and women of talent and ability who had overcome the barrier of race to achieve public recognition. As at its more famous counterpart, Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, at the Roseland black and white mingled, danced, and drank, showing the teenager that there was also a celebratory side to success. At the humble shoeshine stand, he solicited praise and tips from African Americans playing gigs at the ballroom. Decades later he recalled the jazz legends whose shoes he had once proudly buffed: “Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Cootie Williams, Jimmie Lunceford were just a few.” To make a favorable impression, the spunky teenager soon learned to make “my shine rag sound like someone had set off Chinese firecrackers.” During his breaks, he would gawk, openmouthed, listen to the rocking rhythms of the music, and, most especially, admire the brilliance and athleticism of the ballroom dancers doing the Lindy Hop, the standard dance performed to syncopated big band jazz. Occasionally Malcolm would sneak away from his job just to watch the dancers go through their paces.
An impressionable young black man in search of roles and images in the movies and media, however, would have found a sorry set of models. In the forties, the dominant representation of the African American was the comic minstrel, typified by the national radio show Amos ’n’ Andy. (Ironically, of course, the original actors in the series were white, mimicking black dialect.) In films, blacks were generally presented as clowns or mental incompetents. Gone With the Wind, Hollywood’s 1939 extravaganza celebrating the prewar slave South, offered up the servant Mammy, docile yet loyal, obese and hardworking. One of the few Hollywood movies of the period that departed slightly from crude stereotypes was Warner Brothers’ Bullets or Ballots, featuring black actress Louise Beavers as the notorious Nellie LaFleur, the numbers queen. It is likely that Malcolm saw this film as well as dozens of others that addressed racial themes; decades later he would recall Hollywood’s distortions of black people as part of his general indictment of white racism. Even the title of the Warner Brothers’ film may have been recycled in Malcolm’s 1964 address “The Ballot or the Bullet.”
Off-screen, however, there were ample models of militancy and resistance. Some of the figures who would lead the postwar civil rights movement were rising to prominence by focusing on the war and the opportunities and obstacles it presented to African Americans. One of Garvey’s former critics on the socialist left, labor union leader A. Philip Randolph, was pushing the Roosevelt administration to adopt reforms that would increase black employment and undermine Jim Crow segregation. Randolph boldly urged thousands of blacks to launch a civil disobedience campaign in what was called the Negro March on Washington