Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [293]
The destruction of the mosque greatly increased public perceptions that an open gang war was imminent. The NYPD policed the Nation’s Brooklyn mosque and the ten businesses it owned in the surrounding neighborhood; the mosque in Queens was similarly protected. In Chicago, squads stood an around-the-clock vigil to protect the life of Muhammad, still cloistered in his Hyde Park mansion. Captain Joseph characterized the Harlem firebombing as “a vicious sneak attack. . . . The worst thing a man can do is tamper with your religious sanctuary.”
The Nation would exact its revenge not in Harlem’s streets, but in Chicago at the Saviour’s Day convention. In preparation, administrators worked closely with the Chicago police to carry out extraordinary security measures around the convention hall. A police bomb squad thoroughly checked the facility; attendees were processed through police barricades before entering. Elijah Muhammad himself “will not make a move unless accompanied by at least six members of his security force, the Fruit of Islam brigade,” reported the Chicago Tribune. Twenty-five hundred members were present as the convention began on February 26. The event was orchestrated as a triumph of the victors. “Malcolm was a hypocrite who got what he was preaching,” Elijah Muhammad proclaimed. “Just weeks ago he came to this city to blast away with his hate and mudslinging. He didn’t stop here, either, but then went around the country trying to slander me.”
The audience was treated to the spectacle of Wallace Muhammad and Malcolm’s brothers, Wilfred X and Philbert X, walking out onstage to ask forgiveness and to pledge fidelity to the Messenger. Wallace claimed that he had been confused, that it had been wrong to leave the Nation and his father. In tears, he announced that “only God was in a position to judge a figure so exalted” as Elijah Muhammad. Reading texts that had been prepared for them, both Wilfred and Philbert denounced their dead brother for “his mistakes” and made it clear they would not attend his funeral. Wilfred declared to the convention, “We must not let our natural enemy, the white man, come between us [to] get us to kill each other. I was shocked to hear the news of my brother’s death but from my heart I ask Allah to strengthen me as a follower of Elijah Muhammad.”
Back in New York, there were by now serious questions about how Malcolm was to be buried. By Islamic standards, the autopsy itself had represented a desecration of his body. Muslim tradition also requires the prompt burial of the deceased, and on the opening day of the Saviour’s Day convention Malcolm’s corpse was lying in state for the fourth day at Harlem’s Unity Funeral Home, dressed in a Western-style business suit. Since Tuesday, about thirty thousand people had come to pay their respects. During the week Betty and others close to her had contacted more than a dozen Harlem churches, including Adam Clayton Powell’s Abyssinian Baptist, to host Malcolm’s last rites; all declined, fearing Nation of Islam retaliation. Finally, the Faith Temple Church of God in Christ, on Amsterdam Avenue in West Harlem, agreed to make its auditorium available. Within hours, the church received a series of bomb threats, but the ceremony went forward without incident. Just before the funeral, Sheikh Ahmed Hassoun prepared and wrapped Malcolm’s body in a kafan, a traditional Muslim burial sheet.
More than a thousand people packed the Faith Temple Church on Saturday, February 27, to bear witness to Malcolm’s funeral. There were a small number of movement leaders—Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, Dick Gregory, and SNCC’s John Lewis and James Forman—but the majority stayed away, probably fearing violence. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., was not present, nor were most of Harlem’s civic leaders. Betty had asked Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee to preside over the program, and the two