Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [300]
It did not take many days of hiding out in the Mexican desert for Reuben Francis and Anas Luqman to become intensely suspicious of the two ex-NOI members with whom they had gone south to escape police attention after the assassination. Yet Luqman was deliberately vague about what actually happened next, when tensions spiraled out of control and violence flared. Luqman admitted only that when the group decided to split up, things fell apart. There was an altercation and the dead body of an ex-NOI member was left in the desert. One ex-NOI member named John, according to Luqman, “went off, got broke, and couldn’t handle it.” Luqman said he subsequently purchased a fishing boat, and he and Reuben managed to live for a time from the proceeds from their catches. Eventually they parted company; Luqman believes Reuben eventually went back to New York City. The story is a strange one from the start, as Francis’s denunciations of James 67X were well known, and Luqman was James’s best friend and roommate. Was Francis the man who was murdered in the Mexican desert? Since 1965, rumors of his appearance have popped up occasionally, but no credible evidence placing him in the United States—or anywhere else—has emerged.
Ella Collins purchased an attractive Harlem town house that would become the OAAU’s headquarters. Peter Goldman, who visited Collins in the early 1970s, observed that “the OAAU’s active membership had dwindled to a handful, and its most visible activities in Harlem were the annual commemorations of Malcolm’s birth and death.”
Meanwhile, James 67X simply slipped into obscurity. From 1976 until 1988 he lived in Guyana. When he came back to the United States, he became a nurse; in his sixties he remarried and started a new family. His earlier life as Malcolm’s chief aide became as remote as another world.
Muhammad Ali once again met Sonny Liston, in Lewiston, Maine, on May 25, 1965, for their second heavyweight championship bout. Although Ali quickly knocked out Liston, the fight was secondary to the swirl of police activity surrounding the event. Prompted by bomb threats, two hundred Maine police were stationed in the arena. FBI agents and state troopers were also present. The mood was so tense that the event’s singer, entertainer Robert Goulet, forgot the words to the national anthem.
Over the next two years Ali achieved a spectacular boxing record. In November 1965, he humiliated former heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson. Several months later Ali was reclassified by his draft board as 1-A, and was soon notified that he would be inducted into the U.S. military. Ali’s response in opposition to the Vietnam War—“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong”—placed the Black Muslim, paradoxically, in the identical political posture as Malcolm X. When Ali refused to be inducted, his championship was stripped from him and he was barred from fighting for more than three years. He became a hero to the antiwar generation that rejected both the war and the military-industrial complex. To millions of Muslims throughout the world, Ali became a symbol of resistance to American imperialism. There would be many more twists and ironic turns in the magnificent but flawed journey of Ali, from his 1974 recapturing of the heavyweight championship by defeating George Foreman in Zaire to his 1996 surprise appearance at the Atlanta Olympics, holding a torch in his hands to mark the opening event. Like Malcolm before him, Ali also evolved in his beliefs from the Nation of Islam to orthodox Islam. Despite his physical infirmities, he has found peace within his life.
It would be left to Wallace Muhammad to complete Malcolm’s posthumous rehabilitation. His 1965 capitulation to his father was so transparently contrived that his ouster from the sect several years later was predictable. However, by 1974 he was back in the Nation, preaching orthodox Islam and challenging prominent ministers like Farrakhan. When Elijah Muhammad died, on February 25, 1975, Wallace quickly outmaneuvered his siblings to seize control of nearly