Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [306]
Even in his dreams, Farrakhan cannot escape his link to Malcolm. In a 2007 oral history interview, he shared this nocturnal revelation:
As God is my witness, I had a vision of Brother Malcolm. He came to me in like a dream vision. . . . And gray is in his hair. You know he had this little hair, that knot sometime, you know, and I saw the gray in his hair. And he comes to me and he said, “Brother Louis, what went wrong?” And I said to him, “Brother, you were slated to sit in [Elijah Muhammad’s] seat. He had to try you, to see what was in you. And you failed the test. It wasn’t that he was against you, but he wanted to see what was really in you.” . . . I am here because my brother died that I might live. It’s very difficult for me not to just beat him down, because I walked in his shoes. And I know what pain is when you love people, and you work for people, and they turn against you and seek to destroy you. I understand that.
Today, Farrakhan still seeks to demonstrate his continuing filial devotion to Malcolm, despite his central role in advocating his death. His dream, however, places the cause of the murder in Malcolm’s own failures. Farrakhan suggests that Elijah Muhammad intended to make Malcolm his spiritual heir, setting aside the claims of Wallace and his other children. Muhammad was simply testing Malcolm, to determine if he had the leadership qualities necessary to direct the Nation. While it is true that Malcolm, after being silenced, at first desperately attempted to remain inside the Nation of Islam, once the break occurred he was liberated from the restrictions that had been imposed on him. What Farrakhan has difficulty admitting is that it was only when Malcolm accepted the universalism and humanism of orthodox Islam, explicitly rejecting racial separatism, that he could reach a truly global audience. Had he lived, Malcolm could have led an international campaign for human rights for blacks, but he could have accomplished this only by divorcing himself from the Nation of Islam’s sectarian creed.
Several weeks after the firebombing and destruction of Mosque No. 7 in February 1965, Louis was asked to visit and speak to the Nation’s congregation in New York. It was only months later that Elijah Muhammad telephoned to say that he would be transferred to serve as minister of Mosque No. 7 in Harlem. Under Louis’s supervision, the destroyed mosque would be reconstructed; he would move into Malcolm’s rebuilt home in Elmhurst. In August 1965, Muhammad announced Louis’s appointment before six thousand members in Detroit’s Cobo Center.
Upon being told about his new position, an overwhelmed Farrakhan jumped into his car and drove to a park on the outskirts of Boston. Years before, as a high school distance runner, it had been a place of solitude, where he would run and exercise. He recounts how he jogged out into the middle of a grassy field, tears streaming down his face, dropped to his knees, looking up into the sky, and confessed to Malcolm: “I didn’t mean to take your mosque—I didn’t mean to take your home!” As Farrakhan relates this story, it is powerful and it may even be plausible. But is it true?
Only three hours after the assassination of Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan delivered the guest sermon at Newark Mosque No. 25—the very mosque where the assassins had been recruited and organized. Was his presence in Newark on that fateful day simply coincidence, or something more?
Years from now, when thousands of pages of FBI and BOSS surveillance are finally accessible, more definitive judgments will be made about the connections between Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm