Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [40]
Without question, some elements of Detroit Red’s gangster tale are accurate. But if by 1944 Malcolm had graduated from marijuana to cocaine, as seems possible, he probably was in no condition to engineer a series of wellexecuted burglaries without at some point being discovered. An investigation of the NYPD’s arrest record for Malcolm Little years later failed to turn up any criminal charges or arrests.
Clarence Atkins, Malcolm’s friend, asserted, “He was never no big-time racketeer or thug.” A more realistic appraisal of his criminal activity speculates that Malcolm and Sammy may have occasionally burglarized “Harlem’s popular nightspots, such as LaFamille,“ and subsequently “divide[d] the spoils.” Crimes of this nature, during the racially segregated 1940s, were frequently not taken seriously by the nearly all-white NYPD, and Malcolm’s possible burglaries could well have escaped police attention. But the politics of race that underscore the entire Autobiography’s narrative are careful to place the most nihilistic, destructive aspects of Malcolm’s criminal history well outside Harlem. Perhaps this explains Malcolm’s description of his string of successful burglaries in 1944 as taking place in New York City’s nearly all-white suburbs. His role as a steerer for prostitutes also usually occurred in Times Square, not on 125th Street.
What seems plain is that between 1944 and 1946 Malcolm Little was struggling to survive. His sporadic work at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack had dried up, leaving him to find other ways to scrape by. Reginald Little, who had visited his brother on several occasions in 1942–43, had left the merchant marine and by that time settled in Harlem, where Malcolm set him up in a “legal” con operation. “For a small fee, Reginald obtained a ʹregular city peddlerʹs license,’” Malcolm wrote. “Then I took him to a manufacturers’ outlet where we bought a supply of cheap imperfect ‘seconds’—shirts, underwear, cheap rings, watches, all kinds of quick-sale items.” Reginald then sold this merchandise, giving buyers the impression that the goods had been stolen. If approached by the police, Reginald could simply produce his peddlerʹs license and sales receipts from the purchase of the goods. This gambit was a classic grifterʹs short-con, manipulating the expectations of the victim to profit from a perfectly legitimate transaction. Malcolm’s efforts to shield his younger brother from serious criminality revealed the continued responsibility he felt toward his siblings. But it also suggests that he was never himself a hardened criminal.
As the war continued to drag on overseas, it had a powerful if unanticipated impact upon black culture in cities back home—and particularly in music. Big band jazz and swing music’s enormous popularity among white middle-class Americans during the war years had brought it from the margins of entertainment to wide prominence in mainstream popular culture. Around 1943, however, there was a precipitous drop in popularity for swing bands and their showmanship. It was a consequence of both practical concerns and aesthetic ones. Many big bands lost their best musicians to the armed forces. Gasoline was rationed, making it difficult for thirty-piece orchestras to travel. Then, in 1942, the Musicians Union initiated a strike because its members did not receive royalty payments when their records were played on the radio. In solidarity, union members boycotted record production until September 1943, and the lack of new big band singles sapped the genre’s popularity. But the production strike gave artists the space for experimentation and innovation. It was the younger black musicians, the hepcats, who broke most sharply from swing, developing a black-oriented sound at the margins of musical taste and commercialism.
A new sound developed in dark Manhattan, in smoky late-night sessions. Musicians no longer attempted to present themselves as entertainers. They limited the time of songs by stripping down the melodic form, emphasizing improvisation as well as complex chord changes and complicated beats.