Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [72]
Attending the convention was an ambitious twenty-one-year-old singer and nightclub performer named Louis Eugene Walcott. Born in New York City on May 11, 1933, Walcott was raised as an Episcopalian in Roxbury. He would recall that both his parents, like Malcolm’s, had been militant black nationalists: “My father was a Garveyite,” he explained, “so I couldn’t grow up in this society without the touch of Mr. Garvey in my soul, in my mind, and in my spirit.” Both Walcott’s parents had emigrated from the Caribbean, and as in the Little household from an early age he had been encouraged by his mother to read books and magazines documenting the issues affecting blacks. A track star in high school, he also excelled as a debater, violinist, and singer. After graduating from Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina, he began his career in show business as a calypso artist, calling himself “the Charmer.” Like Malcolm, he eventually came to remake himself, first as Louis X, and then as Louis Farrakhan.
It was in Boston in 1954 that “the Charmer” first encountered Malcolm. Walcott and his wife were living in a small apartment on Massachusetts Avenue—only a few doors away from the apartment of Martin Luther King, Jr., who was in graduate school completing his Ph.D. Not far away was the nightclub where Walcott performed, and between his musical sets he would occasionally grab a quick dinner at a nearby restaurant, the Chicken Lane. It was here that he was introduced to Malcolm, who “had on a brown tam, brown coat, brown suit, and brown gloves.” The minister made an immediate impression. “He was an imposing man,” Farrakhan remembered, “talking so bad about white folks, I was scared of him.”
Walcott’s first real experience of the Nation of Islam occurred at the 1955 Saviourʹs Day convention. He was headlining a show, “Calypso Follies,” at the Blue Angel nightclub on Chicago’s North Side, when a friend invited him to the Nation’s festival. The supreme minister had been told that Walcott, who was a minor celebrity in the music and nightclub business, would be present in the audience. Aides later informed Muhammad exactly where the young man was sitting. Well into his talk, Muhammad turned and began speaking directly to him. Farrakhan later described the moment as “instant love.” His wife enthusiastically joined the Nation that night, and although he still harbored reservations, he agreed to join as well. The young couple duly completed the obligatory letter of request for membership and mailed it off to the Chicago office. They heard nothing for five months. That July, Walcott was in New York City, performing in Greenwich Village. He decided to attend a service at Harlem’s Temple No. 7, primarily to hear Malcolm, whose oratory captivated him and who convinced him to dedicate his life to the Nation. “I had never heard a black man in my life talk the way this brother talked,” Farrakhan recalled.
By the mid-1950s, the number of established jazz artists and popular musicians who had joined the Nation of Islam caused some consternation within the Chicago headquarters, which worried that their prominence might make them more independent than other members. The Nation demanded a conservative, sober lifestyle, something quite at odds with the way most musicians lived. In late 1955, the temples were informed that no NOI member would henceforth