Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [83]
All three men who had been arrested were subsequently acquitted. Johnson X Hinton and the Muslims filed a successful lawsuit against the NYPD, receiving more than seventy thousand dollars, the largest police brutality judgment that a New York jury had ever awarded. But the incident had also set in motion the forces culminating in Malcolm’s inevitable rupture with the Nation of Islam. Elijah Muhammad could maintain his personal authority only by forcing his followers away from the outside world; Malcolm knew that the Nation’s future growth depended on its being immersed in the black community’s struggles of daily existence. His evangelism had expanded the NOI’s membership, giving it greater impact, but it was also forcing him to address the problems of non-Muslim black Americans in new ways. Eventually, he would have to choose: whether to remain loyal to Elijah Muhammad, or to be “on the side of my people.”
CHAPTER 5
“Brother, a Minister Has to Be Married”
May 1957-March 1959
The Johnson Hinton controversy introduced the Nation of Islam to hundreds of thousands of blacks, and Malcolm was quick to take advantage. He had already begun publishing a regular column outlining the NOI’s views, “God’s Angry Men,” in the Amsterdam News, and now he worked to broaden the group’s appeal. Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm argued in one column, was “a modern-day Moses who . . . would ask God . . . to destroy this wicked race and their slave empire with plagues of cancer, polio, [and] heart disease.”
Hundreds of new blacks, both those who had been inspired by the Hinton incident and those who were simply curious, started attending temple lectures. Instead of preaching to the converted, Malcolm now gave more attention to crafting a popular message, and he rarely failed to deliver a command performance. Slowly, he began to incorporate into his talks his growing awareness of global events, merging the situations and goals of repressed peoples around the world with those of blacks in America. At his June 21 sermon at Temple No. 7, for example, he linked Bandung’s theme of Third World solidarity with Elijah Muhammad’s apocalyptic vision:
Who is the Original Man? . . . It is the Asiatic Black Man. . . . The brown, red and yellow man along with the black outnumber the white man eleven to one. And he knows it. If ever they all got together to reclaim what the white man has taken from them the whites would not have a chance. How blind we are that we cannot see how badly our people, all our people, need to unite. But the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is here to unite us. The day is near. In the UN there is a pact of nations called the African-Asia block. It is a block comprised of some of the black nations on this earth. They are becoming stronger and it is just a bit more proof that the Black Men are beginning to realize that there is strength in numbers.
The summer of 1957 was one of tremendous growth for Malcolm, as he continued to make inroads to building greater legitimacy for the Nation while keeping up a demanding speaking schedule. In July, Temple No. 7 hosted an extravagant event, the Feast of the Followers of Messenger Muhammad, at Harlem’s Park Palace dance club. More than two thousand attended, including Rafik Asha, leader of the Syrian mission to the UN, and Ahmad Zaki el-Barail, the Egyptian attaché. The presence of the Muslim diplomats was an indication that Elijah Muhammad’s long-standing efforts to acquire greater legitimacy in the Islamic world were producing results. The featured speaker was not Malcolm but twenty-four-year-old Wallace Muhammad, born on October 30, 1933, and seventh among the children of Clara and Elijah. Wallace was an assistant minister in the Chicago temple, and his participation in New York City was significant. He had been tutored in Arabic as a teenager, and by the mid-1950s, troubled by the inconsistencies between his father’s teachings and the classical tenets of Islam, he