Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [86]
Checking out of Sydenham after a two-day stay, he rushed up to Boston to preside over the dedication of a new temple and to offer support for his protégé Louis X, the Boston temple minister. Introduced as “the founder of the Boston temple,” Malcolm reminded his audience about the inequality that existed throughout America. Blacks “have died for this country and yet we are not [full] citizens.” Even other discriminated-against groups, such as the Jews, received better treatment. “A Jew is in the White House, Jews in the State House, the Jews run the country. You and I can’t go into a white hotel down south,” he argued, “but a Jew can.”
Malcolm continued his public criticisms of New York’s police department, writing a telegram to the police commissioner in which he demanded that the officers directly involved in the Hinton incident be suspended. In October, when a New York County grand jury opted not to indict those responsible, Malcolm condemned the decision. “Harlem is already a potential powder keg,” he warned. “If these ignorant white officers are allowed to remain in the Harlem area, their presence is not only a menace to society, but to world peace.” BOSS considered Malcolm’s words as a threat against the police and increased its surveillance by placing black undercover officers inside the Nation. On November 7, BOSS detective Walter A. Upshur visited William Traynham, the administrator of Sydenham Hospital in Harlem, to investigate Malcolm’s recent hospitalization. The detective learned that Malcolm’s “admitting diagnosis was coronary” and obtained the name and address of his private physician.
By November 10, Malcolm was back in Detroit, and soon after departed on a nearly three-week-long tour of the West Coast with the goal of establishing a strong temple in Los Angeles. Following this, he made an unscheduled return stop in Detroit to tell a standing-room-only audience that Islam was “spreading like a flaming fire awakening and uniting Negroes where it is heard.” Although Malcolm usually spoke at Muslim temples, his audiences increasingly consisted of both Muslim and non-Muslim blacks. In his language and style, Malcolm reached out to recruit black Christians to his cause.
His breakthrough as a national speaker generated a financial windfall for the Nation. Between five hundred and one thousand African Americans were joining almost every month. The demand for new temples must have seemed endless. Much of the new revenue went into commercial ventures overseen by Raymond Sharrieff, mostly in Chicago: a restaurant, a dry cleaning and laundry establishment, a bakery, a barbershop, a well-stocked grocery store. The Nation also purchased an apartment building on Chicago’s South Side, as well as a farm and a house in White Cloud, Michigan, valued at sixteen thousand dollars. The economic success of these ventures may have been responsible for Elijah Muhammad’s decision to stop mentioning some of the original tenets of Wallace D. Fard’s Islam—in particular the bizarre Yacub’s History—and to give greater emphasis to the Garveyite thesis that a self-sustainable, all-black capitalist economy was a viable strategy.
Malcolm’s popularity gave him unprecedented leverage with Muhammad, allowing him to achieve major concessions, such as NOI ministers being permitted the surname Shabazz rather than the standard X. Since, according to NOI theology, Shabazz was the original tribal identity of the lost-founds, it could be claimed as a legitimate surname. Contrary to the perception that “Malcolm Shabazz” emerged only after Malcolm’s break with the Nation in 1964, he was using