Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [87]
Muhammad’s pride in Malcolm’s strategic judgments allowed the young minister to develop regional recruitment campaigns in areas where the NOI had never previously canvassed. The best, and in many ways the most problematic, example was in the South. Despite Malcolm’s establishment of the Atlanta temple in 1955, the NOI had virtually no presence below the Mason-Dixon line. Yet in the recent years of the Nation’s greatest growth, the region had become a racial powder keg. In Montgomery, Alabama, the successful bus boycott of 1955-56, initiated by Rosa Parks’s refusal to surrender her seat on a segregated bus, had brought to national attention the struggle to abolish legal Jim Crow. Since the Nation of Islam’s position favored racial separation, Malcolm thought it important that integrationist reformers like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., not be allowed to exercise too great an influence—Elijah Muhammad’s message of black solidarity, black capitalism, and racial separatism had to be carried into Dixie. These arguments made sense to Muhammad, who gave him permission to launch a Southern campaign. Though eager, Malcolm moved with some caution: when the press asked his opinions on the Montgomery boycott, he praised Rosa Parks’s courage, describing her as a “good, hard-working, Christian-believing black woman.” Rarely would he directly criticize the protests espoused by King.
Malcolm already had some experience stumping for the Nation of Islam in the South. In August 1956, one year after establishing the Atlanta temple, he had been the featured speaker for the first Southern Goodwill Tour of the Brotherhood of Islam. The convention attracted hundreds of people across the region, but to ensure an impressive turnout NOI temples from as far away as Atlantic City and Lansing sent their members. By the conclusion of the tour, the Atlanta temple had doubled its membership. The next February, Malcolm was again called to the South, this time to Alabama. While en route to attend the Saviourʹs Day convention in Chicago that year, a group of NOI members tangled with police at a train station in the small town of Flomaton. Two Muslim women had violated an ordinance by sitting on a whites-only bench, and police moved to confront them. When two young Muslim men, Joe Allen and George R. White, sought to protect the women, the local police chief, “Red” Hemby, pulled his revolver. In the struggle, Allen and White disarmed and severely beat the officer. Minutes later they were arrested and charged with attempted murder. Arriving in Flomaton, Malcolm used his influence to secure their release with only minor fines.
His second major Southern tour, the centerpiece of the campaign that Muhammad had approved, took place in September and October of 1958, beginning in Atlanta, which, with its flourishing temple, remained one of the few urban centers in the region to have a significant NOI presence. By September 29 he was in Florida, and over the next two weeks the state’s NOI members coordinated public lectures for him in Miami, Tampa, and Jacksonville. Apparently Malcolm did not modify his talks to address regional issues that were particularly relevant in the South. Nevertheless, his speeches did attract modest media coverage, and the tour enhanced the Nation’s profile, especially in Miami.
The NOI never captured the following in the South that it achieved in the mostly urban industrial Midwest, on the East Coast, and in California. Its organizational weakness in the region was compounded by several critical errors it made in its response to newly emerging desegregation campaigns. Following Muhammad’s lead, NOI leaders believed that white Southerners were at least honest in their hatred of blacks. The NOI could not imagine a political future where Jim Crow segregation would ever become outlawed. Consequently, Malcolm concluded, “the advantage of this is the Southern black man never has been under any illusions about the opposition he is dealing with.” Since white supremacy would always be a reality, blacks were better off reaching