Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [98]
We are going to have a bank of our own here in Chicago and we are going to loan money. This bank is being organized on paper now. Everytime there are enough members to get a number for a temple we are going to have a restaurant, dress shop, and bakery just like we have in Chicago. We are also going to open a health center here. We want educated members with college degrees to help us so they can help their own people.
Betty’s lecture illustrates that she possessed a clear and expansive view of the NOI’s future, based on an educated black middle class—people like herself. The point here is that she was not being manipulated by events; she was a committed, determined follower of Elijah Muhammad in her own right.
The case took nearly a year to go to trial, and in the intervening months Malcolm frequently made reference to what had happened. He also gave several speeches primarily based on the event. When in March 1959 the case was tried, only four of the six individuals originally arrested were prosecuted, including Betty Shabazz. The hearing lasted three weeks and at the time was the longest assault trial ever recorded in Queens County. Sixteen witnesses testified, as the defendants decried the police’s actions as a blatant violation of their property and constitutional rights. The Nation was determined to dominate the environment of the trial. It brought its own stenographers and deployed FOI guards at the court’s doors; anyone who entered the hallway leading to the trial room had their picture taken by one of three roaming NOI photographers.
After the defense rested, the jury, which included three African Americans, deliberated for thirteen hours. At three p.m. on March 18, the jury informed Judge Peter T. Farrell that it had reached a verdict, but the judge was so intimidated by the presence of hundreds of angry Muslims in the courthouse that he took the unusual step of clearing all spectators before the jury revealed its decision. Two of those charged, Betty Shabazz and Minnie Simmons, were exonerated. The jury deadlocked over Yvonne and John Molette without reaching a unanimous decision, freeing them, but subject to a second prosecution. After the verdict was read, the jury was escorted to the subway under a tense police guard, surrounded by hundreds of shouting Muslims. Standing before his members on the courthouse steps, Malcolm instructed, “Any policeman who abuses you belongs in the cemetery. Be peaceful, firm and aggressive but if one of them so much as touch your finger, die.” The jury’s inability to acquit all the accused, according to Malcolm, was the fault of Judge Farrell, who had employed “kangaroo tactics” to protect the police. He harshly criticized Farrell’s “ambiguous interpretations of the law, and failure to charge the jury properly on key points that forced the jury into a deadlock.”
Although Malcolm seldom referred to the case after 1960 or so, it was just as significant as the Johnson Hinton incident. The resolution to fight the case, and to identify it in civil rights terminology, created sympathy and solidarity among most blacks, even those who did not share the NOIʹs separatist views. Malcolm absorbed this lesson from this chaotic event: when the NOI came out in solidarity with civil rights and civil liberties groups addressing problems like police brutality that affected nearly all blacks, the NOI was rewarded with favorable media attention and swelling membership. Meanwhile, the FBI’s New