Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [99]
The FBI had the resources to hire scores of black informants to infiltrate the Nation, but it failed to comprehend the nature of the sect it had deemed so dangerous. It was convinced that the NOI was subversive because it promoted “black hate.”
The FBI never understood that the NOI did not seek the destruction of America’s legal and socioeconomic institutions; the Black Muslims were not radicals, but profound conservatives under Muhammad. They praised capitalism, so long as it served what they deemed blacks’ interests. Their fundamental mistake was their unshakable belief that whites as a group would never transcend their hatred of blacks. The FBI also viewed the Islamic elements of the Nation as fraudulent. As a result, the Bureau never grasped the underlying concerns that motivated Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad, and how both men had constructed a dynamic organization that attracted the membership of tens of thousands of African Americans and the admiration of millions more. The NOIʹs theology certainly “demonized” whites, yet its program in many ways merely channeled the profound sense of alienation that already existed among working-class blacks, born of the reality of Southern Jim Crow segregation and Northern discrimination.
Malcolm and Muhammad did not look to the American political system to redeem itself or to solve the problems of “black Asiatics” in America. It would only be through the grace of Allah, and the building of strong black institutions, that blacks would rediscover their strengths. Malcolm at this time did not consider his pubic addresses “political,” but rather spiritually inspired, based on the prophetic teachings of both the Qurʹan and the Bible, in anticipation of the final days. A time would soon come, however, when the separation between spirituality and politics was no longer a tenable position.
CHAPTER 6
“The Hate That Hate Produced”
March 1959–January 1961
The questions Malcolm faced at the end of 1959 about the necessity of bold political action were not his alone to ponder. During the 1950s, as the civil rights movement grew, it contended with powerful internal struggles over how to move forward. There was not general agreement on the direction that black activism should take or even on the goals that needed to be achieved. While the NOI stood virtually alone in its rejection of direct action, many black leaders, including Malcolm, grew increasingly enamored with the ideals and successes of Third World revolutionaries. Some saw in the Marxist struggle a better way of defining and addressing racial conflict. In the era of McCarthyism, this ideological identification put additional pressure on civil rights groups as black leaders came under intense scrutiny from government agencies. Malcolm was by no means the only one deemed a threat to national security by the FBI.
Despite this pressure, and the general political swing toward conservatism in the postwar years, black activists continued to make significant advances. In December 1952, when Brown v. Board of Education came before the Supreme Court, the political world was still rigidly coded by black and white. “Separate but equal,” as defined by the precedent of the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, remained the law of the land. Yet the years leading up to the 1954 Brown decision saw changing circumstances that presaged its outcome. With the outlawing of the whites-only primary elections by the Supreme Court in 1944, many blacks throughout much of the South began voting for the first time. Between 1944 and 1952, the number of black registered voters there soared, from about 250,000 to nearly 1.25 million. In 1946, in its Morgan v. Virginia decision, the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional any state law requiring Jim Crow sections on interstate buses, a decision that prompted a new civil rights organization, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), to launch a series of