Days of Rage Page 5
As Malcolm later told his story, he was among the better students at his junior high school but became withdrawn after a teacher told him that his idea of becoming a lawyer was not a “realistic goal for a nigger.” After eighth grade he moved to a half sister’s home in Boston; at seventeen he fled to Harlem, where he became a street hustler, dealing drugs, robbing stores, and working as a pimp. Back in Boston, he began burglarizing the homes of wealthy whites; arrested in 1946, he was sentenced to eight to ten years at the Charlestown State Prison.
Like many blacks who would go underground in the 1970s, Malcolm was radicalized behind bars, poring over nationalist texts recommended by older inmates. It was his brother, Reginald, who drew him into an obscure sect called the Nation of Islam. The Nation had been founded in 1930 by a Detroit clothing salesman named Wallace D. Fard, who preached that blacks had ruled the earth six thousand years ago, until their destruction by a renegade black wizard named Yakub, who then created the white man—the “white devil,” in the Nation’s mythos; blacks, Fard prophesied, would destroy the white devil in a future apocalypse. Until his disappearance and presumed death in 1934, Fard imbued his disciples with a message of racial pride, economic equality, and personal discipline. Over the next twenty years his protégé, Elijah Muhammad, quietly built the Nation into a small but vocal group of clean-cut, impeccably dressed black separatists, including a paramilitary wing called the Fruit of Islam. Still, by 1952, when Malcolm emerged from prison, Muhammad had only a few hundred followers.
Malcolm changed everything. Six-foot-three, handsome, intense, and bursting with charisma, he immediately became Muhammad’s protégé. At a storefront mosque in Detroit, on street corners, and later in Chicago and Boston, Malcolm mesmerized black crowds. His sermons, while ostensibly religious, were ringing anthems of black empowerment, pride, and self-defense, concepts many blacks had never heard aired in public. The Muslims dressed neatly and forbade drugs and alcohol. A mosque typically featured a blackboard Islamic flag with the words FREEDOM, JUSTICE AND EQUALITY beneath, alongside an American flag with the words CHRISTIANITY, SLAVERY, SUFFERING, AND DEATH. Men and women sat separately. There were typically no hymns, only an occasional soloist singing a Nation song, such as one written by Louis X (later Louis Farrakhan), “A White Man’s Heaven Is the Black Man’s Hell.”1
Malcolm’s fame grew when he took command of Harlem’s 116th Street Mosque No. 7 in 1954. A whirlwind in a camelhair overcoat, he spent hours on stepladders outside the Broadway Bar, the African National Memorial Bookstore, and the Optimal Cigar Store, repeating his personal story of petty crime and drug abuse, outlining the Nation’s path toward redemption, prophesying the apocalypse, and denouncing White America as a racist, doomed land. The congressman who ran Harlem, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., recognized his talent and invited him to speak at the landmark Abyssinian Baptist Church. Elijah Muhammad saw it, too, and named Malcolm his personal representative in 1957. Malcolm, in turn, put the Black Muslims on the map, building bridges to black newspapers and black intellectuals such as novelist James Baldwin and the actor Ossie Davis. He began writing a syndicated column called God’s Angry Men.
The incident that made Malcolm a Harlem legend occurred in April 1957, when a Black Muslim named Johnson X Hinton interrupted the police beating of a black man and was himself beaten, handcuffed, and taken to the 28th Precinct house. A crowd of two thousand gathered outside the station; a newspaperman summoned Malcolm in hopes he could stop a riot in the making. As a row of sharply dressed members of the Fruit of Islam lined up outside the station, Malcolm was allowed inside to inspect Johnson’s wounds; Johnson was badly hurt and was taken to a hospital. With a single whispered word to an aide, Malcolm then dispersed the angry crowd. “That,” one police official was overheard to mutter, “is too much power for one man to have.”
This and similar incidents drew hundreds of young blacks into the Nation of Islam at a time when “black nationalism,” a growing sense of black pride, was taking hold in Harlem, the cultural capital of Black America. The rise of Malcolm and the Nation of Islam, in fact, paralleled the gradual radicalization of many Northern black elites, especially in Harlem. The avenues above 125th Street had long been home to writers and artists inclined to leftist and even communist causes. In the late 1950s, lacking sources of inspiration in the United States, they began looking overseas. Black pride, as well as a developing sense of African heritage, was stoked by the birth of postcolonial African states and their new black leaders, especially Ghana’s radical, U.S.-educated Kwame Nkrumah, whose 1958 open-car tour of Harlem drew cheering crowds. The Cuban Revolution, bringing with it Castro’s rise to power, along with his outspoken support of the U.S. civil rights movement, was wildly popular in Harlem. Dozens of black intellectuals, from Baldwin to Julian Mayfield, joined the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Even before his exile, Robert Williams visited Cuba and toured the streets of Havana, a straw hat on his head and a pistol strapped to his hip. The Cuban leader’s popularity among blacks soared after his visit to Harlem in September 1960; the first black leader he met was Malcolm, who afterward termed Castro “the only white person I ever liked.”
Malcolm, Robert Williams, and the Cuban Revolution “helped create a new generation of black nationalists who studied local organizing, the politics of armed self-defense, and global upheavals with equal fervor,” Peniel E. Joseph writes in his history of black militancy, Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour, but it was “the 1961 assassination of Congo leader Patrice Lumumba [that] transformed them into radicals.” Coming four months after Castro’s visit, Lumumba’s death at the hands of a white Belgian firing squad prompted unprecedented outrage among New York’s new black nationalists. Harlem’s Amsterdam News termed it an “international lynching” carried out “on the altar of white supremacy.” On February 15, 1961, crowds of angry black nationalists stormed the United Nations, igniting melees with guards and days of protests. One group of demonstrators told reporters that Negroes were henceforth to be called “Afro-Americans.”
“Who died for the black man?” someone yelled.
“Lumumba!”
“Who died for freedom?”
“Lumumba!”
This was something altogether new in America, the image of furious Northern blacks standing in sharp contrast to their stoic Southern brethren marching behind Martin Luther King. Malcolm rode this wave of discontent to national prominence, earning profiles and interviews in Life and the New York Times in which he unleashed verbal thunderbolts like a vengeful Zeus. He attacked moderate black leaders as race traitors, excoriating King as “a chump, not a champ,” and the baseball great Jackie Robinson as an Uncle Tom. As violence spread in the South—the assassination of Medgar Evers in 1963, fire hoses and snapping dogs in Birmingham—Malcolm’s rhetoric grew steadily more violent, climaxing in perhaps his best-known speech, delivered to a group of black leaders in Detroit in November 1963. It was there, drawing the distinction between moderates and militants, that he famously conjured the image of two types of slaves: docile “house Negroes,” who cared for their sick white masters, and hardened “field Negroes,” who wished them dead. In doing so, he foresaw the only logical conclusion to any campaign for black equality in America: a revolution. A violent revolution. He proclaimed:
You don’t have a peaceful revolution. You don’t have a turn-the-other-cheek revolution. There’s no such thing as a nonviolent revolution. . . . Revolution is bloody, revolution is hostile, revolution knows no compromise, revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way. And you, sitting around here like a knot on the wall, saying, “I’m going to love these folks no matter how much they hate me.” No, you need a revolution. Whoever heard of a revolution where they lock arms . . . singing “We Shall Overcome”? You don’t do that in a revolution. You don’t do any singing, you’re too busy swinging.
Malcolm’s image of a bloody revolution galvanized a generation of black militants and set t
he stage for riots that would erupt in American ghettos for the rest of the decade. But he also sowed the seeds of his own demise. Open talk of black-on-white violence, of course, horrified whites and frightened many blacks. But it also elevated Malcolm to a position as black militancy’s most infamous proponent, and this did not sit well with his mentor, Elijah Muhammad, who reserved such influence for himself. Even before the Detroit speech, Muhammad had tried to rein Malcolm in. When a Los Angeles Muslim named Ronald Stokes was killed by police in 1962, Malcolm called for Black Muslims everywhere to retaliate, invoking the long-foreseen “War of Armageddon.” Muhammad called it off, embarrassing Malcolm.
The turning point came three weeks after the Detroit speech, when reporters asked Malcolm what he thought of President Kennedy’s assassination nine days earlier. He replied that “chickens coming home to roost never make me sad; they make me glad.” This was too much for Muhammad, who had forbidden public criticism of Kennedy; amid widespread shock, he suspended Malcolm for three months. Malcolm spent the time touring the United States with his newest acolyte, the prizefighter Cassius Clay. Afterward, on March 8, 1964, Malcolm announced he was quitting the Nation to form a new group, the Organization of Afro-American Unity.
It was the beginning of the end. Malcolm spent much of the next year overseas, on a pilgrimage to Mecca and a tour of African and European capitals. In his absence, Harlem exploded in ten days of riots after an off-duty police officer killed a fifteen-year-old black boy. Helmeted police fired into crowds of angry blacks, who responded by throwing rocks and burning cars. Black nationalists who led the riots wasted no time placing the violence squarely in the context of Malcolm’s new idea of a bloody “revolution.” “There is only one thing that can correct the situation,” one told a crowd, “and that’s guerrilla warfare.” All they needed to set New York ablaze, he went on, was “100 skilled revolutionaries who are ready to die.” Such comments, however, went all but unnoticed in the white press.
What no one realized was that the first to die would be Malcolm himself. During his travels, tensions with the Nation escalated into death threats. Muhammad himself told Louis Farrakhan that “hypocrites like Malcolm should have their heads cut off”; an issue of the Nation’s newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, actually carried a cartoon showing Malcolm’s severed head bouncing free of his body. The end was all but preordained. On February 21, 1965, just days after Malcolm returned from Europe, he was about to address a nationalist meeting in Harlem when he was rushed by several Black Muslims. They opened fire with pistols and a sawed-off shotgun. He was dead within minutes, his body riven by twenty-one gunshot wounds. Malcolm’s death, however, did little to stop his message; if anything, his popularity grew. Thirty thousand people attended a viewing of his body. His posthumous book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, became mandatory reading for every budding black radical.
• • •
After Malcolm, the mantle of black militancy was passed to a newcomer on the national scene, a tall, slender twenty-four-year-old named Stokely Carmichael. A composed, natural leader and a gifted orator whose voice carried a hint of his Trinidadian birth, Carmichael emerged in the mid-1960s as a kind of Malcolm of the South. He was so charismatic that friends jokingly called him Stokely Starmichael; at the height of his influence, Ebony wrote that he “walks like Sidney Poitier, talks like Harry Belafonte and thinks like the post-Muslim Malcolm X.” Carmichael was raised in the Bronx, and in 1964 he graduated from Howard University to become a full-time organizer for an emerging outfit called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, known as Snick. SNCC was formed in the wake of the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins and, until Carmichael’s rise, quietly went about registering black voters in the South’s most dangerous corners. From the beginning, SNCC attracted angry, erudite young blacks, including many Northern black nationalists, many of whom had little patience for King’s plodding marches and lofty speeches. They wanted action. Now.
Heavily influenced by Malcolm’s teachings, Carmichael was further radicalized as a SNCC coordinator during 1964’s “Freedom Summer” voter-registration drive in Mississippi; watching blacks being beaten during a riot in Montgomery, Alabama, the following year, he suffered a breakdown followed by an epiphany. “I knew I could never be hit again,” he recalled, “without hitting back.” Afterward, Carmichael began charting an entirely new course for SNCC. Marches and riots might provide an emotional release, he reasoned, but the surest path to political power was the voting booth. He studied a single Alabama county, Lowndes—known as Bloody Lowndes for the violence directed against black organizers there—and saw that blacks outnumbered whites by a four-to-one margin. Yet only two black voters were registered in the entire county. What if, Carmichael reasoned, they registered enough blacks to elect black people to office?
Lowndes County became an unlikely testing ground for new concepts of black militancy. SNCC formed a political party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, and (fatefully) chose as its symbol a coiled panther; the party became known in the press as the Black Panther Party, a name that would, in time, inspire thousands of young blacks across the country. Taking a page from black nationalism, SNCC held classes for first-time voters in African history and literacy, played tapes of Malcolm’s speeches, and produced pamphlets explaining the political system and how to cast a vote. “It’s very simple,” Carmichael told a reporter. “We intend to take over Lowndes County.”
They didn’t. All seven black candidates for office were defeated, thanks largely to ballot-stuffing tactics widely decried as illegal. It didn’t matter. Carmichael and SNCC had set an example of how blacks could earn political power within the system that would inspire a generation of young black leaders. CANDIDATES LOSE, read the headline in SNCC’s newsletter, BUT BLACK PANTHER STRONG.
By the summer of 1966, Carmichael and his SNCC followers were growing increasingly militant. Their emulation of Malcolm drove a wedge between Carmichael and moderate black leaders like King and the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins. The brewing clash of ideologies came to a head during that summer’s major civil rights event, a march from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi. It had begun on June 5 as a one-man effort by activist James Meredith, the first black man to attend the University of Mississippi; when he was shot and wounded by a white supremacist, Carmichael, King, and other leaders amassed hordes of marchers in Mississippi to finish what he had started.
Tensions between the King and Carmichael camps were evident from the outset. While King wanted another Selma, a moment when whites could join blacks in calling for black voters to register, Carmichael argued successfully that whites should be excluded altogether. For security he brought in the Deacons for Defense, a group of armed Louisiana blacks who followed Robert Williams’s philosophy of self-defense. Marching beneath a withering sun, King overheard a SNCC volunteer say, “I’m not for that nonviolence stuff anymore. If one of those damn white Mississippi crackers touches me, I’m gonna knock the hell out of him.” Each night King and Carmichael delivered speeches around their campfires. “I’m not going to beg the white man for anything I deserve,” Carmichael said at one. “I’m gonna take it.” When King’s people attempted to sing “We Shall Overcome,” Carmichael’s troops sang a new version, “We Shall Overrun.”
The moment that changed everything, when the civil rights movement began to morph into something new and frightening to many Americans, occurred on June 16, 1966, in the town of Greenwood. After he was arrested for pitching a tent at the local high school, Carmichael stormed out of the jail and marched to Broad Street Park, where a crowd waited. He leaped atop a tractor-trailer and shot a fist into the air. “This is the twenty-seventh time that I’ve been arrested,” he announced. “And I ain’t going to jail no more. The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothin’. What we gonna start sayin’ now is Black Power!”
“Black Power!” the crowd roar
ed.
Another activist, Willie Ricks, jumped atop the trailer and joined Carmichael. “What do you want?” Ricks hollered.
“Black Power!”
“What do we want?”
“Black Power!”
Black Power. For the first time the rising tide of black anger had not only a new face, in Stokely Carmichael, but a name: Black Power. Carmichael’s speech electrified the nation. The NAACP’s Roy Wilkins called the term “the father of hatred and the mother of violence.” In a speech the very next night in Greenwood, King himself told his audience, “Some people are telling us to be like our oppressor, who has a history of using Molotov cocktails, who has a history of dropping the atomic bomb, who has a history of lynching Negroes. Now people are telling me to stoop down to that level. I’m sick and tired of violence.” But it was too late. The movement of white Freedom Riders and speeches by Dr. King was ending.
In its place a new movement was taking shape, but exactly what it would look like, no one could say. Carmichael himself, in a television appearance on Face the Nation and in later speeches, struggled to define Black Power. To him, it appeared to mean a grasp for economic and political power by a movement run by blacks—and only blacks. Yet his use of incendiary language—“when you talk about Black Power, you talk about bringing this nation to its knees”—only emboldened those whose vision of “power” meant burning, rioting, and worse. White America certainly had no difficulty defining Black Power. In a jarring juxtaposition, a Life cover that summer featured a tearful Elizabeth Taylor—in an unrelated story—beneath the headline PLOT TO GET WHITEY: RED-HOT YOUNG NEGROES PLAN A GHETTO WAR. The story, focusing on a fringe militant group inspired by Robert Williams, the Revolutionary Action Movement, known as RAM, noted: “In secret recesses of any ghetto in the U.S. there are dozens and hundreds of black men working resolutely toward an Armageddon in which Whitey is to be either destroyed or forced to his knees.”