Photo: Anshu

Reflections of a Black Convert: Part I – A House in the World | Part II | Part III

By Anthony Hardy

“Remember – no matter what you achieve in life,” my mother told me when I was an eight-year-old child, “you will always be nothin’ but a nigger to them.” She looked at me with the piercing eyes only a mother has, the ones that see past your face and penetrate your soul. “When I brought you into this world, you already had three strikes against you: you’re Black, you’re a male, and you’re poor. You ain’t gonna get the same kinda leeway these White folks get.”

It’s the same admonishment all Black parents in America give their children at some point, though maybe not as candidly as my mother did. Above all else, she was a pragmatist and a martinet. Being a poor, single, Black woman in the American South will fashion a pragmatist; the desire to protect your three children from the negative influences of the environment will harden even the softest of hands. When my mother spoke these immortal words to me, the Civil Rights Act of 1965 had been the law of the land for some thirty-nine years; the landmark Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education had been so for forty-five years; and the Civil Rights Act of 1968 – deemed the Fair Housing Act – had been law for thirty-six. Adequate instruction was still a necessity for survival in an ostensibly “integrated” world, particularly for Black males.

My Sustainer saw it fit to fashion me Black and to place me in a poor, deeply rooted Black Catholic community located in a portion of the Bible Belt South. The cathedral serving the community was originally constructed in the late 1800s to serve the ecclesiastic needs of German, Italian and Irish immigrants. A group of nuns opened a school for Blacks and Creoles a few years after the completion of the cathedral. The descendants of emancipated slaves flocked to Roman Catholicism from Protestantism searching for education for their children, as back in those days, Catholics were known for their stellar parochial educational institution. My great grandfather, so my mother told me, was among those individuals who converted seeking something better for his progeny. I would like to think some of those Blacks even shared the pews with their fellow White Catholics.

If so, not for long: the ninety years of Jim Crow laws and the deceptive fallacy of “separate but equal” bifurcated the community. Many of the recent European immigrants who were maligned for being Catholic were able to purchase Whiteness at a fairly cheap price. And then there was the White Flight, the embodiment of discriminatory housing legislation, urban planning, government subsidies, social engineering, predatory economic exploitation, and even physical violence that gave genesis to the coveted suburbs and exurbs, the culmination of the illusionary confluence of separation and equality. These were Jim Crow at its finest—the holy grail of the ever-elusive American Dream, built off the backs of Blacks through savagery, thievery, and connivery.

Long before my mother came into the world in the early 1960s, only Blacks attended the church. Most of the Whites in the surrounding area had long disappeared. In their absence, the powers that be erected in the center of what would become the community of my birth a sewage and water treatment plant. The house of my grandmother, the house in which I was to be raised, was juxtaposed with the cesspool. The cathedral where I was to be baptized was a ten-minute walk down street from the plant; the elementary school where I was to be educated was a fifteen-minute walk from it. For decades, everyone in the vicinity woke up, worked, and laid down to the putrid stench of excrement and chemicals. Some people would even die with the fumes in their breast, said my grandmother.

The smell had not abated when I came into the picture. Sometimes, it was so bad I remember my mother and grandmother praying for God to command the winds to take the fumes. At times, those prayers were answered; other times, we just had to bear it. Allāh subhanahu wa ta`ala (exalted is He), in His Infinite Wisdom, had coined for me a parable using my own childhood as to what I should expect from my existence as a Black man in America.

Said Moses to his people, “Seek help through Allah and be patient. Indeed, the earth belongs to Allah. He causes to inherit it whom He wills of His servants. And the [best] outcome is for the righteous,” (Qur’ān, 7:128).

“Ain’t much else you can do,” both my mother and grandmother would say, “but suffer it and go on.”

✻✻✻

Muslims often ask me what brought me to Islam. By way of preamble, I inform people of the obvious – that I’m a Black man – and the not so obvious – that I hail from the South. I then ask them to couple these facts with their own imagination as to why a man in my position from this part of America would accept the message of the unlettered, gentile Prophet ﷺ. Most of my interlocutors, at this point, have inklings as to some of the reasons—a sign, I hope, that people at the very least comprehend the connection between the social and historical realities and the theological consequences of those realities.

I then proceed to tell them this. In fifth grade, at a private Catholic school attended predominantly by White middle and upper class children, a fourth grader, a White kid, said, “All you Black people should still be slaves!” after I bested him in a game of basketball. Were it not for some childhood friends restraining me, I surely would have beaten him to Hell and back.

When I got home that evening, I started thinking about certain aspects of Christianity, at least as I understood them at the time. It possibly had something to do with the imagery often used in Catholic churches, chiefly pictures of a European Jesus and his equally European mother and disciples, and how inconsistent I thought it was for Blacks in America to be worshipping someone or something that so closely resembled our debasers. This kid and his parents believed that in accepting a certain theological interpretation of a historical event – the supposed crucifixion and resurrection of Christ – they were somehow absolved of their sins and thus would not have to answer for them. Yet I believed, even back then, people should be held accountable before God for their actions. I never told my mother what happened. She might have razed the school and maybe even the church.

Two years later, I found myself in an under-funded, dilapidated public middle school, an institution befitting of the low property taxes in its proximity, surrounded by teenagers who were more my peers, mostly poor Blacks and a few poor Whites. My mother withdrew me from the Catholic school because she could no longer afford the expensive tuition and because she was afraid I would “become White.” Back then I lacked the insight as to how one could “become White” and was unsure what that meant. I was sure, though, the strange white substance hanging exposed from the ceiling of the school was asbestos and that neighboring the school were a liquor store and a scrap metal yard. I was sure many of the teachers were not qualified for their positions, and those that were had to deal with sparse resources. I was sure many didn’t care at all: they were paid just to show up and leave.

The altercation with the fourth grader haunted me still, and because of it, I spent many nights wandering the streets of my neighborhood, agonizing over both social and theological issues as best I could. Although I believed in Him and although I was starting to challenge foundational Christian beliefs such as the Trinity and Vicarious Atonement, I also thought He was totally indifferent to our suffering or to the suffering of others. I never entertained the question of whether God existed; my concern was, rather, did God care? I wrestled with the wisdom of God putting my family in the position He did. I thought we denizens of ghettos and trailer parks were God’s bastard children, His “mistakes” in the way parents in our society often refer to their children, the ones He created by accident. Like our own derelict fathers, I figured He just left us to rot in the dirty armpits of America. I began to consider maybe there was something inherent to our nature that warranted our condition; or maybe we were guilty of some unknown transgression against Him that necessitated our status in society as just recompense. He seemed to prefer Whites, wealthy ones at that—they were made in His image after all. Why wouldn’t one want to “become White” in that case? Maybe, I reasoned, some element of their being was more favorable to the Almighty. Maybe He played favorites with His creation, the Whiter the better in His eyes. As such, I found myself wishing I looked more like them: wishing my skin color was just a little lighter, my hair was less coarse and kinky, my butt and legs were not as big. I was coming into tauhīd (belief in the oneness of God) in one sense but not in others.

I encountered my first Muslim a few months before I started college. She was a Black woman in her mid-fifties, a former member of the Nation of Islam in her youth who had embraced Sunni Islam later in life. She in many ways reminded of my mother, religious yet down-to-earth, profane yet wise. In fact, had my mother been Muslim, she would have resembled this woman. She elucidated the basic tenets of Islam, which I was eager to accept. I claim if one is predisposed to believing in God and prophets, the message of Islam will inevitably reverberate at a recognizable frequency; however, that being said, this woman, because of her background, possessed a manner of relaying the message that resonated with me on a personal level. Had someone else been placed in my path, I might not have been as receptive to the message. Allāhu `Alim (God is All-Knowing).

✻✻✻

Muslims often do not ask what happened after my conversion. In my experience, this appears to be less concerning to them, seeing as how the question seldom surfaces, which is a sad turn of affairs since that response is I think more beneficial and instructive.

Even after I declared shahadah (the declaration of faith in Islam), it took me many years of thinking, soul searching, reading the Qur’ān, considering the life of the Prophet (s), along with a hefty dose of Malcolm X, to reach conclusions about God that were more in line with Islam. I gave much thought to Allāh and how He relates to the suffering and downtrodden in societies, particularly Blacks in America: certain ideas about Blackness in the American context had to be challenged within my own being; ideas about Whiteness had to be jettisoned; old worldviews needed to be dismantled and new ones assembled. The psycho-spiritual furniture and psychological hardwiring in my mind and in my heart needed to be rearranged. The existential angst all humans experience borne of the paradox of infinite potential and mortal finitude needed to be directed towards a different qibla (direction Muslims face in prayer). It’s taken for granted that conversion is a process, not an event.

Not too much time elapsed following my conversion before I became acquainted with how the Muslim community actually functions in terms of race, color, class, and culture. Growing up in ghettos and trailer parks grants one amazing powers of perception. In addition to seeking God, I suppose I was also longing for a haven in the houses of Allāh against the monumental tribulation of being Black in America, a place of brief reprieve. I figured if anyone could understand us Blacks it would be the Muslims, who not only possessed a sizeable Black contingency, but who also by this point, post 9/11, were just as much the objects of unjust scrutiny as we were. I was, as it turned out, quickly disabused of this naïve notion: I went from Whites calling me “slave” to Arabs calling me ‘abd (literally, Arabic for “slave”, sometimes used in a derogatory manner to refer to Black individuals), I went from getting leery looks from Whites to getting them from South Asians, I went from Whites calling me “nigger” to Turks calling me zenci (Adopted from the Arabic “zanji”, meaning “one from the land of the Blacks”; more colloquially, the term means “nigger”), I went from hearing from Whites say, “You people can’t marry our children,” to hearing this from Africans, and I went from Whites saying, “You’re scary and uncivilized” to hearing this from non-Black Muslims in general. Not even the fanes of God were exempt, churches and mosques alike.

I remember, some time after my initial run-ins with the Muslim community, I visited my grandfather who was then eighty-two years old. He is from rustic regions of southern Alabama and had survived Jim Crow, portions of World War II, the Korean War, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Civil Rights Movement. On a whim, I asked my grandfather what he thought about race and if he thought the issue was ameliorating. Given his life experience, I figured his perspective would be valuable.

He gave me this response: “Nowadays, if someone wants to call you ‘nigger,’ they won’t do it your face. There ain’t no more ‘Whites Only’ drinking fountains and pools, ya see. There ain’t no more ‘Whites Only’ neighborhood. But what they do is they say make it so you can’t get a house or a job or they cheat you. They don’t say ‘You can’t live here!’ no mo’ but they make it hard to get a house! The Klan don’t do the lynchings. The police do it now. Ain’t no mo’ poll taxes but they still don’t want us voting! They call you ‘nigger’ but they hide it better. Don’t let them fool ‘bout what they say ‘bout progress. Things is really just the same as they always was.”

When I had this conservation with him, Trayvon Martin hadn’t been killed yet, nor had Jordan Davis, or Oscar Grant or Renisha McBride or John Crawford or Mike Brown. Richard Sherman, I imagine, was probably still in high school, so he wasn’t yet the brash “thug” he would become. And no one was asking for Barack Obama’s birth certificate or questioning his American citizenship.

At least not yet, anyway. I guess the old adage is true: the more things change, the more they remain the same. There is as much literal and figurative ‘nigger’ calling amongst the Muslims in America today as there is in American society at large. Like my great-grandfather before me, I sought something better. As my mother would say though, six in one hand, half a dozen in the other.

I’m looking for a house

In the world

Where the white shadows

Will not fall.

There is no such house,

Dark brothers,

No such house

At all.

—Langston Hughes, “House in the World”

Al-Hajj Malik Al-Shabazz (Malcom X) once described the impact a hadith had on him when he first heard it (during his turn toward orthodoxy) because its implications were so profound. He states in his autobiography in his meeting with Dr. Shawarbi, “he dropped on me something whose logic would never get out of my head. He said, ‘No man has believed perfectly until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.’”¹

This oft-repeated statement of the Prophet Muhammad (saw)² needs deep appreciation today, perhaps the type of appreciation that our social reformer Malcom X had for it. Some of the scholars commented on the word “brother” in the hadith, and said this means not only our Muslim brothers, but actually is referring to all of our brothers and sisters in humanity!³ It is applicable on an individual level, as well as a societal level. Wanting a public health care option for those who are in need of medical attention and are being denied, is part of perfecting the iman (faith/belief) of those who would call themselves Muslims. Furthermore, protecting life, and thereby health is one of the Five (agreed upon) Primary Objectives of Islamic Law, known in Arabic as “Maqaasid Ash-Shariah.”

There is an Islamic legal maxim which states “Maa laa yatim al-waajib illa bihi fahuwa waajib.” This means: That which is needed in order to accomplish something obligatory, becomes in and of itself obligatory. If in order to protect life, we need hospitals, doctors, nurses, clinics, functional medical educational institutions, affordable healthcare, etc. then all of this becomes a communal obligation (Fard Kiffayah) for the society. It is mentioned that in the time of Imam Abu Hamid Al-Ghazzali, many people were sending their children to study Islamic Jurisprudence to the point that he feared a shortage of those in the field of medicine, so he encouraged people to become doctors so that this Fard Kiffayah would be met.⁴

Healthcare is a human right. Protecting access to healthcare for everyone is an Islamic obligation, incumbent upon our communities. If some people are establishing a communal obligation, the responsibility is lifted from everyone else. However, if no one is establishing it, all the Muslims share in the sin.⁵ In our case, we have alhamdulilah, Muslim organizations on the scene, but they are also asking for our help. They need our participation for the will of our community to be represented in the healthcare debates.

As a community, let us take this Ramadan to better understand the beautiful guidance we have within Islam. Let us understand the statements of the Prophet (saw) not only as commanding excellence in perfecting our souls, but also as commanding excellence in perfecting our civilization. Islam encourages organization and structure, as this hadith could not be implemented without it. Taking care of the needs of large numbers of people means Muslims must be organized and trained to fulfill the humanitarian, social, economic, political, educational and spiritual needs of the societies in which we live. This is what it means to wish well for one another! Subhan Allah, Ramadan is not only a month to purify ourselves spiritually, but also to prepare ourselves for living and conveying the moral message of Islam in all aspects of our lives. May Allah help us!

Please see video and call the number:

http://pol.moveon.org/healthcare_cantwait/?id=17194-2566375-ICjt5lx&t=2

Related Articles:

Muslim Physicians on the Front Line of National Health Care Battle:

http://www.masnet.org/views.asp?id=5404

MAS Freedom Legislative Agenda, Article III:

http://masnet.org/takeaction.asp?id=5360

The healthcare debate raging around the country centers on partisanship and the limitations of the government. As Muslims, the question is not one of the public debt or pulling oneself up via bootstraps, but of social responsibility. Stories of the Prophet Muhammad (S) and sahabahs donating for charity and ensuring the well-being of the Muslim ummah paint a picture of how proactive the leaders of a community should be.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2008 that 46.3 million Americans age 18-65 are not covered by any form of healthcare. Yet if “society is responsible to God for the welfare of the individual,” as Hammudah Abdalati, author of Islam in Focus, puts it, why have Muslims not stepped up to the plate to change the status quo? According to Islamic code, a person is entitled to “security and care, should he become disabled” (Abdalati). By default, Muslims should encourage a governing body with these same priorities.

Under the America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, the millions of uninsured Americans will qualify for a public option. Regulations for the private sector will also apply to government-provided care, which will be funded solely by premiums. A summary provided by the House Committee on Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce, and Education and Labor proposes that the public option operate on a “level playing field.”

Additionally, private insurers will be unable to “engage in discriminatory practices” or “exclude coverage of treatments for pre-existing health conditions,” establishing a minimum quality standard for coverage (H.R. 3200). The goals of this bill include “affordability… competition… prevent[ion] of waste, fraud, and abuse.”

“The individual is responsible for the common welfare and prosperity of his society,” Abdalati preaches, and so does the healthcare proposal. The issue boils down to our duty as citizens of this country, and as Muslims. The community should be the proponent of reform and change, rather than a roadblock to the well-being of the public.

Sources:

FactCheck.org
CDC.gov
OpenCongress.org
Islam in Focus by Hammudah Abdalati

The Missing Malcolm: An Interview with Manning Marable

IN YOUR new biography of Malcolm, Malcolm X: A Life of the Invention, you discuss three missing chapters from Alex Haley’s collaboration with Malcolm, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. What’s happened to them? And what’s their importance to understanding Malcolm’s life?

THEY’RE IN the safe of an attorney named Gregory Reed. He’s in Detroit, Michigan. They’re in his safe. And, he has them and doesn’t show them to people. Now why does he have them? How did that happen? Well, in late 1992, I believe October, there was an auction of the Alex Haley estate and for $100,000, he bought these chapters that were discarded from the autobiography.

Alex Haley was the ghostwriter and co-author of the book. You have to remember that Haley went on to great fame as the author of Roots, one of the largest-selling books in American history and a docudrama on television that had a profound impact on race relations in the late 1970s. Haley was deeply hostile to Malcolm X’s politics. He was a Republican, he was opposed to Black nationalism, and he was an integrationist. He had been in the Coast Guard for twenty years. But, he also knew a good thing when he saw it.

A charismatic, handsome, articulate Black leader who had a controversial past as a hustler, a pimp, a drug addict, a numbers runner, “Detroit Red,” “Little Gangster,” “Little Bugsy Siegel,” who supposedly terrorized the Harlem community in the 1940s and went to jail and was given ten years in prison. He goes through a metamorphosis, he becomes a Black Muslim, he comes out, he explodes onto the scene. He creates seventy to eighty new mosques in less than ten years, turns a small sect of 400 people into fifty- to one hundred thousand by 1960–62. Then, he turns more overtly to politics, he breaks from the Nation of Islam (NOI), he builds two new organizations, the Muslim Mosque Incorporated in March 1964 and the Organization of Afro-American Unity in May 1964. He goes to Africa and the Mideast. He is treated as the head of state. He is welcomed at the Fateh by the Saudi royal household. He sits down with Gamal, eats breakfast with Anwar Sadat in Egypt. He caucuses and meets and gets to know Che Guevara while he’s in Africa, as he alludes to in a talk in 1964 at the Audubon Ballroom. So Malcolm is this extraordinary figure, dies at the age of thirty-nine. It’s a hell of a story. Haley understood that. And so, it was on those terms he agreed to work with Malcolm to write the book. But, what Malcolm didn’t know was that Haley already was compromised and had basically been a purveyor of information—a kind of, not informant, but a client of the FBI in this disinformation campaign against the NOI. Haley had collaborated with the FBI. Malcolm never knew that. In the summer of sixty-four when Malcolm was in Egypt, Haley was taking the book manuscript and giving it to an attorney, William O’Dwyer, rewriting passages of the book trying to get it passed as Malcolm’s survey. Malcolm’s on the run, people are trying to kill him, they’re trying to poison him in Egypt. He’s not going to have time to look at the book carefully. Then, he dies.

Haley adds a seventy-nine-page appendix to the book where he has his own integrationist and liberal Republican interpretation. And then, they have M.S. Handler of the New York Times writing in the front of the book. I mean, you know Malcolm respected Handler. But this is not who you want to lead in to a Black revolutionary’s text. So Haley did a variety of things to reframe the book. And, toward the end of the book, there’s a lot of language in it that simply doesn’t sound like Malcolm. It doesn’t sound like him. There’s a lot of information that is just wrong in the book. They misspelled “As-Salamu Alaykum” several times. They give the story of Johnson Hinton. They have Hinton Johnson. They put the date of this very tragic beating of this brother who’s in the Nation, Brother Johnson, in 1959, rather than the year it actually occurred, which was April 1957. So there are simple mistakes in dates, of names, events that clearly show Malcolm did not have access to the final manuscript. He didn’t see it. And it was published nine months after Malcolm’s death. Betty Shabazz was in no shape to check and recheck facts. So all that says to me is you have to read the autobiography very, very carefully, very suspiciously. It’s a wonderful book. It is a great work of literature. But it is a work of literature. It is not an autobiography. It’s a memoir. And it’s gone through the prism of Haley who was a Republican, integrationist, and a defender of U.S. power. You should read the anticommunist articles he wrote for the Reader’s Guide in the mid-fifties on Hungary. This is the man you’re dealing with. So we must be very careful. I learned I had to deconstruct the autobiography to write the biography. If you go to www.malcolmxproject.net, you will see my biography, the architecture of that, and how I had to deconstruct the autobiography. That’s why we put up the Web site.

WHAT DO you suspect is contained in these missing three chapters?

WELL, I’VE seen them for about fifteen minutes. I met with Gregory. I’ve written about this in my book, Living Black History, which came out last year. Living Black History has a whole chapter on this. I couldn’t use it in the autobiography, but I had to tell the story to somebody. I talked with Gregory on the phone. He’s an attorney. He bought it for $100,000. He wanted to make money off of the material. So I phone him up, we talk. He says, “Fly out to Detroit. Meet with me. Come to my law office. There, I’ll show you the chapters.” As honesty suggests, I get to Detroit. He said, “Don’t come to my office. Are you downtown?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Meet me at this restaurant in an hour.” I go there. He’s about a half hour late. He eventually shows up. And he’s carrying a briefcase. And then he said, “I’ll let you see these for fifteen minutes.” I’ve flown from New York and I have fifteen minutes to read the text. “I’ll let you sit here and read them and I’ll leave and I’ll come back.”

I’m sitting here frantically reading these pages. But it only takes me a few minutes to recognize what they are. They were obviously written sometime between August 1963 to December 1963. There’s a presumption in the text that Malcolm is still in the Nation of Islam. So he hasn’t broken with the Nation yet. What they call for is the construction of an unprecedented Black united front, uniting all Black organizations, led by, get this, the Nation of Islam. So Malcolm is envisioning the Nation actively participating in antiracist struggles and building various types of capacities: economic strategies, housing strategies, health-care strategies with the NAACP, with the Urban League, with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). So he wanted to push this religious kind of semi-Islamic organization into Black civil society in an aggressive way. He wanted to open up the Nation. And, I strongly suspect that Malcolm’s drive and push to reach out to the civil rights community and SNCC and CORE is what got him into trouble inside of the NOI, because the bulk of the NOI had been thoroughly against Malcolm’s proselytization efforts that brought in tens of thousands of new members. The old guard felt threatened by that. Then on top of that, since April 1962, the turning point in Malcolm’s career was the murder of Ronald Stokes in the Nation of Islam’s mosque in Los Angeles. Malcolm flies out to LA and spends over a week there and he calls for a grand coalition, very much like the coalition he talked about in the deleted chapters, with CORE, the NAACP, with SNCC that would be anti-police violence against Black people. And, he was talking about the Nation of Islam participating in that coalition. Elijah Muhammad said “time out,” called Malcolm down and said “you better chill that out and get the hell out of Los Angeles.” Malcolm was deeply embarrassed and humiliated that they had to end the mobilization after they had a member murdered by the LAPD. Other men in the Nation in the mosque were dragged outside, strip-searched naked to humiliate them. And Malcolm had mobilized people and he had to back down.

Malcolm came back to New York and by July 1962 is speaking at a Local 1199 union protest. I have a photo of him speaking at a protest rally in July for the labor union, King’s favorite union, 1199, the largest union today in New York City. In Christmas time in 1962, two members of the Nation, who were selling Muhammad Speaks in Times Square, get arrested by the police. How does Malcolm respond? He puts 140 to 150 Fruit of Islam members—the paramilitary organization, the men in the NOI—demonstrating in Times Square on New Year’s Day. Elijah Muhammad called for no demonstrations, no overt political activity. That’s not what Malcolm’s doing. That’s exactly what he’s doing. And he starts doing that a year and a half before the silencing, before the break.

So you know what happens? The Nation of Islam’s newspaper Muhammad Speaks in late 1962 stops covering Malcolm X. If you go through methodically the last year from December 1962 through December 1963, guess what? You see Malcolm once in his own newspaper. And he’s the national spokesman. You see him more often in the New York Times. And this is like a year before the break. So you can already see where he’s going. It doesn’t take a mind reader to see that Elijah Muhammad only used the “chickens coming home to roost” statement [by Malcolm X, in response to John F. Kennedy’s November 1963 assassination] as an excuse to do what they wanted to do, which was to eliminate Malcolm’s influence, curb his politics. I think that they believed he would submit. Most of Malcolm’s closest followers within the Nation thought he would also submit. They weren’t prepared for a break. Malcolm contemplated a break. I think maybe he wasn’t prepared either. But he did anticipate a possibility of it.

He began, in early 1964, talking with a number of people outside of the Nation of Islam to develop the OAAU, the Organization of Afro-American Unity. When he left the Nation, very few members of the NOI went with him, perhaps maybe 100. The mosque in Harlem had as many as 7,000 members. Only 100–150 left. They became the Muslim Mosque Incorporated (MMI), and Sunni Muslims. But the OAAU was the secular organization with largely working-class and middle-class Blacks and many professionals, writers like Huey and Mayfield, historians like John Henrik Clark. The key organizer was Lynn Shifflet of NBC News, a producer, a young Black woman in her late twenties. There were real tensions between the OAAU and the MMI over ideology and their relationship to Malcolm, because Malcolm increasingly was moving toward the politics of the OAAU, away from the MMI, even though these were people who had put their lives on the line to leave the NOI out of personal loyalty to him. So there were tremendous tensions between these two groups, which I will document in the biography.

SO THE Organization of Afro-American Unity really is the culmination of, or the product of, the development of Malcolm’s thought that was written about by Haley in these last three chapters?

THE CHAPTERS that are missing are written prior to the split. Haley says that Malcolm changed his mind after he went to Mecca and decided to deep-six the chapters. Maybe that’s true. We’ll never know. What is true is that it would be nice to print the things that were deleted, put an addendum and appendix on the autobiography. It would be nice to see it. Well I’m not sure. Don’t hold your breath. I saw it for fifteen minutes. Maybe I’m the lucky one. But eventually they will appear. We will see them.

There has been an active suppression of Malcolm’s work and his intellectual legacy for more than forty years. And the suppression has been deliberate and for various reasons. First, many of the key people in his entourage in the Nation and in the OAAU had to go underground. I just interviewed this week James 67X Shabazz (Abdullah Razzaq) who went underground and lived in Guyana for nineteen years, because he was threatened with murder and also threatened by the FBI. So it’s only now in his mid-seventies that he’s returned to the United States several months a year. He lives in Brooklyn with his son. James 67X was Malcolm’s chief-of-staff and his secretary for many years. The others who were closest to Malcolm are now dead. There is Herman Ferguson who is the best eyewitness to the murder. I’ve interviewed him several times and I’m interviewing him once more next week, which will be fun. His eyewitness to the murder, his recount to me, which has partially been published in my journal Souls, is absolutely stunning and it raises many questions about the assassination.

We have, over the last seven years, worked very hard to develop a forensic accounting of the murder. And, we believe we have figured out how the murder took place. That is, the forensics of it. We think we know how that happened. We don’t know who gave the order. But I can tell you what our theory is. The murder took place on February 21, 1965, as a result of the culmination of three separate groups. There was no classic conspiracy, no direct collusion, but, rather, a convergence. Three things had to happen for the murder to take place, and they all did. Law enforcement, the FBI and the NYPD, and its Bureau of Special Services (BOSS), which was its red squad, actively wanted to do surveillance disruption of Malcolm X and possibly eliminate him; certainly the FBI, because their nightmare was seeing King and Malcolm embrace. That was their nightmare. And they realized much to their horror that they were far better off with Malcolm in the Nation of Islam than outside of it, because then he was being treated like a head of state in Africa. They had never anticipated that he would be a houseguest of a Saudi royal family, or that he would be speaking to parliaments from Kenya to Ghana to French Guinea. Malcolm goes to Alabama, three weeks before he’s murdered and reaches out to Dr. King. King is in prison after leading demonstrations. Malcolm goes to Coretta Scott King and he says, “I want you to convey to your husband my deepest respect for him and that I am not trying to undermine Dr. King’s work. My goal is to be to the left of Dr. King, to challenge institutional racism so that those in power can negotiate with King. That’s my role.” So Malcolm understood what his role was. This was the FBI’s nightmare. And so they actively wanted to curtail his influence, if not silence him permanently.

Then you have the Nation of Islam. But what people need to understand is that there were different points of view in the NOI about Malcolm. Some of the leadership, especially in Chicago, the national secretary John Ali, the national head of the Fruit of Islam Raymond Shareef, Elijah Muhammad’s son-in-law Herbert Muhammad, the sons of Elijah Muhammad, Jr., and several others wanted to silence Malcolm permanently. Joseph X, who was a captain of the Fruit of Islam and the Northeast regional security director at Mosque No. 7, formerly Malcolm’s associate and friend, as was John Ali—they actively sought to eliminate him, to blow him up with bombs, to kill him, or firebomb his home or whatever. But other members of the Nation of Islam were against the murder and it is questionable if Elijah Muhammad ever gave the order. It could have been a situation very much like Henry II and Thomas Becket where somebody’s ridding him of his priest. So he doesn’t have to give the order, but the deed is done. It’s understood what needs to be done. But he doesn’t technically give the order.

Then there’s a third group and that’s Malcolm’s own entourage. There were police informants in the group. Gene Roberts who tries to resuscitate Malcolm after he’s shot is an NYPD police officer. He’s a police officer who walks right directly out of the line of fire only seconds before the fuselage goes off—maybe by accident, maybe by design. What is true is that whenever Malcolm spoke, there were at least two dozen cops. There were only two police officers in the Audubon that day and they were assigned as far away in the distance as possible in the building. They were in the rows, in very small-rows in a ballroom adjacent to the large grand ballroom, but separated by a wall and then a vestibule. It was impossible for them to protect Malcolm. There was one police officer in a small park directly across the street from the entrance of the Audubon. No other police officers. They’d been pulled back to the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital four blocks away. No captain, and the guard is usually sitting in the second floor in a booth where they collect money that directly faces the ballroom. You have to walk right past it to get out of the building. No police in the building. Why?

Malcolm gets shot. The hospital, they try to get the ambulance. They can’t get an ambulance. It’s only four blocks away. So men run to the hospital’s emergency room, grab a gurney, and carry his body in a gurney in the street. Seems odd, doesn’t it? His own men, no one checks for weapons at the door. None of the guards are armed. I’ve gone through New York’s Municipal Archives, the police reports of all the guards that day, of every guard. We’ve gone through all that. We know who they were and their names and the changes of the guards. There were three changes of the guards. One around 2:00, one around 2:30, and one about 2:55. We know that several people who were guarding Malcolm that day were not generally part of the OAAU and were assigned to sensitive positions. Guards like William George, who normally guarded Malcolm on the roster were assigned to be as far away from him as possible that day at the front of the building, not next to Malcolm on the rush. The guards who were there rolled out of the way. And Malcolm was naked and alone on the stage.

There’s only one man who could have placed the guards there that way and that was Malcolm’s head of security, Reuben Francis. Francis is the one who does shoot Hayer, who did indeed shoot Malcolm. But Hayer is interviewed very briefly by the NYPD, he’s arrested briefly. They let him go on bond. Then he disappears off planet Earth. And the FBI said, “We can’t find him. We believe he’s in Mexico.” But prior to his disappearance, he’s not even called to the grand jury, even though he’s the only one who shot anybody who was an assassin.

The NYPD doesn’t even interview Capt. Joseph, the head of the Fruit of Islam, at Mosque No. 7, even though, to a room of over 120 people, he cold orders Malcolm’s death. There are witnesses to this. And the FBI doesn’t interview him? We found a folder that said Joseph X and it was empty. There were six men who killed Malcolm, not three. Two of the men who were incarcerated and given life sentences were innocent, Norman Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson. They were innocent. They were sent to prison for life. Why? They weren’t even physically there. Johnson used to be Malcolm’s chauffeur. He used to stand out in the rain in front of Mosque No. 7 or in the snow, holding and reserving a parking space for Malcolm when he drove up. He used to phone him and tell him that he was coming before he arrived. Once a month, he went to go grocery shopping for Betty, Malcolm’s wife. You would know this guy if he came to kill you. Everybody would’ve known him if he had walked into the Audubon that day. He wasn’t there that day. Butler was an enforcer for Capt. Joseph. He was a notorious thug in the Nation. They would have known if they walked into the Audubon that day. The two men weren’t there that day and yet they were convicted of murdering Malcolm X. Why?

I believe the district attorney was protecting informants within Malcolm’s group and within the NOI. And perhaps some of those informants were collaborators and committed the crime. So they convicted the wrong people to cover and protect the anonymity of their own agents. That’s a theory. I can’t prove it, but I think we ought to explore it and we should reopen this case. And, hopefully my book will help reopen it. William Kunstler tried to reopen it back in 1977–78 and he failed because he didn’t have the evidence I have. Hopefully, we can reopen it again.

THE DOMINANT understanding of Malcolm’s life and meaning in mainstream American popular culture really comes from two sources: Haley and Spike Lee’s film. Spike Lee’s interpretation of the assassination shows a Malcolm, who seems to be prepared for his own martyrdom and orders his guards not to be armed on that day, in a way that King with his mountaintop speech also appears to be prepared for what he seems to think is his inevitable fate. Is that a damaging interpretation?

NO, IT’S not and it may be true. Malcolm clearly knew he was going to die. He didn’t know when and I strongly suspect that Malcolm was not going to run away from death and he had the courage to face death. Not that he wanted to die, he didn’t have a death wish. But he had the courage to face death. There is a story, a very influential legend within Shia Islam, about Ali and his son Husayn, both of whom perished in a kind of murder in the cathedral, in the case of Ali in the mosque, and in his son’s case at Karbala where he was killed in, I believe, 682 in common era. About four years later, women came to Karbala, in today’s Iraq, and began to beat themselves and lament that they had not protected the son of Ali. In Shia, Ali is the Shia that we have today. They still gather every year at Karbala. Now hundreds of thousands and maybe a million people lament the events of Karbala. There is nothing greater in Shia Islam than martyrdom, the embrace of death for a higher belief. And to some extent, I think that Malcolm embodied that at that moment. Not that he sought death, but that he did not fear it. That he saw in his martyrdom a way to transcend death that there would be a life after death. I’m sure he was familiar with the legend. Who knows? Perhaps that influenced his actions.

WHAT WILL your biography broadly do to assert a new Malcolm X, itself a reinvention of Malcolm X, as your book is titled, because he reinvented himself many times? What will it do to displace Haley and Spike Lee as the dominant understanding of Malcolm X’s life and meaning?

THERE ARE three core things in the book. The first is what I call a kind of a life of reinvention. Malcolm’s tale is a hero’s tale that’s not unlike Odysseus—a story of travel, of learning, of experience, of ordeals and tests, a classic kind of hero story. It’s a classic Greek story, which frequently or usually ends in death. But at the end, there’s a broader, richer, deeper, critical consciousness that’s achieved. The thing about that story is that Malcolm’s growth comes through a series of artful creative reinventions. He reinvents himself even to the point these reinventions have different names. He was “Jack Carlton” in the summer of 1944. When he was nineteen years old, he wanted to break into show biz and he was at Lobster Pond bar on Forty-Second Street in Midtown Manhattan working as a drummer and professional dancer for about three or four months. He doesn’t write about that in the autobiography. You just have to find out about that. He worked in a bar and grill in Harlem, Jimmy’s Chicken Shack, alongside of the funniest dishwasher and server in Harlem, a guy who had red hair. Malcolm had red hair. So they called Malcolm “Detroit Red” cause nobody had ever heard of Lansing, Michigan, and they called the brother from Chicago “Chicago Red.” His last name was Sanford. We know him today better as Red Foxx, the comedian. So Malcolm and Red Foxx worked in the same restaurant in 1943 and early 1944. He does mention something of this in the autobiography. Malcolm in prison called himself at times Malachi Shabazz. He was Malcolm X. He was El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. He had many, many different names: “Detroit Red,” “Homeboy,” “Mascot,” “Satan” when he was in prison. Yet, through these transformations, he was able to navigate brilliantly a life of reinvention.

What makes Malcolm different from every signature Black figure in American history is that he combines the two central characters of Black folk culture. He is both the trickster and the minister. He’s both. That’s “Detroit Red”—the hustler, the gambler, the outlaw. And, he is also the minister who saves souls, who redeems lives, who heals the sick, who raises the dead. He’s both. King is one. Jesse Jackson is one. Malcolm’s both and he understood the streets and the lumpen proletariat. I hate that phrase, but it comes from Marx. As well as, he saw himself as a minister and an Amun, a cleric. He was always this. And he embodied the cultural spirit of Black folk better than anyone else. When I asked one student about a decade ago, “What was the fundamental difference between Malcolm and Martin?” He said, “Dr. Marable, that’s easy. Martin Luther King, Jr., belongs to the entire world. Malcolm X belongs to us.” There is a tremendous degree of identification on the part of people of African descent, and globally on the part of Muslims, invested in the figure of Malcolm. The very first postage stamp honoring Malcolm X was issued not by the United States but by the Ayatollah Khomeini government of Iran, in 1982, by the Shia Muslims. Perhaps they knew something that everybody else didn’t know.
The second theme in the book is a spiritual journey and Malcolm’s growth in a spiritual sojourn from the periphery of Islam represented by the Nation of Islam to Sunni Islam. There was a price in the journey because he also had to embrace Nasser’s definition of what Islam was in the Pan Arab world. So we have some excellent very interesting articles and speeches Malcolm gave in Cairo. The writings that he did, very critical of the state of Israel in the summer and September 1964, cast Malcolm in a very interesting kind of light as it relates to the Arab struggle and the Palestinian struggle, that heretofore, in the United States, we have rarely seen.

The third theme is betrayal. Malcolm had a capacity ethnographically to read an audience better than any public speaker of his generation. He knew people. He could walk into an audience, read it and give a brilliant address. He could debate at Harvard and Oxford, as well as on 125th Street and Lenox Avenue/Seventh Avenue. He was just a remarkable public speaker. But where his failure came was his consistent inability to make critical accurate judgments of the people closest to him who would betray him. And those included his two brothers Philbert and Wilfred Little who sided with Elijah Muhammad against Malcolm; his chief protégé Louis X/Louis Farrakhan who proclaimed Malcolm to be a man worthy of death, who led the jackal’s course leading to his murder. How do we explain Farrakhan? I sat down with Louis for nine hours in an interview a year and a half ago. We had a fascinating conversation about it. The question I ruminate over is, how much of it is true? Then we have Joseph X, the leader of the Fruit of Islam at Mosque No. 7, who Malcolm had promoted, pulled out of the gutter in Detroit in 1952–53, raised him up to be his chief right-hand person, who then would be betray and try to murder him. John Ali, who had been Malcolm’s secretary at Mosque No. 7, who he promoted to the national leadership, who then conspired to murder him. A variety of people. His closest personal friend Charles Kenyatta had been turned out by the police and was probably a police agent, Malcolm’s best friend, which I’ve only just discovered last week because I just got the file. We have some interesting info. So I think between this data and the other things, a big chunk of the book is about the forensic discussion of the murder and our theory of the murder. I think people will have more than enough information.

LET’S BRING this full circle. We’re now sitting in your office in 2007 in Bloom?berg’s New York. We’ve gone through a period of social cleansing that was Giuliani’s New York, characterized by police brutality, intense gentrification, privatization of public housing. And I was today at Friday Juma at the Malcolm Shabazz Mosque in Harlem and the message today was one about homosexuality, as an abnormal and immoral practice. The other message was about self-help and the idea of the community needing to raise itself up and take care of its own problems. What does the Malcolm X of your book say to this current political economic conjuncture?

WELL, AN honest representation of Malcolm should show the whole person and his trajectory and his evolution. The trajectory of Malcolm was increasingly anti-corporate capitalist. He talked about the need not to appeal to the United States to redress grievances, but to take the criminal to court, that is, the court of world opinion at the United Nations. He called for what is today known as a South-South dialogue, that is, between the Caribbean, Blacks in Latin America, Africa, and South Asia that would span across continents that would be in part Arab and Muslim, and part Black and Brown. And, he envisioned a global kind of jihad of worlds against Western imperialism and a need for people who had experienced colonialism to take back the power through international bodies that built broad-based unity transnationally. That was what Malcolm’s politics were. It was not bootstrap capitalism, nor was it gentrification. Nevertheless, once you’re dead, your image is up for grabs. By 1972, Richard Nixon had invited, and Betty Shabazz had agreed to be on the dais of the re-elect Richard M. Nixon for president dinner party in Washington, D.C. This was only six or seven years after Malcolm X’s assassination. So once you’re murdered, you can’t control what people who had some sort of relationship to you—whether they’re married to you, or they’re political affiliates or associates—what choices they make. Sad but true. It is particularly sad that from the masjid or mosque, one hears a kind of message that’s more appropriate to Booker T. Washington than Malcolm X. But, nevertheless, the struggle continues.

MANNING MARABLE is a professor of Public Affairs, Political Science, History and African-American Studies at Columbia University in New York City, and the founder of the Center for Contemporary Black History (CCBH) at Columbia University. He is the author of numerous works, including How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (Boston: South End Press, 1983), Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945–1990 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991), and Living Black History: How Reimagining the African-American Past Can Remake America’s Racial Future (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2006). His current works in progress include a new comprehensive biography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2009).

Simon J. Black, a freelance writer and PhD student at York University in Toronto, interviewed Dr. Marable in New York City. You can find his writing at www.simonjblack.com.

Originally published here