TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/60s/60urban.001

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                                                                                March 5, 1965

RACES

Death and Transfiguration


     Malcolm X had been a pimp, a cocaine addict and a thief. He
was an unashamed demagogue. His gospel was hatred: "Your little
babies will get polio!" he cried to the "white devils." His
creed was violence: "If ballots won't work, bullets will."

     Yet even before his bullet-ripped body went to its grave,
Malcolm X was being sanctified. Negro leaders called him
"brilliant," said he had recently "moderated" his views, blamed
his assassination on "the white power structure," or, in the
case of Martin Luther King, on a "society sick enough to express
dissent with murder." Malcolm's death, they agreed, was a
setback to the civil rights movement.

     Alias John Doe. In fact, Malcolm X -- in life and in death
-- was a disaster to the civil rights movement.

     Malcolm's murder, almost certainly at the hands of the
Black Muslims from whom he had defected, came on a bright Sunday
afternoon in full view of 400 Negroes in the Audubon Ballroom,
a seedy two-story building on Manhattan's upper Broadway.
Characteristically, he had kept his followers waiting for nearly
an hour while he lingered over tea and a banana split at a
nearby Harlem restaurant.

     Entering the auditorium at last, Malcolm cried: "As-salaam
alaikum [Peace be unto you]." The audience replied in unison:
"Wa-alaikum salaam [And unto you be peace]." Suddenly a
disturbance broke out several rows back. "Get your hand off my
pockets!" a man shouted. "Don't be messing with my pockets!" At
the distraction, Malcolm raised his hands. "Now brothers!" he
cried. "Be cool, don't get excited..."

     As he spoke, three men rushed down the aisle toward him.
Eight feet away, they opened fire. One Negro with a double-
barreled sawed-off shotgun blasted Malcolm at point-blank range.
"There was what sounded like an explosion," said a dazed woman.
"I looked at Malcolm, and there was blood running out of his
goatee." Men and women threw themselves to the floor as the
gunmen squeezed off at least a score of shots. Thirteen shotgun
pellets tore into Malcolm's chest and heart; several slugs from
.45-and .38-cal. pistols shattered his thighs and legs. A woman
screamed: "Oh, black folks, black folks, why you got to kill
each other?"

     The man with the shotgun was hit in the left leg by a
bullet from the pistol of a Malcolm X bodyguard. Crippled, he
was caught by Malcolm X's furious followers, knocked down,
kicked and stomped on. Cops rescued him, took him to a
hospital, and charged him with homicide. He was Thomas Hagan,
alias Talmadge Hayer, a New Jersey thug with a dreary police
record.

     Minutes after the shooting, Malcolm's body was lifted from
the stage, placed on a rolling bed that had been wheeled over
from the nearby Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, and rushed
to an emergency operating room. A team of doctors laid open his
chest, tried to revive him via open-heart massage. But Malcolm
X was dead. Because he had not yet been formally identified, he
was at first entered on hospital records as John Doe.

     "That White Rapist." The man who lived as Malcolm X and
died as John Doe was born Malcolm Little, in Omaha on May 19,
1925. His father was a Baptist preacher and an enthusiast for
Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey's "Back to Africa" movement.
The family moved to Lansing, Mich., where, Malcolm claimed,
white racists set fire to his parents' home in 1929. Two years
later, when Malcolm was six, his father was run over by a
streetcar, his body cut almost in half. Police called it an
accident, but Malcolm insisted that his father had been
bludgeoned by whites and placed across the tracks. Soon
afterward his mother was committed to a mental asylum in
Michigan.

     In his youth, Malcolm prided himself on his reddish hair
and light skin, an inheritance from his maternal grandfather, a
white man. Years later he wrote in his autobiography: "I was for
years insane enough to feel that it was some kind of status
symbol to be light-complexioned. Now I hate every drop of that
white rapist's blood that is in me."

     He quit school after the eighth grade, eventually made his
way to New York. Nicknamed "Big Red," he was a gangling zoot-
suiter who fancied yellow-toed shoed and straightened his hair
with lye in a scalp-searing process called "conking." He worked
briefly as a waiter at Small's Paradise, still one of Harlem's
top nightspots. But an honest dollar was not for Malcolm Little.
He was caught pimping on the side and fired. He thereupon turned
himself into a full-time hustler whose specialties were fixing
up white men with Negro whores and Negro men with white whores.
He peddled marijuana, became a cocaine addict and, to satisfy
his $20-a-day craving, took to burglary. In 1946 he wound up
with a ten-year prison sentence in Boston.

     Bleached-Out. At the gloomy state prison in Charlestown,
Malcolm copied a dictionary from A to Z. He wanted to improve
his vocabulary, and he did. He was to become a spell-binding
speaker.

     More important, he learned in prison about the Black
Muslims, an extremist sect founded in Detroit in 1930 by a
shadowy peddler named W. D. Fard, and ruled since Fard's
mysterious disappearance in 1934 by Elijah Muhammad. The Muslims
offered Malcolm what Marcus Garvey had offered his father -- and
then some. They had caparisoned their movement with the
trappings of religion, along with a mythology holding that the
first human beings were Negroes. Other races -- red, yellow and
white -- resulted only after a wicked and long-lived scientist
named Yacub succeeded over many generations of genetic
experiments in achieving a "bleached-out white race of people."

     Paroled in 1952 after serving six years, Malcolm Little
became Malcolm X, loudly acclaimed the Muslims' professed
prohibitions against tobacco, alcohol and pre-or extra-marital
sex. [As Malcolm explained, the X replaces "the white slave-
master name which had been imposed upon my paternal forebears by
some blue-eyed devil." With only a letter of the alphabet to
serve as a surname, Muslims with the same given name add numbers
before the X to keep one another sorted out. There is, for
example, a James 67X. There are, however, Muslims with such
surnames as Ali or Shabazz.] He shrugged off his sordid past on
the ground that "it was all done when I was part of the white
man's Christian world." In 1958, he married a Muslim Sister
named Betty Shabazz before a justice of the peace in Michigan.
"An old hunchbacked white devil performed the wedding," Malcolm
said later, "and all of the witnesses were devils." At the time
of Malcolm's death, Betty was pregnant and the mother of four
children: Daughter Attilah, named after the Hun; Daughter
Quiblah, after Kublai Khan; Daughter Ilyasah, Arabic for Elijah;
and Daughter Lamumbah, named after the Congo's wild-eyed Patrice
Lumumba.

     Savage Speaker. Malcolm soon proved one of Elijah
Muhammad's best recruiters -- in an organization that, then and
now, desperately needed recruits. The Black Muslims had
received little public notice until the civil rights movement
and its street demonstrations catapulted them into the news.
Today, Black Muslims claim up to 250,000 members. A much more
accurate estimate would accord the group 2,000 in New York, 500
in Chicago, 350 in Los Angeles, 230 in Detroit, 220 in
Washington, 150 both in St. Louis and San Francisco, 100 in
Kansas City, under 100 each of 70 other cities, including
Atlanta, New Orleans, Memphis and Jacksonville. Still, it is a
nice racket for Elijah, son of a Georgia sharecropper. He socks
each member for $8.30 in dues a week, requires each to sell (or
pay for) as many as 200 copies of the 20-cent Muslim newspaper
every two weeks, saddles everybody with an additional $125
assessment for Savior's Day, Feb. 26.

     Malcolm was also a savage speaker. After the 1962 plane
crash in France that killed 121 whites from Georgia, he rose
before a Los Angeles audience and said: "I would like to
announce a very beautiful thing that has happened. I got a wire
from God today. He really answered our prayers over in France.
He dropped an airplane out of the sky with over 130 white
people on it because the Muslims believe in an eye for an eye
and a tooth for a tooth. We will continue to pray and we hope
that every day another plane falls out of the sky."

     The Comeuppance. In demand as a speaker, not just among
Negroes but before white civic groups and on college campuses,
Malcolm gained in popularity and became a threat to Elijah
Muhammad's leadership of the Black Muslims.

     All Elijah wanted was a chance to give Malcolm his
comeuppance -- and in 1963 Malcolm offered him the opportunity.
After President Kennedy's assassination, Malcolm publicly called
the murder a case of "the chickens coming home to roost." Cried
he: "Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost
never did make me sad; they've always made me glad."

     This was outrageous enough for Elijah to suspend Malcolm
from the Black Muslim movement. Malcolm quit for keeps, soon had
formed his own white-hating Organization of Afro-American Unity,
and urged Negroes to form rifle clubs.

     Malcolm, who made a point of getting along well with the
press, also began leaking stories of immorality among the
Muslims. In an open letter, he accused Elijah of having fathered
eight illegitimate babies by six teen-age secretaries at Black
Muslim headquarters in Chicago. Other defectors -- including two
of Elijah's sons -- began following Malcolm out of the sect.
Naturally, this did not sit well with Elijah. "Only those who
wish to be led to hell, or to their doom, will follow Malcolm,"
said his biweekly newspaper, Muhammad Speaks. "The die is set,
and Malcolm shall not escape."

     Premonitions & Bombs. From the moment he left the Black
Muslims, Malcolm had premonitions of mortality. "No one can get
out without trouble," he said. "This thing with me will be
resolved by death and violence." For once he was right. Two
weeks ago, in the dead of the night, fire bombs gutted
Malcolm's home in East Elmhurst, N.Y., forcing him to flee with
his family in nightclothes. Malcolm blamed it on the Muslims;
they, in turn, accused Malcolm of planting the bombs in the
house himself, partly for publicity purposes, partly because
they had lent him the house in the first place and were now
about to evict him.

     For a few days the Malcolm X family stayed with friends. On
the eve of his death, Malcolm checked into an $18-a-day room at
the New York Hilton. Within a few hours, three Negroes turned up
in the lobby, began questioning a bellhop about his room number.
They left when hotel detectives started taking an interest in
their interest. Next day Malcolm X left the hotel for a speaking
engagement -- at the Audubon Ballroom.

     Good as Their Word. At the time of his death, Malcolm X
had a hard-core following of no more than 100 -- but he was more
or less admired by thousands who, deep in their hearts, were
pleased by his denunciations of the white devil. "He will be
avenged," said his half sister Mrs. Ella Mae Collins. "We are
going to repay them for what they did to Malcolm," said Leon 4X
Ameer, another turncoat Black Muslim who had a score of his own
to settle -- a Christmas beating in Boston by karate-skilled
bullboys of the Fruit of Islam, the Black Muslim enforcement
"elite." Added Leon 4X: "I don't know if Elijah will live out
the month."

     In their vows of revenge, the Malcolm X followers were as
good as their word. In Harlem, less than 36 hours after the
murder, a fire bomb tossed from an adjacent rooftop through an
upper window of the Black Muslims' Mosque No. 7 sent flames
shooting 30 feet into the night sky, gutted the building. Six
firemen were hurt when a wall caved in, and 320 cops rushed to
Harlem from three boroughs under a "rapid mobilization" order
after the alarm was sounded. In San Francisco, another mosque
was set ablaze, but firemen quickly doused it.

     In Chicago, Elijah, a pint-sized (120 lbs.), asthmatic man
of 67, professed unconcern, despite rumors that six pro-Malcolm
triggermen were after him. "We are innocent of Malcolm's death,"
he said. "Malcolm died of his own preaching. He preached
violence, and violence took him away." Despite Elijah's
protestations of Black Muslim innocence, New York police
arrested and charged with Malcolm's murder a Negro named Norman
3X Butler, described as a Black Muslim enforcer. When arrested,
Norman 3X was free on $10,000 bail in the nonfatal January
shooting in New York of another Black Muslim defector.

     Human Shield. Chicago police ringed Elijah Muhammad's
19-room, $50,000 red brick mansion on the South Side,
reconnoitered nearby Muslim buildings. When a delivery truck
pulled up to Elijah's house with what the driver said was a
grandfather clock, the police bomb squad rushed to the scene.
They found that it was indeed a grandfather clock, a gift from
Muslim women in Philadelphia.

     What worried the police the most, though, was how to
protect Elijah at the Muslims' annual convention in the Chicago
Coliseum last weekend. An anonymous caller warned, "We have
arrived. Muhammad will have a lively convention." Police combed
the convention halls for bombs, quintupled their security
detail to 45 men, ordered 50 more to stand by. Elijah, said one
cop, will have "as much security as if he were President
Johnson."

     When the convention opened, Elijah drove the four miles in
the midst of an eleven-car motorcade, was surrounded by a
phalanx of Fruit of Islam members inside the hall. Newsmen were
frisked head to toe before entering, even had their shoes
checked for hollowed-out heels. Lining the fern-decorated stage
and directly below it was a human shield of 55 Fruit of Islam
guards, and scores more patrolled the aisles.

     The convention itself was a dud. The hall, with a seating
capacity of some 7,500, was less than half filled. Elijah
Muhammad could hardly be seen behind the ranks of his bodyguards
as he delivered a wheezy, two-hour harangue highlighted by a
warning to would-be assassins that "to seek to snuff out the
life of Elijah Muhammad is to invite doom." On the convention's
second day, Elijah failed to appear. The explanation: his asthma
had kicked up again.

     As for Malcolm Little-Malcolm X-John Doe, he was buried as
Al Hajj Malik Shabazz, the name he earned in 1964 by making his
pilgrimage to Mecca and being received as a true believer. He
wore the white robe that signified his faith. In the four days
before his burial, more than 20,000 persons, almost all Negroes,
filed past his body as it lay on view in a glass-topped,
wrought-copper casket. Following Muslim custom, when Malcolm
was buried in suburban Westchester's Ferncliff Cemetery, his
head was to the east, toward Mecca.