in stature and spirit behind bars. First of all, he was clearly able
to direct the movement even while he was in prison, and once he was
released, he began uttering statements that made Fard and, indeed, the
early Elijah Muhammad sound conservative. In bold staccato phrases,
punctuated by clearing of the throat so endemic to Southern Negro
preachers, Muhammad shouted to the throng that the white man is a
snake, a devil by nature, evil, incapable of doing right. Despite the
fact that he was still garbed in his “release suit,” Muhammad told the
Chicago crowd that it made no sense for Negroes in this country to have
fought against the Japanese, who were victimized by the same blue-eyed
devil who had victimized the American Negro. But Muhammad did not stop
there; he said that the American Negro had had no stake in World War
II. “Rather,” Muhammad said, “the American Negro should be saving his
energy and ammunition for ‘The Battle of Armageddon,’ which will be
waged in the wilderness of North America. This battle--and this is one
of the central teachings of the Nation of Islam--will be for freedom,
justice, and equality. It will be waged to success or under death.”
Muhammad always titillates his followers by telling them that he cannot
at this moment let them know just when the battle will take place and
who the protagonists will be. But one has only to sit in the audience
and hear his followers applaud and laugh to know that they fully
believe that the time of the bloodletting is nigh and that the struggle
will be between black and white.
Despite his boldness, the movement stagnated under Muhammad’s
leadership. In the mid-forties “The Big X” came on the scene. And with
the arrival of Malcolm Little--christened into Islam Malcolm X and
elevated by Elijah Muhammad to be Malcolm Shabazz, but known to the
pimps, prostitutes, and dope addicts as “Big Red”--the Black Muslim
movement really began to move.
_Big Red_
Malcolm Little was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925, and like Elijah
Muhammad he was the son of a Baptist minister. The family soon moved
from Omaha to Lansing, Michigan. Malcolm’s father was a follower of
the Black Nationalist, Marcus Garvey, who felt that all Negroes should
return to Africa and escape the oppression of the white man. The Ku
Klux Klan burned down the family home when Malcolm was only six years
old. “The firemen came,” Malcolm says, “and just sat there without
making any effort to put one drop of water on the fire. The same fire
that burned my father’s home still burns in my soul.”
Following Garvey’s teaching that the Negroes should go into business,
Mr. Little then set out to build his own store. Soon after this,
according to Malcolm, “my father was found with his head bashed and his
body mangled under a streetcar.” Malcolm Shabazz to this day remains
convinced that his father was lynched by white people who resented
even the prospect of a Negro gaining some economic independence. With
his father’s death, Malcolm’s family was forced to separate. In moving
terms, clenching his fists, and at times breaking into tears, Malcolm
has described to me how his mother boiled dandelion greens from day
to day trying to keep her eleven children from starving to death. “We
stayed dizzy and sick because we stayed hungry.” At night Malcolm and
his brothers would go out and steal what food they could to fill their
stomachs. The Littles were a clannish bunch. They struggled to stay
together, but the pangs of hunger were too great, and they were ripped
apart. Malcolm was sent to an institution for boys.
This turned out to be the second molding factor in the life of
Malcolm X. He was one of the few Negroes--if not the only one--in the
institution and he developed a warm love for the white matron who
defended him when other kids were “kicking him around.” In the only
complimentary statement I have heard him make about a white person,
Malcolm says of the matron, “She was good to me. I followed her around
like a little puppy. I was a kind of mascot.” She arranged for him to
attend a near-by school where, although he was the only Negro pupil,
his keen mind put him at the head of the class, which only gained him
the resentment of both the teacher and the pupils.
“When I was in the eighth grade,” Malcolm says, “they asked me what I
wanted to become. I told them I wanted to study law. But they told me
that law was not a suitable profession for a Negro. They suggested that
I think of a trade such as carpentry.”
That ripped it! Malcolm soon left school and came east to New York,
and in a matter of weeks penetrated the underworld where he became
a trusted lieutenant. Malcolm’s early days in the underworld are
described in unpublished notes by writer Alex Haley in the following
words:
Admitted to the underworld’s fringes, sixteen-year-old Malcolm
absorbed all he heard and saw. He swiftly built up a reputation for
honesty by turning over every dollar due his boss (“I have always
been intensely loyal”). By the age of 18, Malcolm was versatile “Big
Red.” He hired from four to six men variously plying dope, numbers,
bootleg whiskey and diverse forms of hustling. Malcolm personally
squired well-heeled white thrill-seekers to Harlem sin dens, and
Negroes to white sin downtown. “My best customers were preachers and
social leaders, police and all kinds of big shots in the business of
controlling other people’s lives.”
His income often reached as high as two thousand dollars a month. And I
have heard Malcolm talk of paying off the cops from a thousand-dollar
bankroll which he pulled from the pocket of his two-hundred-dollar
suit. But not even “Big Red” had enough money to pay all of the
policemen and eventually Malcolm X went to prison for burglary.
It was in 1947, in the maximum security prison at Concord,
Massachusetts, that Malcolm was converted to the teachings of The
Honorable Elijah Muhammad by one of his fellow prisoners who was a
member of the Detroit temple. From that moment Malcolm has neither
smoked, cursed, drunk, nor run after women. He is the most puritanical
man I have ever met. I have interviewed him scores of times but he will
not meet me for an interview at any place where liquor is sold. He does
not object to my smoking, but in polite terms he makes it understood
that he would rather I didn’t smoke around him. I have entertained him
in my home along with other guests, and he has sat relaxed on the floor
as we drink. He has never taken anything but coffee, although he knows
full well that none of us would ever betray him.
Indeed, it is around the widely known and deeply admired morality of
Malcolm X that one of the few pieces of humor about the Muslim movement
came into being.
The story is that Malcolm was attempting to convert a Negro Baptist to
the teaching of Islam.
“What are the rules of your organization?” the Negro asked.
“Well,” Malcolm said, “my brother, you have to stop drinking, stop
swearing, stop gambling, stop using dope, and stop cheating on your
wife!”
“Hell,” the convert replied, “I think I had better remain a Christian.”
3. THE NATION OF ISLAM
Any objective evaluation of the Black Muslims as a religious body must
begin with a fresh look at religion itself, its origin and meaning. The
current, widespread antipathy toward the Black Muslims makes such a
basic review of the roots of religion all the more necessary. Above all
we must shut out the voices of those who insist that the Black Muslims
are not a religion because they--the critics--don’t like what the
Muslims preach and do. After all, the Mormon Church holds, among other
things, that the Negro is inferior because he is the descendant of Ham,
the accursed son of Noah. As a result Negroes are allowed to join the
Mormon Church, but are barred from high church office. But none of us
will take the position that the Mormons are not a religion.
To understand the Black Muslims--and the Mormons, for that matter--we
must retrace that contorted and tribal path man and God have walked
together en route to the here and now.
_Religion as a Group Experience_
The world has always been a mystery to man. It excites his imagination,
challenges his courage, and piques his intellect. But the individual
never meets the world alone. He is of his group; the group is part of
the world he inherited on the day he discovered himself and the other
members of his group--like the thunder and the lightning and the sun
and the trees and the rivers and the canyons and the hurricanes and the
manna trees that are part of that which confounds him. Collectively
confounded, then, the group members react as one. They create a god
almost always in their own image and attribute to him all of the
omnipotence and omnipresence required to account for a plot of matter
spinning dizzily through space into nowhere. And if he is in their
image, then he is their father and they are his children. He watches
over them and protects them from the pestilences that come by day and
the evils that crawl by night. They are his chosen people and he walks
with the warriors of the tribe as they go forth to battle temporal
evil, which is to say, anything and anybody that differs from their
tribe.
In return, the tribesmen insist that god make demands upon them. And
god grants their request: He commands them to bow down and worship
him, and to put no other god before him. He commands them to love one
another even as they love him and he loves them. His commandments on
social ethics always parallel the social history of the tribe involved.
If one day some members of the tribe feel sick from having eaten the
meat from a given animal, then god decrees that such meat is unclean
and that it is sinful to eat of it. If the social history of the
people discloses that the affinity between the man and his woman is
so intense that the intrusion of any other man or woman upon that
relationship brings on community disorder, then god decrees that a man
shall have one wife and a woman one husband, and then commands that the
neighbors covet not the man’s wife or the woman’s husband. And when the
tribe matures to the point of having old men, elders, steeped in the
history of the tradition of the people, god orders that the aged be
respected and all be venerated as his leaders on earth.
Thus it is that the god of a tribe becomes “their” god. History is
replete with battle scars left when the gods of an opposing people
fought it out on the plains and in the valleys. When tribe meets
tribe in war, at least one of the tribes is bound to lose. But even
in defeat the god of the tribe becomes more powerful than ever before
as the tribe is convinced that, though it has lost a battle, it will
eventually win the war. Thus, in the words of one of the great tribal
leaders, “Our god is able to deliver. But if not, we will not bow down
and serve your god.”
Although tribal life revolves around the god concept, few tribal states
have actually become theocracies. Religious leaders have taken their
place beside temporal leaders, and they function in concord, under the
umbrella of their god to make the state a practical institution.
With the dawn of modern history, gods began to fuse and merge as people
began to widen the circle of their experience and accept the reality
of tribal pluralism, and civilizations that have survived to matter in
the context of the current world are those that fly the banner of the
world’s four or five major religions.
Modern man knows little of all this because he inherited already
thought-out religions. Thus he has no idea how primitive and crude his
gods once were. And it is precisely because of modern man’s religious
sophistication that the Black Muslims rasp: At stage center, and
before an audience that is weary of racism and religious bigotry, the
all-black Nation of Islam gleefully re-enacts the shoddy scenes of our
cultural beginnings.
“We are in the image of God,” Malcolm says.
“Make it plain, Brother Minister. Make it plain.”
“That means that God--we call him Allah--must be black like me!”
“All praise due to Allah.”
“God was here in the beginning.”
“Yes sir, that’s right.”
“So we were here from the beginning”--and Malcolm X smiles.
The people come roaring to their feet with shouts of thanks and
deliverance.
“And that which was here from the beginning must be the daddy of
everything else. Am I right or wrong?”
“You right. That’s right.”
“This blue-eyed devil talking about he is superior. It’s about time he
found out that we are his pappy!”
“Make it plain, Brother. Make it plain.”
“Now listen to this,” Malcolm told a rally of three thousand on a
Harlem street corner, “and you will know why black is superior.”
“Come on. Come, let’s hear it!”
“Black is _the_ prime color. It is the strong color.”
“Yes!”
“You can get any other color you want by mixing colors, but you cannot
find colors that you can mix and produce black. Only black can produce
black.”
“Make it plain.”
“And if black is prime, that means it is God, that means it is good.”
“That’s right!”
“Therefore the less black you are the less good you are.”
“All praise due to Allah.” And now the people sense the great truth
that is about to come, and they begin to break with laughter.
“Therefore when you are white, you are as nonblack as you can be.”
“Make it plain, Malcolm. Make it plain.”
“Therefore when you are white you are absolutely nongood; am I right or
wrong?”
“You right!”
“In other words,” Malcolm shouts, “the white man is therefore
absolutely evil, a snake and a devil, and his time of destruction draws
nigh!”
With this the crowd breaks with joy. The applause lasts for several
minutes; white policemen standing guard at the meeting nudge white
onlookers, telling them to “move on.”
This argument, that God is black and the white man a devil, presents
the Black Muslims with the identical philosophical dilemma that has
plagued most religions: How could a good (black) God create a bad
(white) thing?
The doctrine concerning Yakub is the Black Muslims’ attempt to answer
that riddle. In biological terms of reference, accepting the Muslim
notion that the black man is the original man, they must explain how
the black race produced white people. Elijah Muhammad states the
argument in these terms: The Caucasian race was created out of the weak
of the black race; they are the handiwork of Yakub, a black scientist
who rebelled against Allah. Dr. Eric Lincoln is correct when he says
that the doctrine of Yakub is the central myth of the Black Muslim
movement. But it is also the tenet the Black Muslims seem to know least
about.
Writing in the _Pittsburgh Courier_, Elijah Muhammad detailed in these
words the mechanics by which the black scientist Yakub made the white
man:
Who are the white race? I have repeatedly answered that question
in this [column] for nearly the past three years. “Why are they
white-skinned?” Answer: Allah (God) said this is due to being grafted
from the Original Black Nation, as the Black Man has two germs (two
people) in him. One is black and the other brown. The brown germ is
weaker than the black germ. The brown germ can be grafted into its
last stage, and the last stage is white. A scientist by the name
of Yakub discovered this knowledge ... 6,645 years ago, and was
successful in doing this job of grafting after 600 years of following
a strict and rigid birth control law.
According to Elijah Muhammad the experiment was a success, but it also
resulted in the “blue-eyed devils” who now people the world and have
low physical and moral stamina. Muhammad then goes on to show the
physical superiority of the black man by underlining the victories
of Negro ballplayers and prize fighters. He then points up what he
calls the low morality of the white man by citing the gas chambers
of Germany, the atomic bomb of Hiroshima, and all the abuses white
Southerners (and Northerners) have heaped upon the Negro.
Summing up the results of Yakub’s experiment, Elijah Muhammad issues
this finding:
The human beast--the serpent, the dragon, the devil, and Satan--all
mean one and the same: the people or race known as the white or
Caucasian race, sometimes called the European race.
Since by nature they were created liars and murderers, they are the
enemies of truth and righteousness, and the enemies of those who seek
the truth....
But their certification of the white man as a devil, one incapable
of doing good, rests on more than metaphysical grounds. It involves
history. To make their historical point the Black Muslims part company
with the established world historians. They begin their argument by
establishing--with some accuracy--that the black man in Africa had a
developed civilization at the time that, in Malcolm’s words, “the white
savages of Europe were living in caves and crawling around on their
all-fours.” It was the intrusion of the white man into Africa that
spoiled things and brought slavery to the New World.
The decline of the black man in Africa is only temporary. The white
devil was given about six thousand years to flaunt his evil and then
he was to be destroyed as the black man returned to power. The white
man’s time ran out just as World War I was raging; the Black Muslims
overcame the fact that this was an excellent time for the prophecy to
come true--after all, white people were out to destroy each other--with
the argument that sets the American stage for the followers of The
Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
The only reason the destruction of the white man didn’t come off on
schedule, according to the Muslims, is that so many black men are all
mixed up with the white, that it is impossible to destroy the evil men
without destroying some “originals,” that is to say, Negroes. This,
then, is what Muhammad and Malcolm are talking about when they speak to
“the lost-found black man in the wilderness of North America.” They are
really saying that the restoration of black men to world power is being
delayed because of the American Negro; the white man has been given a
new dispensation, actually, not because he deserves it but to give the
Negro time to separate from those scheduled for destruction.
Herein lies the reasoning behind Muhammad’s talk about a separate
state; this is why the Black Muslims with their tremendous power over
people are unable to participate in any of the current civil-rights
actions; they can’t help fight for better jobs, better schools, or
better housing. They are committed to getting out from among the white
man as soon as possible, lest they share his doom of the fire, which
is sure not only to come next time, but to come soon.
To plug up the logical and emotional leaks in such an argument as this,
the Black Muslims must propagate a continuously expanding “line.”
They must maintain the “Islamic” tinge but at the same time keep
their teaching within American terms of reference that Negroes can
understand; they must take Negroes who have a struggle with English and
teach them Arabic; they must convince the most Western of men that they
are Arabs.
This cultural island-hopping can backfire, sometimes with amusing
results. I attended a Black Muslim bazaar with writer Alex Haley.
Elijah Muhammad was scheduled to appear but sent his son, Akbar,
instead. Akbar, a slender, dark-brown twenty-five-year-old, came before
the crowd of some two thousand garbed in a flowing white sheet. In
Middle Eastern Arabic circles Akbar would have been considered in his
Sunday best, but to Harlem Negroes Akbar’s dress smacked of the Ku
Klux Klan, hardly an image one wishes to raise in a man he hopes to
convert. Yet this is the cross-cultural problem the Black Muslims must
continually deal with.
I have seen Malcolm X do this with tremendous effectiveness. I once
debated with him on TV in Los Angeles. He took the stand of a Muslim,
saying that the Moslem faith was the black man’s original culture.
Malcolm must make this basic thrust or all else he says rests on
historical sand. As we were leaving the studio, we were greeted by
several white students, Moslems from Persia, who complained to Malcolm
that they had attempted to visit Muhammad’s temples and were refused
entry because they were white blue-eyed devils. Malcolm glossed the
matter over, and they all parted wishing Allah’s blessing each upon
the other. In reality, Malcolm is not interested in any white people,
Moslem or not. These Persians could no more get in a Black Muslim
temple than Governor Faubus could. “Let’s look at it this way,” Malcolm
told the Persians. “If a lion is in a cage, his roar will be different
from the roar of the lion who is in the forest. That,” he concluded,
“is why you couldn’t get in our temple. But both the lion in the forest
and the lion in the cage are lions. That is what matters. Lions love
lions; they hate leopards.”
Translated, Malcolm was saying that the American Negro, as a Moslem,
must make different noises from the free Moslems of, say, Persia,
because the American Negro is in a cage. The cage, of course, is white
civilization; that is why the roar of the American Negro Moslem is so
provincial; that is why Persians would do well to worship Allah in
their own way in their own temples, while the Black Muslims and Allah
have their rendezvous in a dinky auditorium over a pool hall in Los
Angeles’ Negro ghetto.
It is in such meetings that Malcolm adds the historical ingredient to
his theology. It takes two forms:
First, the Black Muslims excite Negroes to shouts by proving that
the Negro is somebody, a man with a past and a history. I know from
personal experience that Malcolm X is one of the best-versed people in
America on African history. I have sat with him in private and general
gatherings where he has recited startling facts about the nature of
early African civilizations. When challenged, Malcolm is always able
to produce a text--and a legitimate one at that--to support what he
says. Malcolm’s teachings come as a surprise not because they are new,
previously unknown facts about Africa, but because the entire system of
education in the Western World, particularly in America, has carefully
distorted the true history of Africa to support the notion of white,
male supremacy. And so it is from Malcolm X, not from his sixth-grade
history teacher--who is probably white--that the Negro child in the
North learns the truth about Africa and what once really happened
there.
The second historical aspect of the Muslim doctrine involves an
intensive study of the role of the American Negro in American history.
Here again Malcolm and his followers walk into a void left by the
American education system. The black child in Harlem learns about the
Revolutionary War but he does not learn that the man who set it off
by leading the Americans in the Boston Massacre was a Negro, Crispus
Attucks. The black child sees the clock work but he does not know that
Benjamin Bannaker, a Negro, invented the pendulum. The black child
visits the blood bank but he does not know that a Negro, Dr. Charles
Drew, discovered how to preserve blood and thus made the bank possible.
Nobody tells the Negro child these things in school. On the contrary,
the child is taught that American civilization flowed, for the most
part, from white brains. And when Malcolm, to use his words, “pulls
the cover off the white devil and tells black men the truth about
the work of their ancestors,” the Negro child shrieks with pride and
joy--probably for the first time in his life.
Malcolm X brings his message of importance and dignity to a class of
Negroes who have had little, if any, reason to feel proud of themselves
as a race or as individuals. Their encounters with white people
are always unpleasant situations in which Negroes find themselves
embarrassed or emasculated. Think it out for yourself: What contact
does the Negro in Harlem have with the white man?
The white man is the _man_ they must meet every morning when they go
to work in the garment district; the _man_ they must meet when the
rent is due; the _man_ they face when they go to the pawnshop; the
_man_ who comes and sells things on credit; the _man_ who buys the
installment paper and comes to collect the payments; the _man_ who
gets work when they cannot; the _man_ whom they see on TV loosing
dogs on Negro children; the _man_ they face as a schoolteacher who
does not understand them and who is often contemptuous of them--the
man, the man, the man, the white man, the goddam white man! And when
Malcolm X says the white man is a devil, they roar “amen” because every
experience they have with a white man is a devilish one.
Chilling though it may be, the Black Muslims have erected their
teaching on a group experience common to all American Negroes. Few of
us concur in their conviction and sentencing of the white race. But
none of us can question the accuracy of the indictment on which that
conviction rests.
_Elijah Goes to Mecca_
The _hajj_, the long, dusty pilgrimage to Mecca that every Moslem
looks forward to, is the final criterion of whether one is or is not a
Moslem. Only certified followers of Islam are allowed to enter Mecca
during the holy period of the pilgrimage.