Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis

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СКАЧАТЬ LA gang member and armed robber, who was feared throughout the California Youth Authority for his ferocity. George Jackson, a prison revolutionary whose letters would later be published as the bestseller Soledad Brother, and with whom Carr would form a close friendship, unequivocally categorized him as the “baddest motherfucker.” Quentin, as Carr expected, was day after day of relentless combat with guards and other prisoners, but there was also a surprising subculture of Black solidarity: the Nation of Islam (NOI). Carr was indifferent to religious doctrine but impressed by the moral discipline and militant spirit of the Muslims. “Booker North,” he wrote admiringly in his autobiography, “was the most important Muslim leader in San Quentin. He was a fantastically effective proselytizer out on the mainline. Every month he would convert ten or fifteen dudes to Islam. They put him in the Adjustment Center—where the state’s most violent death row inmates were held—on permanent status. But Booker went right on rapping, usually in the exercise yard.” According to Carr, some guards egged on white supremacists to attack Booker in the yard, and when he fought back, guards in the tower shot and killed him.¹ But other brothers took up his work, and the Muslims continued to fight for the right to hold prayer meetings, have Muslim visitors, receive religious publications and keep the Koran in their cells.²

      They were a new species, unlike any Black group that prison officials or city police had previously dealt with. They cultivated a charismatic gravitas, edged with uncertain menace. Coldly polite in dealings with whites, they were warm toward other people of “dark humanity.” Inside prisons, moreover, they were often miracle workers, arbitrating conflicts between Black inmates, promoting literacy and Koran study, and above all, organizing disciplined resistance to degrading routines and brutal treatment. In the community, they were seen as family builders and exemplars of a self-help ethos that they believed someday would be the foundation of a new nation. They also had an impressive record of turning addicts and alcoholics into sober cadre. The widespread belief among whites that they were Black terrorists or dangerous cultists was belied by their careful avoidance of confrontation, obedience to the law, and ban on weapons at meetings and mosques. Even the Fruit of Islam, the NOI’s elite bodyguards in black suits and red bow ties, acted principally as a deterrent to violence. But there was a line that could not be crossed: Muslims asserted a legitimate right of self-defense and expected members to aid one another without hesitation or fear of death. “I don’t even call it violence when it’s in self-defense,” said Malcolm X. “I call it intelligence.”

      As Elijah Muhammad’s chief missionary, Malcolm helped to organize temples (they weren’t called mosques until 1975) across the country, but his true second home after Harlem was Temple No. 27 in South Central Los Angeles—“Malcolm’s Temple,” as it was called within the Nation.³ He arrived in L.A. in spring 1957, writes biographer Manning Marable, “determined to establish a strong NOI base on the West Coast. He also wanted to establish the NOI’s Islamic credentials by engaging in public activities with Middle Eastern and Asian Muslim representatives in the region.” Accordingly he attended several events sponsored by representatives of Islamic countries, scandalized an interfaith meeting by attacking the wealth of many Black churches, and preached to the converted and unconverted alike at the Normandie Hall.⁴ He also acquainted himself with the community’s major Afrocentric institutions, including the Pyramid Cooperative Grocery, Alfred Ligon’s Aquarian Book Shop, Adele Young’s Hugh Gordon Bookshop (supported by both Communists and Pan-Africanists), and the weekly Herald-Dispatch, owned by Sanford and Pat Alexander.⁵

      Returning to the city the following spring, Malcolm apprenticed himself to the Alexanders in the hope of learning as much as possible about newspaper publishing. Pat Alexander, the editor and dominant personality, was a fabulist and demagogue who used the paper as a megaphone for hallucinatory claims about Jewish conspiracies against Black people. She believed, for example, that the Jews, “the smart elements in this country,” had “brought forth the idea, with which they did a great deal of damage to black Americans, of integration” and that they were responsible for the “danger and threat and the dirty, filthy deception of the political left.” Later she alleged that German Jews, expelled by Hitler, had introduced German shepherds to Southern police forces and trained them to attack only Black people. The constant core of her grievances, however, was the considerable number of Jewish furniture and appliance stores, pawnshops, liquor stores (she claimed, preposterously, that there were 3,500) and other businesses in the ghetto, whom she saw as colonial exploiters, regardless of their support for civil rights. They refused to advertise with her for obvious reasons, but in Alexander’s eyes this was only further proof of a Jewish plot against Black ownership and economic independence. But the Herald-Dispatch, even if more extreme than the NOI in its anti-Semitism, was otherwise a good fit for the ideas of Elijah Muhammad.⁶

      Thus the little paper began to publish and syndicate weekly columns from both Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm. Malcolm’s column was called “God’s Angry Men,” and he frequently extolled the rich heritage of Black nationalism, reassuring his readers that the NOI was continuing the work of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. He also attacked Martin Luther King, in a language almost identical to Garvey’s philippics against W. E. B. Du Bois some four decades earlier.⁷ After the new owner of the nation’s largest-circulation Black paper, the Pittsburgh Courier, dropped the “Mr. Muhammad Speaks” column, the Herald-Dispatch soon “became in effect the official Muslim organ,” and the Nation assigned a sales quota to each member: thirty copies each week. As a result circulation soared to 40,000, and a regional edition was started in Chicago. But Pat Alexander never relinquished editorial control, and after Malcolm inaugurated the NOI’s own paper, Muhammad Speaks, in 1961, the Herald-Dispatch lost much of its national importance for the movement. Conflicts with Chicago increased, and in 1964 Alexander blamed the Muslims for firebombing her offices.⁸

      The organization of Temple No. 27, meanwhile, was not without difficulties; Malcolm’s FBI files paraphrase him as saying that “he was very disgusted by the way he was received in Los Angeles, and [it] was one of the worst places in the United States to convert people to Islam.”⁹ He therefore brought out three of his experienced lieutenants from Temple No. 7 in Harlem as interim leaders. Twenty-four-year-old Johnny Morris, a jazz columnist for Miller’s Eagle, was apprenticed as assistant minister and changed his name to John X.¹⁰ He would later take over the temple leadership (as John Shabazz) with invaluable help from the temple secretary, Ronald Stokes, a Korean War veteran from Roxbury. Malcolm became warm friends with the energetic and efficient Stokes, but there were other ghosts of his Boston past whom he was perhaps less happy to see. One was Hakim Jamal, who had just hoboed his way to Los Angeles, bringing the same drinking and drug problems that were already evident when he was just fourteen and briefly met Malcolm in a club. Hakim, whose romantic liaisons with famous and wealthy women would one day become serial tragedies, irked Malcolm by bragging to other people that they were cousins. In fact there was no kinship beyond the fact that Hakim had married a remote relative (at best a second cousin) of the Little family.¹¹

      In July 1959, while Malcolm was meeting with Egyptian President Nasser in Cairo, a New York television station broadcast a sensationalist five-part series, The Hate That Hate Produced. It depicted the Muslims as the Black Ku Klux Klan.¹² A one-hour version of the program (produced by Mike Wallace and Louis Lomax) was soon shown nationally, and during the resulting furor several national civil rights leaders, long attacked by Muhammad and Malcolm for their espousal of integration and alliances with whites, especially Jewish liberals, struck back at the Nation. Thurgood Marshall, for example, told a Princeton audience that “the Black Muslim movement is run by a bunch of thugs organized from prisons and jails and financed, I am sure, by Nasser or some Arab group.” And Martin Luther King, erroneously comparing men to institutions, declared that “Black supremacy is as bad as white supremacy.”¹³

      Meanwhile, Black radicals were divided in their opinions about both the movement and its stellar salesman, Malcolm X. In her oral history Dorothy Healey contrasts the attitude of James Jackson, the editor of the Daily Worker “who had an absolute hatred against СКАЧАТЬ