Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis

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СКАЧАТЬ was an obscene obsession with Black men’s genitals as they were prodded, kicked, and their pants torn off. Two of the wounded Muslims, moreover, had been shot in the groin. The final tally was Stokes dead, seven other Muslims seriously wounded, fourteen ultimately arraigned on felony counts, and the mosque ransacked and all of its documents seized. On the police side of the ledger, one officer was wounded (shot in the left elbow) and seven were injured, none seriously.²⁶

      Word of the attack reached Malcolm, in Harlem, by morning. Marable says that “the desecration of the mosque and the violence brought upon its members pushed Malcolm to a dark place.” Two former members of the Fruit of Islam, Charles 37X and James 67X, told him that as soon as Malcolm found out that Stokes had been murdered, he began to organize a deadly retaliation.

      Members eagerly volunteered, and a team was selected to fly to L.A., presumably, to enact Parker’s self-fulfilling prophecy of Muslims as cop killers. But Elijah Muhammad ordered Malcolm and his comrades to stand down. “Malcolm,” writes Marable, “was stunned; he acquiesced, but with bitter disappointment.”²⁷

      In Los Angeles, bitter surprise was also the reaction among members of Temple No. 27 when they were told to avenge themselves by going into the streets to sell at least fifty copies each of Muhammad Speaks. Hakim Jamal recalled the rank-and-file reaction: “Shock was on every face I looked into. Black men, hundreds of them, ready to kill the devil. Many with guns and many more with enough hate, enough belief in Allah to face anything. We were betrayed!” Some members, according to Jamal, assuaged their anger by going down to Skid Row and sadistically beating up white winos. When Malcolm arrived in L.A., he was told about the forays:

      Some of us smiled at him when the story was being told. We expected a pat on the head or a wink. I have never seen him so angry. He got up out of his chair and tried to explain to us that what we were doing was small time gangsterism. Chopping down a few helpless bums on the sly—it was cowardly and it was useless. Malcolm understood our need to act … The pain on his face when he spoke of Brother Ronald was clear. But he wouldn’t have gone with us to Fifth St. If he had gone into action, then it would have been real action, not that.²⁸

      Jamal, of course, was unaware at the time of Malcolm’s original plan, and he left the NOI with a number of others who were embittered by the failure to retaliate.

      Malcolm, hardly naïve about media, was nonetheless appalled by the way the attack was depicted. “The press,” he told a radio interviewer, “was just as atrocious as the police. Because they helped the police to cover it up by propagating a false image across the country, that there was a blazing gun battle which involved Muslims and police shooting at each other. And everyone who know Muslims knows that Muslims don’t even carry a finger nail file, much less carry guns.”²⁹ At Stokes’s funeral on May 5, Malcolm repeatedly praised the Black organizations and leaders (obviously referring to the L.A. NAACP and CORE) that were protesting the attack despite the hysteria about the NOI in the press, commenting, “Our unity shocked them and we should continue to shock the white man by working together.” He invoked the example of the Bandung Conference of 1955, where twenty-nine countries had participated in the first Afro-Asian meeting in Indonesia, to oppose neocolonialism; if the colored fourth-fifths of humanity could unite against oppression, Malcolm asked, regardless of religious or ideological differences, why should Black Americans not do the same? He also set aside his usual polemical jihad against Christianity to invoke Jesus as a great revolutionary, the prophet of slaves, outcastes and—pointedly—Black people.³⁰

      Malcolm spent much of May speaking to large crowds at church meetings and Sunday rallies, repeatedly emphasizing that the Muslims were not at war with the police, but rather that the police were at war with the Black community as a whole. During one meeting at the Second Baptist Church to which he had not been invited to speak because he was “too inflammatory,” he took the floor anyway, with the audience roaring their approval. “It wasn’t a Muslim who was shot down,” he told the congregation. “It was a Negro. They say we preach hate because we tell the truth. They say we inflame the Negro. The hell they’ve been catching for 400 years has inflamed them.”³¹ To the horror of many white liberals, even the local NAACP agreed. Whatever their opinion of NOI theology, a broad spectrum of community leaders—from veteran journalist Wendell Green to rising political star Mervyn Dymally and young CORE activist Danny Gray—stood by Malcolm’s side and endorsed his call for unity against police violence. Almena Lomax, perhaps the most distinguished Black woman journalist in the country, as well as the founder of the well-regarded Los Angeles Tribune (whose writers were Japanese-American and white, as well as Black), wrote that the “Stokes killing and subsequent events have done more to arouse and unite the Negro community than anything of recent times.”³² In many ways it was a trial run for 1963’s all-encompassing coalition, the United Civil Rights Committee.

      Some Black leaders, however, did not share this ecumenical spirit. Martin Luther King, briefly visiting in mid June, was concerned that the association of civil rights movement with the Muslims could damage support for the Southern struggle. In his two talks in L.A., he equivocated. On one hand, Black supremacy was equally as despicable as white supremacy; “On the other hand I am more concerned with getting rid of the conditions that brought this sort of organization into being than I am with the organization itself.”³³ Tom Bradley, now retired from the LAPD and practicing law while he prepared to run for the city council from a mixed district, also felt that he would lose white liberals if he were seen as “soft” on the NOI. That summer, in a forum sponsored by the Valley chapter of the ACLU, he debated Hugh Manes, the organization’s chief advocate of a civilian police review board. Bradley claimed that the department had “taken giant steps” on the race problem, refusing to criticize Parker. Manes categorically disagreed, responding that “the history of Los Angeles in 30 years had not indicated the police department is aware of the Constitution.” The Muslims, despite their rhetoric, were “strictly law abiding,” and the April LAPD attack raised fundamental civil libertarian issues: “The rights of Muslims affect the rights of all of us.” The audience, mostly white liberals, booed Manes.³⁴

      No one, however, was more alarmed by Malcolm’s attempt to build an inclusive movement against police injustice than Elijah Mohammad himself. In public pronouncements, they appeared to be on exactly the same page. The Messenger, for instance, had told a press conference in Chicago that “in these crucial times we must not think in terms of one’s religion, but in terms of justice for us Black people. This means a united front for justice in America.”³⁵ Marable, again using Farrakhan as a principal source, says that this was mere lip service to the ideal of unity; in fact Elijah Muhammad pulled hard on the leash, “ordering his stubborn lieutenant to halt all [united front] efforts … he vetoed any cooperation with civil rights groups even on a matter as outrageous as Stokes’s murder.”³⁶ His strategy could be interpreted either as patience or passivity. The civil rights movement, he believed, would eventually collapse in the face of white resistance, leaving Black people with no choice but to flock to the NOI. Anything that encouraged hopes of reform or belief in the possibility of integration was pandering to the great lie that the Nation existed to expose.

      Malcolm, on the other hand, found it almost unendurable not to be in the thick of battle, whether that meant tooth-for-tooth retaliation or leading mass protests. Farrakhan recalled that Malcolm “was fascinated by the civil rights movement … [and] speaking less and less about the teachings of [Muhammad].”³⁷ In Taylor Branch’s opinion “the Stokes case marked a turning point” in Malcolm X’s “hidden odyssey.”³⁸ In Los Angeles, he took the first steps toward abandoning Elijah Muhammad’s folk eschatology and moving toward a distinctive strategy of Black liberation that visualized the American struggle as part of a worldwide revolt.

      The temple shootings also marked a watershed for Mayor Sam Yorty, who now became Chief Parker’s cheerleader. In suppressing what the Times now called the “Black Muslim riots,” the mayor backed the chief “100 percent.” He also denounced СКАЧАТЬ