Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
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role played by red diapers in L.A. CORE. Bev Radcliff and Ellen Kleinman, already mentioned, were ISU activists, while Steven Sanfield (the night manager at the famed Larry Edmunds Bookshop in Hollywood) and artist Charles Berrard were close to the Southern California CP. Steve McNichols, also mentioned earlier, was with UCLA and Santa Monica CORE. Adding a different ideological tincture, Robert Farrell and his close friend Ronald La Bostrie represented the civil rights current among L.A.’s Black Catholics. Marjorie Dunson, slightly older, was a Jamaican citizen. En route to Mississippi by train, the contingent planned to meet up with young activists from Texas Southern University who had been struggling to desegregate the coffee shop at Houston’s Grand Central Station. Their Ride ended there.
In Houston’s Jim Crow jail, Ferrell, Berrard and La Bostrie, along with two local protestors, were welcomed “as heroes and treated accordingly” by Black male prisoners; likewise for Dunson, and for Marian Moore, one of the leaders of Houston’s Progressive Youth Association. With her Mediterranean complexion, Kleinman’s race confused her jailers, who initially put her in the Black female section. Sent back to the white women’s wing, she and Pat Kovner (who had helped found CORE in the Valley) became the subject of a hair-raising plebiscite by their fellow inmates, who decided by one vote not to beat them up. The four white male Freedom Riders, however, were greeted as “fuckin’ nigger lovers” and spent two terrible days as punching bags for the sadistic racists and anti-Semites in their part of the jail. McNichols from UCLA suffered the worst beatings, which permanently damaged his spine. As Ferrell would recall years later, “he was never the same physically … he was a damaged man.” Their lawyers were shocked at their battered state—reminiscent of the wounded on the first Freedom Rides—and bailed them out in time to prevent them being murdered. Ironically they would have been safer in Jackson, where Riders, however mistreated, were usually kept apart from other prisoners.26
In September the last of the LA Riders were released from Parchman, although trials and legal battles would continue until 1962. CORE, meanwhile, supported the vigorous picketing of the LA Greyhound terminal that had been initiated by John T. Williams and other members of the Teamster Rank-and-File Committee for Equal Job Opportunity. The demonstrations continued through the fall until the company, profiting from contracts to carry mail and servicemen and therefore vulnerable to federal anti-discrimination law, finally agreed to hire their first Black driver.27 L.A. CORE, while continuing to support the Southern struggle, turned its attention principally to housing integration, the issue that would most define the civil rights movement in Southern California for the next three years. The returning Riders, toughened by jail and profoundly inspired by the courage of their counterparts in the South, were eager to unleash nonviolent direct action on a new scale in Los Angeles. But another force was rising in Black communities throughout the North—one that rejected integration, Christian leadership and nonviolence. Although CORE would return to center stage in 1963, it was Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam that would transfix Los Angeles in the approaching year.
“God’s Angry Men”: The Black Muslims (1962)
In 1958, after a number of guards were injured in a riot at the Deuel youth prison, east of Oakland, authorities took the unprecedented step of transferring the identified instigators, some as young as sixteen, to San Quentin. One of the juveniles was James Carr, an incorrigible 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,