Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
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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 Malcolm X and all that he thought Malcolm X represented,” to that of pioneer Black nationalist turned Communist, Cyril Briggs, who “kept insisting on how important they were.” Briggs, who had lived in L.A for years, was a Pan-Africanist elder of the highest rank—founder of Crusader magazine and the African Blood Brotherhood in 1918–19—but it is unclear whether he and Malcolm ever met. Healey, who acknowledged Briggs’s “great influence on my thinking, even though I didn’t always admit it,” attempted at a “very stormy National Committee meeting” to stop Jackson from publishing any more attacks on Malcolm X, but she was a minority of one, as she would be again ten years later when she supported the Che-Lumumba Club’s collaboration with the Black Panther Party.14
Black artists, musicians and professionals, on their side, were deeply intrigued by Malcolm, and he obliged them through informal meetings and soirees. Band leader Johnny Otis, who had met Malcolm in his earlier incarnation as “Detroit Red,” was part of a group of Black progressives—known as Attack—who would gather for discussions whenever the Muslim leader was in Los Angeles. “He didn’t proselytize at the get-togethers,” Otis recalled. “His talks with us dealt with standing together, respecting our traditions, defending our communities, treating our women with love and care, being responsible toward our children and not taking abuse from the racists in our society.”15 One outspoken participant in these conversations was the Sentinel’s editor, Wendell Green, who had been one of the Tuskegee Airmen during the Second World War and would end his career as the LA representative of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Another was a Caribbean immigrant and trade union activist named Mervyn Dymally, who, in alliance with Jesse Unruh, would become a major figure in California politics for almost a half century, representing South Central L.A. in Congress for twelve years.16
It was inevitable that Chief Parker and Malcolm X would collide over the activities of the NOI in L.A. But the LAPD would have to provide the pretext. As a frustrated FBI informant reported in 1958: “He is not likely to violate any ordinances or laws. He neither smokes nor drinks and is of high moral character.” When in 1960 Hoover unleashed COINTELPRO, the FBI’s notorious counterintelligence program, against the NOI, the initial focus was Elijah Mohammad’s innumerable affairs with young women members.17 Given the animosity between Hoover and Parker, it is unlikely that the bureau’s large trove of surveillance on the NOI was ever shared with the LAPD. The department, on its side, apparently had yet to develop its own informants inside Temple No. 27—though events there would soon provide ample cover for it to do so. The basic briefing given to the LAPD rank and file was a histrionic memo prepared by the San Diego Police Department in 1959. The Fruit of Islam, it asserted,
are almost psychotic in their hatred of Caucasians and are comparable to the Mau Mau or kamikaze in their dedication and fanaticism. It has been reported that many temples have gun clubs in which this militant group are trained in weapons … It has been stated locally, that the members of this cult will kill any police officer when the opportunity presents itself, regardless of the circumstances or outcome.18
The Times, without the slightest evidence, later expanded these allegations with the claim that the NOI was “dedicated to the extermination of the white race.”
Why hadn’t the Nation attacked the police already? For Parker and other cops, the law-abiding behavior of Black Muslims was construed as a clever disguise for diabolical schemes. The first skirmish took place in September 1961 when forty police arrived to disperse a “riot” involving a handful of Muslim newspaper sellers and two white “store detectives” outside a Safeway supermarket on Western Avenue near Venice Boulevard. The security men, claiming that the Muslims were blocking shoppers, had drawn their guns when the newspaper sellers refused to leave or submit to citizen arrests. In the scuffle that followed, the two whites suffered a few bruises as well as derision from the crowd, while five of the Muslims were arrested. They were subsequently acquitted by an all-white jury (a rare occurrence in NOI trials) after the manager confirmed that he had given permission for the paper sales.19 In essence this was a trivial incident that should have raised little alarm, but Parker read it as an omen of a showdown to come. “Following the parking lot melee,” Marable writes, “the LAPD was primed for retaliation against the local NOI.” Parker “instructed his officers to closely monitor the mosque’s activities.”20
The following April (1962) cops observed two men taking some clothing out of the open trunk of a car, parked about a block and half from Temple No. 27. One worked at a dry cleaner where he acquired unredeemed or damaged clothes to sell to fellow Muslims, who, of course, had to conform to a rigid dress code. The other was examining an item for sale. It was past eleven in the evening, and a service at the mosque had just ended. Neither man ran away, or, for that matter, acted suspiciously, yet the two officers approached them as if they were burglary suspects. After frisking them and finding