Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
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one said to the other. When one of the Muslims expressed outrage, he was put in a choke hold and slammed face first on the hood. The other man broke loose to come to his aid, and a brawl developed. Meanwhile, the congregation leaving the mosque saw the commotion, and some of them ran down the street to see what was happening. At this point, according to oral histories gathered years later by Jonah Edelman, a security guard from a local bar, probably a little addled, attempted to help the cops by firing a warning shot in the air. When that failed to back up the gathering group of Muslims, the panicky guard fired again and wounded Roosevelt X Walker, a young sanitation worker. A Muslim wrestling with one of the cops, meanwhile, pried the officer’s gun away and shot him in the shoulder, but an off-duty cop arrived just in time to rescue his colleagues and call for aid.21
Walker, meanwhile, staggered back to the mosque, where Malcolm’s friend Ronald Stokes assisted him while John X (Shabazz) went to call an ambulance. At this point, furious LAPD reinforcements began to arrive—but they went first to the temple, rather than the fight scene up the block. The situation was especially chaotic because Muslim escorts were simultaneously trying to evacuate women from the mosque while husbands were arriving to pick them up. People inside had no idea what had happened up the street. Some began to chant, “Why? Why?” According to trial testimony from the wounded Walker, Stokes and others were trying to carry him outside when they were attacked by two white cops screaming, “You niggers get up against the wall.” One swung his billy club, but the other—Officer Donald Weese—just opened fire. Stokes put up his hands, Walker later explained, and said to the officer that was shooting, “Stop. Stop. Don’t shoot any more.” His hands were in the air when he was shot to death by Weese. Four others were wounded.22
In testimony before the grand jury, Weese was asked if he actually had intended to kill Stokes and the other unarmed Muslims. His answer was scornful: “The fact that I shot to stop and the fact that I shot to kill is one and the same thing, sir[.] I am not Hopalong Cassidy. I cannot distinguish between hitting an arm and so forth, sir. I aimed dead center and I hoped I hit.”23 The following year, during the trial of fourteen indicted Muslims, defense attorney Earl Broady (himself a retired LAPD officer) asked Weese: “‘Did you see any of these men commit a crime when shot?’ ‘Yes,’ Weese said, ‘they were fleeing.’ ‘Do you consider that a crime?’ There was no answer.”24
Another Korean War vet, William Rogers, was running from the scene when he heard someone shout “that’s my nigger.” “Then I felt an explosion in my back and fell. The next thing I knew an officer was beating me over the head.” He blacked out, and when he regained consciousness he found that his younger brother, Robert, was lying next to him, shot four times. “I put out my hand and we held hands … My brother said, ‘They got me, too.’ Then someone came by and kicked our hands apart. I was told to get up but I couldn’t move. My brother said he couldn’t move either.” William Rogers was permanently paralyzed.25
Inside the Temple, meanwhile, Shabazz was shouting at members not to resist, but nonviolence spared few from police fury. Fifteen were lined against a wall in the men’s cloakroom and systematically tormented. “We ought to shoot these niggers,” one cop taunted. “We got them lined up and we ought to kill every one of them.” Another chipped in: “We just killed some of your brothers outside.” There 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