On March 1, around three p.m., after riding more than 1,200 miles in his bus Big Red, he and his six-man entourage checked into the Hotel Theresa. Clay stepped off the bus in no mood to celebrate. Crossing the Mason-Dixon line convinced him, once again, that he would rather live in New York than Louisville or Miami. “I’m heavyweight champion of the world, yet, for a day and a half I had to eat bologna out of a bag . . . simply because I’m black,” he complained. At every southern stop white men could not have cared less that he was the heavyweight champion. No black man, they reminded him, was welcome in a white restaurant. And yet, he could not understand why his “own people,” he said, “so-called Negroes,” still asked him, “‘Why are you a Muslim?’”1
Clay felt more at home on the streets of Harlem, where black fans gave him a hero’s welcome. “I could be living all exclusive, downtown, in some skyscraper,” he said, but he preferred being around his own people at the Theresa. His face broke into a wide smile when a crowd of black kids rushed toward him, shouting his name. For more than an hour, he signed autographs in the lobby. At a hotel with mostly black clientele, he figured that he would not find any trouble, except for the women who showed up at his suite at all hours of the night, posing as Muslims.2
In Harlem, Malcolm’s home turf, the minister smiled like he was in the catbird seat. During the first week of March 1964, Malcolm clung to the new heavyweight champion as if his life depended on him. His designs for Cassius X seemed within his grasp, but the boxer had plans for slipping away. Associated Press
At the corner of Seventh Avenue and 125th Street, the Hotel Theresa sat at the nexus of black culture. A white terracotta building situated near Harlem’s most popular nightclubs and the Apollo Theater, the Theresa was known for catering to black celebrities. Writers, actors, bandleaders, and athletes found everything that they needed inside the hotel: multiroom suites, business offices, a barbershop, beauty parlor, bar, and restaurant. Reporters looking for a scoop came to the Theresa knowing that something newsworthy was always happening. All they had to do was tip a doorman and they were bound to learn something that they could write about. Every night, it seemed, somebody important—a diplomat or a national leader—stayed at the Theresa. Castro, Lumumba, Nasser, Nkrumah, and Khrushchev, a who’s who of American critics, had all visited the “Waldorf of Harlem.”3
Outside the thirteen-story hotel, soapbox speakers railed against the white man while paperboys sold copies of the Amsterdam News. Across the street, radicals held court at Lewis Michaux’s African National Memorial Bookstore. Surrounded by stacks of books, pamphlets, and magazines, Michaux, a slight septuagenarian known among Nationalists as “the Professor,” educated visitors about history and politics, telling old stories about his days in the United Negro Improvement Association. Malcolm became one of his most prized pupils, listening intently as the former window washer preached about Pan-Africanism and American hypocrisy. One time, as he often did, Malcolm pulled out a pocket-size notebook and a red pen, jotting down something Michaux had said about “America’s chickens coming home to roost.”4
After his banishment from Mosque No. 7, Malcolm moved into an office at the Theresa, even though the most famous “Negro” hotel in the country was no longer the popular destination it once was. In fact, it was never really the glamorous getaway writers made it out to be. “With its dimly lit hallways, drab colorless bedrooms, dingy ancient furnishing, and limited room service, the Theresa,” Ebony magazine noted in 1946, “is anything but a first-rate hotel.” In the succeeding years, the hotel’s owners neglected necessary repairs, and the building began deteriorating along with the neighborhood around it. By the time Malcolm settled into Suite 128, the hotel’s white brick was smeared with soot, its luster long gone.5
Malcolm’s mezzanine office had served at one time or another as a brokerage firm and a cosmetics company, and traces of both were still present. When visitors reached his office door they could still read an old hand-painted sign: EVE NELSON COSMETICS. Inside the large conference room, sparsely furnished with two cluttered desks and a few folding chairs, Malcolm designed his future plans, pinning news clippings to a bulletin board and writing ideas on a wall-sized chalkboard. It was an unimpressive workspace, but Malcolm recognized that its proximity to his former mosque—the home that he had known for the last decade—made it an ideal place to set up his new headquarters.6