In the days after his return, Malcolm found himself trapped between his past and his future, struggling to convey his new position as an alternative to the status quo. If he deviated too far from his previous rhetoric, looking for a rapprochement with white liberals, he risked losing his most loyal followers, but if he failed to broaden his thinking, inviting alliances with those he had condemned in the past, then he could not build the unified movement that he envisioned. Malcolm was now convinced that brotherhood between blacks mattered more than ideology. If a black man was willing to fight alongside him, risking his life for freedom, then that man was his brother.7
When fellow activists pressed him about his position, he maintained that whites were still the enemy of black Americans and that he fully intended “to fight that enemy.” On May 23, during a debate with Louis Lomax at the Civic Opera House in Chicago, he explained that traveling abroad had helped him discover a wider perspective. “Separation is not the goal of the Afro-American,” he told the moderator, Irv Kupcinet. “Nor is integration his goal. They are merely methods toward his real end—respect and recognition as a human being.”8
While Malcolm debated Lomax, he looked out at the audience and noticed John Ali and a squad from the Fruit glaring at him. It was the beginning of an emerging pattern. The moment Malcolm returned home, the Black Muslims escalated threats against him, appearing everywhere he went: lecture halls, radio stations, airports, even his home. In Chicago, Raymond Sharrieff had ordered the Fruit to “get” Malcolm. In early June, the Supreme Captain visited Mosque No. 7, where he delivered a harangue against the “hypocrite,” demanding vengeance. Make no mistake, he said, “Malcolm will soon die out.”9
Malcolm could sense his enemies closing in on him. Walking the streets at night, his eyes darted in every direction while he listened for footsteps. He could imagine a squad from the Fruit sneaking up behind him. The Black Muslims, Peter Goldman wrote, “had crowded him into a corner and so had brought him to his most dangerous condition—that reckless, free-swinging, gut-punching fury in which he would use whatever weapon came to hand.”10
His most potent weapon against the Muslims, of course, was evidence that Elijah Muhammad had carried on numerous affairs, impregnating several of his secretaries. He began retaliating by sending his chief aide, James 67X, to California to obtain signed legal documents from women who claimed that Elijah had fathered their children. Then he began working the phones, calling other women who could corroborate the former secretaries’ charges. Malcolm knew that once he pursued this course, his chances of survival deteriorated. Muhammad would stop at nothing to protect his secrets. The FBI overheard Malcolm say on the phone, “Any man who will go to bed with his brother’s daughter, and then turn around and make five other women pregnant, and then accuse all these women of committing adultery, is a ruthless man.”11
On the evening of June 7, at the Audubon Ballroom, Malcolm told nearly five hundred people that Elijah kept several concubines and was the father of six illegitimate children. This was the first time that he spoke publicly about Elijah’s adultery, a move as wise as swinging a broom at a hornet’s nest. The Nation’s officials, he declared, “would even murder to keep it quiet.” Later that night, across Harlem, the Black Muslims mobilized, preparing for war. The following morning Betty received the first of many threatening phone calls. Sometimes her tormentors dialed and hung up. Sometimes they said nothing while she pleaded for them to stop calling. And sometimes they threatened her children. But this time a man told her to deliver a message to her husband. “Just tell him he’s as good as dead.”12
MALCOLM GOT THE message. Later that day, he appeared on CBS with Mike Wallace, divulging Elijah’s improprieties. Muhammad forced him out of the Nation of Islam, he charged, because when he learned about Muhammad’s indiscretions he told other officials, who then made it look as if he was “stirring up things.” Wallace asked him if he feared the consequences of exposing Elijah’s trysts. “Oh yes,” he answered. “I’m probably a dead man already.”13