When Elijah finished his address, the most famous Black Muslim walked over to the podium. Dressed in a black suit, white shirt, and skinny black tie, Muhammad Ali, tight-lipped and solemn, approached the lectern. After offering the traditional Muslim greeting—“As-Salaam-Alaikum”—he explained that he had rushed home from Cairo at Elijah Muhammad’s request. Elijah desired his presence at the Armory so that Ali could remind all of Harlem why he had chosen the Messenger over the hypocrite. Ali told the Nation that Muslims all over the world recognized the Honorable Elijah Muhammad as a legitimate spiritual leader. Clearly, with Malcolm gone, the boxer would serve as Elijah’s new spokesman.20
Ali delivered the goods. He said exactly what Elijah wanted him to say. Everywhere he went—Ghana, Nigeria, and Egypt—Muslims asked him the same question: “‘How is the Honorable Elijah Muhammad?’” If it were not for the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, he insisted, the whole world would not know his name. He owed everything to the Messenger. Graciously, he presented Elijah with a miniature golden mosque, a gift sent from Egypt’s Supreme Council of Islam. As he raised the mini mosque in the air, Louis X, Herbert Muhammad, John Ali, and Elijah Jr.—all enemies of Malcolm—crowded around him, smiling for the cameramen.21
That same day, Ali’s recently assigned press secretary, Leon 4X, also known as Leon Ameer, attended an FOI meeting at the Armory. A lean, diminutive man standing barely five foot four, Ameer was known as a karate expert with a quick temper. He had joined Mosque No. 7 in 1956, four years after receiving an honorable discharge as a steward in the marines. According to his FBI file, Leon was diagnosed with schizophrenia after exhibiting “a sudden episode of acutely disturbed and obviously psychotic behavior.” In a sudden rage, he attacked a large man with an axe during “an argument over a bedding roll.” After spending a few months in a psychiatric hospital, he returned to New York, where he was arrested on separate occasions for robbery and grand larceny. But the life of a hardened criminal dissatisfied him. He missed the marines and the feeling of camaraderie that came with serving in a military unit. When a fellow veteran convinced him to attend a meeting at the local mosque, Leon embraced the Nation’s code of strict discipline and became a soldier in the Fruit of Islam. Soon, he turned his life around, teaching martial arts and eventually becoming one of Malcolm’s bodyguards.22
After Malcolm left the Nation, though, he remained loyal to Elijah Muhammad, and John Ali gave him direct orders to keep an eye on the heavyweight champion. But when he heard the Messenger’s son talk at the Armory, he began questioning his decision. Elijah Jr. spoke with a viciousness that troubled him. Malcolm was a “red, no good dog,” a hypocrite who deserved to die. “If we decide to kill Malcolm,” he said, “no one can help him.” Consumed with rage, Elijah’s son berated the New York Fruit for failing to execute him. “Malcolm should have been killed by now!” If Malcolm refused to leave the Queens home deeded to the Nation, then they would make him leave. “All you have to do is go there and clap on the walls until the walls come down and then cut the nigger’s tongue out and put it in an envelope and send it to me. And I’ll stamp it approved and give it to the Messenger.”23
Leon knew what he had just heard. Everyone in the room understood the implications of the tirade. Looking back, Thomas 15X, a member of the New York Fruit, said that when the Messenger’s son spoke, he spoke on behalf of his father. “Back then, that was an order.”24
LATER THAT EVENING, twenty blocks away at the Audubon Ballroom, more than six hundred people listened to Malcolm announce his latest initiative: the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), a movement inspired by his trip to Africa and the limitations of Muslim Mosque, Inc. (MMI). He had not given up on MMI, but he recognized that it lacked a clearly defined focus and that its religious name turned off too many secularists. Seeking a political platform, Malcolm courted black radicals and intellectuals to join his revolutionary program. In his opening address, he outlined the OAAU’s goals: voter registration campaigns, rent strikes, business boycotts, and “an all-out war on organized crime.”25