After the interview, he left the television studio in an unmarked police car with two detectives and two state attorneys. Driving toward his hotel, a van swerved in front of them, cutting off the police car. About a dozen Muslims swarmed them. Malcolm must have thought that this was it. There was no way two policeman could protect him from this mob. They were clearly outnumbered until six more officers who had tailed behind them rushed to their rescue. Later, when the police escorted him to his hotel room, Malcolm recognized about fifteen Black Muslims loitering in the lobby. He told a detective, “It’s only going to be a matter of time before they catch up with me.”22
THE TIME HAD come for Malcolm to head south and join forces with grassroots civil rights activists. On Thursday, February 4, a day after he lectured at the Tuskegee Institute, he traveled to Selma, Alabama, where Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had organized a voting rights campaign. Facing a court injunction against demonstrations and relentless harassment from police, King led a march, landing himself in jail with more than seven hundred other protestors.23
While King sat behind bars, student activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee invited Malcolm to join a rally at the Brown Chapel American Methodist Episcopal Church. From the Christian pulpit, he exhorted the audience “to use whatever means are necessary to gain the vote.” He praised King’s commitment to peace, but he reminded the congregation that he did not believe in nonviolence. “The white man should thank God that Dr. King is holding his people in check, because there are other ways to obtain their ends.” When he finished speaking, he visited with King’s wife, Coretta. He regretted that he did not visit Martin in jail, but he wanted her to know that he came to Selma to help him. “If the white people realize what the alternative is,” he said, “perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King.”24
A day after returning home from Alabama, he flew to London for the first Congress of the Council of African Organizations. Three days later, on February 9, he traveled to Paris, but when he stepped off the plane customs agents detained him. The ministry of the interior claimed that he threatened to disturb “the public order,” and therefore his presence was “undesirable in France.” Malcolm could not understand why he was being sent back to London. Three months earlier, he had been welcomed in France. What had changed? Some writers have suggested that the French had learned that the CIA intended to kill Malcolm, and the government “didn’t want his blood spilled on its soil.” Although there is no substantiated evidence supporting this theory, the episode in Paris made Malcolm reconsider who it was that truly wanted him dead.25
MALCOLM COULD NO longer rest comfortably at home. On February 13, hours after he returned to the United States, he took a sleeping pill and dozed off. At two forty-five a.m. he woke to a startling sound: Whoom! A Molotov cocktail smashed through his living room window, torching the floor and the furniture. Whoom! A second firebomb shattered another window, scattering glass everywhere. Malcolm shook Betty awake, leapt from the bed, and darted across the hallway to grab his four daughters from their smoking bedrooms. Blinded by the smoke, Betty winced as she stumbled into the hallway. Bam! Another firebomb bounced off the back door, landing in the frosty yard, where it died. Rushing the screaming children and Betty through the kitchen, Malcolm swung open the back door and yelled at Betty, “Stay here!”26
Frightened, she and the children shivered outside, watching the brick bungalow burn. Malcolm hurried back into the five-room house to retrieve a few belongings, some coats, and a .25 caliber pistol. Quickly, he reemerged, coughing, in a singed topcoat. Five minutes later, the Queens fire department arrived, sirens blaring. Incensed, he paced barefoot, holding the gun at his side, while firefighters extinguished the flames. He could not believe that the Muslims would bomb a house containing four little girls, ages seven months to six years. His assassins had sent a clear message. They would kill him by any means necessary, even if it meant murdering his wife and children. Malcolm increasingly sensed his murder was inescapable. “I won’t burn to death,” he said to the fire inspector. “I’ll probably be shot to death in the street one day. Or maybe while I’m speaking.”27
The following day, the press reported that the fire department had found a whiskey bottle filled with gasoline on his daughters’ dresser. Harlem minister James 3X suggested that Malcolm planted the jug on his own, staging the fire for publicity. Why, James asked, would the Muslims torch a house that they owned? “He is obsessed with the idea that we’re after him,” he told the New York Daily News. Later, Malcolm secretly met with a fireman who said that he had seen “a man wearing a police uniform” walk into the house carrying the jug. He had no doubt that someone was trying to frame him.28