The following day, Elijah held a press conference from his living room. He spoke impassively, denying any knowledge about Malcolm’s murder. According to his grandson, Elijah was sitting in his office when he heard the news on the radio. “Oh my God!” he exclaimed. Speechless, he sat quietly for about thirty minutes until he said that he wanted to go home. When reporters asked him if he had ever heard of the suspect, “Thomas Hagan,” he answered, “he is a stranger to us.”56
In the days leading up to the annual Saviours’ Day Convention, officers escorted Ali everywhere he went. The police figured that if Malcolm’s avengers could not get their hands on Elijah, they most certainly would try to kill Ali. On Tuesday, February 23, the morning after a firebomb exploded at Mosque No. 7, completely gutting the Harlem temple, reporters hounded Ali. Anticipating open warfare, writers asked him if he feared death. “I’m with God. If I’m gonna die for truth, I’m ready to die. I ain’t afraid. I ain’t afraid of nothing.”57
Facing death threats, he remained defiant, professing his faith in the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. Publicly, he maintained a loyal front, but his mother sensed that her son wavered about being in the Nation. “I heard he wants to quit [the Muslims],” Odessa said. “I hope he does.” In her heart, though, she doubted that her son would actually leave Elijah. Ali never seriously considered breaking with him. He was in too deep. And now, as a spokesman of the Nation, he could show no remorse for the deceased. “Malcolm X was my friend and he was the friend of everybody as long as he was a member of Islam,” he said. “Now I don’t want to talk about him no more.”58
On Friday, February 26, Muhammad preached for more than two hours at the Coliseum. Outside the old stadium on Wabash Avenue, the police set up a tight perimeter comparable to that for a presidential visit. Two days earlier, they had received a phone call from a man who claimed that he had planted a bomb inside the stadium. Undeterred, Muhammad stepped to the podium. Surrounded by a phalanx of “grimfaced” troopers standing shoulder to shoulder, the Fruit created a bulwark around the Messenger.59
“Malcolm was a hypocrite who got what he was preaching,” he declared, his voice cracking between coughing spells. “If he had not been a hypocrite, we could have given him a glorious burial,” but Malcolm “went around the country trying to slander me.”
Standing on the dais next to Louis X, Ali endorsed Elijah, clapping enthusiastically and repeatedly shouting, “Amen!’ and “Yes, sir!” Muhammad’s frail voice hardly carried in the cavernous arena, but the crowd followed Ali’s cues, showering him with praise: “Sweet words! That’s right! That’s right!” If Malcolm had not turned his back “on me,” Elijah preached, “we would have stood over his body and prayed with tears of grief in our eyes.” But no one on the stage, not Louis, not Ali, not Elijah, not even Malcolm’s own brothers, Philbert and Wilfred, shed a tear. “It’s wrong,” Muhammad reminded his followers, “to even stand beside the grave of a hypocrite.”
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 27, felt like the coldest day of winter. Just before sunrise, mourners began lining up outside Faith Temple Church of God in Christ on Amsterdam Avenue. Braving the bitter chill, grievers quietly huddled together, their hands jammed into their pockets and coat collars pulled up to their ears. As the sun climbed the morning sky, the temperature rose to fourteen degrees. Emerging from the subway, people extended the line, four abreast, down the block and around the corner onto 147th Street. Police barricades could hardly contain the overflowing crowd, estimated at 2,500. Earlier in the week, more than twenty thousand people had viewed Malcolm in his copper casket at the Unity Funeral Chapel on Eighth Avenue. Now, around nine thirty a.m., cameramen from WNBC began filming the funeral procession, capturing images of old women weeping and people hanging out of tenement windows watching the action below. Police squads patrolled the sidewalks while officers stationed on rooftops searched for signs of trouble.60