Inside the church, an old renovated movie house, Malcolm’s glass-covered coffin lay beneath two murals of Jesus. Despite the Christian setting, Sheikh Ahmed Hassoun made sure that Malcolm received a proper Muslim funeral. At nine forty-five, Betty arrived, dressed in black, her face hidden behind a veil. Bomb threats—“We’ll cremate Malcolm with firebombs”—frightened the pregnant widow out of bringing her four daughters to the service. Escorted by Malcolm’s security team and a group of policemen, she walked steadily toward the casket, tears streaming down her face, her upper lip quivering. When she reached the casket, she leaned toward Malcolm, who was wrapped in a white burial sheet, and kissed the glass that separated them. Surrounded by friends, family, newsmen, and photographers, Betty sat in a second-row pew, “looking terribly beautiful and alone.” Some of the most notable figures in black America joined her, including Bayard Rustin, Andrew Young, John Lewis, and Dick Gregory.61
During his former friend’s funeral, Muhammad Ali spent the day in Chicago performing a boxing exhibition at the Nation’s Unity Bazaar. Bounding around the ring in a white T-shirt, the champ looked overweight and sluggish, not yet fully recovered from his hernia surgery. The Muslims had expected a large crowd, but less than ten percent of the Coliseum’s 7,500 seats were filled. Ali did not seem too worried that the police and the FBI were watching him. It was no secret that there were men who had loved Malcolm more than he did, vengeful men who were willing to kill the champ. “Shoot Clay too,” one of them said. “Why not? Why shouldn’t we shoot him? Right in the ring in front of all his people.”62
If the death threats scared Ali, he showed no fear. Instead, he clowned for five rounds, playfully contorting his face while he taunted his brother and tossed a few jabs. When Rahman hit him in the fifth, he pretended that he was hurt and took a dive, provoking laughter from the crowd. On a day of mourning, columnist Jimmy Breslin could not understand how Ali could act so flippant, entertaining the same men who reveled in Malcolm’s death. The champ had surrounded himself with “the dull-minded, dangerous fanatics who will kill for this cult, just as they ran into the Audubon auditorium in broad daylight and killed Malcolm X last Sunday.” Watching the scene unfold, Breslin wondered if Ali ever really loved Malcolm at all.63
In New York, Malcolm’s friend, playwright and actor Ossie Davis, delivered a powerful eulogy. Looking out at the black faces in the packed church, Davis was reminded that Harlem truly loved Malcolm. The actor wanted the world to know that Malcolm was not a “fanatic, a racist,” or a violent demagogue. Those who cast Malcolm as evil never really knew him, he said. To Malcolm’s critics, he asked, “Did you ever talk to Brother Malcolm? Did you ever touch him, or have him smile at you? Did you ever really listen to him?”64
Those who really knew Malcolm understood why the congregation honored him. Malcolm spoke for the powerless, the downtrodden, the voiceless black man. He was an authentic symbol of black pride, strength, and redemption, and he spoke the truth without cowering from whites. A champion of self-determination, he probed America’s deepest wound, the gulf between the country’s democratic ideals and its inequalities. Ultimately, he died in the struggle for Black Power; he died so that other blacks could live without fear, so that they could realize their dreams of freedom. Malcolm, Davis declared, was one of Harlem’s “brightest hopes,” he was “our manhood, our living black manhood! This was his meaning to his people. And in honoring him, we honor the best in ourselves.”65
When Davis finished speaking, the pallbearers loaded Malcolm’s casket into a silver-blue hearse. For twenty miles, a police escort led the fifty-car procession out of the city, through Yonkers and Westchester, to the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, a hamlet in the town of Greenburgh. Around eleven thirty-five, the convoy passed through the cemetery gates. In the Pinewood section of the graveyard, two hundred mourners gathered around plot 150, which was marked with a bronze plaque that read, “EL-HAJJ MALIK EL-SHABAZZ.”66
After reciting the final Muslim prayers, a group of cemetery workers lowered the casket into the bottom of the cold, muddy grave. When the white workers grabbed shovels, a few of the brothers interjected. The undertaker told them that their caravan was already leaving. If they stayed behind, they would have no way to get home. “We’ll walk,” one of the mourners replied. When the brothers started tossing handfuls of dirt into the grave, the white men backed away, surrendering their shovels. The brothers picked up the tools, scooped the dirt, and filled the grave while the last mourners watched in silence. “No white man,” one of them said, “is going to bury Malcolm.”67
Epilogue
ONCE THE HATE IS GONE
Cassius Clay will be the first heavyweight champion in history to train in a bullet-proof ring.
—DAVID GORDON, BOSTON GLOBE, FEBRUARY 23, 1965