On a cold April evening in 1957, a fight broke out between two black men at the corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue in Manhattan, the heart of Harlem. Swiftly, police cars arrived at the scene, sirens wailing, and officers jumped out of their vehicles. White patrolmen broke through the crowd, gripping their nightsticks, demanding the onlookers disperse. As the policemen thumped a suspect, the crowd watched in horror. “Why don’t you carry the man to jail?” Johnson Hinton asked. In Harlem, patrolmen routinely subjected black men to random searches and brutal force. The officers ignored Hinton’s protest, ordering him to move on. But he just wouldn’t listen.1
Growing bolder and louder, he shouted: “You’re not in Alabama! This is New York!” Enraged, Officer Mike Dolan knocked Hinton to the ground. The officer unleashed his baton, cracking Hinton in the skull until blood gushed onto the sidewalk. While the police stuffed his limp body into the squad car, black and brown faces looked on in disgust, complaining in hushed tones. It seemed that there was nothing that they could say, nothing that they could do. The one black man who had challenged the police found himself behind bars, silenced by a bloody baton.2
In Harlem, the black man’s anger toward the white man had long simmered. Everywhere he turned, the white man embarrassed, exploited, and emasculated him. The white man arrested him. The white man raised the rent. The white man got the job. The white man cut his wages. The white man denied his loan application. The white man had better schools, nicer homes, and more money. The goddamn white man.
“My hobby,” Malcolm X said with a sly grin, “is stirring up Negroes.” A provocative orator, he stirred crowds with his quick wit and sharp tongue. Malcolm’s fearlessness and his scathing critiques of white men made him a hero in Harlem and the subject of FBI surveillance. Associated Press
“To live in Harlem,” Ralph Ellison wrote in 1948, “is to dwell in the very bowels of the city; it is to pass a labyrinthine existence among streets that explode monotonously skyward with the spires and crosses of churches and clutter underfoot with garbage and decay.” Black families lived in crowded tenements, crumbling buildings infested by vermin and cockroaches. In the shadows of dark alleys and on crowded street corners, men sought relief, drinking, smoking, and gambling away the little money that they had. Poverty, addiction, and violence plagued black neighborhoods. “Overcrowded and exploited politically and economically,” Ellison observed, “Harlem is the scene and symbol of the Negro’s perpetual alienation in the land of his birth.”3
As the squad cars pulled away from the scene, a woman who witnessed the assault rushed to the Nation of Islam’s Shabazz Restaurant at 113 Lenox Avenue. She told the men that one of their Muslim brothers—Johnson X, as he was known—had been severely beaten by the police. Immediately, Joseph X, the rugged captain of the local temple’s Fruit of Islam (FOI)—the Nation’s “secret army”—organized more than fifty men using a phone chain. Every temple had a security unit made up of an elite group of men who were held to a higher standard of discipline than other members. Trained soldiers, the FOI was responsible for enforcing the laws of the Nation and protecting Elijah Muhammad’s followers. They defended the temples and regularly drilled in paramilitary tactics, boxing, and judo, though they were forbidden from carrying arms.4
When the Muslims arrived at the 28th Precinct on 123rd Street, the police feared that they were hiding guns under their heavy coats. The temple’s minister, a lean, copper-skinned man with a long face and square jaw, wearing thick, black horn-rimmed glasses, marched right into the station. Standing nearly six feet three inches tall and sporting a camel-hair coat, Malcolm X spoke forcefully but calmly, requesting to see Hinton. The police denied that any Muslims were held inside their jail, but as an angry throng of nearly two thousand black people gathered in front of the station, they allowed the minister to check on him. Lying on the cold cement floor of the jail, Hinton could hardly speak; an officer had struck him across the jaw with his baton when he began praying inside his cell. Containing his rage, Malcolm demanded that the lieutenant in charge take the concussed prisoner—who was actually suffering from subdural hemorrhaging—to a hospital. Fearing a riot outside the station, the police called for an ambulance.5 When the minister walked out of the precinct, he directed the brethren to follow him to the hospital.
Outside of his congregation, few people in the crowd knew much about Malcolm. They had never seen him lead a march or a picket or a boycott. The Muslims rejected the American democratic system, refusing overt political action. They didn’t even vote. Instead, the Nation occupied an insulated world of complete separation.