When Malcolm finished, Muhammad, the featured speaker, rose from his large chair, like a royal descending from his throne, and walked over to the lectern. Cassius listened attentively as the slight man with a receding hairline forcefully asserted that the “so-called Negro” had been enslaved for more than four hundred years, echoing what Clay had heard at the Miami mosque. “That is a long time for a master to mistreat you,” he said. For two hours, Muhammad zealously preached while Cassius and Rudy sat well back in the crowded arena, “practically leading the applause.”35
Flanked by twenty to thirty members of the Fruit, Muhammad declared, “The time to rise is now.” It was time for black men to renounce the “games of white men,” he urged, time to abandon the struggle for integration and turn inward, looking to Allah’s Messenger for salvation. Muhammad condemned the Los Angeles police for murdering Ronald Stokes and reminded his parents, the honored guests, that their son did not die in vain. The white man’s day of judgment, he promised, would come before long.36
Muhammad demanded a separate state where blacks could live independently from whites. Malcolm sat just a few feet away from him, nodding with approval as he listened. “We must remember that we are two different people and we must be separate. That is the only way out.”37
The message Clay heard that day jived with what he had learned from his father—keep your distance from white men; they will never treat a black man fairly. It reinforced what he had read in newspapers and magazines and seen on television—images of the mutilated body of Emmett Till, the bombing of Martin Luther King’s Montgomery home, and a white mob assaulting black teenagers outside a Little Rock high school.
That day in Detroit changed Clay’s life. There was something about Malcolm—his swagger, the dazzle in his smile, the way that everyone in the diner watched him—that alerted Cassius that the brother minister, who, in the words of activist Dick Gregory, “spoke like a poor man and walked like a king,” possessed an unbridled confidence and an audacity to speak his mind in a way that no else did.38
“My first impression of Malcolm X was how could a black man talk about the government and white people and act so bold and not be shot at? How could he say these things? Only God must be protecting him,” Clay said later. Malcolm was unlike anyone he had ever met. “He was fearless. That really attracted me.”39
Malcolm had magnetized Clay, drawing him toward the inner circle of the Nation. He had no idea the effect he had on the young boxer that day in Detroit, but he would soon see him again.
AT THE END of the rally, after Clay departed Olympia Stadium, all members of the NOI were required to remain seated. Malcolm read a letter from Supreme Captain Raymond Sharrieff requiring “every Muslim to obtain no less than two subscriptions” of Muhammad Speaks “per day for three months.” Those who failed to meet the sales quota “would be eliminated from the Mosque.”40
Since Stokes’s death, the captains of every mosque had pressed their members to sell more copies of the newspaper. Muhammad Speaks not only offered the Nation an independent platform but also, more importantly, generated significant revenue for the organization. After the Stokes murder, instead of printing the newspaper on a monthly basis, Chicago officials began publishing the periodical biweekly. Supposedly, the issue that covered his funeral sold more than four hundred thousand copies, a misleading figure since an unknown number of copies belonged to members who were forced to purchase stacks of the newspaper in cash but never actually sold them to others.41
On Sunday, July 29, at two p.m., Malcolm attended a fund-raising benefit for Stokes’s family at the Boston Arena. In the hours before the rally, Muslims stood on the corners of St. Botolph Street and Massachusetts Avenue, selling a special reprint edition of Muhammad Speaks featuring gruesome pictures of Stokes that resembled the images of Emmett Till’s disfigured face in Jet magazine. An autopsy photo displayed Stokes lying on his back, his bare chest exposed with deep stitches and his skull lacerated and bruised from policemen’s nightsticks. Inside the tabloid were pictures of black men tethered to trees and hanging from nooses. In an open letter to five black congressmen, Malcolm argued that Stokes was as innocent as “Mack Parker, Emmett Till, or Isaac Woodard,” all victims of southern lynchings.42