ON FRIDAY, JUNE 14, 1963, an all-white Los Angeles jury rendered its decision in the Stokes case. It convicted nine of thirteen Black Muslim defendants, finding them guilty of assaulting police officers during the raid on the West Coast mosque. Two of the Muslims were acquitted, and the jury could not reach unanimous verdicts on two others. Four of the convicted men received prison sentences ranging from one to five years, one served time in the county jail, and the others received probation.39
Ten days later, WNDT in New York televised The Negro and the American Promise, a series of interviews Dr. Kenneth Clark conducted with Malcolm, King, and James Baldwin. Clark, a prominent psychology professor at City College in New York, taped the interviews separately and focused his questions on the future of the black man. Still carrying the burden of Birmingham on his shoulders, King looked exhausted on camera, as if he had just returned from a funeral. In a quiet, gentle voice, he recalled his experience in jail, unwavering in his commitment to nonviolence. Malcolm, angered by the Stokes ruling, spoke forcefully and bitterly, repeating his criticisms of King.40
James Baldwin sympathized with King but feared that America’s blacks were exasperated with his message. Sitting cross-legged, smoking a cigarette, the slight, “dark splinter of a man” with bulbous eyes spoke in contemplative, almost theatrical tones. Wearily, he vented, “You can only survive so many beatings, so much humiliation, so much despair, so many broken promises, before something gives.” He warned that although King possessed great moral authority in the South, his message did not resonate with blacks in northern cities. “Poor Martin has gone through God knows what kind of hell to awaken the American conscience,” he said, “but Martin has reached the end of his rope.”41
Baldwin’s comments echoed the sentiments of his book The Fire Next Time, a searing indictment of America’s history of racism. Writing in labyrinthine sentences, he fiercely articulated the anger and alienation of black America. “The so-called American Negro,” he wrote, “remains trapped, disinherited, and despised, in a nation that has kept him in bondage for nearly four hundred years and is still unable to recognize him as a human being.”42
His message carried overtones of Malcolm’s speeches and Elijah Muhammad’s sermons. In the second of the book’s two essays, Baldwin recounted his Sunday afternoon visit with Elijah at the Chicago mansion in the summer of 1962. Before his meeting with the Black Muslims, many Americans thought of Baldwin as an integrationist, though he never embraced such a label. In the age of television, he emerged as a celebrity writer turned activist, the literary voice of the black experience, a poet of the blues.
At the mansion, Baldwin sat nervously at a large dining table for nearly thirty minutes, chatting with Elijah’s aides while they waited for him to arrive. When Muhammad entered the room, everyone rose from the table. “Something came into the room with him—his disciples’ joy at seeing him, his joy at seeing them,” Baldwin wrote. Studying Muhammad, Baldwin recognized that the “central quality in Elijah’s face is pain, and his smile is a witness to it—pain so old and deep that it becomes personal and particular only when he smiles.” That agony etched onto his face derived from the haunted memories of his boyhood, growing up with eleven siblings in a poor family of sharecroppers in rural Georgia, hearing frightening stories about slave drivers abusing his grandparents, and seeing a bloodied black teenager “dangling from a tree limb” when he was just ten years old.43
As Elijah lectured on American history and the affliction of blacks at the hands of whites, Baldwin realized that he couldn’t refute him. When Kenneth Clark asked him about the appeal of the Nation, he admitted, “When Malcolm talks or the Muslim ministers talk, they articulate for all the Negro people who hear them . . . their suffering, the suffering which has been in this country so long denied. That’s Malcolm’s great authority over any of his audiences.”44
In Baldwin’s view, what made Malcolm so potent politically, so sinister, was that when he spoke, he told black people the brutal truth. Malcolm made them confront their fears about whites, about the source of their powerlessness. Without acknowledging their past, he said, they could never sustain meaningful change. When he talked about the solution to ending their suffering, black people believed him because they had lived his words.
For the first time, Baldwin declared, America had legitimate reason to fear the Black Muslims. If whites failed to eradicate the conditions that created the Nation, if they failed to cleanse the country of hatred, then America might not survive. “A bill is coming,” he warned, “that I fear America is not prepared to pay.”45
Chapter Eight
THE GREAT PRETENDER
One forgets that though a clown never imitates a wise man, the wise man can imitate the clown.
—MALCOLM X