Near the end of the rally, an official asked Clay to rise from his seat so that everyone could see that one of the most famous athletes in America was proud to stand with the Nation. At that moment, even before he won the heavyweight championship, Clay became a propaganda tool for the sect. He was a visible symbol of the movement at a time when the black masses were growing increasingly disenchanted with the Nation’s failure to improve the conditions of black citizens.57
No one heard these criticisms more often than Malcolm. On the streets of Harlem, blacks complained that the Nation needed to do more; he needed to do more. The Black Muslims talked tough, but when it came time to confront the white man, they were nowhere to be found. Malcolm sensed that the disaffection among blacks threatened the future of the movement. He knew that Muhammad would never change his tactics. What they needed, then, was an infusion of energy and youth, an icon of strong, defiant black manhood, a voice that could be heard above all the noise. So when Cassius Clay received a standing ovation in Philadelphia, a stirring sound that Malcolm had only heard at Madison Square Garden, he knew that he had found the Nation’s new symbol, a galvanizing force for the movement.
Yet the boxer was not yet prepared for such a role. After the rally ended, reporters rushed toward him, but he was in no mood to answer their questions. “If you want to interview somebody, interview Malcolm X,” he quipped. “He’s really got something important to say.” The newsmen were stunned that, for the first time in memory, Cassius did not want to talk. He departed the arena without saying much, worried that the media’s muckraking might derail his shot at the title.58
Clay did not yet realize that Malcolm had bigger plans for him. Nor could he have foreseen that the rally in Philadelphia would be the last time he would ever see Malcolm and Muhammad together. From his third row seat, he witnessed Muhammad bestow a great honor upon Malcolm, naming him national minister. But this was just another test, a challenge for Malcolm to prove that he really was his “most faithful, hard-working minister.” What Cassius saw that day was a mirage, a kingdom in harmony. He heard Muhammad close with an eerily prophetic promise. Malcolm, he said, “will follow me until he dies.”59
Chapter Nine
BACK TO THE GRAVE
How can you justify being nonviolent in Mississippi and Alabama, when your churches are being bombed and your little girls are being murdered?
—MALCOLM X
“History,” Newsweek declared, “would mark it: the summer of 1963 was a time of revolution, the season when 19 million U.S. Negroes demanded payment of the century-old promissory note called the Emancipation Proclamation.” The revolution of 1963 was rooted in the rich soil of the South, where overworked field hands bristled under a sharecropping system that locked them into permanent poverty. The revolution could be seen in the northern slums, where blacks protested dilapidated housing, police brutality, and substandard wages. It could be heard in the mourners’ cries at Ronald Stokes’s funeral, in the prayers of Martin Luther King, and in the sermons of Malcolm X. From the churches of Birmingham to the streets of Harlem, a “revolution of rising expectations” swept the country. It was a revolution teetering between frustration and faith, despair and hope, nonviolence and bloodshed.1
In Detroit, Malcolm talked about the revolution. Reverend Albert Cleage Jr., a Black Nationalist Christian minister, had invited him to deliver the keynote address at the Northern Grassroots Leadership Conference in November. Organized by the Group on Advanced Leadership (GOAL), the conference attracted a wide range of radicals, militants, Marxists, and socialists who viewed Malcolm as a leader of Black Nationalism.2
On November 10, Richard Henry, GOAL president, greeted two thousand blacks, most of whom were not Muslims, into the King Solomon Baptist Church with a grand announcement: “Welcome to the revolution!” At the conference, organizers proclaimed support for the all-black Freedom Now Party, the principle of armed self-defense, and solidarity with “the colored oppressed people of the world.” From the pulpit, Malcolm delivered his “Message to the Grassroots,” a Nationalist manifesto that would endure as a source of inspiration for Black Power activists over the next decade.3
He began by reminding the audience that what united them—with each other and with the dark-skinned people in Africa and Asia—was resistance to racial oppression. History, he said, taught that only bloody revolution would end the long suffering of black people. The nonviolent “Negro revolution” led by King and other integrationist liberals, he insisted, was not a revolution at all. A real revolution “is bloody, revolution is hostile, revolution knows no compromise, revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way.”4