Days of Rage (6 page)

It started in 1954. By that point American blacks, especially those laboring under Jim Crow in the South, had been subjected to almost a century of oppression, police brutality, discrimination, disenfranchisement, and lynching. They were, by and large, second-class citizens living in poverty, denied access to the best jobs and schools and subjected to intermittent atrocities, from the murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 to that of the activist Medgar Evers eight years later. While groups like the NAACP had been campaigning for equal rights for decades, the modern civil rights movement gained momentum with 1954’s
Brown v. Board of Education,
the landmark Supreme Court decision that overturned school segregation.

A year later came the boycott of public buses in Montgomery, Alabama, a protest that vaulted a minister named Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence. A group he formed with other ministers, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, emerged as an umbrella organization for black protests. King’s movement gained momentum during the fight to desegregate schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, and then burst into international consciousness with a series of “sit-ins” that began in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960. A new medium, television, broadcast images of enraged Southern sheriffs dragging away black protesters that mobilized an entire generation of white people, many of them college students, who would come to define the 1960s. Then came the Freedom Riders, Bull Connor’s snapping German shepherds in Birmingham, Alabama, the March on Washington, Selma. Along the way “the Movement” was born.

Through it all, King famously counseled a Gandhian policy of nonviolent resistance as the surest way to overcome ingrained Southern racism. From the beginning, however, his hymns of peace were accompanied by a deeper, angrier, little-noticed bass line throbbing ominously in the background of the civil rights symphony. This was the siren song of what many blacks termed “self-defense” but which a generation of wary whites saw simply as a call to violence, to shotgun blasts in the night, to rioting, to black men rampaging through streets of burning white homes and businesses. This music began softly, barely audible, in the late 1950s, then rose in volume through the early 1960s until becoming a full-throated chorus in 1966 and 1967. By 1968 it was a battle song. “Self-defense” became “struggle,” then “resistance,” then “Black Power,” then revolution and guerrilla warfare and death.

In some ways, it was a very old song. Calls for black uprisings date at least to the slave revolts of Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey, and cries for black militancy and separatism surfaced as early as the late 1800s. Modern black militarism dates to the years before World War I, when shadowy groups such as the African Blood Brotherhood and later Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association advocated the formation of paramilitary “self-defense units.” Garvey’s Universal African Legions were rifle-toting pseudo-soldiers in navy uniforms who marched through Harlem in the 1920s. These were fringe movements at best, barely noticed outside the black community.

The notion of a violent struggle against White America received little currency during the 1950s; King’s message was the only one most Americans, black and white alike, were able to hear. But the specter of racial violence was always there, and as the years wore on with little sign of the seismic changes
many blacks demanded, the voices of militancy grew louder. Between 1959 and 1972, the torch of “self-defense” was passed between five consecutive black men and their acolytes.

The first, and least remembered, was Robert F. Williams, head of the NAACP chapter in the Ku Klux Klan stronghold of Monroe, North Carolina. A grandson of slaves, Williams spent his early years working in Detroit factories, where he became a labor organizer. Returning home in 1955, he wasted little time confronting Monroe’s white power structure, boycotting whites-only lunch counters and demanding in vain that black children be allowed to use the town pool. After watching a Klansman force a black girl to dance at gunpoint, Williams formed the Black Armed Guard, arguing that “armed self-reliance” was necessary in the face of Klan “terrorism.” Its members were mostly NAACP men who started carrying guns. “If the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution cannot be enforced in this social jungle called Dixie at this time, then Negroes must defend themselves, even if it is necessary to resort to violence,” he once told reporters.

Williams became an international figure during 1958’s infamous “Kissing Case.” Two black boys, aged seven and nine, had participated in a schoolyard kissing game in which a white Monroe girl gave one of the boys a peck on the cheek; the boys were arrested for molestation, jailed, beaten, and sent to a reform school. Williams led a defense effort that eventually included Eleanor Roosevelt and, after a British newspaper exposé, demonstrations in Paris, Rome, and Vienna; in Rotterdam the U.S. embassy was stoned. Soon after, the boys were released. Williams, in turn, emerged as a minor celebrity, feted by Northern progressives in Harlem and other black strongholds.

During and after the case, Williams gave newspaper interviews in which he openly advocated black self-defense; if the Klan attacked a black man in Monroe, he swore, there would be retribution. “We must be willing to kill if necessary,” he told one reporter. Alarmed, the NAACP suspended him. Williams was unrepentant. Then, in 1961, when Freedom Riders came to the area to register black voters, a white couple drove into an angry black crowd. Williams took the couple into his home, then briefly refused to let them leave, saying it would be unsafe. Afterward, prosecutors charged him with kidnapping. When Williams fled, the FBI issued a warrant charging him with unlawful interstate flight. With the help of radical friends in Harlem, he made his way to Canada and then to Cuba, becoming among the first, but far from the last, U.S. radical to be warmly welcomed by Fidel Castro.

In Cuba Williams became a one-man factory of anti-Americanism. It was there he wrote the book that became his legacy,
Negroes with Guns
, in which he argued that North Carolina authorities began protecting blacks only after they armed themselves. Between 1962 and 1965 Williams churned out a stream of bellicose writings, many in a self-published newspaper,
the Crusader
. Castro even gave him a radio show broadcast into Southern states, called
Radio Free Dixie
. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Williams called on black servicemen to engage in armed insurrection. Even at the height of his notoriety, however, he remained a marginal figure, familiar mostly to other radicals and the FBI. He all but disappeared after moving to China in 1965.

The second, and vastly more influential, messenger of black militancy was a charismatic Harlem preacher named Malcolm Little, better known to history as Malcolm X. Unlike Williams and King and most other black leaders seen on American television, Malcolm was a native of cold Northern slums, where blacks faced conditions every bit as daunting as those in the Jim Crow South: poverty, widespread unemployment, poor housing, and rampant police brutality. A black man arrested in Harlem in the 1960s could routinely expect a beating; when policemen killed a black citizen, there was rarely a successful prosecution. It was no accident that when underground groups began forming in 1970 and 1971, their targets were rarely slumlords or army barracks or politicians. They were almost always policemen.

Focusing on these issues, Malcolm X had an exponentially greater influence on blacks than on whites. This was in large part because he never seriously engaged with the Southern civil rights movement (always the primary focus of white interest). He spent much of his career performing in a rhetorical theater that few whites even knew was open.

Malcolm was born in Omaha in 1925, one of eight children. His father, Earl, was a Baptist lay preacher and an ardent member of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association; from an early age, Earl’s sense of black pride and self-reliance was instilled in Malcolm. Legend holds that the
Klan harassed Earl Little for his views and forced the family to flee Omaha; they settled in Lansing, Michigan, in 1928.

As Malcolm later told his story, he was among the better students at his junior high school but became withdrawn after a teacher told him that his idea of becoming a lawyer was not a “realistic goal for a nigger.” After eighth grade he moved to a half sister’s home in Boston; at seventeen he fled to Harlem, where he became a street hustler, dealing drugs, robbing stores, and working as a pimp. Back in Boston, he began burglarizing the homes of wealthy whites; arrested in 1946, he was sentenced to eight to ten years at the Charlestown State Prison.

Like many blacks who would go underground in the 1970s, Malcolm was radicalized behind bars, poring over nationalist texts recommended by older inmates. It was his brother, Reginald, who drew him into an obscure sect called the Nation of Islam. The Nation had been founded in 1930 by a Detroit clothing salesman named Wallace D. Fard, who preached that blacks had ruled the earth six thousand years ago, until their destruction by a renegade black wizard named Yakub, who then created the white man—the “white devil,” in the Nation’s mythos; blacks, Fard prophesied, would destroy the white devil in a future apocalypse. Until his disappearance and presumed death in 1934, Fard imbued his disciples with a message of racial pride, economic equality, and personal discipline. Over the next twenty years his protégé, Elijah Muhammad, quietly built the Nation into a small but vocal group of clean-cut, impeccably dressed black separatists, including a paramilitary wing called the Fruit of Islam. Still, by 1952, when Malcolm emerged from prison, Muhammad had only a few hundred followers.

Malcolm changed everything. Six-foot-three, handsome, intense, and bursting with charisma, he immediately became Muhammad’s protégé. At a storefront mosque in Detroit, on street corners, and later in Chicago and Boston, Malcolm mesmerized black crowds. His sermons, while ostensibly religious, were ringing anthems of black empowerment, pride, and self-defense, concepts many blacks had never heard aired in public. The Muslims dressed neatly and forbade drugs and alcohol. A mosque typically featured a blackboard Islamic flag with the words
FREEDOM, JUSTICE AND EQUALITY
beneath, alongside an American flag with the words
CHRISTIANITY, SLAVERY, SUFFERING, AND DEATH
. Men and women sat separately. There were typically no hymns, only an occasional soloist singing a Nation song, such as one written by Louis X (later Louis Farrakhan), “A White Man’s Heaven Is the Black Man’s Hell.”
¹

Malcolm’s fame grew when he took command of Harlem’s 116th Street Mosque No. 7 in 1954. A whirlwind in a camelhair overcoat, he spent hours on stepladders outside the Broadway Bar, the African National Memorial Bookstore, and the Optimal Cigar Store, repeating his personal story of petty crime and drug abuse, outlining the Nation’s path toward redemption, prophesying the apocalypse, and denouncing White America as a racist, doomed land. The congressman who ran Harlem, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., recognized his talent and invited him to speak at the landmark Abyssinian Baptist Church. Elijah Muhammad saw it, too, and named Malcolm his personal representative in 1957. Malcolm, in turn, put the Black Muslims on the map, building bridges to black newspapers and black intellectuals such as novelist James Baldwin and the actor Ossie Davis. He began writing a syndicated column called God’s Angry Men.

The incident that made Malcolm a Harlem legend occurred in April 1957, when a Black Muslim named Johnson X Hinton interrupted the police beating of a black man and was himself beaten, handcuffed, and taken to the 28th Precinct house. A crowd of two thousand gathered outside the station; a newspaperman summoned Malcolm in hopes he could stop a riot in the making. As a row of sharply dressed members of the Fruit of Islam lined up outside the station, Malcolm was allowed inside to inspect Johnson’s wounds; Johnson was badly hurt and was taken to a hospital. With a single whispered word to an aide, Malcolm then dispersed the angry crowd. “That,” one police official was overheard to mutter, “is too much power for one man to have.”

This and similar incidents drew hundreds of young blacks into the Nation of Islam at a time when “black nationalism,” a growing sense of black pride, was taking hold in Harlem, the cultural capital of Black America. The rise of Malcolm and the Nation of Islam, in fact, paralleled the gradual radicalization of many Northern black elites, especially in Harlem. The avenues above 125th Street had long been home to writers and artists inclined to leftist and even communist causes. In the late 1950s, lacking sources of inspiration
in the United States, they began looking overseas. Black pride, as well as a developing sense of African heritage, was stoked by the birth of postcolonial African states and their new black leaders, especially Ghana’s radical, U.S.-educated Kwame Nkrumah, whose 1958 open-car tour of Harlem drew cheering crowds. The Cuban Revolution, bringing with it Castro’s rise to power, along with his outspoken support of the U.S. civil rights movement, was wildly popular in Harlem. Dozens of black intellectuals, from Baldwin to Julian Mayfield, joined the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Even before his exile, Robert Williams visited Cuba and toured the streets of Havana, a straw hat on his head and a pistol strapped to his hip. The Cuban leader’s popularity among blacks soared after his visit to Harlem in September 1960; the first black leader he met was Malcolm, who afterward termed Castro “the only white person I ever liked.”

Malcolm, Robert Williams, and the Cuban Revolution “helped create a new generation of black nationalists who studied local organizing, the politics of armed self-defense, and global upheavals with equal fervor,” Peniel E. Joseph writes in his history of black militancy,
Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour
, but it was “the 1961 assassination of Congo leader Patrice Lumumba [that] transformed them into radicals.” Coming four months after Castro’s visit, Lumumba’s death at the hands of a white Belgian firing squad prompted unprecedented outrage among New York’s new black nationalists. Harlem’s
Amsterdam News
termed it an “international lynching” carried out “on the altar of white supremacy.” On February 15, 1961, crowds of angry black nationalists stormed the United Nations, igniting melees with guards and days of protests. One group of demonstrators told reporters that Negroes were henceforth to be called “Afro-Americans.”