Pillar of Fire (3 page)

Overtaking several Muslims, Officer Anderson stopped one with his nightstick on the landing at the main entrance and dragged him back down into the sidewalk, yelling for everyone to freeze. Observing this as he converged from the other cruiser, Officer Williams drew his gun and ran past them through one of the big double doors. Behind him, Officer Reynolds started to object that—quite apart from any scruples about search warrants, probable cause, or religious sanctuary—smart tactics called for sealing off the building until help arrived, but by then it was too late, and, on an instinctive flash that even if Williams was an impulsive six-month rookie, he was still his partner, Reynolds lowered his shoulder to follow. He slammed into Charles Zeno with enough momentum to carry both of them through the hallway at an angle into the men's coatroom on the right, grappling in mutual shock, swinging each other by the lapels for leverage while they bounced off walls and crashed into the water cooler, whose glass jug shattered on the floor as the two men landed in a heap. Several other Muslims joined on Zeno's side until they heard the loud voice of Minister Morris saying to leave the officer alone and turned to see Officer Williams holding his gun at Morris's temple. Reynolds freed himself and retrieved his own gun from the floor. Then, overtaken by rage and release, he drove his fist into Zeno's jaw about the time the first shots rang out from the sidewalk.

Officer Weese took up a position at the curb directly in front of the entrance with his gun pointed and his off hand resting at the knee, yelling freeze. From the next of the cruisers now piling rapidly in, Officer Lee Logan came up on the right with his weapons out. The Muslims compressed back upon Officer Anderson, fighting and resisting him as he swung his nightstick to drive them against the exterior wall. One or two of them cried out, “Why? Why?” Then nearly all of them took up the rhythmic Arabic chant “
Allab-u akbar! Allab-u akbar!
” (“God is great! God is great!”), which further unnerved the officers as something unintelligible and voodooish, much as the sudden onslaught of the police undid some of the Muslims, especially William X Rogers, who had carried a morbid fear of guns since being wounded four times in Korea. When Rogers made a dash for the entrance, Weese shot him through the spine.

Following a tiny aftershock of peace came the blur of violence. The younger brother of William Rogers pummeled Officer Logan, who finally threw him a few feet away and opened repeated fire along with Weese, hitting Robert X Rogers four times. As Arthur Coleman dived away from the shots, one of the bullets went through his hip and lodged at the base of his penis. Officer Anderson came out of the crowd to the left in the grip of Ronald Stokes, who was clinging to him as a shield. When Anderson broke free to leave his adversary alone in an open space, Stokes raised both hands toward Weese, who shot him through the heart from about eight feet, then started to reload.

Coleman attracted notice by struggling to stand. Officer Logan tried to cuff him back to submission with the butt handle of his gun, but Coleman seized his wrist and the two men came face-to-face. Logan kneed him in the groin, and even in terror the officer felt sickened by the unexpected warmth of the blood from Coleman's wound. With the gun deadlocked between them, Logan managed to fire a shot into the left side of Coleman's chest less than an inch above the lung. Still, Coleman hung on—his hands wrapped tightly around Logan's, his finger twisted over Logan's on the trigger, each man desperate to push the barrel away.

Just then Officer Kuykendall came running up from the south to put his revolver at Coleman's head. “Let go of the gun!” he ordered, and Coleman yelled, “Are you crazy? He shot me twice!” When Kuykendall threatened to blow his brains out, Coleman told him to go ahead. Then came a frozen moment in front of paralyzed onlookers—three men's heads close together, a black man and a uniformed white officer in a death struggle joined by a man of hidden ties to each side, with Logan's gun trembling back and forth under pressure in their midst. As Coleman slowly wrenched the muzzle around toward Logan, Kuykendall had to decide whether to take one life instantly or risk another by delay. He put away his gun, pulled out his sap, and slammed it again and again to the skull until Coleman finally lost his grip on Logan's gun and slumped to the pavement.

In a skittering aftermath outside, the Long Beach minister, Randolph X Sidle, darted out to smash the water jug from the women's coatroom against the head of Officer Anderson, then melted quickly back among the captives inside. A few moments later—so long after it was over that the suicidal dash seemed to take place in slow motion—Fred X Jingles ran full speed up Broadway from the car that had circled the block indecisively with his wounded brother, screaming at the police, and finally leaped high on Officer Logan's back as though to ride him. Four or five officers from the scores now gathered with shotguns and other heavy weaponry beat Jingles to the ground and handcuffed him, as they also handcuffed the four shot Muslims lying facedown nearby. Violence lasted longer in the men's coatroom, where there was vomiting from shame or fear, and where some of the victorious officers punished more than a dozen Muslims spread-eagled against the wall. They took turns searching them, screaming at and beating them, kicking them between the legs from behind, and finally, ripping each of their suit jackets from coattail to the neck and each of their trousers from the rear belt line forward through the crotch to the zipper. An episode that had begun over a used suit for Fred X Jingles ended half an hour and much chaotic hatred later with many shredded, torn ones. Mabel Zeno, who had slipped out the back of the mosque with Delores Stokes and was straining against the police lines to recover her sons—still parked in the Ford near all the shooting—saw her husband, Charles, marched out to police wagons in a line of prisoners, dragging his pants at his feet.

 

A
DAY LATER
at Central Receiving Hospital, Officer Kensic was startled to receive a visit from LAPD Chief William Parker. Arthur X Coleman, on being bailed out of General Hospital, was no less surprised to find himself facing the pocket camera of the Nation of Islam's national minister, Malcolm X, who had flown in from New York. The opposing leaders swiftly took the public stage from the combatants themselves. Calling Friday night's violence “the most brutal conflict I've seen” in twenty-five years as a Los Angeles policeman, the last twelve as chief, Parker portrayed his men as victims of a savage attack from a group he described as a “hate organization which is dedicated to the destruction of the Caucasian race.” Malcolm X, for his part, drew a large crowd to the Statler-Hilton Hotel on the day before the funeral of Ronald Stokes, and he shocked many of the curious reporters with the audacity of his opening words: “Seven innocent, unarmed black men were shot down in cold blood….” He described Chief Parker as a man “intoxicated with power and with his own ego,” who had transmitted an obsessive fear of the Muslims to his officers. “The same feelings he harbors towards the Muslims extend to the entire Negro community and probably to the Mexican-Americans as well,” said Malcolm, who accused the “white press” of acting as tools of Chief Parker to “suppress the facts” through one-sided stories such as appeared in Los Angeles: “Muslims Shoot, Beat Police in Wild Gunfight.”

For Earl Broady, the Malcolm X who appeared unannounced at his office seemed quite different from the daredevil Black Muslim in the news. He spoke with evenhanded precision to reconstruct the chaos and asked for Broady's representation in the criminal trials he felt were sure to come, calculating that the state must prosecute the Muslims in order to ward off civil damage suits. Broady turned Malcolm away more than once, saying he was too busy and too close to Chief Parker. As a policeman himself from 1929 to 1946, before entering law, Broady saw Parker as a reform autocrat in the style of J. Edgar Hoover and gave him credit for modest improvements over the frontier corruptions of the old Raymond Chandlerera LAPD. Broady's wife, a devout Methodist, objected vehemently to the case on the grounds that the Muslims were openly anti-Christian, unlike the worst of his ordinary criminal clients, and Broady himself resented the Nation of Islam, drawn largely from stereotypical lowlifes, as an embarrassment to the hard-earned respectability of middle-class Negroes. The Broadys recently had acquired an imposing white colonnade home in Beverly Hills, where Malcolm X visited when he could not find Broady at the office—calling day after day, always alone with a briefcase, playing on Broady's personal knowledge of the harsh, segregated inner world of the LAPD precincts. His patient appeals, plus the largest retainer offer in Broady's career, finally induced the lawyer to take the case.

Malcolm X helped work a similar transformation among the entire nonwhite population of Los Angeles. As an opening wedge, he brought with him from New York a telegram of support from National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Executive Director Roy Wilkins calling for an investigation of possible police brutality in the Stokes case. Based upon the NAACP's long record of complaints against Parker's department, Wilkins doubted the police version that unarmed Muslims had been uniformly the aggressors against armed officers. “From our knowledge, the Muslims are not brawlers,” he said. At first, Wilkins and NAACP leaders in Los Angeles tried to distance themselves from the stigma of the Muslims, saying that the NAACP on principle would defend even the segregationist White Citizens Council against excessive police force, but Malcolm and the city fathers worked from opposite ends to deny the established Negro leaders their safe ground. At a Board of Supervisors leadership meeting on May 8, Negro leaders supported Chief Parker's call for a grand jury campaign to wipe out the Muslims, until large numbers of nonleaders who had jammed into the room hooted them down, yelling that it was the police, not the Muslims, who needed investigation. One supervisor announced that he had not felt such racial tension since the “zoot-suit riots” of 1944-45. Three days later, twenty-five Negro ministers obtained an emergency audience with Chief Parker, but they had scarcely begun their pitch for a cooperative effort to eliminate the Muslims
and
police brutality when Parker stalked out, declaring that he refused to be lectured by anyone who questioned the integrity of his department.

As word spread of this rebuff, the ministers felt compelled to call a mass meeting to steady their course. They secured one of the most prestigious pulpits in the city—that of Rev. J. Raymond Henderson, the old friend and rival of Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr., on Atlanta's Auburn Avenue back in the 1930s, who had migrated to California to build one of the largest congregations in the West—and on Sunday evening, May 13, an overflow crowd of three thousand packed Second Baptist Church. As a non-Christian, Malcolm X was not permitted on the podium, of course, and there was heated discussion among the deacons about whether to admit him at all, but once he was there seated next to the wheelchair of William X Rogers, who was permanently paralyzed from the gunshot wound through his back, and once he rose and asked to speak from the floor after the Pledge of Allegiance and several fervent prayers for God's justice, there was no polite alternative but to allow the exotic Muslim to hold forth from the sanctuary of the Negro Baptists. He spoke for the better part of an hour. A Negro newspaper described him far down in its story as “a brilliant speaker and a studied orator, capable of swaying any audience in the typical manner displayed by Adolf Hitler….” One of Chief Parker's own undercover agents reported that when Reverend Henderson interrupted to chastise Malcolm X for inflammatory raw speech about police conduct, members of Second Baptist led the booing of their own pastor and demanded that Malcolm continue.

The white city fathers threw up an opposing wall of indignation. Mayor Sam Yorty, who had won his office the previous year partly on the strength of Negro votes, after campaigning against Chief Parker's segregated, “Gestapo organization,” endorsed his former antagonist “one hundred per cent” over the shootings at the Muslim mosque. He publicly accused the NAACP leaders of consorting with Muslims of known criminal records, such as Malcolm X, and of following a “Communist-inspired” program of “wild and exaggerated charges of police brutality.” Together with Chief Parker, Yorty flew to Washington for a publicized conference with Attorney General Robert Kennedy. They described the LAPD's ongoing intelligence operation against the Muslims, and obtained Kennedy's promise of a federal investigation. These consolidating moves sealed off most citizens behind warlike news stories such as appeared in the
Los Angeles Times
: “Muslim Hatred Called Threat to Community—Fanatical Cult Said to Direct Venom at All Whites and Negroes Trying to Oppose It.”

At least one political career rose on the recoil of sentiment among minorities. Mervyn Dymally, a schoolteacher from Trinidad and fringe candidate for the California Assembly, complained to the local Muslims that he had been excluded from the mass meeting at Second Baptist, obliged to stand outside in the rain with the overflow crowd while his heavily favored opponent served as emcee. By the next Sunday's mass meeting, Malcolm X had gained not only a position on the podium but considerable influence over the program. He brought on an American Indian speaker and a Mexican-American, urging the more respectable ethnic leaders to “work together with us, and if we Muslims get the white men off our backs, they'll never get on yours.” Then he introduced Dymally, whose first words to the crowd—the traditional Muslim greeting in Arabic, “
As-Salaamu—Alaikum
” (“Peace be upon you”)—produced a sharp breath of surprise and then thunderous applause on the swelling inclusion of outcasts.