The Messenger, page 25
Clara, it turns out, had also discovered that Evelyn was scheduled to give birth to Elijah’s child in March, and that a third young secretary, Ola X Hughes, would have a child he sired in April.52 As if that weren’t bad enough, Elijah started spending an inordinate amount of time with a June X, another of his secretaries. The FBI taped a conversation on January 27 in which Muhammad and one of his mistresses discussed his plans to redecorate the apartment.53
The annual Saviour’s Day convention of 1960 couldn’t have come at a worse time for Clara. She was so upset with her husband that she didn’t want to be with him in private, let alone play the role of the innocent, ignorant wife before an assembly of thousands. On February 13 she and Elijah got into a bitter argument, and he grabbed his coat and stormed out of the house. When he left, Clara called one of her daughters. “I’m sick and tired of it,” she protested. “I’ll try to stick it out until the 26th [Saviour’s Day], but that’s it.”54 Clara had threatened to skip the event entirely because things were so bad between her and her husband. When Lottie called the Chicago residence on Monday, February 22, to speak to her father, Clara sounded deeply depressed. “All he ever says to me is ‘As Salaam Alaikum,’ ” Clara confided, “and it’s all because of that bitch in Detroit.” Her daughter knew immediately to whom Clara was referring, as Elijah had been spending a great deal of time with a young woman from Mosque No. 1. “You need a long rest, Momma,” her daughter said. “I thought that stuff was all under the rug.”55
“No,” Clara replied, “I’m sick of being treated like a dog. After Friday [Saviour’s Day], I’m going to leave here.” She burst into tears and hung up the phone before Lottie could say another word. What Clara had kept to herself was her greatest shame: her husband had taken the virginity of a young female relative.56 She made good on her threat a week later. On March 9, she left Chicago and headed for Jacksonville, Florida, to visit a relative for a few days.57
Clara wasn’t the only person close to the Messenger who was upset with him on Saviour’s Day. A few days before the event, Farrakhan called him to request permission to sell his first recording, “A White Man’s Heaven Is a Black Man’s Hell,” during the convention. “No,” the Messenger replied, “it’s too inflammable.” The lyrics would frighten the unconverted away from the open convention instead of luring them inside, he said.58 Sensing Farrakhan’s dejection—the record was very popular and the convention was the perfect place to market it—the Messenger tried to make Farrakhan feel better by telling him that while he couldn’t sell the record on the first two days of the weekend-long affair, he could sell it on the last day.59
Among those who bought a copy was a lanky youth who was in town to attend an annual athletic exhibition. He played the record night and day upon returning to his home in Louisville. Though his father was horrified by the antiwhite, anti-Christian lyrics, he kept his anger to himself. After all, his namesake, Cassius Clay Jr., had won all of his bouts at the Golden Gloves tournament and was a shoo-in for the 1960 Olympics boxing team. Though Clay Jr. was regarded as a “good boy” by whites in town, the Louisville Courier-Journal listed him as among those burned by hot water thrown on civil rights demonstrators in the spring of 1960. An aunt warned Clay after the demonstration that he was “being brainwashed” by Farrakhan’s recording.60
Another of Farrakhan’s customers was Dr. Lonnie Cross, chairman of the department of mathematics at Atlanta University. From the moment he heard the record playing on a jukebox in a black-owned restaurant, Dr. Cross recalled, he knew he had found his mission in life.61 Dr. Cross was the kind of convert—a highly educated, middle-class black—Muhammad dreamt about. Speaking to Clara in Atlanta in late March, Muhammad proudly told her that “the class we have been after is waking up! We’re finally taking Chicago at last … they [African Americans] are all in our corner either openly or secretly.”62 Within a year, Dr. Lonnie Cross was Minister Lonnie X Cross of the Atlanta mosque.
On May 20, 1960, James Bland came up with another COINTELPRO suggestion that he believed would destroy the Messenger and the NOI. In a memo to Belmont, he wrote:
Elijah Muhammad is the national leader of the Nation of Islam (NOI) and Evelyn Lorene Williams is one of his secretaries. Both are on the Security Index. Williams disappeared from Elijah’s home during January 1960, and was subsequently located in Los Angeles. Los Angeles [field office] recently ascertained that she had been a patient at St. Francis Hospital at Lynwood, California, and had given birth to a child on March 30, 1960. She is unmarried.63
Bland asked that a fictitious letter be sent to Clara and a select group of ministers. The letter began:
Despite the highly stated aims … spouted by Elijah Muhammad, there appears to be a tremendous occupational hazard in being a young unmarried secretary employed in the household of Elijah Muhammad.… One of Elijah’s secretaries recently disappeared from the fold. When next heard of she was a patient at a Los Angeles hospital.… Could this have been the reason Elijah cut short his visit to Los Angeles, canceled his speaking engagements and announced he had to return to Chicago “due to pressing business”?… Elijah Muhammad has … preached against extramarital relationships but he doesn’t seem to be able to keep things under control in his own household.
The COINTELPRO was approved by Assistant FBI Director Cartha DeLoach on May 22. In the meantime, the Messenger had impregnated June X, and she was one month pregnant when Evelyn was delivered of her child.64
The Chicago field office also wrote the director to request permission to renew the wiretaps and electronic bugging devices inside the South Vernon Street apartment. Muhammad was spending most of his time there, the request noted, with several young women:
Muhammad, feeling he is secure in his “hideaway,” may converse more freely with high officials of the NOI and his personal contacts. Through this it is hoped to obtain policy and future plans of Muhammad both personally and for the NOI. It is felt that only confidants of Muhammad will have this listing available.65
Besides his troubles with Clara, Muhammad’s relationship with Malcolm X was becoming combative. By mid-May, more than seventy radio stations across the country were broadcasting speeches by Malcolm X and Muhammad at least once a week. Malcolm felt that his radio addresses should be as candid and fiery as those he usually gave in public. Their addresses, he felt, could make them the Islamic version of Billy Graham. Having the advantage of age and experience, Muhammad was mindful of how Father Charles Coughlin’s unrestrained enthusiasm on his national radio program proved to be his undoing.66 A radio advertising agent had warned him, Muhammad said, that most stations will not carry the broadcast if it contains “our harsh radical stuff” because they would lose advertising revenue.
He told me to tell you that the best way of winning [converts] is to not go into any of that raw stuff in the open. He said to take it very soft and not to hit those hard places like we do in the temple … put great emphasis on the good of doing in unity regardless of what religion or faith one belongs to.… Just tell them that our main trouble is disunity and disunity is caused by lack of knowledge of self.
If this compromise was agreeable, Muhammad said, the agent was willing to sign the two of them to a thirty-six-week contract. Malcolm agreed, of course, since the Messenger was “infallible.”67
In view of the successful national radio program, the FBI accelerated the number of COINTELPRO actions against Black Muslims. While the letter it produced about Muhammad’s marital problems had some impact in Chicago, any loss in membership was quickly offset by people lured into mosques after hearing Malcolm X on the radio. His voice entranced them like the Sirens or the Pied Piper. No one articulated the despair and the dreams of black people better than Malcolm. No black leader confronted white people the way he did, made them appear so ignorant during debates the way he did, or made being Caucasian sound like such a tremendous burden the way he did. Blacks routinely witnessed police grabbing and punching Dr. King and throwing him into the back of a paddy wagon; they never saw police cast a cruel eye at Malcolm, even when he stood before officers and called them devils. Malcolm’s voice sprang from the radio like light from the birth of a new day. At the rate the NOI was growing, the FBI would need an everlasting total eclipse to block Muhammad from his goal of 144,000 converts.
The years of wiretaps suddenly began to pay off. The Bureau knew from its 1959 investigation of Fard that among the aliases the Muslim mystic used were “Fred Dodd” and “James Dodd,” and “Wallace Dodd Ford.”68 If there were any doubts regarding whether Muhammad knew that Wallace Dodd Ford and Wallace D. Fard were the same man, they were erased in the summer of 1960. On August 8, 1960, the Messenger—or someone on his personal staff—called American Airlines and made a reservation in the name of J. Dodd at telephone number HUdson 3-6531.69 That was the phone number at Muhammad’s home in Chicago. The reservation was for a three o’clock flight to Cincinnati, Ohio, from Midway Airport and Muhammad was the one who boarded the plane under that name. The use of the name J. Dodd raised questions for several reasons. Whether Muhammad personally made the reservation or an FBI informant on his staff made it for him, it suggests that he was aware of Fard’s identity. Moreover, he had seen boxes in Fard’s hotel room that were addressed to “Mr. Dodd” or “Mr. Fred Dodd.” It seems unlikely that anyone other than Muhammad would have approved of making the reservation in that name for obvious reasons: (1) it would have been embarrassing when he arrived at the airport without knowing under whose name his reservation was made, and (2) if a staffer used the name of Dodd without Muhammad’s knowledge, it would have immediately exposed the staff member as a government informant. This suggests that the use of the name Dodd was Muhammad’s idea. This link was interesting, but like much of the data the FBI accumulated in the COINTELPRO against Muhammad, it had to be set aside until the timing was right to use it. A congressional probe held promise as the ideal opportunity.
While the Messenger focused on reorganizing his empire—he was training John Ali as the new NOI national secretary—and cuddling up with his newborns, Malcolm busied himself creating the monthly newspaper Muhammad Speaks.70 He patterned the paper after Negro World, the official news organ of Marcus Garvey’s UNIA, and the Pittsburgh Courier, the premier African-American newspaper of the 1950s. The content of Muhammad Speaks was a careful balance of news about the NOI, international events affecting people of color, accounts of horrendous injustices inflicted upon African Americans, and a splash of photographs from recent social events.
Among the highlights in the fall was the induction of a dozen Third World nations into the U.N. General Assembly. Although Malcolm was no longer on the city’s official welcoming committee, the NOI’s reputation among Arab and African nations was such that no one dared to exclude the Harlem minister from welcoming ceremonies. With Muhammad’s approval, Malcolm and a phalanx of Muslims were on hand to receive Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Sékou Touré of the Republic of Guinea, Gamal Nasser of Egypt, and Dr. Mahmond Yousse Shawarbi of Yemen, a nation that had recently joined Nasser’s United Arab Republic. When Nasser arrived at Idlewild Airport on September 30, a Muslim honor guard of 150 men was on hand to welcome him.71 Their uniforms—red bow tie, white shirt, and blue suit—symbolized one of many paradoxes of the NOI. Though Muhammad claimed to hate everything America stood for, he had chosen the colors of the American flag as the official colors for the honor guard who welcomed foreign heads of state who also professed hatred for the United States.72
The only head of state whom Muhammad had qualms about being associated with was Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary who, with the aid of the Soviet Union, had overthrown the right-wing Batista regime in 1959. Besides, Muhammad was uncertain of Castro’s racial background; all of the other heads of state were Asian or African. Muhammad saw Castro as a white devil, as did several other black nationalists. Castro’s government, Harlem activist Carlos Cooks declared, represented a “return to white supremacy.”73 The other thing that bothered Muhammad was Castro’s ties to the Soviet Union. Castro’s relationship with the United States bore too many resemblances to American-Japanese tensions in the 1930s. Muhammad had grossly miscalculated American strength during World War II and ended up in jail. This time, he wanted to select his bedfellows more carefully.
Castro had expressed a desire to meet Muhammad before his arrival in the United States in September 1960; when he invited several black activists to Cuba in early 1960, someone suggested that the Muslims would make valuable American allies. On August 11, the FBI intercepted a phone call between Muhammad and his personal secretary, Tynetta Nelson, regarding Castro’s impending visit. Muhammad had been fretting about Malcolm X’s desire to meet Cuba’s new head of state, but Nelson suggested that a meeting with Castro might actually be advantageous. “You know,” she said, “I had a funny dream last night. In the dream, Fidel Castro came to see you.”74
“There may be something to that,” Muhammad replied. “I got a message that they would pay all expenses of a number of my followers and myself to come there for a visit.” Changing the subject, he asked her whether she had bought a gun yet, as he had advised her to do. “But won’t I need a license?” she asked.
“No,” Muhammad replied. “Just don’t let anyone else know about it.”75 After notifying FBI headquarters of the conversation, particularly about the Messenger’s advice on the gun, the Chicago SAC sought permission to share the information with the Chicago Police Department as a COINTELPRO maneuver. The suggestion was rebuffed, however, since it carried the risk of exposing the FBI’s wiretap as the source of the information.76
Muhammad was taken aback when Castro and Malcolm X held an impromptu meeting at the Hotel Theresa, where the Cuban leader was staying. After the meeting had generated barrels of ink from pundits and members of Congress, Muhammad told Wallace Terry of the Washington Post that Malcolm X had overstepped his bounds. “If I had known Malcolm was going to visit Castro, I would have prevented it. The Muslim world is against Communism. I don’t like it because it’s atheistic. But Communism has its place in Allah’s program. It was raised to destroy the whites.”77 The Messenger’s suspicion that Hoover would try to use Malcolm X’s affiliation with Communist delegates at the United Nations was well-founded. On September 9, Hoover—having learned of Nelson’s discussion with Muhammad—wrote to J. Walter Yeagley, the assistant U.S. attorney general, to explore the possibility of prosecuting the Messenger, Malcolm X, and other leaders of the NOI pursuant to Executive Order Number 10450.78
Yeagley replied:
The available evidence concerning the activities of the leaders of this organization falls far short of the evidentiary requirements sufficient to meet the standards set forth in the [Supreme Court’s] Yates decision … the First Amendment would require something more than language of prophecy and prediction and implied threats against the Government to establish the existence of a clear and present danger to the nation and its citizens.
Hoover was infuriated. “Just stalling!” he scribbled at the bottom of the letter.79
Despite the censuring of Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954 for trampling upon the Constitution in the name of national security, Hoover remained a practicing McCarthyite. In his 1958 book, Masters of Deceit, he explained why African-American political activity had to be watched closely:
The [Communist] Party’s claim that it is working for Negro rights is a deception and a fraud. The Party’s sole interest, as most American Negroes know, is to hoodwink the Negro, to exploit him and use him as a tool to build a communist America. The Party has made vigorous efforts to infiltrate the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.80
To protect blacks from what he regarded as their childlike immaturity when it came to politics, the FBI maintained a file on nearly every prominent African American.
Two weeks after Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were sentenced to death in 1951, for example, the Bureau was investigating Nat King Cole. Cole, the Los Angeles field office SAC wrote in a memo to Hoover on April 20, had been a member of “the Communist Party and the Communist Political Association” during the mid-1940s.81 The Bureau conducted another inquiry on the native Alabamian in 1960 after learning that he was the treasurer of the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King, then under indictment in Alabama for alleged income tax evasion.82 In March 1959, the New York field office investigated another wildly successful African American, Lorraine Hansberry. “Captioned individual is the author of the play entitled, A Raisin in the Sun. At the request of the Bureau, an investigation has been conducted to determine if this play, in any way, is controlled or influenced by the Communist Party, or in any way follows the Communist line.”83
In other cases, files were maintained on individuals for years, even though they had denounced Communism. A classic case in point is Edward Kennedy Ellington, better known as Duke Ellington. In May 1938, Ellington endorsed the first All-Harlem Youth Conference, an organization whose sole aim was to generate jobs for unemployed young people. The Bureau, however, was among the government entities that labeled the conference a “Communist front.”84 For the next twelve years, Ellington participated in social activities that the Bureau classified as Communist or Communist fronts. For the next ten years, the Communist-run Daily Worker newspaper periodically ran articles mentioning Ellington’s name. Ellington didn’t complain until the Daily Worker reported in 1950 that he had signed the Stockholm Peace Petition. Ellington denied the report and demanded a retraction. Seeing how minor allegations had ruined the Hollywood Ten and scores of others, Ellington wrote a newspaper article in which he emphatically expressed his opposition to Communism. Yet in 1960, an FBI agent made the following comment in a memorandum to a State Department official as Ellington was embarking for a concert tour in France:
