BOOK MARK : SPECIAL REPORT: Race and Black America : ‘Beneath His Fearless Exterior, He Feared’

Again and again, Malcolm reiterated that he expected to die prematurely, as his father had. “It will be all over soon,” he told one associate. He told another that he had been informed that the NOI (Nation of Islam) wanted him dead by Feb. 26, the day the movement’s Savior’s Day Convention was scheduled to begin.

He said he did not fear death. But Gladys Towels Root and others sensed that, beneath his fearless exterior, he feared it as much as we all do. He asked Root how he could protect himself. And he began preparing his followers for a retraction of his allegation that the Nation of Islam had firebombed his home.

There were other indications that he did not accept the idea of an early death with equanimity; for instance, the way he had canceled his scheduled Chicago appearance the day after Mrs. Root had filed the paternity suits against Elijah Muhammad. And his fear of poison, as well as his extended African safaris, which he tacitly acknowledged were partly prompted by the need to put distance between himself and Elijah’s henchmen.

He bridled at shadows. One night as he walked to his car, an automobile backfired and emitted a loud “bang,” Malcolm froze. His companions tactfully ignored the look that registered on his face. Others noticed how jittery he became when strangers approached and how he kept looking back over his shoulder. He made it a practice never to sit with his back to the front door. He said it was a lesson he had learned from his confrontation with West Indian Archie.

To discourage further attempts to wire his car ignition with explosives, Malcolm secured the hood of his Oldsmobile with a lock and chain. He also obtained an application form for a pistol permit. There are conflicting reports as to whether he filled it out, it was virtually impossible for a New Yorker who had committed a felony to obtain a pistol permit.

But it had become apparent that the political Malcolm, like the youthful criminal Malcolm, was provoking the very retaliation he dreaded. A case in point was his disclosure of Elijah Muhammad’s secret contacts with the Ku Klux Klan. The disclosure (which was reminiscent of the way James Eason had disclosed Marcus Garvey’s contacts with the Klan) focused on a 1961 meeting Malcolm had held on the Messenger’s behalf with representatives of the Klan. Since the KKK opposed racial mixing, Elijah had requested the meeting to enlist its aid in obtaining land that the Nation of Islam could use to implement its separatist doctrines. The Imperial Wizard, the Klan’s top leader, had reportedly instructed his subordinates to talk with Elijah’s representatives in hope of eliciting information that could be turned over to the federal government.

At the meeting, which was held in Atlanta, Malcolm told the Klan officials what they wanted to hear. Both their movement and his, he asserted, needed to fight the Catholics and the Jews. He asserted that Jews were running the civil rights movement and manipulating its black members. According to an FBI informant who reported the results of the meeting to the Bureau, Malcolm said he could not understand why the Klan allowed Martin Luther King, Jr. to live.

Malcolm also disclosed that Elijah Muhammad had invited American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, who advocated racial separation, to address the NOI’s 1962 national convention, where he was booed before the audience could be induced to allow him to speak.

As a result of his disclosures about the Messenger, Malcolm’s youthful premonitions about death had become self-fulfilling prophecies. “Surely man is the most ardent contributor to his own doom,” he had written years earlier:

Man is actually the tool of his own destruction . . . laboring towards the completion of his own end.

1991, Bruce Perry. Reprinted with permission from Station Hill Press Inc.

BOOK REVIEW: “Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America,” by Bruce Perry, is reviewed on Page 3 of today’s Book Review Section.