First, the Black Muslims excite Negroes to shouts by proving that the Negro is somebody, a man with a past and a history. I know from personal experience that Malcolm X is one of the best-versed people in America on African history. I have sat with him in private and general gatherings where he has recited startling facts about the nature of early African civilizations. When challenged, Malcolm is always able to produce a text—and a legitimate one at that—to support what he says. Malcolm’s teachings come as a surprise not because they are new, previously unknown facts about Africa, but because the entire system of education in the Western World, particularly in America, has carefully distorted the true history of Africa to support the notion of white, male supremacy. And so it is from Malcolm X, not from his sixth-grade history teacher—who is probably white—that the Negro child in the North learns the truth about Africa and what once really happened there.
The second historical aspect of the Muslim doctrine involves an intensive study of the role of the American Negro in American history. Here again Malcolm and his followers walk into a void left by the American education system. The black child in Harlem learns about the Revolutionary War but he does not learn that the man who set it off by leading the Americans in the Boston Massacre was a Negro, Crispus Attucks. The black child sees the clock work but he does not know that Benjamin Bannaker, a Negro, invented the pendulum. The black child visits the blood bank but he does not know that a Negro, Dr. Charles Drew, discovered how to preserve blood and thus made the bank possible. Nobody tells the Negro child these things in school. On the contrary, the child is taught that American civilization flowed, for the most part, from white brains. And when Malcolm, to use his words, “pulls the cover off the white devil and tells black men the truth about the work of their ancestors,” the Negro child shrieks with pride and joy—probably for the first time in his life.
Malcolm X brings his message of importance and dignity to a class of Negroes who have had little, if any, reason to feel proud of themselves as a race or as individuals. Their encounters with white people are always unpleasant situations in which Negroes find themselves embarrassed or emasculated. Think it out for yourself: What contact does the Negro in Harlem have with the white man?
The white man is the man they must meet every morning when they go to work in the garment district; the man they must meet when the rent is due; the man they face when they go to the pawnshop; the man who comes and sells things on credit; the man who buys the installment paper and comes to collect the payments; the man who gets work when they cannot; the man whom they see on TV loosing dogs on Negro children; the man they face as a schoolteacher who does not understand them and who is often contemptuous of them—the man, the man, the man, the white man, the goddam white man! And when Malcolm X says the white man is a devil, they roar “amen” because every experience they have with a white man is a devilish one.
Chilling though it may be, the Black Muslims have erected their teaching on a group experience common to all American Negroes. Few of us concur in their conviction and sentencing of the white race. But none of us can question the accuracy of the indictment on which that conviction rests.
Elijah Goes to Mecca
The hajj, the long, dusty pilgrimage to Mecca that every Moslem looks forward to, is the final criterion of whether one is or is not a Moslem. Only certified followers of Islam are allowed to enter Mecca during the holy period of the pilgrimage.
“Elijah Muhammad is not a Moslem,” said Imam Talib Ahmad Dawud in 1960. “He is just plain Elijah Poole of Sandersville, Georgia.” Dawud, an American Negro and leader of the Muslim Brotherhood USA, was then locked in a bitter struggle with the Black Muslims over the question of their religious authenticity. But the Imam’s remarks couldn’t have been more ill-timed. Even as Dawud was denouncing the Black Muslims, Elijah was packing his bags for a trip “back home where I can visit and pray with my own people.” Several days after he departed from New York, Elijah placed his credentials before the eagle-eyed hajj committee, the final judge of who may march to Mecca and pray. Elijah Muhammad was admitted without delay, and Black Muslims—the word was cabled back and came over the wire services—held meetings of praise and thanks all over the nation.
That was that. Muhammad was admitted to the hajj, he made the holy walk to Mecca. Who, then, is to dispute his religious credentials?
Muhammad’s journey to Mecca brought an end to all the arguments about his true affiliation with traditional Islam. When Mike Wallace and I were preparing a TV documentary on the Black Muslims, the orthodox Moslems denounced the movement. “They teach race hate,” one Islamic spokesman told us, “and that means they couldn’t be Moslems.” The Federation of Islamic Associations of Chicago is the official Moslem organization in the United States and Canada. They have denounced Elijah; they have praised him for conducting the largest Arabic school in America and for accepting the Koran as law, but federation officials are “suspicious” of him. These Moslems, however, are largely of European descent, although their ranks are peppered with a few Negro converts. Their rejection of Elijah rests on his argument concerning racism, and they flinch when Muhammad calls himself “The Messenger of Allah.”