Malcolm elected to speak against us. We were all pained by his outburst, but now—after several weeks of reflection—it is clear that Malcolm did precisely what he had to do. For the Negro revolt had caught up with the Black Muslims.
The Black Muslims came to power during a moral interregnum, at a time when it seemed certain that this nation would refuse to obey its own desegregation laws. But the sudden new militancy of the Negro has forced an unscheduled confrontation between the Muslims and this republic: America must prove that it is not a nation of white devils or perish. The Black Muslims, on the other hand, must face the reality of change in the American way of life. The Negro has always privately talked loud and bitterly about the American white man. The Black Muslims brought that talk into the open, on television and radio, and made it plain for all to see and hear. This was good for both the Negro and the white man: it shocked and frightened white people to hear what we have been thinking and saying about them for five hundred years; the Black Muslims were a catharsis for us, purging our innards of the bile brought on by slavery and segregation. Released from consuming anger we dropped the façade of puritan legalism and went racing into the streets screaming that defiance which is endemic to the tribe of restless natives we American Negroes most certainly are. Thus the inspired Negro students who took our fight into the streets, who shouted “now or never,” have challenged the Black Muslims by interposing the theology of desegregation. In The Negro Revolt I described that theology in these words:
The sit-ins raged throughout the spring of 1960 and convinced even more people that direct mass action was the shorter, more effective route to their goal of desegregation. But, from an internal viewpoint, more significant than the stale coffee and soggy hamburgers was the brand of Negro that was emerging. They were no longer afraid; their boldness, at times, was nothing short of alarming. And although few people knew it, a new religion, peculiar to the Negro, was being born.
This faith, given incipient articulation by Martin Luther King, was the culmination of a hundred years of folk suffering. Like all faiths, it is peculiar to the people who fashioned it; it was a hodgepodge, as every faith is, of every ethical principle absorbed by my people from other cultures. And so the best of Confucius, Moses, Jesus, Gandhi, and Thoreau was extracted, then mixed with the peculiar experience of the Negro in America. The result was a faith that justified the bus boycott and inspired Negro college students to make a moral crusade out of their right to sit down in a restaurant owned by a white man and eat a hamburger.
As Pastor Kelly Miller Smith walked to the lectern to begin his Sunday sermon, on that first Sunday of March, 1960, in Nashville, Tennessee, he knew his parishioners wanted and needed more than just another spiritual message. The congregation—most of them middle-class Americans, many of them university students and faculty members—sat before him waiting, tense; for Nashville, like some thirty-odd other Southern college towns, was taut with racial tension in the wake of widespread student demonstrations against lunch counter discrimination in department stores.
Among the worshipers in Pastor Smith’s First Baptist Church were some of the eighty-five students from Fisk and from Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial University who had been arrested and charged with conspiracy to obstruct trade and commerce because they staged protests in several of Nashville’s segregated eating places. Just two days before, Nashville police had invaded Mr. Smith’s church—which also served as headquarters for the demonstrators—and arrested one of their number, James Lawson, Jr., a Negro senior theological student at predominantly white Vanderbilt University, on the same charge.
“Father, forgive them,” Mr. Smith began, “for they know not what they do.” And for the next half-hour, the crucifixion of Christ carried this meaning as he spoke:
“The students sat at the lunch counters alone to eat, and when refused service, to wait and pray. And as they sat there on that Southern Mount of Olives, the Roman soldiers, garbed in the uniforms of Nashville policemen and wielding night sticks, came and led the praying children away. As they walked down the streets, through a red light, and toward Golgotha, the segregationist mob shouted jeers, pushed and shoved them, and spat in their faces, but the suffering students never said a mumbling word. Once the martyr mounts the Cross, wears the crown of thorns, and feels the pierce of the sword in his side there is no turning back.
“And there is no turning back for those who follow in the martyr’s steps,” the minister continued. “All we can do is to hold fast to what we believe, suffer what we must suffer if we would forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
This new gospel of the American Negro is rooted in the theology of desegregation; its missionaries are several thousand Negro students who—like Paul, Silas, and Peter of the early Christian era—are braving great dangers and employing new techniques to spread the faith. It is not an easy faith, for it names the conservative Negro leadership class as sinners along with the segregationists. Yet this new gospel is being preached by clergymen and laymen alike wherever Negroes gather.
Here, then—in the American Negro’s mind and for his loyalty—is being waged one of the several battles gods have fought during the history of man. This particular encounter is between a home-grown Allah who is one with black men the world over, but who has a special yen for the American Negro, and a transmuted Jesus who was born in Judea, crucified on Golgotha’s heights, rose from the dead to ascend into heaven, but submitted to reincarnation as a student sit-in. And so it is that Allah and Jesus fight it out for the spiritual allegiance of the American Negro at a lunch counter in Woolworth’s.
This is indeed a long way from the mountains near Olympia and the flats of Greece where the gods once romped and fought for glory. But gods follow man; wherever man is, wherever the great issues of man are being determined, there also one will find the gods. Man and the issue are now centered around the rise and current crisis of Western civilization. The British historian-theologian Arnold Toynbee suggests that the black Westerner may well determine the fate of Atlantic civilization. The gods apparently agree, and they have come to our shores to ply their wares. But Western man, particularly the Negro, is demanding more of his gods than man once did.
Once upon a time all god had to do was promise man life after death, an eternal remission for the sins man committed on earth while trying to sing a hymn in a strange land. But the gods can no longer get away with such shoddy realism; men want to eat good food, sleep without being awakened by nibbling rats, work at jobs commensurate with their abilities, live where their earning power allows them, and use all facilities paid for out of public funds.
“We don’t want to eat a hot dog in this store,” Jeremiah X said to me as we watched scores of Birmingham youngsters stage sit-ins; “we want the store and the ground on which it sits.”
This is the dilemma the Black Muslims now face: They must eschew everything tinged by “integration,” yet they must seek acceptance among the black masses who are risking their all—particularly in the South—for the sake of fuller involvement in the American mainstream. The Muslims’ reply, of course, is the separate state, a place where all American black men will live, have their own government, readopt Arabic, reaccept Allah, and ready themselves for the hour when the “word” will be given and Armageddon will proceed.
The tragedy of this is that Black Muslim leaders, including Elijah Muhammad, have said they know such a state will never come into being. This admission by them relieves me of the need to discuss the impracticality of the proposal. Rather, I am engaged by the fact that the Black Muslims continue to urge Negroes to back the demands for such a state rather than act to better their plight in the nation as it now is.
Their promise of a separate state, like the chariot that was scheduled to swing low and take us home a century ago, is but another of the mirages that has kept the American Negro from digging water in the land that is his and under his feet. Black Muslims are forbidden to vote; thus they cannot help us overcome such men as Eastland and Talmadge. They are against all forms of integration; thus they cannot help us in the fight for better jobs, schools, and housing.