Days of Rage by Bryan Burrough Read Free Book Online Page B

Harlem’s 116th Street Mosque No. 7 in 1954. A whirlwind in a camelhair overcoat, he spent hours on stepladders outside the Broadway Bar, the African National Memorial Bookstore, and the Optimal Cigar Store, repeating his personal story of petty crime and drug abuse, outlining the Nation’s path toward redemption, prophesying the apocalypse, and denouncing White America as a racist, doomed land. The congressman who ran Harlem, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., recognized his talent and invited him to speak at the landmark Abyssinian Baptist Church. Elijah Muhammad saw it, too, and named Malcolm his personal representative in 1957. Malcolm, in turn, put the Black Muslims on the map, building bridges to black newspapers and black intellectuals such as novelist James Baldwin and the actor Ossie Davis. He began writing a syndicated column called God’s Angry Men.
    The incident that made Malcolm a Harlem legend occurred in April 1957, when a Black Muslim named Johnson X Hinton interrupted the police beating of a black man and was himself beaten, handcuffed, and taken to the 28th Precinct house. A crowd of two thousand gathered outside the station; a newspaperman summoned Malcolm in hopes he could stop a riot in the making. As a row of sharply dressed members of the Fruit of Islam lined up outside the station, Malcolm was allowed inside to inspect Johnson’s wounds; Johnson was badly hurt and was taken to a hospital. With a single whispered word to an aide, Malcolm then dispersed the angry crowd. “That,” one police official was overheard to mutter, “is too much power for one man to have.”
    This and similar incidents drew hundreds of young blacks into the Nation of Islam at a time when “black nationalism,” a growing sense of black pride, was taking hold in Harlem, the cultural capital of Black America. The rise of Malcolm and the Nation of Islam, in fact, paralleled the gradual radicalization of many Northern black elites, especially in Harlem. The avenues above 125th Street had long been home to writers and artists inclined to leftist and even communist causes. In the late 1950s, lacking sources of inspirationin the United States, they began looking overseas. Black pride, as well as a developing sense of African heritage, was stoked by the birth of postcolonial African states and their new black leaders, especially Ghana’s radical, U.S.-educated Kwame Nkrumah, whose 1958 open-car tour of Harlem drew cheering crowds. The Cuban Revolution, bringing with it Castro’s rise to power, along with his outspoken support of the U.S. civil rights movement, was wildly popular in Harlem. Dozens of black intellectuals, from Baldwin to Julian Mayfield, joined the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Even before his exile, Robert Williams visited Cuba and toured the streets of Havana, a straw hat on his head and a pistol strapped to his hip. The Cuban leader’s popularity among blacks soared after his visit to Harlem in September 1960; the first black leader he met was Malcolm, who afterward termed Castro “the only white person I ever liked.”
    Malcolm, Robert Williams, and the Cuban Revolution “helped create a new generation of black nationalists who studied local organizing, the politics of armed self-defense, and global upheavals with equal fervor,” Peniel E. Joseph writes in his history of black militancy, Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour , but it was “the 1961 assassination of Congo leader Patrice Lumumba [that] transformed them into radicals.” Coming four months after Castro’s visit, Lumumba’s death at the hands of a white Belgian firing squad prompted unprecedented outrage among New York’s new black nationalists. Harlem’s Amsterdam News termed it an “international lynching” carried out “on the altar of white supremacy.” On February 15, 1961, crowds of angry black nationalists stormed the United Nations, igniting melees with guards and days of protests. One group of demonstrators told reporters that Negroes were