Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
his two talks in L.A., he equivocated. On one hand, Black supremacy was equally as despicable as white supremacy; “On the other hand I am more concerned with getting rid of the conditions that brought this sort of organization into being than I am with the organization itself.”33 Tom Bradley, now retired from the LAPD and practicing law while he prepared to run for the city council from a mixed district, also felt that he would lose white liberals if he were seen as “soft” on the NOI. That summer, in a forum sponsored by the Valley chapter of the ACLU, he debated Hugh Manes, the organization’s chief advocate of a civilian police review board. Bradley claimed that the department had “taken giant steps” on the race problem, refusing to criticize Parker. Manes categorically disagreed, responding that “the history of Los Angeles in 30 years had not indicated the police department is aware of the Constitution.” The Muslims, despite their rhetoric, were “strictly law abiding,” and the April LAPD attack raised fundamental civil libertarian issues: “The rights of Muslims affect the rights of all of us.” The audience, mostly white liberals, booed Manes.34
No one, however, was more alarmed by Malcolm’s attempt to build an inclusive movement against police injustice than Elijah Mohammad himself. In public pronouncements, they appeared to be on exactly the same page. The Messenger, for instance, had told a press conference in Chicago that “in these crucial times we must not think in terms of one’s religion, but in terms of justice for us Black people. This means a united front for justice in America.”35 Marable, again using Farrakhan as a principal source, says that this was mere lip service to the ideal of unity; in fact Elijah Muhammad pulled hard on the leash, “ordering his stubborn lieutenant to halt all [united front] efforts … he vetoed any cooperation with civil rights groups even on a matter as outrageous as Stokes’s murder.”36 His strategy could be interpreted either as patience or passivity. The civil rights movement, he believed, would eventually collapse in the face of white resistance, leaving Black people with no choice but to flock to the NOI. Anything that encouraged hopes of reform or belief in the possibility of integration was pandering to the great lie that the Nation existed to expose.
Malcolm, on the other hand, found it almost unendurable not to be in the thick of battle, whether that meant tooth-for-tooth retaliation or leading mass protests. Farrakhan recalled that Malcolm “was fascinated by the civil rights movement … [and] speaking less and less about the teachings of [Muhammad].”37 In Taylor Branch’s opinion “the Stokes case marked a turning point” in Malcolm X’s “hidden odyssey.”38 In Los Angeles, he took the first steps toward abandoning Elijah Muhammad’s folk eschatology and moving toward a distinctive strategy of Black liberation that visualized the American struggle as part of a worldwide revolt.
The temple shootings also marked a watershed for Mayor Sam Yorty, who now became Chief Parker’s cheerleader. In suppressing what the Times now called the “Black Muslim riots,” the mayor backed the chief “100 percent.” He also denounced the proposed civilian police review board, sponsored jointly by the NAACP and the ACLU, as “communist inspired.” (As a result, Almena Lomax observed, “the Mayor’s stock in the Negro community right now is on a par with a snake’s belly for the reason that he has reneged on his campaign promise to do something about police brutality.”)39 He and Parker, together with Sheriff Peter Pitchess, flew to Washington to ask the attorney general to add the NOI to his list of subversive organizations. Yorty, sounding more like a warden than a mayor, believed that with such a listing “their meeting places could be closed, their literature seized and their activities otherwise curtailed.”40 Undoubtedly, Smilin’ Sam was the last person that Bobby Kennedy wanted to see in his office, but Parker was an old friend from his days as a Senate counsel (as well as a fellow Catholic), so he listened patiently and then arranged for Parker to meet the following Monday with top FBI and Justice Department officials to share information about the “Muslim threat.”41 The chief undoubtedly rattled off his favorite statistics—including the preposterous allegation that Blacks committed two-thirds of crimes in Los Angeles—and expounded on his “through the looking glass” theory, as John Buntin put it, that “race relations in Los Angeles seemed bad because race relations were so good that the city had become the target for agitators.”42
Meanwhile the fourteen Muslim “agitators” comported themselves with quiet dignity in a long trial that began in May 1963. The prosecutor was Deputy District Attorney Harold Kippen, who the summer before had sent two of the 1960 Griffith Park “rioters” to prison. The defense team—Loren Miller and Earl Broady—had been carefully chosen by Malcolm for both legal prowess and unimpeachable respectability (both would later be appointed judges). The initial coroner’s jury took only half an hour to rule the shooting of Stokes a justifiable homicide, even though Weese testified that he had had his hands up, trying to surrender. The grand jury which then prepared the original indictments was all white, as was the trial jury. The cops on the witness stand misidentified their supposed assailants and contradicted each other’s accounts. The case against Shabazz for attempted murder was based solely on the testimony of the security guard and quickly fell apart as other witnesses acknowledged that he never left the temple. In the end the jury spent a record eighteen days in heavily guarded deliberation.
Shabazz was acquitted along with a few others, but the majority of the defendants received one-to ten-year prison terms. When asked in court about the officers’ intentions, Shabazz testified: “I was aware of documents circulated in police stations all over California which constituted anti-Muslim propaganda.” The police, he said, “were looking for an excuse to kill us.”43 Six years later the LA Black Panthers would say the same thing.
“Not Tomorrow—but Now!”: L.A.’s United Civil Rights Movement (1963)
In his book Why We Can’t Wait, Martin Luther King proclaimed 1963 “the year of the Negro Revolution.” James Baldwin, A. Philip Randolph, and Roy Wilkins echoed the phrase, as did Newsweek, Time, and the New York Times. On the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, the civil rights movement crossed the Mason-Dixon Line to become a truly national uprising. Its fulcrum, still Southern, was the great struggle in Birmingham—the “most segregated city in America” according to King—where a united Black community, including its children, confronted police dogs, fire hoses, jail beatings and church bombings.1 Solidarity demonstrations in the North, however, soon led to emulation, as protest groups, often with CORE in the vanguard, embraced the Birmingham strategy of a “package deal”—demanding immediate progress toward integration on multiple fronts.
In his celebrated essay “The Meaning of Birmingham,” Bayard Rustin wrote that
unlike the period of the Montgomery boycott, when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had to be organized to stimulate similar action elsewhere, the response to Birmingham has been immediate and spontaneous. City after city has come into the fight, from Jackson, Mississippi, to Chestertown, Maryland … frustration has now given way to an open and publicly declared war on segregation and racial discrimination throughout the nation. The aim is simple. It is directed at all white Americans—the President of the United States, his brother, Robert, the trade-union movement, the power elite, and every living white soul the Negro meets. The war cry is “unconditional surrender—end all Jim Crow now.” Not next week, not tomorrow—but now.2
If not “now,” a growing number of national leaders began to recognize, the likely alternative might be an abandonment of nonviolence by the Black community. Thus James Nabrit Jr., the president of Howard University, warned in June that unless Washington took immediate action to enforce equal rights, the country would explode, “including the wholesale killing of people.” The SCLC’s George Lawrence called the situation a “powder keg,” emphasizing that it “was no longer just a Southern thing. [It was] exploding all over the country.”3 And in July, United Auto