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believe in nonviolence and mistake us for one of them and put your hands on us thinking that we’re going to turn the other cheek—and we’ll put you to death just like that.”
    Before his first emergency flight to Los Angeles, Malcolm confided to associates that the moment demanded an honest Muslim response and that they should expect to hear of blood flowing. His exacting investigations were conducted as prime research toward the Nation’s independent justice in which, at a minimum, sanctioned Muslims would strike one of the most guilty of the LAPD officers. Malcolm carried forward his plans by stealth until strict orders intervened through National Secretary John Ali: no retribution. “Play dead on everything…,” instructed Elijah Muhammad. “Just tell Malcolm to cool his heels.”
    Malcolm obeyed, but he chafed. When an all-white coroner’s jury on May 14 required less than thirty minutes to deliver a ruling of justifiable homicide in the Stokes case, even though Officer Weese bluntly testified that he had shot an unarmed man whose arms were raised because he felt menaced, reporters asked the new public figure in Los Angeles whether he really despaired of getting justice in the courts, and if so, what would he do? “I can only say that I am thankful there is a God in Heaven to give real justice to our people when necessary,” Malcolm replied. Pressed to reconcile this otherworldliness with his icy realism, he would only say, “God gives justice in his own way.”
    Back in New York, the editor of Harlem’s Amsterdam News observed that Malcolm had lost face by looking passively to the Almighty. The internal strain caused a brief public stir in early June of 1962, when an Air France jetliner crashed near Paris, killing more than one hundred leading white citizens of Atlanta, Georgia. “I got a wire from God today…,” Malcolm announced at a Los Angeles rally protesting the first criminal indictments handed down against Muslims in the Stokes case. “Many people have been asking, ‘Well, what are you going to do?’ And since we know that the man is tracking us down day by day to try and find out what we are going to do, so he’ll have some excuse to put us behind his bars, we call on our God. He gets rid of 120 of them in one whop…and we hope that every day another plane falls out of the sky.” To cheers and applause, he offered tortured consolation. “God knows you are cowards,” he said. “God knows you are afraid. God knows that the white man has got you shaking in your boots. So God doesn’t leave it up to you to defend yourself.”
    Mayor Yorty played a police agent’s recording of Malcolm’s remarks at a press conference. “This shows the distorted type of mind this fiend has,” he announced, and the resulting stories—“Warn on ‘Mouthing’ of Muslim”—became the first news item about Malcolm X to draw national press attention. In Atlanta, where Martin Luther King and Harry Belafonte had just canceled sit-ins against downtown segregation as a conciliatory gesture to the grieving city, reporters asked King what it meant that Malcolm could express joy over the random deaths of white strangers. “If the Muslim leader said that,” King carefully replied, “I would certainly disagree with him.”
    â€œThe Messenger should have done more,” Malcolm told a few trusted associates in his own Temple No. 7. “People in the civil rights movement have been brutalized, and we haven’t done anything to help them. Now we have our own brothers killed and maimed, and we still haven’t done anything.” Even this tiny, private glimpse of frustration was startling to Muslims trained by Malcolm himself for unswerving homage to Muhammad’s edicts. The Nation’s quasi-military apparatus under captains and lieutenants, which guarded doctrines