Pillar of Fire Read Online Free PDF

against heresy or even “slack talk,” also collected revenue by an exacting system of investigations, trials, and sanctions ranging from reprimands to “slap-gantlets,” communal shunning, and excommunication. Muhammad required all males to meet a streethawking sales quota of his newspaper, Muhammad Speaks , and to guarantee performance by prepaying allotments of each issue in cash. “Credit will ruin them,” he told his officials. “They are just out of the jungles.” Sales of the new paper rose nationwide on spectacular coverage of the Stokes case. By the summer of 1962, Muhammad remarked in wonder that $15,000 was now “merely pocket change,” and he agreed to pay the astronomical blanket fee of $120,000 to defend his members in Los Angeles.
    Late that year, on being introduced for trial preparation at Elijah Muhammad’s second home in Phoenix (bought from the estate of bluesman Louis Jordan), Earl Broady and his co-counsel, Loren Miller, confronted a wizened, wheezy old man of sixty-four years—to them a field hand in a fez, plainly ignorant and inarticulate * as he mumbled thanks for helping “my mens.” Utterly astonished that Muhammad held any authority over someone of Malcolm X’s polished commitment, the lawyers avoided each other’s eyes to keep from laughing impolitely at the attendants who constantly uttered obeisance to the “Holy Apostle.” To others, however, the humble manner of Elijah Muhammad only confirmed his miracle power to transform thousands of primitive, decayed “lost souls” into Muslims of permanent zeal. Even the gruff, fearsome Captain Joseph, enforcer of discipline at Malcolm’s Temple No. 7 in New York, barely managed to keep his teeth from chattering in the Messenger’s presence. Joseph automatically found truth in every twist of Muhammad’s reaction to the Los Angeles shooting: surely it was suicidal to risk a war of retaliation when the Nation was so weak.
    In December of 1962, at preliminary hearings for the Stokes case defendants—Arthur X Coleman, Fred X Jingles, Minister John X Morris, Roosevelt X Walker, Charles X Zeno, and eight other Muslims—Malcolm X sat erectly in the back of the courtroom and then regularly castigated white reporters at sidewalk press conferences for “writing only the prosecution’s side of the story.” By then, wiretap clerks in Chicago and Phoenix reported hints of Muslim friction to the FBI, which had been maintaining microphone bugs and telephone wiretaps on Elijah Muhammad since 1957. They heard Muhammad fret with lieutenants about “who’s to control Malcolm.” While still flattering Malcolm in their direct talks as “a modern Paul” with a genius for gaining public notice, Muhammad occasionally signed off abruptly with an edge of warning: “I hope Allah will keep you wise.”
    Malcolm’s one kindred ally within the Muslim hierarchy—destined to succeed where he failed, as quietly as Malcolm’s notoriety would be loud—missed the early Stokes ordeal because he had been locked away in the federal prison at Sandstone, Minnesota, since his twenty-eighth birthday in 1961. This was Wallace D. Muhammad, who, since being named by and for the founder of the Nation of Islam, W. D. Fard, had been marked as the seventh and most religious of Elijah Muhammad’s eight children. Wallace had been born just before Fard, the mysterious silk peddler, disappeared, having fashioned a revolutionary cosmology for thousands of Negro sharecroppers who migrated north for the paved gold of jobs only to crash into the Depression. Elijah Poole of Georgia, humiliated into alcoholism by relief lines, was one of Fard’s most enthusiastic aides in a sectarian movement that swept up eight thousand members and registered as a tribal curiosity among a few whites, including one scholar who published in The American Journal of