When Malcolm X was shot in the Audubon Ballroom in February 1965, Reverend Morris stood up before the congregation at the Langley Church of God and asked us to mourn his loss. “He was a great man,” Morris declared. I remember being taken aback. In that climate, it seemed like a big leap. I assumed that for people in the church, the Nation of Islam represented a completely different world—not only because of religion, but because the evangelical milieu was so far away from the mundane concerns of the material world. For people so single-minded in their focus on salvation, I thought, it would be considered folly to advocate for political justice or social revolution.
At the church, I was careful never to mention that I was an admirer of Malcolm and everything he stood for. But given where I had grown up and what I had seen—given the path my life was taking in the early 1960s—I found it impossible not to be impressed by Malcolm. Like Muhal Richjard Abrams or the poet Amus Mor, for me Malcolm was one of the main models, a figure whose example defined the times. I remember watching Malcolm on these talk shows on TV. They didn’t have anybody who could handle him. It would always be two or three or four white intellectuals up against Malcolm, as though one antagonist wasn’t sufficient. How is that fair? I wondered. And then he would demolish every argument they came up with. What he said was bold, but he never advanced opinions that he couldn’t back up with facts. And the country had never seen anything like that before. They’d never seen a Black man on TV who could battle intellectually like that, who had the arsenal of facts and the rhetorical agility to dominate any debate. It was the most sophisticated thing that young Black men in my generation had ever seen.
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