Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.life From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: The Irishman and the man called 'X' Date: Wed, 18 Nov 92 16:10:35 EST Message-ID: \SE E;LIFE;MALCOLM IN THE EXTREME;ESSAY \HD The Irishman and the man called 'X' \BY Tom Kelly \CR THE WASHINGTON TIMES Thirty years ago, when I was a reporter for the Washington Daily News, I spent an afternoon and evening with Malcolm X. He was very tall and intense, a bronze-skinned man who tramped aggressively back and forth across the small downtown hotel room in which we met like - to make an obvious but accurate comparison - a tiger in a cage. He was not, at the time, taken seriously by white folks outside the FBI nor by what were then known as responsible black leaders. He seemed to me, as I sat listening and taking notes, a young, angry man (he was 37) in considered and profound rebellion against the white world and its outrageous rules and customs. I knew he had grown up in the Midwest and had lived in Boston and had been sent to prison in 1946 for burglary. In prison, he had become a disciple and soon thereafter the strong right hand of Elijah Muhammad of Detroit, leader of the Black Muslims, a highly disciplined religious sect that preached total separation of the races. He was, I soon realized as he talked, being intentionally abrasive. "You are Irish?" he said. I said I was, the son of immigrants. "Name one good thing the Irish ever gave the world?" The answer seemed obvious to me - plays, poems, stories, from Sheridan to Shaw to Yeats, Joyce and O'Casey. I started to say so, and then it occurred to me that his intention was to put me (as a representative of both the Irish and overbearing white people) on the defensive. "The potato," I said. Malcolm X looked at me in silence and then shrugged. He may have decided that I was refusing to play his game or, it seems more likely, that I wouldn't be an interesting player. He had come to town for a Muslim rally at the old Uline Ice Arena on Second Street NE, a shabby part of town next to the railroad tracks. The rally had been advertised with posters on trees all over the black neighborhoods. The Black Muslim credo then seemed to both the black and white middle classes bizarre and, perhaps, a little frightening. It had been only a few years since the Supreme Court had ordered the desegregation of schools, and Washington, a Southern city, was adjusting painfully. The Black Muslims rejected the concept, had started their own schools and small businesses and proclaimed total separation, total self-reliance, strong men and reserved women. I went to the rally and found myself in a world I'd never known. I had grown up in Washington, always a city with a substantial black population. I had known and talked with many black men and women and had wished them well, but had not really known any blacks. The whites ran things, and I was white, and they were not, and we were essentially separated - though not as completely as Malcolm and the Black Muslims wished us to be. I was stopped at the door of the rally and frisked thoroughly by unsmiling young men in black suits, white shirts and red bow ties, the Black Muslims' own security police, known as the Fruit of Islam. The arena was packed with men and women and children, and I appeared to be the only white. It was disconcerting. I found a seat on a side aisle, up front, sat silently and watched. I realized gradually that this was a gathering of hard-working, long-suffering poor people, the ignored and forgotten, maids and cleaning women, the ditch diggers and broom pushers, and that Malcolm was the energizing center of their lives - their hope, their promise, their redemption. He harangued and cursed the "blue-eyed devils" and demanded that his listeners reject the slave names by which their small world knew them and adopt, like himself (born Malcolm Little in Omaha), the simple X instead. He was a force of nature, angry and intolerant, passionate and impatient and demanding of sacrifice. He strode the aisles waving greenbacks in the air and shouting that he did not want to hear the clinking of mere coins in the collection plates. He seemed clearly a man of some strange destiny, though who knew the future? It held, as we now know, his break with the Black Muslims and his founding of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, a more tolerant Islam creed. It held also his assassination in New York City by three gunmen in 1965, when he was 39. And it held the enduring reminders of his presence, in books and on T-shirts and now in a much-publicized movie, but also in the minds and hearts of millions - by no means all of them poor and black. Tom Kelly is a reporter for the Life section. This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM