Free Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight by Max Wallace, Howard Bingham Page A

pray—that act—well, that took me a week. Picking a lock to rob someone’s house was the only way my knees had ever been bent before. I had to force myself to bend my knees. And waves of shame and embarrassment would force me back up.”
    Taking advantage of the prison library, he read all he could about the “so-called Negro” people in America and the injustices they had suffered. Then, in 1949, with three years to go before he was eligible for parole, Malcolm sat down and initiated his first contact with the “Messenger of Allah” in the form of a short letter. Apologizing for his poor grammar and spelling, Malcolm introduced himself and explained he was writing at the urgence of his brothers and sisters.
    A week later, Muhammad wrote back welcoming Malcolm into the “true knowledge.” He enclosed a five-dollar bill as he did with all prisoners who wrote to him. The black prisoner, he wrote, symbolized white society’s crime of keeping black men oppressed and deprived and ignorant, and unable to get decent jobs, turning them into criminals.
    The reply had an electric effect on the young Malcolm, and he vowed to dedicate his life to the Messenger and his movement. For the next three years, Malcolm busied himself converting his fellow inmates and devouring the books in the prison library as he prepared himself to take advantage of his imminent freedom. “I still marvel at how swiftly my previous life’s thinking pattern slid away from me, like snow off a roof,” he would recall. Each day he wrote Elijah Muhammad, updating him on the progress of his new protégé.
    When he was released in 1952, Malcolm traveled to Chicago to watch the Messenger address the faithful at a rally. “I was totally unprepared for the Messenger Elijah Muhammad’s physical impact on my emotions,” he wrote years later. After Muhammad addressed the cheering crowd, exhorting the black man to uplift himself and his brothers and sisters, Malcolm was shocked to hear his name mentioned from the podium. In a parable comparing his new disciple to Job, who remained faithful to God even in the face of hardship, Muhammad intoned, “We will see how Malcolm does. I believe that he is going to remain faithful.” In keeping with the Nation’s tradition, he urged his new devotee to shed his “slave name” Little and renamed him Malcolm X.
    For a decade, Malcolm rewarded his mentor’s faith in him, taking advantage of the skills he had learned in his criminal days. “As a street hustler, I was always the most articulate in the ghetto,” he would write. Within a year of his release, Malcolm had been named assistant minister of the Detroit Temple, where his flare for fiery rhetoric and his ability to recruit disaffected youth was responsible for tripling membership in only a few months.
    Next he was assigned to organize temples in Philadelphia and Boston, and he so impressed Muhammad with his success that within two years he was named minister of New York’s Temple number 7, the largest Nation of Islam temple in the country. As he moved rapidly up the ladder of the Nation, Malcolm’s relationship with Elijah Muhammad grew stronger, becoming almost like that of a father and son. Everywhere he went, he praised the Messenger in the highest of terms, comparing himself to the popular ventriloquist’s dummy, Charlie McCarthy. “When you hear Charlie McCarthy speak,” he would say, “you listen and marvel at what he says. What you forget is that Charlie is nothing but a dummy—a hunk of wood sitting on Edgar Bergen’s lap. This is the way it is with the Messenger and me. It is my mouth working, but the voice is his.”
    For those ten years, Malcolm’s devotion to Muhammad was absolute. His charismatic personality and flare for promotion brought thousands of new followers into the movement. Each day he would stand on a Harlem street corner and, within minutes, would be surrounded by throngs of young blacks attracted by his appealing message. In