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

his autobiography, he explains his success. “At the bottom of the social heap is the black man in the big-city ghetto,” he would tell them. “He lives night and day with the rats and cockroaches and drowns himself with alcohol and anaesthetizes himself with dope, to try and forget where and what he is. The Negro has given up all hope. He’s the hardest one for us to reach, because he’s the deepest in the mud. But when you get him, you’ve got the best kind of Muslim. Because he’s the most fearless. He has nothing to lose, even his life, because he didn’t have that in the first place.”
    The movement’s rapid growth and the influence of Malcolm X took place for the most part off the media’s radar screen—until 1959, when Mike Wallace produced a five-part TV series called “The Hate that Hate Produced.” The highly inflammatory series vaulted the Black Muslims into the consciousness of the American public, using sensational terms to imply a threat that didn’t really exist. “Black supremacy,” “gospel of hate,” “hate-mongers in our midst”; the series claimed the movement had at least 250,000 members “preaching hatred for the white man” and implied that the Nation was readying for a race war. Wallace chose to focus attention on Malcolm X as the chief spokesperson of the Muslims rather than the leader Elijah Muhammad. Overnight, the Nation of Islam became a national phenomenon; recruitment flourished, and the ranks of the movement swelled close to the exaggerated figure the series had portrayed.
    Although this was the first time most Americans learned of the Nation’s existence, it was already very familiar to one man—FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Long before Hoover took over the FBI, he had worked as an official in the Justice Department’s General Intelligence Division. Among his assignments, he directed counterintelligence operations against the black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey. His intense racism—he alternately referred to Garvey as a “nigger” or a “jigaboo”—led to a near obsession with black militancy. During his early years at the Bureau of Investigation—the forerunner of the FBI—he refused to involve the Bureau in preventing the increasing number of lynchings rampant in the South, saying it had “no authority to protect citizens of African descent in the enjoyment of civil rights generally,” according to one department memo. During the 1960s and the increasing militancy of the civil rights movement, Hoover would combine his other obsession, anti-communism, to persecute Martin Luther King Jr.—who he was convinced worked for Moscow—as “public enemy number one.” But before King came to national prominence, Hoover targeted the Nation of Islam and its leaders Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X for special scrutiny
    As early as 1952, the FBI began tapping Muhammad’s phones. The same year, Hoover unsuccessfully attempted to convince the government to place the Nation of Islam on the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations. In 1959, the Justice Department refused his request to prosecute the Nation for subversive activities and concluded that the group was not a threat to national security.
    Hoover insisted that all surveillance reports on the activities of Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad be forwarded to him personally. For two decades, the FBI unsuccessfully attempted to locate W. D. Fard in an effort to prove him a hoax and discredit the movement.
    After years of surveillance, the FBI could find no concrete evidence of a threat to national security. Despite their hostility towards the “white devils,” members of the Nation were generally law-abiding. In 1960, agents questioned Malcolm X after he gave a particularly inflammatory speech about the spaceship that will “descend on the United States, bomb it, and destroy all the devils.” An FBI account of his interrogation calls him “uncooperative” but quotes Malcolm as saying “Muslims are