Malcolm X: Eerie Premonitions of His Own Death

Malcolm X, the fiery and controversial Black activist and leader, was assassinated by three Black Muslims as he was giving a speech in New York City on Feb. 21, 1965. The next day, Jules Loh, an Associated Press reporter, published an interview he had conducted with Malcolm X on March 26, 1964, during which the activist discussed his own possible assassination—but insisted Loh not publish his remarks. After Malcolm X’s murder, Loh felt freed of his promise and published this article the next day. It was printed by the Aberdeen American-News (Aberdeen, South Dakota) on the front page of its Feb. 22, 1965, issue:

Intimate Glimpses

‘Hostile Forces Out to Kill Him’

Editor’s Note—A year ago AP reporter Jules Loh had a long interview with Malcolm X during a plane trip from Washington to New York. Malcolm X said he was in peril but asked that nothing be published on this aspect. In the following article, Loh recalls the conversation in the light of Malcolm X’s violent death.

By Jules Loh

New York (AP)—Malcolm X said a year ago that “hostile forces,” which he wouldn’t identify, were out to kill him. It sounded like far-fetched melodrama at the time, but now he is dead.

“They did make an effort to kill me,” he said. “I can prove it.”

The manner of his death Sunday—cut down while he was making a speech—fits Malcolm’s own dramatic account of the intrigue and subsurface violence which he said was rampant within the Black Muslims at the time he left the sect.

His leaving, he said, was in no way voluntary. “They put me out,” he insisted. He said he had announced publicly he had broken away of his own will merely to avoid any more discussion of his departure than necessary.

‘Our Own Law’

“We have our own law,” Malcolm said, “our own way of taking care of ourselves.”

The words came back forcefully Sunday.

Malcolm X asked that none of this be published at the time. He recounted it last March 26 during an airplane flight from Washington to New York. He had flown to Washington that morning to watch the Senate debate the civil rights bill. The trip, and Malcolm’s conversation as he sat with the chair tilted back as the plane roared toward New York at dusk, provided some intimate glimpses of the Negro leader.

He called the civil rights bill debate “a con game.” He said that if the bill were passed, it would never be enforced. “Enforcing it would bring a civil war to the South and a race war to the North,” he said. For his part, Malcolm believed the answer to racial problems lay in neither legislation nor nonviolent direct action after the fashion of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Separate Land

He said he believed that unless Negroes lived in a separate land—and he didn’t really see how this could ever come about—one race would simply dominate the other. He wanted the black man—Malcolm avoided the term Negro, “an invention of blue-eyed white devils”—to be on top.

Malcolm said his animosity toward whites had begun “even before I was born.”

“In 1925 my family lived in Omaha,” he said. “My father was an organizer for Marcus Garvey (a black nationalist leader). One night the Ku Klux Klan rode out to the house, shot out all the windows and told my father to move. My mother was carrying me at the time. My brother, who was six years older, told me he remembered my mother, pregnant, standing in the doorway shaking her fist.”

He said his family had moved to Lansing, Mich., when he was 4. There, he said, his house was burned by white terrorists. On Sept. 31 that year his father was killed.

“An accident?” Malcolm commented. “He was run over by a streetcar. Only the back wheels ran over him,” Malcolm said.

Decrepit Schools

Malcolm told about going to decrepit schools, winding up in a detention home near Lansing for delinquency, then moving to Boston in 1940.

“Thinking back,” he said, “I never was nonviolent. When someone threw a rock at me I threw it back. Sometimes,” he said, after a pause, “I threw one before one was thrown at me.”

Malcolm said he was working as a bus boy at the Parker House in Boston when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

“I never was sad about that,” he said. “I never was upset about any mishap Uncle Sam experienced. As a matter of fact, I think I felt a little joy. There they were, those little brown men—or yellow men, whatever—making Uncle Sam suffer.”

Malcolm chuckled.

He refused to discuss the episode which sent him to prison in 1946. He said he was taking dope—sniffing cocaine, as he put it—and stole to support his habit. “I was not an honest man,” he said.

In prison he was converted to the creed of the Black Muslims and also thought long and deeply about his animosity toward white people.

‘Robbed’ in Store

“I once worked in a furniture store in Detroit and saw how the owner was robbing our people, giving them cheap furniture at high prices. He robbed them all week long, then at the end of the week made a contribution to the NAACP and the Urban League.”

The Muslim sect provided for Malcolm an outlet for the black nationalism inherited from his father and also a vehicle for a determined effort to reform his own life, partly to prove that blacks are more moral and ethical than whites. “Before I became a Muslim,” he said, “I tried to be white.”

In prison, he said, he read the Bible through, then the Koran. First, though, he read the dictionary literally from A to Z. He never lost his flair for words and his interest in word roots and meanings. He also developed a passing acquaintance with French, Spanish, German and Italian.

He said he had developed, in prison, an understanding of “the Negro’s real problem. He had no pride. The real crime of slavery was that it destroyed the Negro’s cultural pride, his blackness, his negritude.”

To Eat Watermelon

“I had to become a Muslim to get nerve enough to eat watermelon,” he added. “I like watermelon. Now I eat it and don’t care what anybody says.”

Armed with his new ideology, and vocabulary, Malcolm left prison and went to work fulltime for the Muslims. He said he had organized the Muslim mosques in Boston and Philadelphia, and in 1954 became minister of the powerful New York mosque.

His success in the Muslims, he said, led to his rift with the sect in December 1963. He accused the Muslim chief, Elijah Muhammad, and his followers of jealousy. He said that when Muhammad became ill in 1963, “some elements within the Muslims thought I was trying to take over.”

Malcolm said the organization had been trying for two years to find a way to get rid of him and finally seized upon his widely quoted remark about President John F. Kennedy. Malcolm had said the Kennedy assassination was an instance of “the chickens coming home to roost.”

Malcolm said he never had received an official reason for his expulsion, “but the reason was I was too militant, I was rocking the boat.”

No Changes

He added: “We had a law wherein no Muslim could be the victim of any kind of punitive action without a hearing before the entire body. They didn’t want to give me a hearing because they had no legitimate charges. But they didn’t want to publicly put me out.”

In the end, Malcolm said, “they succeeding not only in suspending me, but isolating me so I couldn’t come before the Muslims. Then they began spreading propaganda against me, and I was told the suspension would be indefinite.

“Right after I was suspended, silenced, then isolated, an effort was made to do me harm. But they picked the wrong ones.” He said that the ones picked as assassins were secretly loyal to him within the sect.

“All the ones they picked after that to push me would pull,” he said with a wry smile.

Asked what he meant by doing him harm, Malcolm said: “Put me to death. With bullets.”

He said several actual attempts, not merely plots, had been made on his life. “I can prove it.” Once, he said, his car had been wired with explosives.

He said that when word of the attempts spread within the Muslims, “the brothers began taking sides.” But this was done secretly, he said. Shortly after his expulsion he went from mosque to mosque trying to solidify his strength.

For more information, visit the Malcolm X Official Website.

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