Nan Haley often told her husband, “You’re married to your typewriter.” In June 1959 she gave him an ultimatum. “She banged her hand on the kitchen table and said, ‘It’s me or that typewriter,’” he recalled. “I thought, ‘I wish you hadn’t phrased it that way.’” They both moved back to New York in the summer of 1959 but separated for good. Nan settled in Harlem, and Alex moved to a one-room basement studio apartment on Grove Street in Greenwich Village. Maintaining two residences and living on a relatively meager military pension meant that Nan and Alex faced hard financial times. He had not wanted her to work when the children were small. But “when Alex left me, I knew I had to work,” she said later. “I had to take care [of] and provide for my children. Because I knew that I could never depend on him.” By then she was angry at his financial irresponsibility. “It was always ‘when my ship comes in and when things get better, I’m going to do this for you, I’m going to do that for you.’ But he never did. . . . He did not do what he was supposed to do.” Years later, Nan bemoaned Alex’s failings as a husband. “I don’t think he ever let me get close to him. Only to cook, wash, have sex, that’s about it. . . . He always was secretive.” Haley never spoke speak critically of Nan and claimed that they “just sort of drifted apart.”1
Haley maintained contact with his children but made little time for them. His son, Fella, lived with him for a while in the Village after the teenager was accused of having sex with a minor girl in Harlem in 1962. The disposition of the charge is not clear. Fella entered the army in the mid-1960s and served with the 101st Airborne Division as a paratrooper in Vietnam.2
Money problems plagued Haley from his first days out of the Coast Guard. He pursued freelance writing jobs far and wide, but they did not come quickly. “I was literally hanging on by my fingernails, trying to make it as a magazine writer,” he remembered. One fellow Coast Guard veteran noted that it was hard for some men to adjust to fending entirely for themselves, saying, “Alex lost control of his finances.” A friend told him about a civil service job as a “public information officer,” for which Haley was well qualified. The friend, to whom Haley owed money, promised that he could get Haley the job if he agreed to take it immediately. Haley finally said that he wanted to “keep on trying to make it [with] writing.” At that point his Greenwich Village cupboard held only two cans of sardines and his pocket only eighteen cents, which he spent on a head of cabbage. He thought, “There’s nowhere to go but up.”3
Haley longed for the writing community to which Barnaby Conrad had introduced him in San Francisco. He wrote to several writers then living in Greenwich Village. He heard only from James Baldwin. “Jimmy, bless him . . . perceived, that I was really crying for a shoulder to lean on.” Baldwin walked into Haley’s basement apartment, “as if we were old buddies and writing peers, and sat down, cross-legged on the little hassock I had, and talked to me for an hour . . . about nothing in particular, and not that much about writing. But he said to me, in his actions, that he regarded me as a peer. And that did more for me than he could ever know.” The two became good friends.4
More companionship came from George Sims, a boyhood friend from Henning, a tall, light-skinned man married to an Irish woman at a time when interracial marriages were uncommon. Sims had settled in Greenwich Village and worked as a janitor and bank messenger. He had arranged for Haley to live in the basement apartment of his building. Sims had an avid curiosity about black history that he satisfied by spending nights and weekends at the New York Public Library. He reputedly had a photographic memory. In the early 1960s Sims and Haley spent many late evenings wandering about Greenwich Village. They chatted about Henning, the people they knew there, and the meaning of the lives they had observed. The time spent with Sims in Greenwich Village nurtured Alex’s autobiographical instincts. The two men were close companions for the next thirty years, and Sims became Haley’s research assistant.
Haley wrote in his diary on New Year’s Day 1962 that he was hard at work writing, pausing only a few minutes to have a drink with the Simses before recording his resolutions for the future: “This year, I hope, will see a number of aspirations accomplished, chief among them my first book—at this writing, the book on Henning, and that it will prove a resounding success.” This is the first recorded mention of his conscious intention to write about his background.5
Years later he wrote an unpublished autobiographical novel in the third person, set during these years in New York. One scene depicted Alex visiting Nan at her job as a waitress. In the novel she works because she enjoys it, not because she has to, and “Alex wishes she wouldn’t work.” He hands her his pension check, and Nan pushes it back to him. She senses that something is disturbing him but knows that she “probably can’t get close to it.” She asks about his writing, and “he says a little too much about how well it’s going.” He will have to “install a bigger mailbox to handle all the checks!” The next scene describes his mailbox as overflowing with rejected manuscripts and unpaid bills. “He hasn’t had a sale in too long. . . . turned down by all the best magazines. What’s wrong?” George Sims offers to get Haley a job as a messenger at the bank where he works. In the next scene, “Alex is in a messenger’s uniform which is too small in some places and too big in others.” His white boss is overbearing and condescending, and on the job, Haley is “shunted aside, ignored, treated as though he were a mindless robot.” He feels like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: “Nothing. Nobody.”6
He returns home to his basement cell, like the one the Invisible Man occupies, to find his father waiting for him in the hall. Simon Haley looks at the messenger’s uniform and asks what Alex has done to himself. “Three sons I’ve got . . . a lawyer, an architect—and a messenger boy.” Simon has let Alex find his own way, but now Simon thinks that was a mistake, and he is “ready to move back into the vacuum.” His response to Alex’s poor achievement is the same as always: college. Alex refuses, because he is going to be a writer. He tries to make peace with Simon, but his father is bitterly disappointed in him. “And what next?” Simon asks. “A janitor? A shoe-shine?” The next day on the job, Haley lashes out at white women who refuse to acknowledge his presence. “Look at me! I’m somebody, you hear? I’m a person. Look at me!” He angrily quits the messenger job.
Haley’s autobiographical novel revealed his fear of failure during his first years after leaving the Coast Guard. His commitment to writing did in fact falter amid his financial struggles. He applied for corporate public relations jobs and included his photograph with his resume, so there would be no awkwardness at an interview. Despite excellent qualifications, he never got an interview. He did work briefly as a bank messenger. Whether or not the interaction with Simon in the novel was based on a real event, it showed his hurt at his father’s disappointment in him. It would have been uncharacteristic of Haley to lash out at the white women ignoring him, but the scene he created suggested the kind of anger found in the writing of Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin. Haley was at work on imagining a narrative of his life that dwelt on the obstacles he had overcome.
In the early 1960s Haley pursued magazine assignments intensively. He queried various magazines about a wide range of story ideas and was forced to develop a thick skin. He renewed connections to Coronet, Reader’s Digest, and the Saturday Evening Post. He discussed story ideas with the editors of the men’s pulp magazine Climax and talked about possible celebrity pieces for Hugh Hefner’s Show Business Illustrated. He developed a profile of the comedian Phyllis Diller, whom he had known in San Francisco, where she began her career; he eventually sold the piece to the Saturday Evening Post.7 Haley then began to focus on profiles of black celebrities. He developed a list of what he called “People on the Way Up.” He developed stories on Lena Horne, Leontyne Price, Dick Gregory, Leadbelly, Floyd Patterson, and the Olympian Ralph Boston. None of these articles, together representing many months of work in 1960 and 1961, was published. Freelance writing was often a demoralizing pursuit.
In 1962, he did place a long piece on the theme of black achievement in Cosmopolitan magazine, at that point still a literary and arts publication. Haley wrote a history of black contributions to American musical culture that touched on the evolution of African traditions through spirituals, minstrels, blues, and jazz, culminating in musical theater in the mid-twentieth century. He connected dozens of black artists to one or another of the musical genres and ended on a triumphal note: “It will be an exciting future indeed when Negro contributions in other fields equal those made in the musical life of America.”8
Haley began to connect with entertainment celebrities in New York. In February 1961 he attended a performance of Il Trovatore with the singer and actress Lena Horne; her husband, Lennie Hayton, a white composer of big band music and Hollywood musical scores, including “Singin’ in the Rain”; and the sociologist and social reformer Jeanne Noble, who had recently become a professor at New York University. Afterward, he had dinner with them at Sardi’s, a theater district restaurant. Horne and Noble were members of the black sorority Delta Sigma Theta, and both were involved in civil rights activism. Haley was making contacts with an entertainment elite that might help him on the way up as a writer. But he may also have been having a romance with Noble, a thirty-four-year-old Georgia native. Like Nan, she was a pretty, light-skinned woman who went on to a distinguished career in academics and public service. In his autobiographical novel, Haley describes a relationship he had had with a young, black, and ambitious woman he called “Gwen Richards.” He finally breaks off their relationship because he is more committed to his writing than he is to Gwen.9
Haley’s most successful connection in the world of magazine writing proved to be with Reader’s Digest. In the early 1920s, DeWitt Wallace had recognized that there was a rapidly expanding middle-brow audience for periodical literature and that there were far too many magazines published for the average person to keep up with all the good journalism. Wallace liked articles that were uplifting, that revealed the tenacity of the human spirit and people’s capacity to help others. It may have been at Reader’s Digest that Haley acquired the maxim he often offered: “Find something good and praise it.” In 1960 and 1961 Haley developed a number of stories for the Digest, most of them profiles of celebrities, black and white. His most noteworthy article was an adoring piece on Percival Scott, his boss on the Murzim. Still, fewer than half the stories he wrote for Reader’s Digest were published.
The stories that did appear in print were all profiles of talented African Americans who had overcome great obstacles and remained humble, unchanged by great success. Haley wrote about two gold medal–winning Olympians from poor black families, the high jumper John Thomas and the sprinter Wilma Rudolph. Thomas had suffered a terrible injury to his leg but recovered and returned to the top of the field. Haley quoted Thomas’s white coach about him: “A kid so nice you’d be proud if he was your own.” Wilma Rudolph had been born with what everyone believed were hopelessly crippled legs—everyone except her mother, who was determined that her twentieth child would walk. At great sacrifice, she got her daughter the therapy that enabled her finally to walk at age eight, and by eighteen, Wilma had grown to be a gazelle-like sprinter. She won three gold medals at the Rome Olympics in 1960 and then returned to her small Tennessee hometown and prepared to be an elementary school teacher. Haley’s profile of Mahalia Jackson, “She Makes a Joyful Noise,” tells of the singer’s rise from humble beginnings in New Orleans, where her gift of a powerful soprano voice was spotted early. Jackson often turned down lucrative deals that would have meant switching from gospel music to blues and jazz. Haley placed her in the context of black Christianity and portrayed her loyalty to gospel music as her chief virtue.10
In 1963 Haley turned to his family experiences in “The Man Who Wouldn’t Quit.” Here he told the story of his brother George’s struggle as one of the first blacks to enter the University of Arkansas law school in the early 1950s. George was a model young man, a war veteran and an outstanding college student, the academic star of the Haley family. Simon Haley, now teaching in Arkansas, had persuaded George to be a pioneer of desegregation. George suffered abuse from other students and isolation from the law school community, and in his first year he wanted to quit. But he endured the hardships, finally made a white friend, Miller Williams, and ended his legal education on the school’s law review. At the end of his piece, Haley announced proudly that George was a successful lawyer and a rising star in Republican politics in Kansas—and revealed that George was his brother.
This story ran in spite of the angry opposition of Miller Williams, who in 1963 was on faculty in the English Department at Louisiana State University, having forsaken law for poetry. Williams feared the possible impact that public exposure of his support for racial integration in Arkansas would have on him and his family, given the volatile racial atmosphere of Louisiana. He had originally been asked to collaborate with Haley on the article, but after traveling to Kansas City to interview George, Williams was cut out of the process, he said, without compensation. Alex, he said, nonetheless promised that Williams would have a chance to review anything said by or about him before it went into print. But Williams said that he was not given that chance and that George ignored his pleas for help. After threatening Alex Haley and Reader’s Digest with a lawsuit, he was sent galley proofs for the article, which was due out in days. Miller then informed Alex that one anecdote in the story was fabricated: “I get the impression that your attitude has been, ‘What does it matter, so long as I got the information I needed, and so long as I get me a good story?’” He demanded that Haley “get rid of my name and my teaching at L.S.U.” Furthermore, “the remarks attributed clearly to me are self-disparaging, they are inane, and they are false.” But the story ran with Williams’s name, his affiliation with Louisiana State, the allegedly false anecdote, and a quote attributed to Miller asking George to be the godfather of his daughter Lucinda. Alex Haley wrote to the Reader’s Digest legal department that Williams was upset that he had been cut out of a byline and that his need for money could explain “his seeming anxiety to file some potentially lucrative suit.”11
There was a postscript to this situation: in a few years, Miller and Lucinda Williams got away from Louisiana unharmed and settled at the University of Arkansas, where he established a university press and became a nationally renowned poet. Lucinda became a celebrated singer and songwriter, nominated fifteen times for Grammy Awards and winning three. Bill Clinton asked Miller Williams to read his poem “Of History and Hope” at the 1997 presidential inauguration. And in 1998 Clinton appointed the staunchly Republican George Haley ambassador to the Gambia.
By 1962 Haley’s freelance career was taking off. His work benefited from extensive critiques by Reader’s Digest editors, especially a senior editor, Charles Ferguson. In 1963 the Digest arranged to pay Haley a monthly stipend of $300 and to cover his travel expenses as he scouted for stories. It was an unusual—and fortunate—arrangement for a freelance writer. The Digest paid him $12,000 in 1963. He wrote ten articles, of which the editors bought only two, for $4,000 each. He began to place stories with other magazines too. “I got to the point I’d sell one in every five and then gradually one in every four. Eventually I became able to sell just about whatever I wrote, particularly after I began to be assigned stories by editors who had. . . . acquired a certain amount of confidence that I could execute an assignment. I could make a month’s pay with one article.”12
* * *
Haley’s rise as a freelance writer was linked in part to the growing notoriety of the Nation of Islam (NOI). He had first heard of the Nation when a black musician he knew in San Francisco went home to Detroit, was converted to the sect, and returned saying, “The white man is the devil.” In July 1959, about the time Haley got back to New York, Mike Wallace produced a sensationalist depiction of the group, The Hate That Hate Produced, for a local commercial New York station. Widely viewed, the report introduced the Nation to a white population previously unaware of it. The Nation had mosques in fifty American cities, and Wallace showed that some blacks had embraced the “flagrant doctrine of black supremacy.” Elijah Muhammad, known by his followers as “the Messenger” of Allah, led the Nation. Muhammad declared that blacks were not originally or naturally Christians. Among the sensational statements Wallace highlighted was the Messenger’s promise “to give the call” for destruction of the white man by 1970. The Hate That Hate Produced also brought before the camera Malcolm X, a handsome, red-headed, copper-skinned man whose speeches riveted listeners, whether they agreed with him or not. Malcolm was brilliant at the podium and on television. His crackling baritone voice and his razor-edged opinions about white society’s hypocrisies made for irresistible listening. In 1958 an FBI informant reported that Malcolm was an “expert organizer and an untiring worker” whose hatred for whites was not likely to “erupt in violence as he is much too clever and intelligent for that.”13
Malcolm recounted the Nation’s creation story: the serpent in the garden with Adam and Eve was Yacub, a white man, from whom the pale races of men evolved. African civilization was originally superior to European civilization, and only through millennia of oppression had people been led to believe otherwise. Blacks were not really in favor of integration, Malcolm insisted, because it polluted black interests. The NAACP was a “black body with white head.” Malcolm was most compelling when he justified the Nation’s hatred of “the white devil.” Whites’ characterization of members of the Nation as subversive was outrageous, he said: “Here is a man who has raped your mother and hung your father on his tree, is he subversive? Here is a man who robbed you of all knowledge of your nation and your religion and is he subversive?”14
Malcolm had moved to Harlem in 1954 and transformed NOI Mosque No. 7 into an exciting place with a growing membership. Harlem residents seemed irresistibly drawn to him. His duties soon included expanding the Nation along the East Coast, which he did with astonishing success. He later claimed that the national membership of the Nation was only about four hundred when he began preaching but numbered in the tens of thousands by 1959. Malcolm and the Nation’s message of strict personal conduct appealed to a growing number of residents of dangerous black ghettos.15
Haley interested Reader’s Digest in a piece on the Nation, and he wrote Malcolm several letters that went unanswered. Finally he went to the Muslim restaurant in Harlem that served as Malcolm’s office. Haley showed Malcolm a letter from Reader’s Digest requesting a story on the Nation. “You’re a tool—you’re a white man’s tool,” Malcolm responded, but he kept talking to Haley. Haley responded that he intended to write an objective piece, to which Malcolm replied that a white man’s promise was worthless but that he would consider cooperating. Later Malcolm said that Haley would need the permission of Elijah Muhammad. Haley went to Chicago and had dinner with the Messenger. Nothing was said about the article, but when Haley returned to New York, Malcolm agreed to help. Haley began attending Mosque No. 7 in Harlem, and he traveled to NOI temples in several other cities. His easygoing demeanor and enthusiasm for research allayed at least some of the natural suspicions among the NOI men.16
Malcolm introduced Haley to Louis Lomax, the black television reporter who had collaborated with Mike Wallace. Lomax personally rejected the NOI’s separatism but believed that 80 percent of blacks “vibrate sympathetically” with its open hatred of whites. Haley’s friend James Baldwin held a sympathetic view of the Nation. In 1961 Baldwin wrote that “the Muslim movement has all the evidence on its side. . . . This is the great power a Muslim speaker has over his audience. His listeners have not heard the truth about their daily lives honored by anyone else. Almost all others, black or white, prefer to soften the truth, and point to a new day which is coming for America.” In a 1962 New Yorker article, later published as the longer of the two essays in his celebrated book The Fire Next Time, Baldwin wrote that Elijah Muhammad had done “what generations of welfare workers and committees and resolutions and reports and housing projects and playgrounds have failed to do: to heal and redeem drunkards and junkies, to convert people who have come out of prison and to keep them out, to make men chaste and women virtuous, and to invest both the male and the female with a pride and a serenity that hang about them like an unfailing light.”17
Probably the greatest influence on Haley’s understanding of the Nation came from C. Eric Lincoln. Haley and Lincoln were about the same age, had grown up in Alabama at the same time, and both had backgrounds in the AME church. They spent time together in Greenwich Village while Lincoln finished his dissertation, the first scholarly treatment of the Nation, Black Muslims in America, published in 1961. Lincoln placed the NOI within the historical context of black nationalism. Lincoln began with William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, who in 1903 published The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois argued for the existence of an Afro-American folk spirit, writing that “the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world. . . . Negro blood has a message for the world.” Du Bois defined black nationalism as including a sense of alienation from white power and dominant white values. He emphasized blacks’ common history—a glorious African past, the horrors of slavery, the disappointments of emancipation—and the myths that blacks built on them. Black nationalism included the celebration of African American culture and the belief that blacks’ spirit as a people arose from their cultural distinctiveness. For Du Bois, whites, in essence, were selfish and violent, and blacks in their essence were gifted with higher sensitivity, a distinctive humaneness that whites lacked.18
Lincoln noted that most older members of the Nation of Islam shared a background in Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which had attracted millions of American members in the 1920s. Garvey insisted the United States was far too racist and undemocratic to ever include blacks as equals, and he cited the mistreatment of blacks during and after World War I to justify a plan for blacks’ wholesale migration to Africa. Few of Garvey’s followers actually intended to emigrate, but all responded to the movement’s promotion of race pride. Unlike the NOI in its condemnation of Christianity, Garvey reconciled evangelical Christianity with black nationalism by portraying God and Jesus as black. It worked: many of the UNIA’s most devoted organizers were Christian ministers, including Malcolm’s own father. Garvey’s influence among blacks raised the suspicions of the U.S. government, which believed rumors of armed Garveyites preparing for race war. In 1925 Garvey was convicted of mail fraud, sent to prison for several years, and then deported. The UNIA went into decline, but some of its supporters joined the Nation of Islam when it emerged in Detroit in the 1930s.
“Mr. Muhammad Speaks” appeared in Reader’s Digest in March 1960. The article began with a tone similar to that of The Hate That Hate Produced. Blacks across America, the piece noted, were talking about Elijah Muhammad and the Nation, which Haley described as a “vitriolically anti-white, anti-Christian cult that preaches black superiority.” The Nation was building businesses and schools intended to end black dependency on whites and to help blacks in cities find “a new way of life—a militant and arrogant black unity.” He quoted Malcolm: “When I was a Christian, I was a criminal. I was only doing what the white man taught me.” This rejection of white society, Haley wrote, arose from discrimination against blacks, and his article turned more sympathetic to the Nation. He noted: “Old friends of new Muslims are astounded at the incredible changes of personality which take place as converts swap lifelong habits for new spartan standards.” He quoted black sources who understood the Nation’s growth as a response to bad social conditions for blacks. He concluded that it was “important for Christianity and democracy to help remove the Negroes’ honest grievances and thus eliminate the appeal of such a potent racist cult.”19
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In 1961 Haley made a connection with a new magazine, Show Business Illustrated, published by Hugh Hefner and the Playboy enterprise. Haley developed a story about Miles Davis, the brilliant jazz trumpeter, a man known for his hostility to the media and his racial edginess. Davis routinely refused to talk to white journalists, but he gave the affable black journalist an interview. Before the article could be published, however, Show Business Illustrated folded. A. C. Spectorsky, Hefner’s editorial director, was transforming Playboy from a girlie magazine into a publication with serious literary content and social criticism, including a concern for American race relations. Hefner was sympathetic to civil rights activism. He forced the desegregation of Playboy clubs in southern cities, and he and Spectorsky instilled a pro–civil rights message in the magazine. In July 1962 Playboy ran a long article, “Through the Racial Looking Glass,” by Nat Hentoff, the jazz critic for the Village Voice and a writer in close touch with black intellectuals and artists, that explored black anger. Hentoff quoted the jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie as telling a group of white jazzmen, “You people had better just lie down and die. You’ve lost Africa and Asia, and now they are cutting out from white power everywhere. You’d better give up or learn how it feels being a minority.” James Baldwin asserted for the article that “the American Negro can no longer be, and will never be again, controlled by white America’s image of him.” Hentoff also quoted the comedian Dick Gregory: “I’m so goddamn sick and tired of a white man telling us about us.”20
In 1962 Spectorsky appointed Murray Fisher to develop the magazine’s interview series. Fisher, tall and muscular and about thirty years old at the time, was described by Playboy colleagues as abrasive, combative, and even a bully. Fisher found Haley’s unpublished piece on Miles Davis in the files of Show Business Illustrated and asked him to develop it into the first Playboy interview. Davis had liked Haley since the writer showed up at Davis’s boxing gym and put on gloves to spar with him. “In a clinch I agreed with Davis that writers and reporters were a hateful, untrustworthy breed,” Haley recalled. Davis laughed and later gave Haley a series of illuminating interviews. He dwelt on the perils of being a black celebrity; he believed he had been mistreated by white critics and disrespected by white audiences at his performances, and unlike most black entertainers in the past, he did not keep his resentments to himself. Davis had long rejected bookings in the South. “I ain’t going to play nowhere in the South that Negroes can’t come. But I ain’t going to play nowhere in the North that Negroes don’t come.” Davis concluded by saying, “This whole prejudice mess is something you would feel so good if it could just be got rid of, like a big sore eating inside of your belly.”21
The Miles Davis piece established Haley as a gifted interviewer. Haley’s affability and his reticence about his own political and social views lent an empathetic tone to his profiles. “I like to study the person,” he later said, “study what they’ve done, be low-key in my approach with them . . . project by my manner and my sincerity, which really has to be sincere, that I was genuinely interested in what they did and how they did it.” But in the Davis interview, Haley’s questions did not exhibit overt sympathy; they might have come from a polite, white skeptic.
In January 1963 the Saturday Evening Post published another profile of the NOI titled “Black Merchants of Hate,” which Haley co-authored with Alfred Balk, a white investigative reporter on the Post staff. Balk and Haley presented themselves as an interracial investigating team that discovered things both “heartening” and “deeply disturbing.” During their research, Balk was reporting to the FBI on his and Haley’s research and getting information from the Bureau with the promise that he would not attribute it to the FBI. This was a common tactic at the Bureau in investigating organizations suspected of “un-American” activities.22 Haley and Balk’s story began with how, in 1957, Malcolm dispersed a Harlem crowd assembled to protest the beating of an NOI member. “No man should have that much power,” a white policeman observed. Police in Chicago insisted that the NOI was not a mere cult but “a mass movement on a national scale.” Haley and Balk described an NOI meeting of five thousand that put them in mind of the “huge meetings at which Hitler screamed his doctrines of Aryan supremacy.” As quoted in the article, Elijah Muhammad declared that whites were corrupt and their civilization doomed: “Get away from them! . . . They was taught to do evil! They was taught to hate you and me! Stand up and fight the white man! . . . We will rule!” Haley and Balk quoted C. Eric Lincoln’s characterization of NOI members as having been uneducated, unskilled, isolated from “the common values of society,” “shunned by successful whites and Negroes alike,” and hopeless until they heard Muhammad’s prophecy of race supremacy.23 The article delivered the message of black subversion of traditional authority, which the FBI consistently advanced about black groups, including civil rights organizations.
“Black Merchants of Hate” carried a harsher tone about the NOI than Haley’s 1960 Reader’s Digest piece. The Post had a history of racist fiction and edgy investigative journalism. It probably reflected the influence of Balk, and perhaps through him the anti-black views of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Haley had certainly been exposed to a much more complex understanding of black anger than was reflected in the Post piece.
The other noteworthy difference between the Reader’s Digest piece and the Saturday Evening Post article was the latter’s much more extensive focus on Malcolm X. He was portrayed as the most influential Black Muslim. The media attention contributed to a growing opposition to Malcolm in the close circle around Elijah Muhammad, especially on the part of Muhammad’s aide John Ali, formerly a protégé of Malcolm, and of Muhammad’s daughter and son-in-law, Ethel and Raymond Sharieff. In 1960 and 1961 Muhammad had disapproved of Malcolm’s meeting with Cuban leader Fidel Castro and his public criticism of President Kennedy; the Messenger discouraged any activity that invited closer scrutiny and harassment by the federal government. Muhammad downplayed his unhappiness with Malcolm when they met, but the inner circle schemed against Malcolm with Muhammad’s tacit approval. At the same time, people within the sect had been whispering that Muhammad had fathered a number of children with secretaries in the organization. The gossip was true, but Malcolm tried to ignore it. He saw himself as a loyal servant of the Messenger and wanted to be seen as such by others, even as his fame as the main public representative of the NOI grew.24
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Haley’s positive relationship with Malcolm X seemed not to suffer because of “Black Merchants of Hate.” When Haley asked him to do a Playboy interview, Malcolm and Muhammad again agreed. Spectorsky, who was Jewish, objected to the interview, probably because of the vicious anti-Semitism Malcolm expressed. Hefner overruled him, and the editors justified the interview on the grounds that “knowledge and awareness are necessary and effective antitoxins against the venom of hate.” Introducing the interview, Playboy characterized Malcolm as Muhammad’s erudite disciple, who wielded “all but absolute authority over the movement and its membership as Muhammad’s business manager, trouble shooter, prime minister and heir apparent.”25 In the interview, Malcolm said there had never been a sincere white man, ever, in history. Whites had brainwashed blacks, but now blacks had seen the truth of the white devils’ malevolent influence, and the white man’s influence in the world was finished. Christians of all varieties were evil, especially Catholics, who produced fascist and communist dictators. Jews liked to advise the black man, he said, “but they never advise him how to solve his problem the way Jews solved their problem.” Elijah Muhammad “cleans us up—morally, mentally and spiritually” from the “the mess that white men have made.” Blacks should be given their own territory in the United States. Muhammad taught that it was God’s intention “to put the black man back at the top of civilization, where he was in the beginning—before Adam, the white man, was created.” Bourgeois Negroes pretended to be alienated from the Black Muslims, “but they’re just making the white man think they don’t go for what Mr. Muhammad is saying.”
Throughout the interview, Haley challenged Malcolm’s interpretations of history and motive, but the minister never backed away from the anti-white doctrines of the NOI. Malcolm insisted to Haley that Playboy’s editors would never print the interview as he gave it, and he was taken aback when in fact they did. Haley and Malcolm had created a seminal document of American history and a memorable expression of black alienation. The interview changed the course of both men’s lives.