Brother Malcolm X and Baltimore

By A. Peter Bailey
TriceEdneyWire.com Columnist

Since the outbreak in Baltimore over the killing of Freddie Gray by Baltimore City police officers, several people have asked me how I believe Brother Malcolm X would have responded to such an event.

My response is to relay to them how Brother Malcolm responded to the 1964 Harlem uprising resulting in the killing of unarmed 15 year-old James Powell by New York City police officer Thomas Gilligan. At the time I was editor of the Organization of Afro-American Unity’s (OAAU) newsletter. Brother Malcolm was in Cairo attending the Organization of African Unity Conference as an observer.

When he called the OAAU office to get an update on what was happening, he told the brothers in charge of security to keep OAAU members out of what was happening in the streets. His position being that sometimes the cops would deliberately provoke or take advantage of such events to do mass arrests of members of organization such as ours. The cops would have jumped at an excuse to burst into our office and wreak havoc. He had already told us that if someone attending one of our meetings or rallies stood up and shouted something like “We ought to bomb the subways,” that person should be immediately evicted. Nine times out of 10, he said, that person is probably a government plant trying to set us up for mass arrests if there was even a 30-second discussion of his proposal.

Brother Malcolm believed in disciplined responses to such situations as was demonstrated when he was still in the Nation of Islam (NOI). New York City cops had arrested and beaten a NOI member and taken him to a police precinct. When Brother Malcolm, accompanied by several hundred NOI members went to the precinct and asked to see the victim of police abuse, the repeatedly said no way.

Meanwhile, outside the precinct, those NOI members stood and glared at the building in total silence. According to legendary Amsterdam News reporter, Jimmy Hicks, the cops were extremely unnerved by the disciplined total silence of the Black Muslims. Finally, he noted, a Black cop told the person in charge that it was be very wise and prudent to let Brother Malcolm see the prisoner. When he saw him and was satisfied that he was no longer under attack, he came out of the building and signaled to the NOI members that they should now leave; they did so without a word being said.

One wonders if several thousand protesters in Baltimore, instead of chanting slogans and waving posters, had stood in front of a police station, or the coroner’s office or even the mayor’s office in total, disciplined, determined silence, would have been a more effective way of finding out more quickly how Freddie Gray ended up dead while in police custody.

This article originally published in the May 11, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.