kafan. Only the face with its reddish moustache and goatee was left exposed. The mourners
who had come with Sheik Hassoun filed to the bier and he read passages from theKoran. Then
he turned to a funeral home representative: "Now the body is ready for burial." Soon, the sheik
and his retinue left, and the viewing by the public resumed. When the word spread, numbers of
persons who had come before returned for another wait in the long, slowly moving line, wanting
to see the Moslem burial dress.
It was late during this Friday afternoon that I got into the quietly moving line, thinking about the
Malcolm X with whom I had worked closely for about two years. Blue-uniformed policemen stood
at intervals watching us shuffle along within the wooden gray-painted police barricades. Just
across the street several men were looking at the line from behind a large side window of the
"Lone Star Barber Shop, Eddie Johns, Prop., William Ashe, Mgr." Among the policemen were a
few press representatives talking to each other to pass the time. Then we were inside the softly
lit, hushed, cool, large chapel. Standing at either end of the long, handsome bronze coffin were
two big, dark policemen, mostly looking straight ahead, but moving their lips when some viewer
tarried. Within minutes I had reached the coffin. Under the glass lid, I glimpsed the delicate white
shrouding over the chest and up like a hood about the face on which I tried to concentrate for as
long as I could. All that I could think was that it was he, all right-Malcolm X. "Move on"-the
policeman's voice was soft. Malcolm looked to me-just waxy and dead. The policeman's hand
was gesturing at his waist level. I thought, "Well-good-bye." I moved on.
Twenty-two thousand people had viewed the body when the line was stopped that night for good,
at eleven P.M. Quietly, between midnight and dawn, a dozen police cars flanked a hearse that
went the twenty-odd blocks farther uptown to the Faith Temple. The bronze coffin was wheeled
inside and placed upon a platform draped in thick dark red velvet, in front of the altar, and the
coffin's lid was reopened. As the hearse pulled away, policemen stood at posts of vigil both inside
and outside Faith Temple. It was crispy cold outside.
About six A.M., people began forming a line on the east side of Amsterdam Avenue. By nine A.M.
, an estimated six thousand persons thronged the nearby blocks, behind police barriers, and
faces were in every window of the apartment buildings across the street; some stood shivering on
fire escapes. From 145th Street to 149th Street, policemen had blocked off all automobile traffic
except for their own cars, the newspapers' cars, and the equipment trucks for radio and television
on-the-spot coverage. There were hundreds of policemen, some on the rooftops in the immediate
area. Combing the crowd's edges were reporters with microphones and notebooks. "He was
fascinating, a remarkably fascinating man, that's why I'm here," a white girl in her mid-twenties
told a New York Times man; and a Negro woman, "I'm paying my respects to the greatest black
man in this century. He's a black man. Don't say colored." Another woman, noticing steel helmets
inside a television network car, laughed to the driver, "You getting ready for next summer?"
When the Faith Temple doors were opened at 9:20, a corps of OAAU members entered. Within
the next quarter-hour, twenty of the men had ushered in six hundred seat-holders. Fifty press
reporters, photographers and television cameramen clustered beneath religious murals to the
rear of the altar, and some stood on chairs to see better. A Negro engineer monitored recording
equipment between the altar and the coffin which was guarded by eight uniformed Negro
policemen and two uniformed Negro policewomen. One Negro plain-clothes policeman sat on
either side of heavily veiled Sister Betty in the second row. The raised lid of the coffin hid the Faith
Temple's brass tithe box and candelabra; the head of the Islamic Mission of America, in Brooklyn,
Sheik Al-Haj Daoud Ahmed Faisal, had counseled that any hint of Christianity in the services
would make the deceased a kafir, an unbeliever. (The sheik had also dissented with the days
of public exhibition of the body: "Death is a private matter between Allah and the deceased.")
Before the services began, OAAU ushers brought in one floral wreath-a two-by-five arrangement
of the Islamic Star and Crescent in white carnations against a background of red carnations.
First, the actor Ossie Davis and his wife, actress Ruby Dee, read the notes, telegrams and cables
of condolence. They came from every major civil-rights organization; from individual figures such
as Dr. Martin Luther King; from organizations and governments abroad, such as The Africa-
Pakistan-West-Indian Society of the London School of Economics, the Pan-African Congress of
darsice
(darsice)
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