it easy! Take your time!" his audience pleaded with him. "He had no right to reject me!" Elijah
Muhammad declared. "He was a star, who went astray!... They knew I didn't harm Malcolm, but
he tried to make war against me." He said that Malcolm X would have been given "the most
glorious of burials" if he had stayed with the Black Muslims and had died a natural death;
"instead, we stand beside the grave of a hypocrite!... Malcolm! Who was he leading? Who
was he teaching? He has no truth! We didn't wantto kill Malcolm! His foolish teaching would bring
him to his own end! I am not going to let the crackpots destroy the good things Allah sent to you
and me!"
Elijah Muhammad drove his frail energy to speak for about an hour and a half. He challenged any
would-be assassins: "If you seek to snuff out the life of Elijah Muhammad, you are inviting your
own doom! The Holy Quran tells us not to pick a fight but to defend ourselves. We will fight!" It
was mid-afternoon when Elijah Muhammad turned back to his seat with some three thousand
Black Muslim men, women, and children shouting "Yes, sir!... So sweet!... All praise to
Muhammad!"
In the Unity Funeral Home in the Harlem community of New York City in the mid-afternoon, the
public's viewing of the body of Malcolm X was interrupted by the arrival of a party of about a
dozen people whose central figure was a white-turbaned, dark-robed elderly man whose white
beard fell to his chest and who carried a forked stick. When reporters rushed to attempt
interviews, another man in the party waved them away, saying, "A silent tongue does not betray
its owner." The man was Sheik
Ahmed Hassoun, a Sudanese, a member of the Sunni Moslems, who had taught in Mecca for 35
years when he had met Malcolm X there, and then had soon come to the United States to serve
as Malcolm X's spiritual advisor and to teach at the Muslim Mosque, Inc.
Sheik Hassoun prepared the body for burial in accordance with Moslem ritual. Removing the
Western clothing in which the body had been on display, Sheik Hassoun washed the body with
special holy oil. Then he draped the body in the traditional seven white linen shrouds, called the
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