Those Who Know Don't Say by Garrett Felber

Those Who Know Don't Say by Garrett Felber

Author:Garrett Felber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press


Wendell Green of the Citizens Protest Committee echoed the NOI’s call for a united front.72 “This is not a political rally. Neither is it a religious rally,” he told the assembled twelve hundred concerned citizens. “If there is one thing that our community stands united on, it stands united against unlawful police violence and abuse of police power.” The police shooting could have just as easily happened in front of the Elks lodge or Shriners Auditorium, Green argued. All you had to be “was Black and moving within sight and range of a shooting policeman’s weapon.” Like Miller, he critiqued the use of statistics to generate and mask police violence. “The Negro community is over-policed. Why? The Los Angeles Department is statistic happy.… These unnecessary arrests build the statistics that the police department uses to poison the minds of the public and the policemen giving a gross misrepresentation of our community.”73 Although he was not scheduled to speak, Malcolm X took the opportunity to second this call for unity, stating that because the NAACP had backed the NOI, the police department was now mad at both organizations.74

Two days later, Malcolm delivered another rousing call for Black unity at the Park Manor Auditorium before a crowd of over one thousand, who waited outside to pour into the auditorium. The minister called for a mass protest march on city hall and congratulated Black leaders, in particular the NAACP, for coming together on the issue of police brutality.75 One of the attendees was Ron (Everett) Karenga, later Maulana Karenga of the US Organization and the founder of Kwanzaa. A year after writing C. Eric Lincoln, requesting an advanced copy of his book to help advance his study of the “Black Muslim Brotherhood,” Karenga wrote in the Herald-Dispatch that “this rally, being neither religious nor political is to bring together all people with the same problem and to find a solution.”76

But concern was growing among NAACP officials about what this budding coalition might mean. That “the NAACP is supporting the rights of the Muslim[s], without embracing their doctrine[,] is shaking everybody up,” one organizational report noted. Field secretary Althea Simmons “is getting a considerable amount of calls about it.” Simmons wrote to Gloster Current that “the Muslim situation has almost gotten out of hand as far as NAACP is concerned in that in Mr. [Edward] Warren’s T.V. appearances and statements to the press the NAACP’s participation has not been clearly confined to the issue of police brutality and therefore, we now have the Muslims embracing the NAACP and stating that NAACP supports the Muslims unqualifiedly.” A year after its conference resolution to condemn Black Nationalists in Philadelphia, Simmons again asked for clarification so that “we would know the details of the position of the National Office.”77

The NAACP was not alone in its discomfort. The unity of early May began to falter when Reverend H. H. Brookins and other Black clergy came away from protest rallies feeling that Malcolm had made “irresponsible statements” and that



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