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In Chicago, Elijah, a pint-sized (120 Ibs.), asthmatic man of 67, professed unconcern, despite rumors that six pro-Malcolm triggermen were after him. "We are innocent of Malcolm's death," he said. "Malcolm died of his own preaching. He preached violence, and violence took him away." Despite Elijah's protestations of Black Muslim innocence, New York police arrested and charged with Malcolm's murder a Negro named Norman 3X Butler, described as a Black Muslim enforcer. When arrested, Norman 3X was free on $10,000 bail in the nonfatal January shooting in New York of another Black Muslim defector.
Human Shield. Chicago police ringed Elijah Muhammad's 19-room, $50,000 red brick mansion on the South Side, reconnoitered nearby Muslim buildings. When a delivery truck pulled up to Elijah's house with what the driver said was a grandfather clock, the police bomb squad rushed to the scene. They found that it was indeed a grandfather clock, a gift from Muslim women in Philadelphia.
What worried the police the most, though, was how to protect Elijah at the Muslims' annual convention in the Chicago Coliseum last weekend. An anonymous caller warned, "We have arrived. Muhammad will have a lively convention." Police combed the convention hall for bombs, quintupled their security detail to 45 men, ordered 50 more to stand by. Elijah, said one cop, will have "as much security as if he were President Johnson."
When the convention opened, Elijah drove the four miles in the midst of an eleven-car motorcade, was surrounded by a phalanx of Fruit of Islam members inside the hall. Newsmen were frisked head to toe before entering, even had their shoes checked for hollowed-out heels. Lining the fern-decorated stage and directly below it was a human shield of 55 Fruit of Islam guards, and scores more patrolled the aisles.
The convention itself was a dud. The hall, with a seating capacity of some 7,500, was less than half filled. Elijah Muhammad could hardly be seen behind the ranks of his bodyguards as he delivered a wheezy, two-hour harangue highlighted by a warning to would-be assassins that "to seek to snuff out the life of Elijah Muhammad is to invite doom." On the convention's second day, Elijah failed to appear. The explanation: his asthma had kicked up again.
As for Malcolm Little-Malcolm X-John Doe, he was buried as Al Hajj Malik Shabazz, the name he earned in 1964 by making his pilgrimage to Mecca and being received as a true believer. He wore the white robe that signified his faith. In the four days before his burial, more than 20,000 persons, almost all Negroes, filed past his body as it lay on view in a glass-topped, wrought-copper casket. Following Muslim custom, when Malcolm was buried in suburban Westchester's Ferncliff Cemetery, his head was to the east, toward Mecca.
*As Malcolm explained, the X replaces "the white slave-master name which had been imposed upon my paternal forebears by some blue-eyed devil." With only a letter of the alphabet to serve as a surname, Muslims with the same given name add numbers before the X to keep one another sorted out. There is, for example, a James 67X. There are, however, Muslims with such surnames as Ali or Shabazz.