So it wasn’t easy for him to relax on the night after the Million Man March. It should have been a moment of triumph. At 62, he had just chanted his lyrics to the largest black audience ever assembled in America. Even critics had conceded that the event–if not his rambling speech–was a success. For dinner, he had invited political allies and lieutenants to join his family in the presidential suite of Washington’s Vista Hotel. The widow of his beloved mentor, the late Elijah Muhammad, was there. So was D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, who had been busted in a drug sting five years ago, five floors below–and who had been re-elected with Farrakhan’s help.
But Farrakhan is rarely offstage. He grew visibly perturbed as he watched what amounted to election returns: the television commentary. The official crowd count still infuriated him. It was a racist plot, he asserted. The media were “so vicious,” he declared. The talking heads, white and black, upset him. Whatever good the march may have done, said one pundit on “MacNeil/Lehrer,” was outweighed by the “central role” Farrakhan plays “in creating divisions in our current society.”
Farrakhan shook his head in disgust, according to one of his guests. “Farrakhan has divided the nation?” he said in mock astonishment. “It’s the whites who have done the dividing in America.” Another news show replayed Colin Powell’s comments. The retired general, who had declined to attend the march, compared Farrakhan to Mark Fuhrman. Farrakhan reacted with bitter disdain–especially since, he later told NEWSWEEK, he’d had a “very warm” telephone conversation with Powell before the march. “Colin Powell,” he said to his guests, “should have been here. He could have been validated by his brothers.”
“Validated”: a state of grace Farrakhan now thinks he’s achieved. Let commentators call him a “nut.” Let them review his long history of verbal assaults on Jews, Koreans, Palestinian Arabs, homosexuals–and whites in general. Yes, the NEWSWEEK Poll shows that only 14 percent of blacks think he reflects the mainstream of African-American thought. But by holding their convocation on the Mall, the marchers made a series of political declarations, whether they intended to or not. One of them was this: there’s no keeping Farrakhan from the national spotlight. “I am a reality in America,” he declared. He now seems to want nothing less than to be the country’s leading black political figure. “Farrakhan wants to be a plain old American leader,” says C. Eric Lincoln, a Duke sociologist who has known him since 1957.
Back home in Chicago, without a large audience to play to, Farrakhan talked at length to NEWSWEEK about what sounded like mainstream plans (page 36). Seated in the chandeliered dining room of the house Elijah Muhammad built in 1973 in a middle-class neighborhood, Farrakhan carefully inched away from some tenets of the Nation of Islam: that politics is evil and the only course in America is “separation”–a black nation unto itself, built apart and paid for by white reparations for slavery.
In a “private setting,” Farrakhan said, the Elijah Muhammad once conceded that the separatist dream was unrealistic. “‘Perhaps I know that they will never give us eight or 10 states’,” Farrakhan quoted his mentor as saying. As blacks and whites contemplate “what alimony would look like if there is a divorce,” Farrakhan told NEwsWEEK, “that might be a strong incentive for the husband and wife to sit down and say ‘Let’s get it together’.”
In previously eschewing politics, Farrakhan said, he was just following his leader’s orders: “He disallowed us to register or to vote.” He has voted only once, for Jesse Jackson in the 1984 Illinois Democratic primary. Now he will dispatch his bow-tied army to register voters nationwide–and he’ll vote in 1996. As for his policy agenda, Farrakhan envisions “a cooperative effort” to rebuild the inner cities, one that would join “government and corporate America” with an “alliance of black organizational, religious, political, civic and fraternal leaders.” He hopes to play a major role in next month’s “African-American summit.”
It’s a radical and, to many, an outrageous thought: Farrakhan goes mainstream. But his timing is good. Leadership in the black community, nurtured in the church-based civil-fights movement, is divided, confused, spent. Beset by economic fears and the chaos of the inner city, many blacks are ready for talk of go-it-alone self-help. Farrakhan fits the near-hysterical tone of public life today, in which versions of the “paranoid style” – from Ross Perot to Pat Robertson to Pat Buchanan–are in fashion.
So what should we make of Farrakhan? Does he really want to be a “plain old American leader”? Even if he does, can he possibly be one? Will blacks accept him as something more than a megaphone for anger? Can whites ever tolerate him? It all depends on who the man behind the bow tie really is. “I know you do not know me,” he said at a press conference last week, “but I know you will get to know me.”
We will get to know a man who must overcome his own history. Farrakhan’s hatred of what he calls the white-supremacist culture is both operatic and real. His life story is a catalog of resentments. In the neighborhood he grew up in, the political hero was Marcus Garvey, avatar of separatism. Farrakhan has spent his adulthood- since 1955–winning ferocious battles for dominance within a dictatorial organization he thinks he was divinely inspired to lead. Now he faces young radicals who may see his next steps toward “the mainstream” as a prelude to betrayal.
The parallels between Farrakhan’s life and Colin Powell’s are just close enough to be constructive. Both were born in New York in the ’30s, light-skinned children of West Indian immigrants. Both love calypso. Both were model young members of the Episcopal Church. Both had opportunities to succeed in white society. But while Powell took advantage of his chance by joining an integrated U.S. Army, Farrakhan enlisted in the shock troops of racial separatism.
The father of nine children by his wife of 41 years, Farrakhan came honestly to his belief in the traditional family: he didn’t have one. He rarely talks of his lineage, but did so with NEWSWEEK. His mother, Mac Manning, was an immigrant to New York City from St. Kitts, then a British crown colony in the Caribbean. She married a man from Jamaica, Percival Clark, who soon disappeared. Mae fell in love with another West Indian, Louis Walcott, who fathered Farrakhans older brother, Alvan Walcott. Clark returned just long enough to get Mac pregnant with a second child.
Although Clark was her husband, Mae was distraught: Walcott was the man in her life. Years later, Farrakhan says, his mother confessed that she had tried to abort him three times with a coat hanger: “After the third time,” Farrakhan recalls, “she decided she would go ahead and have the baby and face the consequences.” Louis Eugene Walcott was born in 1988, given the name of a man who was not his father-and who later abandoned the family, too. “Gene” Walcott never met his real father.
There’s more drama to the story: a matter of skin color. In a speech in Newark, N.J., last year, Farrakhan explained his mother’s anguish. She and his brother were dark. She feared the baby would be light-skinned, and advertise her unfaithfulness. Speaking to African-American audiences, Farrakhan tries to laugh about the story. But he’s always been self-conscious about his appearance, says Arthur Magida, who has interviewed Farrakhan and is writing an unauthorized biography. “He’s been trying to prove his blackness to himself and others all his life,” Magida says.
Farrakhan had chances to move into white society, but it didn’t happen. Reared in Boston’s Roxbury, a thriving center of West Indian culture, he was gifted musically and began studying violin seriously at the age of 5. He was a good enough student to be admitted to Boston Latin, perhaps the nation’s most prestigious public school. He enrolled in the seventh grade, but left after less than a year, lonely in a new place that was predominantly white. Farrakhan says he had hoped to attend Juilliard, but couldn’t even think of applying. His mother was a domestic; the school was far away. “We were a very, very poor family,” he says. Instead, after high school, Farrakhan attended a black teachers’ college in North Carolina on a modest track scholarship.
Farrakhan fell back on his roots, literally. Marrying his high-school sweetheart, Betsy (now Khadijah), he left college and returned to Boston. His mother was a calypso fan, and so was he. The “kings of calypso”–men with grand stage names such as Lord Executioner, Growler, Attila the Hun and Black Prince–had visited his home in Boston. Their art was both musical and political, an outgrowth of a Lenten festival in Trinidad in which men competed to concoct clever put-downs of the powers that be. He had picked up the guitar and ukulele as a boy. Now he turned himself into “The Charmer,” and hit the road to perform in clubs in the early ’50s. Again: near success. The calypso craze was about to break, the first “black” pop music to enthrall white America. But it was Harry Belafonte who won the fame.
The next step–joining the Nation of Islam – wasn’t hard for Farrakhan. Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican-born leader of the back-to-Africa movement, was a hero in Roxbury. Farrakhan’s own mother was an admirer. The theories of Garvey and Elijah Muhammad were grounded in the same perception: that white America would hey-er fully accept blacks in an equal society. In 1955, on a nightclub tour in Chicago, Gene Walcott heard Muhammad speak, and the calypso singer returned to Boston as Louis X. Years later he renamed himself Farrakhan. Muhammad became the surrogate for the father he’d never known.
Showmanship and music fueled Farrakhan’s early rise. Within two years of joining the Nation, he had written, staged and starred in a play in Boston called “The Trial.” Farmkhan played the “prosecutor.” The defendant was a black man in white-face, wearing a red wig and bright blue eye makeup. Farrakhan harangued the “white man.” “I charge you with being the greatest liar on earth!” he bellowed. “I charge you with being the greatest fornicator on earth!” There was no suspense about the outcome, recalls C. Eric Lincoln, who saw the play. “The jury sentenced the defendant to death in about a half a second.” Farrakhan wrote songs for the play, one of which he later made into a Nation of Islam calypso anthem: “The White Man’s Heaven Is the Black Man’s Hell.”
There was more than stage anger. Farrakhan also rose by being willing to viciously condemn anyone who dared challenge the prerogatives of the Nation. When Malcolm X renounced the Nation’s racist ideology, Farrakhan declared him to be marked for “death.” Malcolm was assassinated soon thereafter. There is no evidence that Farrakhan was connected to the killings, but he’s admitted to helping create the “atmosphere” that led to the murder.
The intervening 31 years have seen endless wrangles and occasional may-hem–with Farrakhan always surviving and rising. He’s a controversial figure in the community at large. In the NEWSWEEK Poll, blacks divide evenly, 41 percent to 41 percent, on whether they view him favorably or unfavorably. Jesse Jackson, by contrast, is viewed favorably by 80 percent.
Still, Farrakhan can attract an audience like no other political performer. And he has been laying the groundwork for the march–and his entry into politics–more carefully than white America bothered to notice. He started in 1990 with a “Stop the Killing” tour aimed at highlighting urban violence. He drew huge crowds. In 1993, he spoke to 20,000 at the Javits Center in New York. He produced a video, and carefully maintained a list of volunteers he could use to make the march happen.
But Farrakhan also thinks the crowd on the Mall was a testament to his role as a messenger of God. In place of a wedding band, Farrakhan wears a giant gold ring emblazoned with 40 diamonds that form a silhouette of Elijah Muhammad. As the pope is wedded to Christ, Farrakhan says, “I am wedded to this man whom I believe is the Messiah.” Pointing to the ring, he notes another detail–“a little tiny diamond where Mr. Muhammad’s heart would be. I think that little, little bitty diamond represents Farrakhan.” If grandiloquence alone is enough to make a leader, then America will have to deal with the “reality” of Louis Farrakhan for a long time to come.
Torn between his separatist ideology and his mainstream ambitions, Farrakhan tacks between anger and conciliation. Scenes from a black leader’s battle for legitimacy:
Elijah Poole meets Fard Muhammad, a silk salesman who’s spreading a black Muslim gospel. After Fard Muhammad disappears in 1934, Poole claims his teacher was Allah incarnate. He then founds the Nation of Islam, calling himself Elijah Muhammad and preaching black self-sufficiency.
Louis Eugene Walcott–later Farrakhan–is born in the Bronx, N.Y. Three years later, the family moves to Boston.
His wife pregnant, Walcott drops out of Winston-Salem (N.C.) Teachers College. A talented musician since childhood, he becomes a calypso singer known as “The Charmer.”
Visiting Chicago, Walcott is converted by a speech by Elijah Muhammad and joins NOI as Louis X. Tutored by Malcolm X in Harlem, he becomes minister of NOI’s Boston temple in 1957.
Malcolm X, privately denouncing Elijah Muhammad’s extramarital affairs, leaves NOI. Louis succeeds him as minister of Temple 7 in Harlem, and in December writes, “Malcolm shall not escape . . . Such a man is worthy of death.”
Malcolm X is assassinated in February.
Elijah Muhammad dies. His son, Wallace, moves Black Muslims toward mainstream Islam.
After extensive travel in Africa and the Middle East, Louis, now Farrakhan, breaks from Wallace Muhammad and vows to revive Elijah Muhammad’s original separatist teachings.
Farrakhan supports Jesse Jackson’s White House bid, but his entry into politics–and Jackson’s campaign–is marred by a speech that seems to praise Hitler and remarks referring to Judaism as a “gutter religion.”
Libya’s Muammar Kaddafi lends Farrakhan $5 million, interest-free, to finance POWER, a black economic-development project. At a POWER rally in New York, Farrakhan calls the city the “capital of the Jews.”
Farrakhan performs two violin concerts featuring the music of Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn. The Congressional Black Caucus invites him to establish closer ties, but puts the reconciliation on hold when a Farrakhan aide makes a hate-filled speech at a New Jersey college.
In January, Qubilah Shabazz, daughter of Malcolm X, is arrested for plotting to kill Farrakhan in retaliation for what she believed was his role in her father’s death, In October, a shadow is cast over his Million Man March when reporters ask him to explain his earlier remark that Jews are “bloodsuckers.”
