Introduction
OF the three brothers who bear witness for Malcolm X — known, as we were, by our slave name, the Henry brothers — only Milton was sure from the beginning. I was the last to come to the realization that it was he “who should come” and that there was no need to “look for another.”
I personally saw and spoke to Malcolm X on only four occasions. Once was in Washington, in the lobby of the headquarters hotel just before the 1963 March on Washington; another time, shortly before, was in the Shabazz Restaurant in Detroit. Each time Malcolm smiled, shook my hand and spoke with that characteristic courtesy and brotherliness, but I am sure he did not know me and certainly did not recall me from one meeting to the next. Twice more we were to meet: once, short days before the death of John Kennedy (November 1963) when he came to Detroit to address a rally sponsored by the civil rights group (GOAL — The Group On Advanced Leadership), of which I was president, a moment when Malcolm’s popularity with the Muslim rank-and-file was at an all-time high and he was still within Elijah Muhammad’s “Nation of Islam.”
The last lime was a year later, February 14, 1965, the day his home in New York was fire-bombed, one week before his assassination; he came to Detroit, despite the fire¬ bombing, to speak at a rally to which Brother Milton and Brother Ajay, owners of the Afro-American Broadcasting Company, had invited him. On this occasion Malcolm had departed Elijah’s “Nation of Islam”; he was sure of his own death to come, magnificently unconcerned but prepared, certain that either Black Muslim enforcers, doing the bidding of Elijah Muhammad, or agents of the United States government would soon succeed against him personally where both had failed before. We talked at length in his hotel room; I was anxious that we should give national form and specific programmatic direction to the new movement that his break with Elijah signaled. He assured us that it would come. And, when he gave up his life in New York the following Sunday, we were left, I felt, without that direction.
Of course that was not true.
All that we should do, Malcolm had already set out before us. It was left but for us to organize and carry out the work.
So here we come: the Malcolmites laboring with and speaking for the young black mass who, with more debt to Malcolm than they realize, and more wisdom than we who now join them, began our new War In America. From this moment the cry on our lips, the goal in our hearts, the drive behind our minds, our might, our very lives is LAND AND POWER, on this continent, in our time.
How we shall achieve this is the subject of this first Maicolmite epistle, written in October 1966, which we have called: War In America.
BROTHER IMARI
Detroit, Michigan, U.S.A.
January 1968
