Lies on the Prize: Academia's Betrayal of Malcolm X

© Karl Evanzz (2017)

  INTRODUCTION: When Manning Marable’s book, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, was published by Viking in 2011, I wrote that there was nothing new of a factual nature in it because Marable had lifted it all from seven previous books. One item he borrowed, however, was a lie that Malcolm X had a homosexual relationship with a middle-aged white man in late 1944. No one in the mainstream media questioned Marable’s sources, so the lie has masqueraded as the truth, until now.

   The media went buck wild spreading a lie about Malcolm X’s private life, a lie deeply offensive not only to his daughters but to his millions of admirers around the world. Let’s see if the media will demonstrate equal enthusiasm for spreading the truth. Let’s see whether Viking, Zaheer Ali, and Marable’s other researchers will issue a public apology to his daughters.

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                                A diller, a dollar,

                                Some ten o’clock

                                Scholar who gets the facts

                                Oh so wrong

                                                          

                           --------------------------------

     In his autobiography, one of the most captivating ever written (in the same league, I would argue, as the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini), Malcolm X recounts the origins of his brief stint as a house burglar. The episode is one of the lighter moments in a book filled with breathtaking peaks and death-defying freefalls.

    Mesmerized by Harlem’s street life, Malcolm Little spent most of 1943-1945 there working odd jobs, hustling, and hobnobbing with some of the most famous (Lionel Hampton, Billie Holiday, Jean Parks), soon-to-be-famous (Redd Foxx), and infamous characters (Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, West Indian Archie) one could ever hope to meet.

    In the fall of 1944, the nineteen-year-old, known as “Detroit Red” or simply “Red,” was hiding out in Harlem because he had stolen payout money that a crime syndicate owed to someone who had picked the right three-digit number in the illegal lottery (known as the “policy game” in those days).

    Red was supposed to give the money to Archie but spent it having high times at a hotel with twenty-two-year-old Beatrice Bazarian, a married white woman from Boston whom he had been pimping for about 3 years. Unable to win the money back through gambling or hustling, he had essentially signed his own death warrant; no one stole from the mob and lived long unless they repaid it and were lucky.

   With his life on the line, Red fled back to Boston and moved into the apartment of Malcolm Jarvis, a friend of four years whom he had nicknamed “Shorty”. There, he resumed his relationship with Beatrice, nicknamed “Bea”.

    Jarvis, a twenty-one-year-old father of two toddlers and trapped in a doomed marriage, was desperate for money to pay child support. Since neither he nor Red had any marketable job skills (Jarvis was functionally illiterate), they decided to start burglarizing homes in some of Boston’s more affluent neighborhoods.

   Bea’s seventeen-year-old sister Joyce and a close friend, Kora Marederosian, were amenable to the plan. Bea said that they knew of a few places where the pickings were good and easy, as they once lived in those areas.

   That’s when Jarvis mentioned two friends who might also be interested. One of them, it turned out, had suburban connections similar to the white girls, and he had a history of “jimmying” doors and windows.

   Malcolm recalled it thusly:

 

     “When I began to explain how [home burglary] was done, Shorty wanted to bring in this friend of his, whom I had met, and liked, called Rudy*.

    1. Rudy’s mother was Italian, his father was a Negro.

    2. He was born right there in Boston, a short, [light-skinned] fellow, a pretty boy type.

    3. Rudy worked regularly for an employment agency that sent him to wait on tables at exclusive parties. He had a side deal going, a hustle that took me right back to the old steering days in Harlem.

     4.  Once a week, Rudy went to the home of this old, rich Boston blue-blood, pillar-of-society aristocrat. He paid Rudy to undress them both, then pick up the old man like a baby, lay him on the bed, then stand over him and sprinkle him all over with talcum powder.

     5. Rudy said the old man would actually reach his climax from that.

     6. Rudy, I remember, spoke of one old white man who paid a black couple to let him watch them have intercourse on his bed.

     7. Another was so “sensitive” that he paid to sit on a chair outside a room where a couple was – he got his satisfaction just from imagining what was going on inside. (p. 141)

(*Pay careful attention to italicized text.)

    I have itemized Malcolm X’s recollection about Rudy because it is critical to understanding how dishonest writers used this one passage in the Autobiography to fabricate a claim that Rudy was a pseudonym for Malcolm himself. Second, Malcolm understood that readers would find the fetishes amusing. He was clearly surprised that these old white men would ejaculate without genital contact. That’s an important detail.

   Now, let’s examine how writers have taken Malcolm X’s comments out of context.

 

BRUCE PERRY

     

   The distortions and fabrications began in 1991 with the publication of Malcolm: The Man Who Changed Black America, a book which easily qualifies as the most xenophobic and homophobic one that I’ve ever read.  The author, a Jewish American named Bruce Perry, claimed to have interviewed nearly 500 people, but even if he interviewed 500,000 people, it would not justify the overtly bigoted tone of the book and his relentlessly mean-spirited assault not just on Malcolm X but on Malcolm’s parents, grandparents, wife, and nearly everyone related to him.

  These, for example, are some of the claims made by Perry on the very first page.

1. Earl Little’s father, John, did not want the baby [Malcolm] named in his honor after reading a wire from Earl stating that the baby looked “like an albino.” The baby’s grandmother agreed with her husband because she hated the “white blood” in her veins.
2. Louise Little, Malcolm’s mother, never met her white father. She was the first of several illegitimate children. The grandmother who raised her was dictatorial and spent little time at home with the children.
3. An aunt habitually flogged Louise and the other children with make-shift whips, a trade she learned from her parents. The aunt’s father had stripped one of his girls naked and made her sit on the ground in front of neighbors.
4. The aunt was as indifferent to children’s feelings as was her own mother. She would also leave home for extended periods, leaving Louise in charge.
5. Louise revenged [sic] herself by beating the other children.

     Malcolm’s sister Ella Collins is listed as the main source for the opening statements, but here’s the problem, and it’s one that plagues the whole book: Earl Little had parted ways with Ella’s mother, Daisy Mason, after an eight-year relationship (roughly 1909-1917) and three children. He married Louise Norton Langdon of the West Indies soon after meeting her in 1919 at a Universal Negro Improvement Association convention in Canada.

    Similar biases come into play with single-source allegations by Caucasians in the book. Perry seems to disregard that many whites who knew Malcolm Little in elementary school as a “good nigger,” had watched him transform into a world-traveling international celebrity called Malcolm X, a man who called them white devils (before renouncing the Nation of Islam) and who once thought of Jews (which would include Perry, of course) as the “worst” type of devil.

     Compounding the objectivity and veracity issues was Perry’s decision in 1991 to embargo his research until 2041. It’s unheard of for a serious scholar to pull such a stunt.

     But I digress.

  

   Based on Malcolm X’s memory of Rudy, and listing a single source for his interpretation, Perry writes the following:

  “Malcolm also worked . . . as a “butler” for a Boston Brahmin . . . His bachelor employer, William Paul Lennon, was hazy about the exact nature of Malcolm’s duties when he was questioned about them . . . According to Jarvis, Lennon paid Malcolm to disrobe him, place him on his bed, sprinkle him with talcum powder, and massage him until he reached climax. . . Malcolm would later assert that someone else, not he, was giving Lennon his satisfaction. Though another man did take part in some of the rubdowns, Malcolm himself actively participated. . . .

   Malcolm’s income-producing homosexual activity was sporadic.  (p.82-83)

   Thus began the game of Liar’s Poker. Notwithstanding Malcolm X’s detailed description of Rudy, Perry argues that Rudy is fictitious, and that Malcolm is the “real” Rudy.

    Moreover, Jarvis told Perry that Malcolm would “massage” Lennon until the old man ejaculated. To further denote the homosexual nature of the alleged encounters, Perry mentions that Lennon is a bachelor, that he hired Malcolm as a “butler,” and that Lennon’s memory of what type of housework Malcolm did was “hazy”.

 A few chapters later, Perry identifies the “other man” who allegedly joined Malcolm in these encounters:

   Jackie [Massie] was the girlfriend of Frank Cooper, who had participated in some of the powdering expeditions at Paul Lennon’s home. (p129)

    Perry offers no source for this allegation. However, he cites Jarvis as the source of the data about Massie.  While he does mention a Francis “Sonny” Brown, it is in connection with the burglaries:

     “According to Malcolm, the break-ins were highly professional . . . but in fact, the burglaries were amateurish and unplanned. One evening, Malcolm, Bea, Joyce, Kora Marderosian, and a tough, feisty twenty-three-year-old ex-con named “Sonny” Brown were cruising around Arlington, a posh Boston suburb.”  (p. 94)

 

  An important note here is that Perry correctly identifies Brown’s age at the time, and also describes him as an “ex-con.” He doesn’t cite a single source for this information, but as we shall see, it could only have come from one person: Jarvis.

  Finally, Perry adds a physical description of Brown:

    “Not even Sonny, who was built like Jersey Joe Walcott, ever questioned his authority.”

(p. 95)

   Arnold Raymond Cream, aka Jersey Joe Walcott, was the world heavyweight boxing champion from 1951-1952. He was six feet tall and weighed nearly 200 pounds, and had a face like a bulldog, the result of brutal fisticuffs with men more than a decade younger (he was the oldest boxing champion at the time). Perry’s description of Brown is a glaring contradistinction of the one given by Malcolm X of Rudy as a short, light-skinned youth.

PERRY’S CONCLUSION: Only two people were involved with Lennon, according to Perry’s single source, Malcolm Jarvis, and they were Malcolm Little and Frank Cooper. There was no real person as described by Malcolm X; Rudy was fictional.

LOUS A. DeCARO

   The next book to mention Rudy was On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X, a 1996 offering which grew out of Louis A. DeCaro’s 1994 doctoral dissertation.

    In an email exchange between May-June of this year, DeCaro told me that while he regarded Perry’s book as essential for “raw data” on Malcolm X’s early life, he had too many reservations about the tone of the book and some of its claims, one of them being Perry’s account of the alleged relationship between Malcolm and Lennon.

  Perry, for those unfamiliar with his book, attempts to psychoanalyze every word Malcolm uttered and every move he made since birth, even though Perry is neither a psychiatrist nor the holder of any degrees in psychology. Consequently, his book was dismissed by most reviewers as a hodge-podge of biography and psychobabble. He has shunned the media since being pummeled in interviews about the book, and after serious questions were raised about his ethics and employment history. Now in his eightieth year, he lives in the small town of Malvern, Pennsylvania.

   

   So DeCaro makes no mention of Lennon and the alleged sexual encounters, but he does mention Brown in connection with the burglaries, stating that Malcolm’s account “seems to be fictitious”: 

  “[Malcolm] returned to gambling, and then formed a burglary ring. . . He not only included Shorty but Shorty’s half-Italian, half-black friend, Rudy . . . In fact, much of Malcolm’s account seems to be fictitious. . . Another gangster appears to have been “Rudy,” an African American actually named Francis E. Brown, also known as “Sonny.” Shorty – Malcolm Jarvis – also participated, though not in the first two burglaries. (p. 72-73)

   When I asked DeCaro what he regarded as fictitious about Malcolm’s recollection of the ring since all of those arrested gave somewhat different accounts, he replied that “fictitious” was perhaps inappropriate, that embellished or another synonym would have been more precise.

DeCARO’s CONCLUSION:  DeCaro did not obtain any prison files, arrest records, or other data about Francis Brown before his book was published, meaning that he accepted Malcolm X’s description of "Rudy’s" parentage, and that he trusted Perry’s claim that Brown had a criminal past. However, the use of the word “fictitious” in relation to Rudy and Malcolm X appears to have tripped up two subsequent writers.

 

RODNELL COLLINS

 

 

   The most unsettling and disingenuous account of the alleged relationship between Malcolm and Lennon comes from an unlikely source: a putative relative of Malcolm X. Making matters worse, the ghostwriter of Seventh Child: A Family Memoir of Malcolm X, is Alphonso Peter Bailey, a former editor at Ebony magazine and a member of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) who was with Malcolm X the day he died.

   Bailey describes himself as a “Malcolmite,” a person who believes that Malcolm set an example after his break from the Nation of Islam which ought to be emulated. He is a respected journalist whom I have known since meeting him at a book signing for The Judas Factor in Newport News, Virginia, in 1993, and we appeared together on radio and television a few times many years ago. Seventh Child was published by Birch Lane Press in 1998, three years after it published The Autobiography of Alvin Ailey, as told to Bailey.

  Unlike the Ailey book, Seventh Child was largely ignored by the media. Bailey, who publicly discussed the extremely difficult time he had getting Ailey to cooperate (he died before the manuscript was finished), told me in the spring of 2011 that the Ailey book was a cakewalk compared to his follow-up with Collins. The lack of documentation was problematic, he said.

    The first mention of Brown in Seventh Child is in regard to the burglary operation:

  

  

      “The people whose homes he [Malcolm], Jarvis and Brown burglarized in white, upper-middle-class neighborhoods in Belmont, Milton, Winchester and the Cambridge area around Harvard University. . . were all well known to the two upper-middle-class white women.   (p. 45)

    On January 12, 1946, in Boston, Malcolm, Jarvis and Brown were arrested by detectives . . . .”

  The claim that Brown was arrested is erroneous. He was never captured. And a few chapters later:

  “Besides, she had heard other interesting things about Miss Massey from Uncle Malcolm himself. According to Ma, during her prison visits, Malcolm, for the first time, filled her in on some aspects of his life in Boston and Harlem, including a business deal he and Malcolm Jarvis had with an elderly, wealthy white millionaire named Paul Lennon, who would pay them to rub powder over his body.  . . Lennon’s current powderer was Frank Cooper, who had sometimes visited [Lennon] with Uncle Malcolm and Jarvis.” (p.76)

    A couple of things about his account stick out. For starters, Collins doesn’t appear to even know Brown’s first name, referring to him by his surname in the text and in the Index.  Second, Collins has thrown Jarvis into the alleged sex ring. Third, like Perry, he claims that the sessions involved rubbing the powder all over Lennon as opposed to merely sprinkling it, as Malcolm wrote in his autobiography.

 

  COLLINS’S CONCLUSION:  While Perry claims that Jarvis accused Malcolm X and Cooper of massaging Lennon, Collins is the first person to claim that Malcolm himself confessed to being among those who rubbed powder on Lennon. In essence, then, Collins is labeling his uncle a liar and asserting that Rudy and Malcolm are one and the same.

   Collins told a professor last year that his recollections and quotes are based on audiotapes and other documents in his possession.

   However, when I asked Bailey in 2011 about their source materials, he said they were virtually nil. Collins, he said, shared no audiotapes, no family bibles or transcribed histories from Ella or anyone else There were some letters between Ella and Malcolm that could not be used for copyright reasons, but that was about it. I don’t quite understand, frankly, how two people who profess to honor Malcolm X could write a book based on so much irresponsible family gossip, but that’s a matter for another day.

    Like Perry's book, Seventh Child has so many errors and outright fabrications that it would be a distraction to discuss them all here. I will mention a few because two professors have cited Collins as the second source to claim that Rudy was a pseudonym for Malcolm X. They believe Collins is reliable since he's Malcolm’s nephew. I earlier referred to Collins as a “putative” relative, by the way, because the FBI file on Ella Collins describes him as her “adopted child.”

 

   From Seventh Child:

1.       “It’s also important to note that, contrary to popular belief, Malcolm never actually lived in Harlem during his hanging-out days” (p 90). That’s a lie. Malcolm’s addresses in New York are mentioned in his draft record, FBI file, and other documents, and Malcolm talks about an apartment he and his younger brother Reginald had in New York. Moreover, Malcolm states clearly that he lived in New York for most of 1944-1945 (p. 111), and this is corroborated in part by old telephone directories and news reports on entertainers and events that he mentions. For instance, Malcolm discusses seeing Billie Holiday at the Onyx Club in New York. Newspaper articles, like this one from 1944, reveal that Holiday made several extended appearances at the Onyx Club when Malcolm lived in New York.

2.      Malcolm first met Lumumba in 1960 when the latter spoke at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and they became good friends.  (p. 171). Another complete fabrication easily dispelled by a check of newspaper articles and the FBI files on Malcolm X for the year 1960. Lumumba was at Howard for less than two hours on July 28, 1960, and he was always accompanied by American Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Christian Herter. Malcolm was nowhere near Washington that day.

3.      Earl Senior [Malcolm’s father] also fathered three other children by his first wife, Daisy Mason: Ma (1914), Aunt Mary (1915), and Earl Junior (1917) (p. 14).  Only partially true. For a memoir which brags about its exclusive knowledge of Malcolm’s family, Collins gets the birth sequence completely wrong. Earl Jr. was born in May 1909 (he is 10 years old in the 1920 census), followed by Ella in either 1913 or 1914 (Rodnell has mentioned both), and then Mary in September 1916.

4.         Earl Little Jr. was “the oldest of Earl Senior’s ten children,” Collins writes (p. 38) twenty-four pages after describing him as the third-oldest.

5.      Earl was a well-known entertainer in Boston, and was often the opening act for prominent acts, including Billie Holiday. In fact, Earl was rumored to be having an affair with her. He introduced Malcolm to her and Holiday called him “Little Brother” because he reminded her of Earl  (p. 38). 

       Since that contains so many falsehoods, I would label it one of the Big Bopper, Big Whopper lies in the book.

   Note how similar the Billie Holiday claim is to this from the Autobiography of Malcolm X:

   Reginald and I went to the Savoy Ballroom, the Apollo Theater, the Braddock Hotel bar, the nightclubs and speakeasies, wherever Negroes played music. The great Lady Day, Billie Holiday, hugged him and called him "baby brother."  (p. 111)

   

   The story raises serious questions about Collins’s credibility for another reason as well: Earl Little Jr. was a habitual offender and was incarcerated in Boston and Baltimore from 1930-1940. His escape exploits once grabbed headlines:

   When Malcolm made his first visit (during summer break from school) to Ella’s house in July 1940, Earl had just gotten out of prison. Malcolm returned to Lansing in August and did not revisit Ella until May 1941. By that time, Earl Junior was on his deathbed (under medical supervision beginning May 6, 1941). According to his death certificate, he died of pulmonary tuberculosis on June 2, 1941.

6.      Earl Little Sr. left Daisy Mason with three children when he left Georgia, and he never legally divorced her before marrying Malcolm’s mother in 1919.  (p. 23-24). Another falsehood. Daisy Mason and Earl Little were never legally married according to court records, nor did he leave her in Georgia, according to genealogical records. The lie that Earl Sr. was a bigamist was first uttered by Perry, picked up by Collins, and then repeated by the next author.

MANNING MARABLE

     Enter Manning Marable, an African American academic who cited Malcolm X as one of his heroes.

    The Columbia University professor toiled on a biography of Malcolm X for nearly two decades before it was actually published in 2011. It was supposed to be his magnum opus, a three-volume work exploring every aspect of the black activist’s life and death. His previous books were unknown outside of limited academic circles.

    Based on his source notes, Marable interviewed very few people for the proposed trilogy, and even though he knew Malcolm X’s daughters for more than twenty years, he never formally interviewed any of them. According to Marable’s widow, he suffered from sarcoidosis from 1986 until his death on April 1, 2011 – just days before Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, was published by Viking.

   The publisher had major problems with Marable. Not only had he failed to deliver a trilogy (it was supposed to be comparable to Taylor Branch’s three-part biography of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.), he was having trouble finishing even a single book due to declining health which necessitated a double lung transplant in 2010.

   I never met Marable, but I was contacted by several people who were working with him as researchers in the spring of 2010. One of them, on Marable’s behalf, offered me money if I would assist them on the book project.

   I feigned interest because I had heard Marable intended to posit a number bizarre accusations and wanted to see if it was true. What they told me left me dumbfounded. Among them:

1. Malcolm had an extramarital affair with a wealthy white female New Yorker. The woman was well known because she was often seen walking her two “purple” Great Danes around an exclusive neighborhood.
2. Malcolm was also having affair with a 17-year-old female member of the OAAU whom he impregnated shortly before he was murdered. He was with her the night before his assassination.
3. Reuben Francis, the only person to shoot one of Malcolm’s assassins, was an FBI informant who actually orchestrated the assassination.

     There was more, but since I could tell that Marable’s book was going to be another poisonous arrow in the relentless character assassination of Malcolm X, I told his associates that I was not interested in any way, shape, or form.

   I was furious about the allegations for a number of reasons. I had already cautioned Marable in print that he was harming his own reputation by making baseless claims regarding Alex Haley, whom he had falsely characterized in 2005 as an FBI informant.

   His book was overdue at the time, so I assumed that he was throwing things against the wall to see which ones would stick in the media and thereby make his book more marketable.

   I mentioned to his researchers that if Malcolm had been having an affair with anyone, let alone a white woman, it would have been mentioned in the transcripts of wiretapped telephone calls. The FBI had him under around-the-clock physical surveillance in the final year of his life, and transcribed nearly all of his telephone calls. A photo of Malcolm X having a rendezvous with a white woman would have been on the cover of every major newspaper and every sleazy tabloid in the country had it been true.

   Nor, I pointed out, would Malcolm have been involved with a teenage girl at the very time he was due in a Los Angeles courtroom to testify against Elijah Muhammad for impregnating a number of his own teenage secretaries.

   I also explained to them that given the recent attempts to kill him and the firebombing of his home on February 14, it seems that Malcolm would not have had much interest in extramarital activities. No sane man would think about running around having affairs when someone is trying to kill him every time he steps outside. That only happens in awful, illogical horror movies.

   When one researcher insisted that all of the allegations were true, I explained to him that it was impossible for Malcolm to have fathered a child fourteen months after his death. I suggested that he talk to James 67X Warden, a former Malcolm X protégé who wanted to expel Benjamin Goodman from Muslim Mosque Inc., because it was Goodman, not Malcolm, who was involved with the teenager (Goodman had recently separated from his wife).

    After showing him proof that Goodman had fathered the child in April 1966 (she died at age 33 in 1999), Marable's researcher said he was only “joking,” and that Goodman had been the original source of the “lie.”

   Well, Goodman was dead by then, so it was easy to accuse him of spreading a lie.

  

   Despite my warnings to him about numerous errors that were unfair to Malcolm’s daughters, extended family, and to his legacy, Marable told me that the book was set in stone (remember, this was the spring of 2010) and that no changes could be made to the text unless lawyers vetting the book found an issue with something.

   When the book was published, I received a review copy. I was interested in seeing whether Marable had taken anything I said to heart. He had not. The only change I noticed was that the “white woman with two purple dogs” had morphed into Lynne Shifflett, an African American OAAU member who had ruffled a few feathers in the group. The sources were bogus, of course, for the same reasons stated earlier: it would have shown up in the wiretaps. Shifflet had a contentious professional relationship with Warden, whom Marable unwisely used as one of his pivotal sources. Many OAAU members suspect that Warden, not Rueben, was involved in the assassination plot, and with good reason.

    Another serious fabrication was the alleged homosexual relationship. Marable concluded that Brown was completely fictional and that only MX was involved with Lennon. 

 From Reinvention:

    The Autobiography describes sexual contacts with Lennon, except that Malcolm falsely attributes them to a character named Rudy. . .

  Based on circumstantial but strong evidence, Malcolm was probably describing his own homosexual encounters with Paul Lennon. The revelation of his involvement with Lennon produced much speculation about Malcolm’s sexual orientation, but the experience appears to have been limited. (p. 66)

  And this:

 More credible, perhaps, is Rodnell Collins’s insight about his uncle: “Malcolm basically lived two lives” . . . But in his Detroit Red life, he participated in . . . apparently, paid homosexual encounters.  (p. 66)

  In the footnotes, the “much speculation” Marable cites was from Bruce Perry, whose prejudices are about a subtle as a raging bull in a china shop. Marable notes that Jarvis was the sole source of Perry’s claim. Then he cites Collins (who claims to be quoting Ella Collins), as corroboration. In addition, the Collins quote about “two lives” is taken completely out of context.

 

   About Francis Brown, he writes:

   Malcolm quickly ran down Shorty Jarvis, who complained to him about his wife and their money problems. . . His motley crew consisted of another African American, Francis E. “Sonny” Brown . . . Early in the evening of December 14, 1945, Malcolm and Brown robbed a Brookline home  . . . . Sonny would jimmy the home’s rear door, then open the front door for Malcolm and Shorty.  (p. 67)

   Publicists at Viking highlighted the claims about the alleged “Lennon Affair” as though it was something unique to Reinvention, but basically, Marable had swindled his publisher. Not only had he borrowed the claims about Lennon from Perry, but he also borrowed nearly everything else in Reinvention from seven earlier books, all of which he dismissed in the afterword.

MARABLE’S CONCLUSION:  There was no real Rudy; he was a figment of Malcolm X’s imagination.

CHRISTOPHER PHELPS

  The most recent academician to explore the alleged homosexual “relationships” of Malcolm as a young man also used Perry’s book as his primary source. Christopher Phelps, an American who teaches at the University of Nottingham, has published “The Sexuality of Malcolm X,” an error-filled exposition in which he highlights five alleged same-sex relationships of Malcolm as a young man, according to Perry.

   It should be noted that the people who seem most interested in Malcolm’s pre-adult sex education are primarily white males, some of whom are openly gay. A lead researcher on Reinvention, for instance, is noticeably effeminate.

   It would be difficult to find a black person (other than Marable) who cares about Malcolm’s sexual explorations as a youth. Indeed, it takes a twisted mind to begin with to go around asking someone three decades later about  their friend's sexual experiences in grade school. It borders on vicarious pedophilia.

  According to Phelps, the “hyper-masculinity” of Malcolm X and other black revolutionaries accounts for the “storm of criticism” aimed at Marable, but that’s miles from the truth. The criticism was due to Marable’s questionable research methodology on some of his outlandish claims. Moreover, I doubt that many African American men consider Malcolm X “hyper-masculine.” He was simply among those black men who do not tolerate being disrespected, and whose integrity cannot be bought, even in the face of death.

   In discussing Lennon, Phelps writes:

   Shortly thereafter [Perry’s book], powerful new corroboration of Malcolm’s youthful same-sexual activity appeared, particularly in regard to William Paul Lennon. In 1998, Rodnell Collins . . . published a book billed as a memoir . . . with Peter Bailey. . . .

   Most strikingly, the book introduced a letter Malcolm wrote from prison to Ella Collins on 10 September 146.”  (p. 671).

      Phelps didn't actually see the letter, nor did he receive a photocopy from Collins, and no one else has mentioned seeing the letter. It doesn’t appear among the letters in the appendix of Seventh Child, and as stated earlier, Bailey said that Collins had virtually no documentation when they wrote the book. Collins also told Phelps that his quotes from his mother were taken directly from audiotaped interviews; remember that Bailey told me there were no such audiotapes.

    For these reasons and others cited heretofore, Collins hardly qualifies as “powerful” corroboration.

    There are other serious shortcomings in the Phelps article, particularly his interpretation of the term “sexual perversion” cited in Malcolm X’s draft registration file.

   According to Phelps:

  The phrase “sexual perversion” almost surely indicates declaration of same-sex encounters in order to evade conscription.  (p. 675).

       It means nothing of the sort, of course, and any seasoned historian would know that. If you read the Autobiography, Malcolm explains that he deliberately set out to have himself disqualified for military service:

  

   The day I went down there, I costumed like an actor. With my wild zoot suit I wore the yellow knob-toe shoes, and I frizzled my hair up into a reddish bush of conk. . . Suddenly, I sprang up and peeped under both doors, the one I'd entered and another that probably was a closet. And then I bent and whispered fast in his ear. "Daddy-o, now you and me, we're from up North here, so don't you tell nobody. . . I want to get sent down South. Organize them nigger soldiers, you dig? Steal us some guns, and kill us crackers!"

   That psychiatrist's blue pencil dropped, and his professional manner fell off in all directions. He stared at me as if I were a snake's egg hatching, fumbling for his red pencil. I knew I had him. I was going back out past Miss First when he said, "That will be all." (p. 106-108)

      To the therapist, the way Malcolm behaved clearly indicated that he was deranged, and the way he looked and dressed indicated that he was a pimp. In that era, many states prosecuted pimps under “sexual perversion” laws.

   

   Given Malcolm’s paranoid behavior act, the psychiatrist classified him as psychologically unfit. For Phelps to argue that the board must have had some evidence that Malcolm was engaged in homosexual activity at the time is ludicrous and far beneath the standard one expects from a competent college professor.

   To his credit, Phelps corrects an error made by Perry, Collins, and Marable, who portrayed Lennon as a bachelor:

  

       Lennon was wealthy, for example, a fact Marable was unable to verify. His prosperity came from his marriage to a socialite, born Jeanne Marie Scott, daughter of a Wall Street banker who in 1915 left her the bulk of an estate valued at $584,225 ($13.7 million today) . . . . (p. 677)

   

  However, Phelps seems to suggest that the marriage was a sham, one designed to conceal Lennon’s alleged homosexuality. He quotes a newspaper article thusly:

        “The wedding of the couple came as a complete surprise to friends as no engagement was announced,” one news account observed.” (p. 677)

       

            

   Newspaper gossips often get things wrong, and only two of them suggested that the marriage came as a surprise. The Palm Beach Post, whose reporters were familiar with both the bride and groom, had already informed its readers of the marriage. 

    Moreover, the marriage would not have come as a surprise to anyone who knew Lennon and Jeanne-Marie Scott. They both worked at the American Embassy in France in early 1919. Lennon was a clerk at the embassy and Scott worked for her husband, Philander Lathrop Cable, who was the embassy's secretary. Below are passport photos of Lennon and Scott around that time.

                            

     

   Lennon left France for Cuba in March 1919 but later returned to France. In 1936, he and Jeanne-Marie traveled together to Italy.

    Compounding problems with his research, Phelps states that “their childless union appears to have dissolved in 1948, “shortly after Malcolm Little’s incarceration” (p. 677).

    Malcolm had been in jail for two years by 1948, so inferring that the assumed break-up of Lennon’s marriage was linked to his alleged relationship with Malcolm four years earlier is unacceptably shoddy scholarship.

   Phelps omits that Lennon and his wife had informally adopted a young Italian, Nino Pola, who lived with them and traveled with them to France shortly after their honeymoon.

  In fact, Pola spent so much time with the Lennons that reporters assumed the youth was his son. (Nino Pola’s family lived in Boston not far from Lennon.)

 

    Citing other alleged homosexual experiences which appear in Perry’s book on Malcolm X, Phelps concludes that while some may disagree with Perry’s claims, others “will find the convergence of evidence more than hearsay and sufficient to indicate that Malcolm Little did at the very least participate in the talcum-powder rubdowns of Paul Lennon.” (p. 679).

    Phelps admits that there are serious credibility problems with Perry’s sources, mainly because his interviews are undated and because Perry resorts to anonymous sources for some of his more scurrilous claims.

    What he overlooks, however, is that most of Perry's allegations about Malcolm’s homosexual experiences are entirely dubious. In addition to giving anonymous sources, Perry gives erroneous information about individuals he claims were homosexual. For example, Phelps, citing Perry, mentions the case of Delia Williams, a woman who allegedly had a transvestite tenant living in her home when Malcolm stayed there briefly. The transvestite’s name is given as Willie Mae (p. 667)

   In fact, Delia Williams had married the man in question, Willie Gray, in Tulsa, Oklahoma on August 21, 1922. Her husband was hardly her tenant.

    Nor is there is anything to substantiate Perry’s claim that Gray was a transvestite. The only thing true about the allegation is that Willie Gray and Deila Williams lived together in Flint.

    Phelps further cites as evidence of Malcolm’s homosexual activity Perry’s claim that while working at a mattress company in Lansing, Malcolm was involved with Jimmy Williams, a “240-pound homosexual.” In fact, James “Jimmy” Williams was a college-educated black man with a wife and two children, according to the 1940 census report for Lansing, Michigan.

     

  

      As for the claim by a former classmate who told Perry (and cited by Phelps) that Malcolm had a homosexual encounter in junior high school, it’s simply not believable, especially given Perry’s erroneous data about the two men who both happened to be named “Williams” and the anonymous sources for other alleged incidences.

     Another faulty assumption by Phelps is that “Lennon had a proclivity for hiring servants drawn from a rougher demographic” (p. 678). He only cites two instances: a man who robbed him in 1943, and Malcolm. He proffers nothing about the first individual’s background to indicate his social status, nor does he have any idea of how many people Lennon hired over a certain period.

    Like Marable and Perry, Phelps failed to determine whether it was even possible for Malcolm to have been employed by Lennon. Personally, based on this timeline, the parole process, and other factors, I doubt it. Here is Malcolm’s employment history for 1944.

MALCOLM LITTLE EMPLOYMENT HISTORY

July 44 -September 44: Worked as bartender and sometime entertainer at Abe Goldstein's Lobster Pond at 152 w. 42d Street in New York City.

October 44: Worked as packer for a Sears warehouse in Brookline, but walked off the job after 3 weeks. (in late October or early November)

November 29, 1944: Arrested for stealing Ella’s fur coat.

November 30: Pleads guilty and given a three-month suspended sentence.

December-January 1945: Returns to Lansing, Michigan.

March 1945: Arrested for grand larceny in Lansing on March 18, 1945.

  
   Malcolm told prison officials that he worked for Lennon sometime after October 1944 but before leaving for Lansing in either December or January 1945. This leaves at most about a month from the time he quit Sears to his arrest on November 29. We know that Malcolm did not work at any restaurants during that time, so the question is: how could he have met Lennon?

   Lennon had at least three people on his staff in 1940, according to the 1940 decennial census report. At least one of them was from a solidly middle-class family (the father being an accountant), and another was a young man who married in 1941, which negates the implication that Lennon seemed to be running a personal brothel of young males.

    Something all of these authors overlooked:

1.      Lennon lived right down the street from his parents, whose home was at 43 Arlington. (Lennon was at 5 Arlington and had another place on Cotuit).

2.      Male secretaries were virtually the only secretaries during Lennon’s youth. Lennon worked a secretary and clerk before and after World War One. Lennon’s father was once a secretary for the family business.

3.      Nino Pola lived at Lennon’s home from approximately 1936 until 1943, when he joined the war effort, and resumed his close relationship with Lennon after military service.

PHELPS’S CONCLUSION:  Rudy was “likely” a composite of Malcolm X and Frank Cooper. (p. 675, fn. 48).

MALCOLM JARVIS (1998):

  When it comes to the two Malcolms – Jarvis and Little – one thing should be remembered. One of them had an amazing memory and always spoke candidly; the other had an amazingly bad memory or was simply a pathological prevaricator.

    All of the books mentioning Malcolm X’s alleged relationship with Lennon have the same sources: Malcolm Jarvis and/or Rodnell Collins. Collins, who was born in 1945, clearly had no first-hand knowledge, and his claims about getting all of his data from Ella Collins is highly suspect.

   Since Collins’s credibility is questionable, let’s look at the trustworthiness of Jarvis. Jarvis makes a single reference to Francis “Sonny” Brown in his slim 1998 memoir, The Other Malcolm – “Shorty” Jarvis.

   

       By this time, we’d decided to form a small gang . . . We added two new members, John R. [Richmond] and Sonny B. [Brown]. Sonny B. had a yen for Cora[sic] M. [Marderosian], but nothing ever materialized. (p. 46).

    From the opening pages, it’s obvious that Jarvis harbored bitterness and jealousy toward Malcolm X:

    He [Jarvis] feels he has been caricatured both by Haley in The Autobiography of Malcolm X and by Spike Lee in his movie “Malcolm X.” In fact, by his own account, Shorty thought both portrayed him as an otiose “buffoon” . . . In other words, were it not for Shorty, there would not have been a Malcolm X, as the world came to know him. (p. 2)

   Following his opening condemnation of the Autobiography, Jarvis spends the first chapter “correcting” what he perceives to be errors in it.  Most of these are not corrections at all. Ironically, they are a misplaced attempt to elaborate on obvious topics, such as Malcolm’s philosophy while in the Nation of Islam.

   In his version, Jarvis claims that he had little use for white women.

   In the Autobiography, however, Malcolm portrays Jarvis as a very dark-skinned young man obsessed with white women:

 

   

       Sophia's being around was one of Shorty's greatest pleasures about my homecoming. I have said it before, I never in my life have seen a black man that desired white women as sincerely as Shorty did. Since I had known him, he had had several. He had never been able to keep a white woman any length of time, though, because he was too good to them, and, as I have said, any woman, white or black, seems to get bored with that.

     It happened that Shorty was between white women when one night Sophia brought to the house her seventeen-year-old sister. I never saw anything like the way that she and Shorty nearly jumped for each other. For him, she wasn't only a white girl, but a young white girl.  (p. 136-137).

   It doesn’t take a psychic to recognize that Malcolm’s autobiography, preceding the birth of the Black Power movement, must have hurt Shorty deeply, as it depicts a black man obsessed with white women. Nonetheless, it’s clear that Jarvis lied about not caring to date white women (p. 45).

   Shorty was also offended by Malcolm’s comment that he initially thought Jarvis was ten years older than he (p. 7). Shorty had a long scar across the middle of his forehead. He was a street urchin who had to work to support his family because his father was disabled in 1942. In addition, he was trying to take care of his own two children after his wife was institutionalized. The combination of a hard street life and being the breadwinner for two families had taken a toll on Shorty and made him seem much older than his chronological age.

    Malcolm X, as anyone who has ready his Autobiography can attest, had an amazing memory, one which squares with historical records. That’s why I believe Malcolm when he states that Jarvis claimed to be from Michigan:

  

    Shorty had dropped out of first-year high school in Lansing, lived awhile with an uncle and aunt in Detroit, and had spent the last six years living with his cousin in Roxbury. But when I mentioned the names of Lansing people and places, he remembered many, and pretty soon we sounded as if we had been raised in the same block.  (p. 45)

  

    And later:

      And I looked up Shorty’s mother [in Lansing]. I knew he’d be touched by my doing that. She was an old lady, and she was glad to hear from Shorty through me. (p. 80).

     In his memoir, Shorty retorts that "neither my mother nor any part of my family lived in any part of Michigan . . ." (p. 8)

   Clearly, someone isn’t telling the truth, and my finger’s pointing to Shorty. He fed Malcolm lies about his past and Malcolm believed him. A similar pattern of deception appears throughout Shorty’s prison record and in his memoir.

 

    In another chapter, Malcolm notes:

     Shorty thought it would be a great chance for me. He was worried sick himself about the draft call that he knew was soon to come. Like hundreds of the black ghetto's young men, he was taking some stuff that, it was said, would make your heart sound defective to the draft board's doctors. (p. 72)

 

     Jarvis disagreed: 

   I was not a draft dodger. I never took glycerin or any other drugs to affect the functioning of my heart in order to avoid the draft (p. 8)

    Finally, Malcolm recalls the first time that he had his hair conked:

     Shorty soon decided that my hair was finally long enough to be conked. He had promised to school me in how to beat the barbershops . . . by making up congolene, and then conking ourselves. . . . I took the little list of ingredients he had printed out for me . . . The congolene just felt warm when Shorty started combing it in. But then my head caught fire. I gritted my teeth and tried to pull the sides of the kitchen table together. The comb felt as if it was raking my skin off.

     My eyes watered, my nose was running. I couldn't stand it any longer; I bolted to the washbasin. I was cursing Shorty with every name I could think of when he got the spray going and started soap-lathering my head. (p. 53-54)

     If you are at all familiar with this hair-straightening process, you know there is no way in hell that Malcolm would have forgotten who gave him his first conk. It’s typically such a grueling, painful, and frightening undertaking that you never forget it. A key concern is that the lye will drip into your eyes and blind you, or that it will burn your scalp so badly that you will be permanently scarred. The first time remains as vivid to you as your first real love, the year you graduated college, or the any other momentous event in your life because that’s what it was.

    Maybe Jarvis is joking. He states that he never conked “Malcolm X’s hair,” which is true in the most literal sense (p. 8). He obviously conked Malcolm Little’s hair. That he would deny doing so indicates that he’s lying about more serious matters.

    Which brings us to the final and main point: Whom should we believe about Rudy: Malcolm X or Jarvis?

    Remember Malcolm X’s description of Rudy, who is first identified as Francis E. Brown in Perry’s book?  According to Malcolm, Rudy was born in Boston to an Italian mother and African American father.

    Contrary to Marable’s claim in Reinvention, Rudy was not a figment of Malcolm’s imagination.
    Born on August 28, 1922 in Boston, Francis Eric Brown was the son of Elizabeth Cataldo, born in Maine in 1891 to Italian immigrants. She was given up for adoption at age four after her father, Raffaele Cataldo, stabbed two men in Boston in June 1895, killing one of them.

  

   She married Edward Walter Brown, an African American born in the District of Columbia in 1882. By 1940, the couple had nearly a dozen children and were in dire economic straits. As a result, by the time the family moved to 17 Lansing Street, close to where both Malcolm Jarvis and Ella Collins lived, Francis “Sonny” Brown was in trouble with the law.

  1. Malcolm Little lived with Ella Little Collins on Dale Street.

  2. Francis "Sonny" Brown (aka Rudy) lived on Lansing Street.

  3. Francis "Frank" Cooper lived on Bower Street.

  4. Malcolm Jarvis lived on Humbolt (and later Waumbeck).

  5. John Richmond lived on Humbolt.

  BLUE BOX:  The poolroom where Jarvis and Malcolm first met. 

     As their prison records indicate, Brown and Jarvis attended Lewis Intermediate School, where they became fast friends. Both did poorly academically and both quickly drifted into delinquency.

   Brown was first arrested for larceny in 1934 and Jarvis for the same offense in 1936.

   In 1938, Jarvis and Brown were arrested for breaking and entering after Brown used his jimmying skills to open a door. Jarvis snitched and got probation. Brown went a juvenile detention center.

   After he was released a few months later, Brown, Jarvis and three others, committed armed robbery. Once again, Jarvis snitched and was freed. Brown was locked up and could not afford bail.

  After serving a month in jail while awaiting trial, Brown was given five years to an indefinite term. He was only sixteen years old. Brown’s prison file describes him as a short, "light-brown Negro," which is exactly how Malcolm X described him.

 In terms of Paul Lennon, prison officials made a significant observation about Brown, to wit:

    Note that one of the people Brown wrote to during his year served in prison was Malcolm Jarvis. When interviewed by prison officials about Brown, Jarvis denied being his friend. However, they knew he was lying since the two had attended the same school, lived in the same neighborhood, and committed a series of crimes together over an seven-year period.

     Observe further that none of the academics to date have mentioned three crucial elements about the burglary ring: (1) Lennon’s home was one of the first to be robbed; (2)  they mainly targeted homes about which one of the crew members had personal  knowledge; (3) Brown had jimmied the locks during previous burglaries with Jarvis.

From the Autobiography:

    “We pulled our first job that night – the place of the old man who hired Rudy to sprinkle him with talcum powder. A cleaner job could not have been asked for. Everything went like clockwork. . . . The old man later told Rudy how a small army of detectives had been there – and they decided that the job had the earmarks of some gang which had been operating around Boston for about a year." (p. 144)

     Despite a claim by Perry and Marable that Malcolm X’s gang was incompetent, note that it netted over $10,000 from four burglaries committed over a very short span of time.

   

   Malcolm’s statement that Lennon personally called Brown to tell him police were looking for him would account for why Brown was the only team member who was never captured. It also strengthens Malcolm’s assertion that Brown was involved with Lennon.

   In his article, Phelps mentions a subsequent robbery at Lennon’s home.

   “In 1955, Lennon was rescued by police who found him gagged and tied in bed at his Sandwich home in the middle of the day, with two naked male domestic employees bound and lying on the floor in the same room.” (p. 678)

   But Phelps somehow overlooked an article about the robbery of Malcolm Jarvis two years earlier. Jarvis, who returned to Boston after his release on parole in June 1951, picked up two men in Danvers (about 25 miles from his home) in October 1953. He bought them coffee and cigarettes and drove them to Kittery, Maine, which is seventy miles from Boston. The two men, one of whom was wearing a suit, tied up Jarvis and left him in the woods near the York-Kittery line.

    The article fails as journalism. It doesn’t reveal why Jarvis was in the area; why he would drive two strangers seventy miles from his home; what weapon, if any, was used to rob him; who found him in the woods.

    Given the nature of parole hearings, where the more prominent people you know, the better your chances of getting released, Malcolm would have wanted to contact Lennon in an attempt to blackmail him into supporting his parole application. It's as simple as that.

    It’s the only theory which makes sense, as it’s clear that he could not have met Lennon through employment in late 1944. Scholars took a footnote from Malcolm’s prison record, combined it with lies from a jealous colleague, and created a homosexual affair myth, relegating Francis Brown, a very real and very tragic young man, into a figment of Malcolm’s imagination.

    The myth, as I have shown, is of their own making. A lie snowballed into a “truth” because academicians repeated a lie and never questioned the veracity of the original source.

     If Perry had not written such a bigoted, bizarre biography, one might excuse him for believing Malcolm Jarvis’s claims about Malcolm X and Lennon.

    As for Marable and Phelps, they had absolutely no justification for failing to obtain the prison file of Francis E. “Sonny” Brown. It raises serious questions about their scholastic integrity. Marable had a gaggle of graduate students working with him, yet it never occurred to any of them to request Brown’s prison record. That is evidence of either duplicity or gross incompetence, and they owe Malcolm X's daughters an apology.

© 2017. Adapted from the revised edition of The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X.

SOURCE NOTES: (HC=hardcover edition; PB=paperback)


Collins, Rodnell, with A. Peter Bailey. Seventh Child: A Family Memoir of Malcolm X. (New York: Birch Press, 1998). HC
DeCaro, Louis A. On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X. (NewYork: New York University Press, 1996). HC
Malcolm X, with Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, 1965). HC
Marable, Manning. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2011). HC
Perry, Bruce. Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America. (New York: Station Hill Press, 1991). PB
Phelps, Christopher. "The Sexuality of Malcolm X," Journal of American Studies, 51, no. 3 (2017), 659-690.