“COINTELPRO specialists intervened to weaken some racial forces to which the Bureau itself assigned no pretext of Communist influence. To ‘widen the rift between [Elijah] Muhammad and [Malcolm X] Little and possibly result in Little’s expulsion from the NOI [Nation of Islam],’ FBI headquarters drafted an anonymous news story about ‘war within the ranks of the Muslims’ empire,’ based on the infighting gleaned from wiretaps. In February, DeLoach and his assistants fed directly into the Chicago Defender, the nation’s largest Negro newspaper, a provocative text that described Malcolm’s suspension after his Kennedy assassination statement as a public cover for a factional battle in which Malcolm, attacked by his colleagues as a ‘religious fanatic and a hard-to-control true revolutionary,’ countercharged that luxury had corrupted the Muhammad family from the Nation’s strict moral code. The story was close enough to the truth to give FBI authors the satisfaction of learning by wiretap that Elijah Muhammad’s advisers considered it a leak by Malcolm X. ‘All the papers have it,’ they fumed.” Taylor Branch “Pillar of Fire: America in the King years 1963-65” Page 243
Posted on: Mon, 28 Jul 2014 10:03:54 +0000
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