On April 27th, 1962, Los Angeles police fatally shot Nation of Islam member Ronald Stokes. Officers mistook him and a group of Muslims removing clothes from a car outside a Los Angeles mosque for criminals. The conflict quickly escalated to a police raid inside the mosque, leaving a total of seven Muslims shot, one killed, and one paralyzed from a bullet wound to the back.
Stokes’s death compelled Malcolm to engage in new dimensions of the black freedom struggle. He discovered a new center of political gravity by returning to the arena that had launched him: America’s racially scarred criminal justice system. Decades before protests against mass incarceration galvanized the black freedom struggle, Malcolm indicted the entire justice system as racist.
His crusade against police brutality and violence against black folk in urban cities paralleled King’s mobilization of southern blacks in Montgomery and Albany. Malcolm transformed Stokes’s death into a political indictment against American democracy, linking systemic police violence in black Los Angeles to structural inequalities that, he argued, gripped every facet of American society.
The melee in Los Angeles shook Malcolm, who had founded the temple five years earlier and knew Stokes personally. The violence demonstrated the tension between the Nation of Islam and law enforcement, something Malcolm would stress in his public account of the events. The black presence in Los Angeles, like in other major cities, had grown exponentially following the Second World War as southern migrants sought relief from Jim Crow and found new economic opportunities.
By the early 1960s, African Americans in Los Angeles and other major cities were experiencing discrimination in housing, public schools, and employment that upended the narratives that claimed Jim Crow as a peculiar problem of the South.
Northern-style racial segregation could be seen in poverty-filled urban ghettos and in the tense relationship between law enforcement and those communities. If segregated lunch counters, bus and train stations, and water fountains served as the most glaring symbols of racial discrimination in the South, the police served as the most visible declaration of racial injustice in big cities.
Malcolm, as the Nation of Islam’s national representative, [launched] a nationwide speaking tour that turned Ronald Stokes into a martyr of the larger civil rights struggle.
Malcolm exploded upon hearing news of Stokes’s death. From New York, he gathered Fruit of Islam soldiers and prepared them for a retaliation mission in Los Angeles. Elijah Muhammad restrained him. “Brother, you don’t go to war over provocation,” he warned, sensing that any plans for retribution might bring down the full weight of law enforcement upon the Nation.
Malcolm listened but chafed at the Messenger’s orders and his interpretation of the events leading to Stokes’s death. “Every one of those Muslims should have died before they allowed an aggressor to come into their mosque,” the Messenger concluded. The decision stunned Malcolm and left him embarrassed by the group’s inability to defend itself.
Muhammad’s lack of action pushed Malcolm, as the Nation of Islam’s national representative, to launch a nationwide speaking tour that turned Ronald Stokes into a martyr of the larger civil rights struggle. Malcolm immediately flew to Los Angeles from New York, where he conducted a press conference describing the Friday-night melee between a group of devout Muslim worshippers, fresh from an evening service, and gun-toting police officers as an act of racist violence.