Pillar of Fire Read online

  William Tribble, who was driving home from a moonlighting job as a doorman at the nearby Club 54, double-parked near the police cruiser and jumped from his car, alarmed by the sights of a street brawl. Kensic was down, trying to ward off attackers who darted in to hit him before he could get up or draw his gun. When they ignored shouts to leave the officers alone, Tribble ran behind his own car, unlocked the trunk, fumbled for his special deputy’s .38, pulled out an old box of cartridges, loaded the gun there in the middle of Broadway, then ran around near the curb behind the Buick and fired a warning shot into the air. Its loud crack silenced the frenzy for an instant before the Muslims, their belligerence loosed by a sense of victory over the police, turned upon the none-too-confident Negro who had once aspired to be a policeman. When Tribble’s gun misfired on a second warning shot, they inched toward him as he backed up, his gun trembling visibly.

  This became a moment of regret for Tomlinson, who found himself freed on the sidewalk behind the Muslims while their attention was riveted upon Tribble in the street. Training told Tomlinson to stand clear, draw his gun, freeze everyone, and then radio for help, but he pulled out his sap instead and lunged toward the nearest Muslims from behind, aiming to get even for having failed to land a single blow. Just then, however, Tribble fired into the crowd, hitting Clarence Jingles in the side, and Tomlinson joined his adversaries scattering in headlong dives away from the bullet. Monroe X Jones landed on the pavement close to Kensic, who was so dazed that Jones was able to pull Kensic’s gun from its holster. Before Tomlinson could jump up with his gun, Jones shot him—the bullet tearing a path from the back of Tomlinson’s left shoulder, down his arm, and out through his elbow. Then Jones danced along the curb to face Tribble, and in a wild panic they emptied their guns at each other from a range of some ten feet. When the terrible noise ceased, each man was amazed to find himself still standing. Jones, discovering blood from a gunshot wound in his shoulder, threw Kensic’s gun down a sewer and ran blindly through the streets until he stopped exhausted at a phone booth to call his mother for help.

  When Officer Paul Kuykendall passed by just after Tribble’s frantic departure, the excited looks on the faces of the gathering crowd made him snap into a U-turn and park his Ford Falcon station wagon across from Tomlinson’s cruiser, a block south of the temple. A fifteen-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD)—blue-eyed, burly, and so light-skinned that many of his colleagues did not know he was a Negro—Kuykendall was famous among the Negro officers as the first nonwhite ever to win assignment “on motors,” as cruiser patrol was called, back in the early 1950s. For a long time he had patrolled alone, or paired with one of his Negro successors, as the department’s policy against interracial partnerships had been reversed only the previous year, in 1961. To protect his ambiguous identity, or escape from it, Kuykendall carried himself as a loner and for a number of years had managed to avoid assignments most likely to make race a blatant issue in daily police work.

  Extraordinary events began to conspire against camouflage when the off-duty Kuykendall leaped from his car in civilian clothes, transfixed by the sight of a bloodied police officer weaving unsteadily in the middle of Broadway surrounded by angry Muslims. This was Kensic, whose first shocked thought after the gunfire had been to tackle anyone who might have taken his revolver. Now in a helpless rage, like a baited bear, Kensic went down again. The assailants—among them an athletic teenager named Troy X Augustine—paid no attention to Kuykendall’s shouts to desist until he drew his own revolver and fired into the air. The shot refocused all their adrenaline instantly on Kuykendall, who backed them down with the gun until he could get close enough to Kensic to hear that his gun was lost and his partner shot over on the sidewalk. A Negro woman was kneeling there, comforting Tomlinson and wailing about why on earth did anyone shoot a policeman. Kuykendall kept his gun and one eye on the Muslims, who were beginning to melt away, as he backed to the driver’s door of Tomlinson’s cruiser, reached in for the radio, and sent out the department’s most urgent message: officer in trouble.

  A moaning Roosevelt Walker was among the first of the fleeing Muslims to reach the temple. He limped through the closer of two entrances and collapsed at the foot of the stairs leading up to private offices above the assembly hall. His cries for help brought Minister John X Morris and other officials hurtling down to find their escort lieutenant bleeding profusely, yelling, “I’m shot!” A stray bullet from the Tribble-Jones exchange had pierced his crotch. Morris shouted for Secretary Ronald Stokes to call an ambulance. Some Muslims began to carry Walker upstairs for comfort; others thought they should take him to the hospital themselves. Walker became stymied cargo halfway up a jammed stairway, with some trying to take him up, others down, and still others bursting in with news from the fight.

  A horn blast and loud shouts for Minister John X Morris came from a carload of Muslims who pulled up outside yelling that they had Brother Clarence inside with them, shot, and what should they do? Morris signaled from the window that they should wait, but chaos overtook him before he could find out about the ambulance. The car lurched off, carrying a hysterical debate about whether they should speed home, to the hospital, or back to the temple to await definitive orders from Minister Morris. With the sounds of police sirens rising, Morris pushed his way outside and up the sidewalk to the main entrance—where Mabel Zeno was still waiting for her husband—herding everyone he could into the assembly hall.

  Officers Donald Weese and Richard Anderson, in the first cruiser that roared up to the fight scene a block south of the mosque, scarcely slowed down as they caught sight of the two downed uniforms and Kuykendall in the street windmilling them with one arm as he pointed with the other toward the men in Muslim dress who were running for the temple. Some of these were stragglers from the fight; others, like Ronald Stokes, who was hoisting Roosevelt Walker’s feet, were spilling out of the office entrance. Anderson yelled for Weese to let him jump out of the cruiser in foot pursuit. This small delay allowed Officers Robert Williams and Robert Reynolds to barrel around them in the second crusier to a screeching, skewed halt north of the temple. Just before then, from the opposite direction, Charles X Zeno pulled up looking for his wife. A small bit of the emergency registered quickly from the faces and sirens, whereupon Zeno told his three sons to wait in the car while he ran to get their mother before there was trouble.

  Overtaking several Muslims, Officer Anderson stopped one with his nightstick on the landing at the main entrance and dragged him back down into the sidewalk, yelling for everyone to freeze. Observing this as he converged from the other cruiser, Officer Williams drew his gun and ran past them through one of the big double doors. Behind him, Officer Reynolds started to object that—quite apart from any scruples about search warrants, probable cause, or religious sanctuary—smart tactics called for sealing off the building until help arrived, but by then it was too late, and, on an instinctive flash that even if Williams was an impulsive six-month rookie, he was still his partner, Reynolds lowered his shoulder to follow. He slammed into Charles Zeno with enough momentum to carry both of them through the hallway at an angle into the men’s coatroom on the right, grappling in mutual shock, swinging each other by the lapels for leverage while they bounced off walls and crashed into the water cooler, whose glass jug shattered on the floor as the two men landed in a heap. Several other Muslims joined on Zeno’s side until they heard the loud voice of Minister Morris saying to leave the officer alone and turned to see Officer Williams holding his gun at Morris’s temple. Reynolds freed himself and retrieved his own gun from the floor. Then, overtaken by rage and release, he drove his fist into Zeno’s jaw about the time the first shots rang out from the sidewalk.

  Officer Weese took up a position at the curb directly in front of the entrance with his gun pointed and his off hand resting at the knee, yelling freeze. From the next of the cruisers now piling rapidly in, Officer Lee Logan came up on the right with his weapons out. The Muslims com
pressed back upon Officer Anderson, fighting and resisting him as he swung his nightstick to drive them against the exterior wall. One or two of them cried out, “Why? Why?” Then nearly all of them took up the rhythmic Arabic chant “Allab-u akbar! Allab-u akbar!” (“God is great! God is great!”), which further unnerved the officers as something unintelligible and voodooish, much as the sudden onslaught of the police undid some of the Muslims, especially William X Rogers, who had carried a morbid fear of guns since being wounded four times in Korea. When Rogers made a dash for the entrance, Weese shot him through the spine.

  Following a tiny aftershock of peace came the blur of violence. The younger brother of William Rogers pummeled Officer Logan, who finally threw him a few feet away and opened repeated fire along with Weese, hitting Robert X Rogers four times. As Arthur Coleman dived away from the shots, one of the bullets went through his hip and lodged at the base of his penis. Officer Anderson came out of the crowd to the left in the grip of Ronald Stokes, who was clinging to him as a shield. When Anderson broke free to leave his adversary alone in an open space, Stokes raised both hands toward Weese, who shot him through the heart from about eight feet, then started to reload.

  Coleman attracted notice by struggling to stand. Officer Logan tried to cuff him back to submission with the butt handle of his gun, but Coleman seized his wrist and the two men came face-to-face. Logan kneed him in the groin, and even in terror the officer felt sickened by the unexpected warmth of the blood from Coleman’s wound. With the gun deadlocked between them, Logan managed to fire a shot into the left side of Coleman’s chest less than an inch above the lung. Still, Coleman hung on—his hands wrapped tightly around Logan’s, his finger twisted over Logan’s on the trigger, each man desperate to push the barrel away.

  Just then Officer Kuykendall came running up from the south to put his revolver at Coleman’s head. “Let go of the gun!” he ordered, and Coleman yelled, “Are you crazy? He shot me twice!” When Kuykendall threatened to blow his brains out, Coleman told him to go ahead. Then came a frozen moment in front of paralyzed onlookers—three men’s heads close together, a black man and a uniformed white officer in a death struggle joined by a man of hidden ties to each side, with Logan’s gun trembling back and forth under pressure in their midst. As Coleman slowly wrenched the muzzle around toward Logan, Kuykendall had to decide whether to take one life instantly or risk another by delay. He put away his gun, pulled out his sap, and slammed it again and again to the skull until Coleman finally lost his grip on Logan’s gun and slumped to the pavement.

  In a skittering aftermath outside, the Long Beach minister, Randolph X Sidle, darted out to smash the water jug from the women’s coatroom against the head of Officer Anderson, then melted quickly back among the captives inside. A few moments later—so long after it was over that the suicidal dash seemed to take place in slow motion—Fred X Jingles ran full speed up Broadway from the car that had circled the block indecisively with his wounded brother, screaming at the police, and finally leaped high on Officer Logan’s back as though to ride him. Four or five officers from the scores now gathered with shotguns and other heavy weaponry beat Jingles to the ground and handcuffed him, as they also handcuffed the four shot Muslims lying facedown nearby. Violence lasted longer in the men’s coatroom, where there was vomiting from shame or fear, and where some of the victorious officers punished more than a dozen Muslims spread-eagled against the wall. They took turns searching them, screaming at and beating them, kicking them between the legs from behind, and finally, ripping each of their suit jackets from coattail to the neck and each of their trousers from the rear belt line forward through the crotch to the zipper. An episode that had begun over a used suit for Fred X Jingles ended half an hour and much chaotic hatred later with many shredded, torn ones. Mabel Zeno, who had slipped out the back of the mosque with Delores Stokes and was straining against the police lines to recover her sons—still parked in the Ford near all the shooting—saw her husband, Charles, marched out to police wagons in a line of prisoners, dragging his pants at his feet.

  A DAY LATER at Central Receiving Hospital, Officer Kensic was startled to receive a visit from LAPD Chief William Parker. Arthur X Coleman, on being bailed out of General Hospital, was no less surprised to find himself facing the pocket camera of the Nation of Islam’s national minister, Malcolm X, who had flown in from New York. The opposing leaders swiftly took the public stage from the combatants themselves. Calling Friday night’s violence “the most brutal conflict I’ve seen” in twenty-five years as a Los Angeles policeman, the last twelve as chief, Parker portrayed his men as victims of a savage attack from a group he described as a “hate organization which is dedicated to the destruction of the Caucasian race.” Malcolm X, for his part, drew a large crowd to the Statler-Hilton Hotel on the day before the funeral of Ronald Stokes, and he shocked many of the curious reporters with the audacity of his opening words: “Seven innocent, unarmed black men were shot down in cold blood….” He described Chief Parker as a man “intoxicated with power and with his own ego,” who had transmitted an obsessive fear of the Muslims to his officers. “The same feelings he harbors towards the Muslims extend to the entire Negro community and probably to the Mexican-Americans as well,” said Malcolm, who accused the “white press” of acting as tools of Chief Parker to “suppress the facts” through one-sided stories such as appeared in Los Angeles: “Muslims Shoot, Beat Police in Wild Gunfight.”

  For Earl Broady, the Malcolm X who appeared unannounced at his office seemed quite different from the daredevil Black Muslim in the news. He spoke with evenhanded precision to reconstruct the chaos and asked for Broady’s representation in the criminal trials he felt were sure to come, calculating that the state must prosecute the Muslims in order to ward off civil damage suits. Broady turned Malcolm away more than once, saying he was too busy and too close to Chief Parker. As a policeman himself from 1929 to 1946, before entering law, Broady saw Parker as a reform autocrat in the style of J. Edgar Hoover and gave him credit for modest improvements over the frontier corruptions of the old Raymond Chandlerera LAPD. Broady’s wife, a devout Methodist, objected vehemently to the case on the grounds that the Muslims were openly anti-Christian, unlike the worst of his ordinary criminal clients, and Broady himself resented the Nation of Islam, drawn largely from stereotypical lowlifes, as an embarrassment to the hard-earned respectability of middle-class Negroes. The Broadys recently had acquired an imposing white colonnade home in Beverly Hills, where Malcolm X visited when he could not find Broady at the office—calling day after day, always alone with a briefcase, playing on Broady’s personal knowledge of the harsh, segregated inner world of the LAPD precincts. His patient appeals, plus the largest retainer offer in Broady’s career, finally induced the lawyer to take the case.

  Malcolm X helped work a similar transformation among the entire nonwhite population of Los Angeles. As an opening wedge, he brought with him from New York a telegram of support from National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Executive Director Roy Wilkins calling for an investigation of possible police brutality in the Stokes case. Based upon the NAACP’s long record of complaints against Parker’s department, Wilkins doubted the police version that unarmed Muslims had been uniformly the aggressors against armed officers. “From our knowledge, the Muslims are not brawlers,” he said. At first, Wilkins and NAACP leaders in Los Angeles tried to distance themselves from the stigma of the Muslims, saying that the NAACP on principle would defend even the segregationist White Citizens Council against excessive police force, but Malcolm and the city fathers worked from opposite ends to deny the established Negro leaders their safe ground. At a Board of Supervisors leadership meeting on May 8, Negro leaders supported Chief Parker’s call for a grand jury campaign to wipe out the Muslims, until large numbers of nonleaders who had jammed into the room hooted them down, yelling that it was the police, not the Muslims, who needed investigation. One supervisor announced that he had not felt such rac
ial tension since the “zoot-suit riots” of 1944-45. Three days later, twenty-five Negro ministers obtained an emergency audience with Chief Parker, but they had scarcely begun their pitch for a cooperative effort to eliminate the Muslims and police brutality when Parker stalked out, declaring that he refused to be lectured by anyone who questioned the integrity of his department.

  As word spread of this rebuff, the ministers felt compelled to call a mass meeting to steady their course. They secured one of the most prestigious pulpits in the city—that of Rev. J. Raymond Henderson, the old friend and rival of Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr., on Atlanta’s Auburn Avenue back in the 1930s, who had migrated to California to build one of the largest congregations in the West—and on Sunday evening, May 13, an overflow crowd of three thousand packed Second Baptist Church. As a non-Christian, Malcolm X was not permitted on the podium, of course, and there was heated discussion among the deacons about whether to admit him at all, but once he was there seated next to the wheelchair of William X Rogers, who was permanently paralyzed from the gunshot wound through his back, and once he rose and asked to speak from the floor after the Pledge of Allegiance and several fervent prayers for God’s justice, there was no polite alternative but to allow the exotic Muslim to hold forth from the sanctuary of the Negro Baptists. He spoke for the better part of an hour. A Negro newspaper described him far down in its story as “a brilliant speaker and a studied orator, capable of swaying any audience in the typical manner displayed by Adolf Hitler….” One of Chief Parker’s own undercover agents reported that when Reverend Henderson interrupted to chastise Malcolm X for inflammatory raw speech about police conduct, members of Second Baptist led the booing of their own pastor and demanded that Malcolm continue.