Eyes on the Prize II; Interview with Mike Wallace

I'll try to incorporate the answer, and I'll try it to understand the other edges, give me a statement. I'll stand a little. Sure. And you can talk to me. I'll go to the camera, then. Gotcha. Okay. Okay. Interview with Mike Wallace, New York City. Go see him, A. Okay. Tell me, first of all, how that 1959 documentary came about. Lou Lomax, a reporter I'd never heard of. Came to my office, told me about something called the Black Muslims. I'd never heard of them. We went next door to Saudi's restaurant to have lunch, and he told me at great length about an organization called the Black Muslims. He didn't tell me how many people they were or how strongly they were. What he suggested to me was that they were not a particularly well-known organization. They had never been written about in the White Press that there was very little can of them in the White community.

Would we be interested in doing a broadcast, a documentary about them? I suggested that, yeah, we might, let's learn more about them. One of the conditions of our doing the broadcast, he said, was, they will not talk to a White reporter. Therefore, who's going to be the reporter? It was obvious, Lou Lomax wanted the job. Lou Lomax had good contacts with the Muslims, with Malcolm X, with Elijah Muhammad, and people around them. So Ted Yates, who was the producer with whom I worked, and I finally made a deal for Lomax to go to work on that documentary for us. The reporter on that documentary was Lou Lomax. The producer was Ted Yates. I was the narrator, but I never met Elijah Muhammad at that time. As a matter of fact, I've never, never did meet Elijah Muhammad, and did not meet Malcolm X at that time. All that I did was voice over anchor the work done by Lomax and camera crew.

And after that, and we called it the hate that hate produced, and after that went on the air, we put it on five minutes a night on local news, and it attracted some attention we decided to make an hour of it. And following that, there were various people from the Black community who participated in a forum about it. I'd like to ask you how the title came about. I don't remember. No, it's just one of what a man did. The meaning of the hate that hate produced was there is hatred, hatred, suspicion, whatever, on both sides. And indeed, the Muslims hated the whites, and they acknowledged that they did. Malcolm was very eloquent about that. Elijah Muhammad was very eloquent about it. They were racist. They were separatists. They wanted to separate the blacks from the whites in this country. If they felt that hatred, it was in reaction to the hatred that they felt had been directed against them.

In your opening remarks, you referred to the Muslims being preachers of hate while sober-minded Negroes stood idly by. I was wondering who some of those sober-minded Negroes were. Very of the entire Black leadership. Take a look at the Black leadership back then. I'm Roy Wilkins, for instance, a friend of mine, a man for whom I had great respect. The word of the Black Muslims simply had not filtered out to the white community, to the white journalistic community, to the white community in general. When I first heard about the Muslims, I didn't know what Lou Lomax was telling me about. And when I say, stood idly by, we never heard a word from any of the Black leadership at that time, that there was this group called Black Muslims. What about Malcolm X? You've been talking about the Muslims. Tell me a little bit about your Christian Christian Malcolm X in that program. My impression of Malcolm X on that first program was that he was a demagogue racist.

What some people think of Louis Farrakhan today is what I felt about Malcolm X when I first saw on film, not in person, what he had said about whites. That's what I felt about him. And only later did I meet him and begin to talk to him and become a friend of Malcolm's. As he began to understand, I think, quite better, as he began to... I think that Malcolm, here can I try to say, maybe I should wait and listen to him. Let's just stop down here for a moment. Let's just continue this subject. Oh, just sort of pick another question.

Okay. Very well, Max, of course, was Black. When you were putting the program together, did that lead to any differences of opinion? No, no. Lomax knew the subject. We didn't. We were being introduced to the subject. Ted Jates, who is now dead, killed on the first day of the Sixth Day War, was a fine producer. I was editor, reporter. And we had talked to Lomax enough, and he had talked enough to the principles, Elijah, Malcolm and others, for us to believe what he delivered to us. That's an interesting point of view, though. You were actually doing the show for a white audience, and to actually educate in the two of us. Not necessarily to a white audience. We were doing it for the New York audience, which is hardly a white audience. The hate that hate produced for a young outfit, an outfit with not much money.

We had $3,000 budget for this documentary, one hour. For this young outfit, that was a kind of a maverick outfit. Newsmaker Productions working on Channel 13, which was then a commercial outfit. It hadn't turned educational yet. For us to get this kind of a story was really quite extraordinary. I doubt maybe that some of the so-called establishment television stations at the time would have done this story. Okay, what sort of response did the show get? John Crosby was the nation's television critic at the time. He was astonished, wrote about it, wrote about it glowingly, and suggested that other people should pay attention to it, as a result of which, because up to that time there hadn't been a word about the black Muslims in any white publication.

Following that, US News, New York Times, Times Newsweek, others followed up the free press out in Detroit. Actually, it was the first time that the black Muslims came to the attention of white America. So was there any angry response? There was angry response following the hour that we put on on Channel 13 that night of the hate that hate produced. We had a group of Jackie Robinson, Roy Wilkins, Gardner Taylor, Arnold Forster from the Anti-Defamation League and a woman, black woman, and a hedgeman. A couple of them, especially Roy Wilkins, Jackie Robinson to some degree, suggested that we had overstated about the black Muslims. That they weren't as important as we had made them by devoting this hour to the subject. It took white journalism only a couple of three months to do much more than we had done very shortly thereafter.

And some of the people in the panel wrote eventually to the New York Times which had, in effect, downgraded the hate that hate produced. Some of the people who took part in that panel wrote to the Times, chiding them for having not paid enough attention and taken the broadcast seriously enough. How many do you know the role we're playing about? During that time there was a lot of attention paid to the civil rights movement in the South, a lot of attention paid to Martin Luther King. Was there a kind of a media position with respect to Malcolm and the nation of Islam because it didn't seem like they got quite as much? The white press generally did not know who Malcolm was. They did not know who Elijah Muhammad was. They simply didn't have any kind of the black Muslim movement. So they weren't getting any attention.

We began to get them attention. Want me to take that again? You'll let me know when. White journalism at that time didn't know who Malcolm was, didn't know who Elijah Muhammad was, had no kind of the black Muslim. So there was no attention being paid at that time. It took some time following that. For major publications, white publications, if you will, in New York Times, the US News, Detroit Free Press to come forth and begin to pay attention to put reporters on it and find out that the black Muslims were indeed a substantial group and a group that had to be dealt with. Okay, I would certainly like to jump forward a little bit in time to make more of 30 people. Apparently that's a time point.

I thought it sounded like very little. Is this alright? The word we're jumping time. Tell me about when Malcolm came in and talked to you. Was the date of that 1965? I think it was 64. 64? 64. After Malcolm went to Mecca, and I heard from him a couple of times, postcards was all. But he had some confidence in me, felt that I was a friend, and as he began to learn, and he felt that certain white reporters were trustworthy. And he used to write to me occasionally. After Malcolm came back from Mecca, I wanted to talk to him. I was at CBS by then. And he came into my office and said to me, in effect, as a matter of fact, I'm trying to say what I make up what I don't remember.

Malcolm came to my office at CBS and suggested that he was in danger. I said, what are you talking about? They are out to get me. Who? The Black Muslims. Why? Now tell you why, he said. And then he began to tell me a tale about Elijah Muhammad as a lecture. He fathered children by young women whom he had taken as secretaries from out of town. Not one, not two, but several women. I found that very difficult to believe. He said, Mike, I will prove it to you. I will get on the phone with some of the people who are now living in Los Angeles. And I'll let you listen. And indeed, that's what happened. He called a couple of women on the West Coast. We have a transcript of that conversation. Because also listening was my secretary, a young Southern woman who was scared to death by what she heard.

But it was quite apparent from that phone conversation that indeed the allegations by Malcolm were correct that Elijah Muhammad had fathered children by a group of young women who had been working as his secretaries. He felt that because of that, and I suggested to a Malcolm, you start talking about this publicly, you're going to get killed. And he said, in effect, he knew there was this danger. But he was going to go ahead with it. What was the date of his death? February 21st, 65. It was only very short time later. But he was gunned down here in New York City. Besides some of these incidents, you seem to have had some sort of personal relationship with him. Tell me your impression of Malcolm I. Malcolm was an avoid of discovery, discovery of himself, discovery of the white man.

He was not tied to an understanding of the white man, not tied by the black Muslims, willing to understand that he was wrong about some whites. I liked Malcolm, I liked his strength, I liked his humor, I liked his openness. And I admired, I must say, his determination, his ambition to be a black leader. He was in search of a group. He wanted to be a leader. He knew that there was Roy Wilkins on the NAACP. He knew there was Martin Luther King. He knew there were various other black leaders. And he was trying to find his place in that constellation. And his OAU was his effort, as I understood it, to try to do that. You mentioned you liked his humor, can you give me an example? I can't.

When you met him after you returned from Mecca, did he seem like a changed man to you in any way? When he returned from Mecca, he did indeed seem like a changed man. It's as though he had made an extraordinary discovery of himself and of white people in general. It's as though that voyage, not just to Mecca, but to the Middle East, and rubbing up against white reporters and rubbing up against a variety of people, had simply broadened his view of life. He was such an intelligent man anyway, such a capable man, such a charismatic man. And I felt, I had felt that he was beginning to get an education, even as I was getting educated about the black community then. He was beginning to be educated about the white community. We're pretty much out of the question, so I'm prepared. I'm just sort of curious if there's any other thing that you'd like to tell me about. You've had a number of contacts with him, is there any particular moment that stands out?

No, there isn't. There really isn't, as I say, we weren't. The moment that stands out was when he came to my office and told me, look, I am going to tell this tale about Elijah Muhammad, a man for whom I had, he had this admiration. He was the leader. And he was going to tell the tale that he said had been told him by Elijah Muhammad's son Wallace, that Elijah was a lecture, who had impregnated several of his secretary. He knew he was going to put himself in danger when he told that tale. He told it publicly. He told that to me in my office, and it was only two, three months before he was gone down. Let's step down one more time. We may be at the end of it, Dr. Earl. Okay, so you just give me your response when Louis Lomax came back with some of this film. When Louis Lomax came back with the film of the rally, the black Muslim rally, I was simply stunned.

I mean, here was this auditorium overflowing, thousands of people about an organization. I knew nothing about it. I found it difficult to credit when I saw it. And of course, when we put it on the air, New Yorkers, because that's all who saw it, we're stunned that there was this organization, the black Muslims, about which white New Yorkers simply knew nothing. Okay. All right. Thank you very much. Let's hold the room. Sure.