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“God’s Angry Men”: The Black Muslims (1962)

In 1958, after a number of guards were injured in a riot at the Deuel youth prison, east of Oakland, authorities took the unprecedented step of transferring the identified instigators, some as young as sixteen, to San Quentin. One of the juveniles was James Carr, an incorrigible LA gang member and armed robber, who was feared throughout the California Youth Authority for his ferocity. George Jackson, a prison revolutionary whose letters would later be published as the bestseller Soledad Brother, and with whom Carr would form a close friendship, unequivocally categorized him as the “baddest motherfucker.” Quentin, as Carr expected, was day after day of relentless combat with guards and other prisoners, but there was also a surprising subculture of Black solidarity: the Nation of Islam (NOI). Carr was indifferent to religious doctrine but impressed by the moral discipline and militant spirit of the Muslims. “Booker North,” he wrote admiringly in his autobiography, “was the most important Muslim leader in San Quentin. He was a fantastically effective proselytizer out on the mainline. Every month he would convert ten or fifteen dudes to Islam. They put him in the Adjustment Center—where the state’s most violent death row inmates were held—on permanent status. But Booker went right on rapping, usually in the exercise yard.” According to Carr, some guards egged on white supremacists to attack Booker in the yard, and when he fought back, guards in the tower shot and killed him.¹ But other brothers took up his work, and the Muslims continued to fight for the right to hold prayer meetings, have Muslim visitors, receive religious publications and keep the Koran in their cells.²

They were a new species, unlike any Black group that prison officials or city police had previously dealt with. They cultivated a charismatic gravitas, edged with uncertain menace. Coldly polite in dealings with whites, they were warm toward other people of “dark humanity.” Inside prisons, moreover, they were often miracle workers, arbitrating conflicts between Black inmates, promoting literacy and Koran study, and above all, organizing disciplined resistance to degrading routines and brutal treatment. In the community, they were seen as family builders and exemplars of a self-help ethos that they believed someday would be the foundation of a new nation. They also had an impressive record of turning addicts and alcoholics into sober cadre. The widespread belief among whites that they were Black terrorists or dangerous cultists was belied by their careful avoidance of confrontation, obedience to the law, and ban on weapons at meetings and mosques. Even the Fruit of Islam, the NOI’s elite bodyguards in black suits and red bow ties, acted principally as a deterrent to violence. But there was a line that could not be crossed: Muslims asserted a legitimate right of self-defense and expected members to aid one another without hesitation or fear of death. “I don’t even call it violence when it’s in self-defense,” said Malcolm X. “I call it intelligence.”

As Elijah Muhammad’s chief missionary, Malcolm helped to organize temples (they weren’t called mosques until 1975) across the country, but his true second home after Harlem was Temple No. 27 in South Central Los Angeles—“Malcolm’s Temple,” as it was called within the Nation.³ He arrived in L.A. in spring 1957, writes biographer Manning Marable, “determined to establish a strong NOI base on the West Coast. He also wanted to establish the NOI’s Islamic credentials by engaging in public activities with Middle Eastern and Asian Muslim representatives in the region.” Accordingly he attended several events sponsored by representatives of Islamic countries, scandalized an interfaith meeting by attacking the wealth of many Black churches, and preached to the converted and unconverted alike at the Normandie Hall.⁴ He also acquainted himself with the community’s major Afrocentric institutions, including the Pyramid Cooperative Grocery, Alfred Ligon’s Aquarian Book Shop, Adele Young’s Hugh Gordon Bookshop (supported by both Communists and Pan-Africanists), and the weekly Herald-Dispatch, owned by Sanford and Pat Alexander.⁵

Returning to the city the following spring, Malcolm apprenticed himself to the Alexanders in the hope of learning as much as possible about newspaper publishing. Pat Alexander, the editor and dominant personality, was a fabulist and demagogue who used the paper as a megaphone for hallucinatory claims about Jewish conspiracies against Black people. She believed, for example, that the Jews, “the smart elements in this country,” had “brought forth the idea, with which they did a great deal of damage to black Americans, of integration” and that they were responsible for the “danger and threat and the dirty, filthy deception of the political left.” Later she alleged that German Jews, expelled by Hitler, had introduced German shepherds to Southern police forces and trained them to attack only Black people. The constant core of her grievances, however, was the considerable number of Jewish furniture and appliance stores, pawnshops, liquor stores (she claimed, preposterously, that there were 3,500) and other businesses in the ghetto, whom she saw as colonial exploiters, regardless of their support for civil rights. They refused to advertise with her for obvious reasons, but in Alexander’s eyes this was only further proof of a Jewish plot against Black ownership and economic independence. But the Herald-Dispatch, even if more extreme than the NOI in its anti-Semitism, was otherwise a good fit for the ideas of Elijah Muhammad.⁶

Thus the little paper began to publish and syndicate weekly columns from both Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm. Malcolm’s column was called “God’s Angry Men,” and he frequently extolled the rich heritage of Black nationalism, reassuring his readers that the NOI was continuing the work of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. He also attacked Martin Luther King, in a language almost identical to Garvey’s philippics against W. E. B. Du Bois some four decades earlier.⁷ After the new owner of the nation’s largest-circulation Black paper, the Pittsburgh Courier, dropped the “Mr. Muhammad Speaks” column, the Herald-Dispatch soon “became in effect the official Muslim organ,” and the Nation assigned a sales quota to each member: thirty copies each week. As a result circulation soared to 40,000, and a regional edition was started in Chicago. But Pat Alexander never relinquished editorial control, and after Malcolm inaugurated the NOI’s own paper, Muhammad Speaks, in 1961, the Herald-Dispatch lost much of its national importance for the movement. Conflicts with Chicago increased, and in 1964 Alexander blamed the Muslims for firebombing her offices.⁸

The organization of Temple No. 27, meanwhile, was not without difficulties; Malcolm’s FBI files paraphrase him as saying that “he was very disgusted by the way he was received in Los Angeles, and [it] was one of the worst places in the United States to convert people to Islam.”⁹ He therefore brought out three of his experienced lieutenants from Temple No. 7 in Harlem as interim leaders. Twenty-four-year-old Johnny Morris, a jazz columnist for Miller’s Eagle, was apprenticed as assistant minister and changed his name to John X.¹⁰ He would later take over the temple leadership (as John Shabazz) with invaluable help from the temple secretary, Ronald Stokes, a Korean War veteran from Roxbury. Malcolm became warm friends with the energetic and efficient Stokes, but there were other ghosts of his Boston past whom he was perhaps less happy to see. One was Hakim Jamal, who had just hoboed his way to Los Angeles, bringing the same drinking and drug problems that were already evident when he was just fourteen and briefly met Malcolm in a club. Hakim, whose romantic liaisons with famous and wealthy women would one day become serial tragedies, irked Malcolm by bragging to other people that they were cousins. In fact there was no kinship beyond the fact that Hakim had married a remote relative (at best a second cousin) of the Little family.¹¹

In July 1959, while Malcolm was meeting with Egyptian President Nasser in Cairo, a New York television station broadcast a sensationalist five-part series, The Hate That Hate Produced. It depicted the Muslims as the Black Ku Klux Klan.¹² A one-hour version of the program (produced by Mike Wallace and Louis Lomax) was soon shown nationally, and during the resulting furor several national civil rights leaders, long attacked by Muhammad and Malcolm for their espousal of integration and alliances with whites, especially Jewish liberals, struck back at the Nation. Thurgood Marshall, for example, told a Princeton audience that “the Black Muslim movement is run by a bunch of thugs organized from prisons and jails and financed, I am sure, by Nasser or some Arab group.” And Martin Luther King, erroneously comparing men to institutions, declared that “Black supremacy is as bad as white supremacy.”¹³

Meanwhile, Black radicals were divided in their opinions about both the movement and its stellar salesman, Malcolm X. In her oral history Dorothy Healey contrasts the attitude of James Jackson, the editor of the Daily Worker “who had an absolute hatred against Malcolm X and all that he thought Malcolm X represented,” to that of pioneer Black nationalist turned Communist, Cyril Briggs, who “kept insisting on how important they were.” Briggs, who had lived in L.A for years, was a Pan-Africanist elder of the highest rank—founder of Crusader magazine and the African Blood Brotherhood in 1918–19—but it is unclear whether he and Malcolm ever met. Healey, who acknowledged Briggs’s “great influence on my thinking, even though I didn’t always admit it,” attempted at a “very stormy National Committee meeting” to stop Jackson from publishing any more attacks on Malcolm X, but she was a minority of one, as she would be again ten years later when she supported the Che-Lumumba Club’s collaboration with the Black Panther Party.¹⁴

Black artists, musicians and professionals, on their side, were deeply intrigued by Malcolm, and he obliged them through informal meetings and soirees. Band leader Johnny Otis, who had met Malcolm in his earlier incarnation as “Detroit Red,” was part of a group of Black progressives—known as Attack—who would gather for discussions whenever the Muslim leader was in Los Angeles. “He didn’t proselytize at the get-togethers,” Otis recalled. “His talks with us dealt with standing together, respecting our traditions, defending our communities, treating our women with love and care, being responsible toward our children and not taking abuse from the racists in our society.”¹⁵ One outspoken participant in these conversations was the Sentinel’s editor, Wendell Green, who had been one of the Tuskegee Airmen during the Second World War and would end his career as the LA representative of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Another was a Caribbean immigrant and trade union activist named Mervyn Dymally, who, in alliance with Jesse Unruh, would become a major figure in California politics for almost a half century, representing South Central L.A. in Congress for twelve years.¹⁶

It was inevitable that Chief Parker and Malcolm X would collide over the activities of the NOI in L.A. But the LAPD would have to provide the pretext. As a frustrated FBI informant reported in 1958: “He is not likely to violate any ordinances or laws. He neither smokes nor drinks and is of high moral character.” When in 1960 Hoover unleashed COINTELPRO, the FBI’s notorious counterintelligence program, against the NOI, the initial focus was Elijah Mohammad’s innumerable affairs with young women members.¹⁷ Given the animosity between Hoover and Parker, it is unlikely that the bureau’s large trove of surveillance on the NOI was ever shared with the LAPD. The department, on its side, apparently had yet to develop its own informants inside Temple No. 27—though events there would soon provide ample cover for it to do so. The basic briefing given to the LAPD rank and file was a histrionic memo prepared by the San Diego Police Department in 1959. The Fruit of Islam, it asserted,

are almost psychotic in their hatred of Caucasians and are comparable to the Mau Mau or kamikaze in their dedication and fanaticism. It has been reported that many temples have gun clubs in which this militant group are trained in weapons … It has been stated locally, that the members of this cult will kill any police officer when the opportunity presents itself, regardless of the circumstances or outcome.¹⁸

The Times, without the slightest evidence, later expanded these allegations with the claim that the NOI was “dedicated to the extermination of the white race.”

Why hadn’t the Nation attacked the police already? For Parker and other cops, the law-abiding behavior of Black Muslims was construed as a clever disguise for diabolical schemes. The first skirmish took place in September 1961 when forty police arrived to disperse a “riot” involving a handful of Muslim newspaper sellers and two white “store detectives” outside a Safeway supermarket on Western Avenue near Venice Boulevard. The security men, claiming that the Muslims were blocking shoppers, had drawn their guns when the newspaper sellers refused to leave or submit to citizen arrests. In the scuffle that followed, the two whites suffered a few bruises as well as derision from the crowd, while five of the Muslims were arrested. They were subsequently acquitted by an all-white jury (a rare occurrence in NOI trials) after the manager confirmed that he had given permission for the paper sales.¹⁹ In essence this was a trivial incident that should have raised little alarm, but Parker read it as an omen of a showdown to come. “Following the parking lot melee,” Marable writes, “the LAPD was primed for retaliation against the local NOI.” Parker “instructed his officers to closely monitor the mosque’s activities.”²⁰

The following April (1962) cops observed two men taking some clothing out of the open trunk of a car, parked about a block and half from Temple No. 27. One worked at a dry cleaner where he acquired unredeemed or damaged clothes to sell to fellow Muslims, who, of course, had to conform to a rigid dress code. The other was examining an item for sale. It was past eleven in the evening, and a service at the mosque had just ended. Neither man ran away, or, for that matter, acted suspiciously, yet the two officers approached them as if they were burglary suspects. After frisking them and finding nothing, the cops called in a license check. The car was clean. Refusing to give up, the cops decided to interrogate them individually. “Let’s separate these niggers,” one said to the other. When one of the Muslims expressed outrage, he was put in a choke hold and slammed face first on the hood. The other man broke loose to come to his aid, and a brawl developed. Meanwhile, the congregation leaving the mosque saw the commotion, and some of them ran down the street to see what was happening. At this point, according to oral histories gathered years later by Jonah Edelman, a security guard from a local bar, probably a little addled, attempted to help the cops by firing a warning shot in the air. When that failed to back up the gathering group of Muslims, the panicky guard fired again and wounded Roosevelt X Walker, a young sanitation worker. A Muslim wrestling with one of the cops, meanwhile, pried the officer’s gun away and shot him in the shoulder, but an off-duty cop arrived just in time to rescue his colleagues and call for aid.²¹

Walker, meanwhile, staggered back to the mosque, where Malcolm’s friend Ronald Stokes assisted him while John X (Shabazz) went to call an ambulance. At this point, furious LAPD reinforcements began to arrive—but they went first to the temple, rather than the fight scene up the block. The situation was especially chaotic because Muslim escorts were simultaneously trying to evacuate women from the mosque while husbands were arriving to pick them up. People inside had no idea what had happened up the street. Some began to chant, “Why? Why?” According to trial testimony from the wounded Walker, Stokes and others were trying to carry him outside when they were attacked by two white cops screaming, “You niggers get up against the wall.” One swung his billy club, but the other—Officer Donald Weese—just opened fire. Stokes put up his hands, Walker later explained, and said to the officer that was shooting, “Stop. Stop. Don’t shoot any more.” His hands were in the air when he was shot to death by Weese. Four others were wounded.²²

In testimony before the grand jury, Weese was asked if he actually had intended to kill Stokes and the other unarmed Muslims. His answer was scornful: “The fact that I shot to stop and the fact that I shot to kill is one and the same thing, sir[.] I am not Hopalong Cassidy. I cannot distinguish between hitting an arm and so forth, sir. I aimed dead center and I hoped I hit.”²³ The following year, during the trial of fourteen indicted Muslims, defense attorney Earl Broady (himself a retired LAPD officer) asked Weese: “‘Did you see any of these men commit a crime when shot?’ ‘Yes,’ Weese said, ‘they were fleeing.’ ‘Do you consider that a crime?’ There was no answer.”²⁴

Another Korean War vet, William Rogers, was running from the scene when he heard someone shout “that’s my nigger.” “Then I felt an explosion in my back and fell. The next thing I knew an officer was beating me over the head.” He blacked out, and when he regained consciousness he found that his younger brother, Robert, was lying next to him, shot four times. “I put out my hand and we held hands … My brother said, ‘They got me, too.’ Then someone came by and kicked our hands apart. I was told to get up but I couldn’t move. My brother said he couldn’t move either.” William Rogers was permanently paralyzed.²⁵

Inside the Temple, meanwhile, Shabazz was shouting at members not to resist, but nonviolence spared few from police fury. Fifteen were lined against a wall in the men’s cloakroom and systematically tormented. “We ought to shoot these niggers,” one cop taunted. “We got them lined up and we ought to kill every one of them.” Another chipped in: “We just killed some of your brothers outside.” There was an obscene obsession with Black men’s genitals as they were prodded, kicked, and their pants torn off. Two of the wounded Muslims, moreover, had been shot in the groin. The final tally was Stokes dead, seven other Muslims seriously wounded, fourteen ultimately arraigned on felony counts, and the mosque ransacked and all of its documents seized. On the police side of the ledger, one officer was wounded (shot in the left elbow) and seven were injured, none seriously.²⁶

Word of the attack reached Malcolm, in Harlem, by morning. Marable says that “the desecration of the mosque and the violence brought upon its members pushed Malcolm to a dark place.” Two former members of the Fruit of Islam, Charles 37X and James 67X, told him that as soon as Malcolm found out that Stokes had been murdered, he began to organize a deadly retaliation.

Members eagerly volunteered, and a team was selected to fly to L.A., presumably, to enact Parker’s self-fulfilling prophecy of Muslims as cop killers. But Elijah Muhammad ordered Malcolm and his comrades to stand down. “Malcolm,” writes Marable, “was stunned; he acquiesced, but with bitter disappointment.”²⁷

In Los Angeles, bitter surprise was also the reaction among members of Temple No. 27 when they were told to avenge themselves by going into the streets to sell at least fifty copies each of Muhammad Speaks. Hakim Jamal recalled the rank-and-file reaction: “Shock was on every face I looked into. Black men, hundreds of them, ready to kill the devil. Many with guns and many more with enough hate, enough belief in Allah to face anything. We were betrayed!” Some members, according to Jamal, assuaged their anger by going down to Skid Row and sadistically beating up white winos. When Malcolm arrived in L.A., he was told about the forays:

Some of us smiled at him when the story was being told. We expected a pat on the head or a wink. I have never seen him so angry. He got up out of his chair and tried to explain to us that what we were doing was small time gangsterism. Chopping down a few helpless bums on the sly—it was cowardly and it was useless. Malcolm understood our need to act … The pain on his face when he spoke of Brother Ronald was clear. But he wouldn’t have gone with us to Fifth St. If he had gone into action, then it would have been real action, not that.²⁸

Jamal, of course, was unaware at the time of Malcolm’s original plan, and he left the NOI with a number of others who were embittered by the failure to retaliate.

Malcolm, hardly naïve about media, was nonetheless appalled by the way the attack was depicted. “The press,” he told a radio interviewer, “was just as atrocious as the police. Because they helped the police to cover it up by propagating a false image across the country, that there was a blazing gun battle which involved Muslims and police shooting at each other. And everyone who know Muslims knows that Muslims don’t even carry a finger nail file, much less carry guns.”²⁹ At Stokes’s funeral on May 5, Malcolm repeatedly praised the Black organizations and leaders (obviously referring to the L.A. NAACP and CORE) that were protesting the attack despite the hysteria about the NOI in the press, commenting, “Our unity shocked them and we should continue to shock the white man by working together.” He invoked the example of the Bandung Conference of 1955, where twenty-nine countries had participated in the first Afro-Asian meeting in Indonesia, to oppose neocolonialism; if the colored fourth-fifths of humanity could unite against oppression, Malcolm asked, regardless of religious or ideological differences, why should Black Americans not do the same? He also set aside his usual polemical jihad against Christianity to invoke Jesus as a great revolutionary, the prophet of slaves, outcastes and—pointedly—Black people.³⁰

Malcolm spent much of May speaking to large crowds at church meetings and Sunday rallies, repeatedly emphasizing that the Muslims were not at war with the police, but rather that the police were at war with the Black community as a whole. During one meeting at the Second Baptist Church to which he had not been invited to speak because he was “too inflammatory,” he took the floor anyway, with the audience roaring their approval. “It wasn’t a Muslim who was shot down,” he told the congregation. “It was a Negro. They say we preach hate because we tell the truth. They say we inflame the Negro. The hell they’ve been catching for 400 years has inflamed them.”³¹ To the horror of many white liberals, even the local NAACP agreed. Whatever their opinion of NOI theology, a broad spectrum of community leaders—from veteran journalist Wendell Green to rising political star Mervyn Dymally and young CORE activist Danny Gray—stood by Malcolm’s side and endorsed his call for unity against police violence. Almena Lomax, perhaps the most distinguished Black woman journalist in the country, as well as the founder of the well-regarded Los Angeles Tribune (whose writers were Japanese-American and white, as well as Black), wrote that the “Stokes killing and subsequent events have done more to arouse and unite the Negro community than anything of recent times.”³² In many ways it was a trial run for 1963’s all-encompassing coalition, the United Civil Rights Committee.

Some Black leaders, however, did not share this ecumenical spirit. Martin Luther King, briefly visiting in mid June, was concerned that the association of civil rights movement with the Muslims could damage support for the Southern struggle. In his two talks in L.A., he equivocated. On one hand, Black supremacy was equally as despicable as white supremacy; “On the other hand I am more concerned with getting rid of the conditions that brought this sort of organization into being than I am with the organization itself.”³³ Tom Bradley, now retired from the LAPD and practicing law while he prepared to run for the city council from a mixed district, also felt that he would lose white liberals if he were seen as “soft” on the NOI. That summer, in a forum sponsored by the Valley chapter of the ACLU, he debated Hugh Manes, the organization’s chief advocate of a civilian police review board. Bradley claimed that the department had “taken giant steps” on the race problem, refusing to criticize Parker. Manes categorically disagreed, responding that “the history of Los Angeles in 30 years had not indicated the police department is aware of the Constitution.” The Muslims, despite their rhetoric, were “strictly law abiding,” and the April LAPD attack raised fundamental civil libertarian issues: “The rights of Muslims affect the rights of all of us.” The audience, mostly white liberals, booed Manes.³⁴

No one, however, was more alarmed by Malcolm’s attempt to build an inclusive movement against police injustice than Elijah Mohammad himself. In public pronouncements, they appeared to be on exactly the same page. The Messenger, for instance, had told a press conference in Chicago that “in these crucial times we must not think in terms of one’s religion, but in terms of justice for us Black people. This means a united front for justice in America.”³⁵ Marable, again using Farrakhan as a principal source, says that this was mere lip service to the ideal of unity; in fact Elijah Muhammad pulled hard on the leash, “ordering his stubborn lieutenant to halt all [united front] efforts … he vetoed any cooperation with civil rights groups even on a matter as outrageous as Stokes’s murder.”³⁶ His strategy could be interpreted either as patience or passivity. The civil rights movement, he believed, would eventually collapse in the face of white resistance, leaving Black people with no choice but to flock to the NOI. Anything that encouraged hopes of reform or belief in the possibility of integration was pandering to the great lie that the Nation existed to expose.

Malcolm, on the other hand, found it almost unendurable not to be in the thick of battle, whether that meant tooth-for-tooth retaliation or leading mass protests. Farrakhan recalled that Malcolm “was fascinated by the civil rights movement … [and] speaking less and less about the teachings of [Muhammad].”³⁷ In Taylor Branch’s opinion “the Stokes case marked a turning point” in Malcolm X’s “hidden odyssey.”³⁸ In Los Angeles, he took the first steps toward abandoning Elijah Muhammad’s folk eschatology and moving toward a distinctive strategy of Black liberation that visualized the American struggle as part of a worldwide revolt.

The temple shootings also marked a watershed for Mayor Sam Yorty, who now became Chief Parker’s cheerleader. In suppressing what the Times now called the “Black Muslim riots,” the mayor backed the chief “100 percent.” He also denounced the proposed civilian police review board, sponsored jointly by the NAACP and the ACLU, as “communist inspired.” (As a result, Almena Lomax observed, “the Mayor’s stock in the Negro community right now is on a par with a snake’s belly for the reason that he has reneged on his campaign promise to do something about police brutality.”)³⁹ He and Parker, together with Sheriff Peter Pitchess, flew to Washington to ask the attorney general to add the NOI to his list of subversive organizations. Yorty, sounding more like a warden than a mayor, believed that with such a listing “their meeting places could be closed, their literature seized and their activities otherwise curtailed.”⁴⁰ Undoubtedly, Smilin’ Sam was the last person that Bobby Kennedy wanted to see in his office, but Parker was an old friend from his days as a Senate counsel (as well as a fellow Catholic), so he listened patiently and then arranged for Parker to meet the following Monday with top FBI and Justice Department officials to share information about the “Muslim threat.”⁴¹ The chief undoubtedly rattled off his favorite statistics—including the preposterous allegation that Blacks committed two-thirds of crimes in Los Angeles—and expounded on his “through the looking glass” theory, as John Buntin put it, that “race relations in Los Angeles seemed bad because race relations were so good that the city had become the target for agitators.”⁴²

Meanwhile the fourteen Muslim “agitators” comported themselves with quiet dignity in a long trial that began in May 1963. The prosecutor was Deputy District Attorney Harold Kippen, who the summer before had sent two of the 1960 Griffith Park “rioters” to prison. The defense team—Loren Miller and Earl Broady—had been carefully chosen by Malcolm for both legal prowess and unimpeachable respectability (both would later be appointed judges). The initial coroner’s jury took only half an hour to rule the shooting of Stokes a justifiable homicide, even though Weese testified that he had had his hands up, trying to surrender. The grand jury which then prepared the original indictments was all white, as was the trial jury. The cops on the witness stand misidentified their supposed assailants and contradicted each other’s accounts. The case against Shabazz for attempted murder was based solely on the testimony of the security guard and quickly fell apart as other witnesses acknowledged that he never left the temple. In the end the jury spent a record eighteen days in heavily guarded deliberation.

Shabazz was acquitted along with a few others, but the majority of the defendants received one-to ten-year prison terms. When asked in court about the officers’ intentions, Shabazz testified: “I was aware of documents circulated in police stations all over California which constituted anti-Muslim propaganda.” The police, he said, “were looking for an excuse to kill us.”⁴³ Six years later the LA Black Panthers would say the same thing.