The tour had one other major unintended consequence. AMSAC had sent Farmer to Africa as a living rebuttal to Malcolm X, and he performed this part well enough, drawing laughter and applause from African audiences when he described the black Muslim’s message of racial separatism as “apartheid and . . . worse.” The two men had clashed publicly on a number of occasions in the United States, and by 1965 Farmer feared that Malcolm, who was searching for a new role after his recent break with the Nation of Islam, might become a bridge figure between the forces of black nationalism in America and international Maoism, making him “a really serious problem for the civil rights organizations, [an] almost terrifying problem.” On a personal level, however, the relationship between Farmer and Malcolm was very different. A mutual respect, even affection, had developed in the course of their public encounters, and the black Muslim sent the civil rights leader a postcard every week while he was on his second African tour in 1964. On the eve of Farmer’s departure for Africa in January 1965, Malcolm, having heard the trip announced by a New York radio station, visited Farmer in his apartment, asking that he not say anything that might damage his (Malcolm’s) reputation in Egypt, a major source of his funding. “I said, ‘I’m not going there,’” Farmer recounted later. “He said, ‘fine.’ We’re good friends.”103
Then, shortly after he arrived in Ghana, Farmer met with a young woman he had known in the United States, who suddenly announced, in the course of a conversation about Malcolm’s recent trip to Africa, “He is going to be killed, you know.” When pressed by Farmer, the woman (unidentified in his later account of the meeting) went on to state that the assassination would take place before April 1, 1965, and would be carried out by a mysterious group “far more dangerous” than the Black Muslims.
On February 21, back in his New York apartment, Farmer learned that Malcolm had been shot to death during an appearance at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, reportedly by gunmen from the Nation of Islam.
“The Black Muslims did not kill him,” he told a news conference immediately afterward. “Malcolm’s murder was a political killing with international implications.” Later, Farmer tried unsuccessfully to locate the woman he had met in Ghana. “The last line I got on her,” he recorded
220
I N T O A F R I C A
sadly, “was that she was doing a striptease act in a Sicilian nightclub.”104
Still, this did not prevent Farmer from speculating publicly that Malcolm’s assassination was the work of Harlem drug racketeers (who were known to resent his preaching against narcotics) in league with the CIA.105
Whether justified or not, Farmer’s suspicions about the CIA were obviously not in AMSAC’s plans for his African trip. As well as demonstrating (once again) the practical hazards of “arm’s length” operations, Farmer’s statements against U.S. foreign policy and the CIA show that, although his African agenda was similar to that of his sponsors, it was not identical, and that while he might have served as an unwitting agent of the Agency, he was not its stooge. Still, the episode evidently did not put AMSAC off the idea of sponsoring civil rights leaders to undertake similar trips in the future. In April 1965, Calvin Raullerson wrote Martin Luther King expressing his “interest in having you make a tour of Africa under the auspices of the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa through a grant provided by the American Society of African Culture.” The initial response was encouraging. “He is very interested in doing this kind of trip and thinks it is something he ought to do,” Raullerson reported to John Davis. “He is specially interested in going to East Africa where he has never been.”106 King’s schedule, however, ruled out such a tour before late 1966, by which time the likelihood of the CIA’s subsidizing him via AMSAC had become extremely remote, partly because of King’s growing dissatisfaction with Cold War American foreign policy in Vietnam and partly because of other developments affecting AMSAC.
The Farmer tour was AMSAC’s last really successful venture. The growth of radicalism among young African Americans was reflected by the emergence in New York of a new generation of black artists who rejected the vanguardist leadership of the “Negro intellectual establishment,” a move symbolized by the staging of a dissident American Festival of Negro Arts at Fairleigh Dickinson University in 1965.107 The following year, these tensions spilled over into the First World Festival of Negro Arts, an event held in Dakar, Senegal, under the joint sponsorship of Léopold Senghor’s Senegalese government, UNESCO, and AMSAC. While the Soviets moored a cruise ship offshore and tried to lure delegates aboard with vodka and an exhibit about the slave trade, the Americans at the festival
A F R I C A N A M E R I C A N S
221