As Johnson Hinton was carried out of the station to an ambulance, Malcolm walked out the door and paused at the top of the steps. The dimly lit night was filled with Black Muslims and onlookers. Malcolm made a slight gesture, and, according to both police and editor Hicks, in exactly three minutes the streets were empty. The hundreds of Muslims simply vanished--at least the police thought they had vanished. In actuality they shifted their cordon to the hospital where Hinton was being treated. And it was only after Malcolm emerged from the hospital and gave another sign that the Black Muslims finally dispersed to their various homes. “No man,” Police Captain McGowan said to James Hicks, “should have that much power over that many people. We cannot control this town if one man can wield that kind of power.” Johnson Hinton now walks around with a silver plate in his head. An all-white jury awarded him seventy-five thousand dollars in damages against the City of New York. Those knowledgeable about the case and the Black Muslims feel that seventy-five thousand dollars is a small fee to pay for the service Malcolm X rendered the city that night. As the jury found, the police were absolutely wrong, and as Negroes know, Hinton’s was only one of the Negro heads that are cracked open without reason by the New York police each year. But there was a difference between Johnson Hinton and all the other Negroes who get their heads split open in Harlem: Hinton had black brothers and sisters who cared about him; he was a member of a tightly knit congregation of believers whose basic tenet is “fight in defense of your life” and whose main social ethic is “be ready to exact justice when one of your brothers is abused.” The Muslims will deny it, but they have a “crisis system” that moves into action whenever a Muslim is abused. It involves a telephone pyramid--one man calls ten people and each of them calls ten--that in one hour can produce upward of a thousand Muslims at any given point in New York. And the night Johnson Hinton’s head was split open was the night New York police officials went into a huddle and named the Black Muslims, particularly Malcolm X, as people to watch. 2. FROM MOSES TO MALCOLM X The black Muslims have been in the national spotlight for only four years now, although the movement itself was born more than a quarter of a century ago. It attracted some attention in Chicago and Detroit but did not emerge as a national concern until Minister Malcolm X, then serving as leader of the New York Muslims and as a sort of roving bishop for the entire movement, burst upon the scene.