Meanwhile the Black Muslims are bombarding Negroes all over the nation with their message to the “lost-found, so-called Negro in the wilderness of North America.” For a number of years Mr. Muhammad had a weekly column in some of the nation’s best Negro newspapers. Now the Muslims publish their own weekly, _Mr. Muhammad Speaks_, a thirty-six-page tabloid that has the largest circulation of any Negro newspaper being published. The Muslims also conduct a weekly radio program on stations in some forty cities throughout the nation. All this is augmented by the appearances of Malcolm X on radio and TV programs each week. All in all, the Black Muslims have covered the nation; their basic teachings are known and debated by Negroes everywhere. On the whole, then, the state of the Nation of Islam is good; its population is growing, its economy is well into the black, and its foreign relations--though strained--are better than they have ever been before. 4. THE BLACK MUSLIMS AND THE NEGRO REVOLT _The Separate State_ On the day every television network carried scenes of Birmingham police dogs attacking Negro children, Malcolm X submitted to an interview. Asked what he thought of the events at Birmingham, Malcolm said: “Martin Luther King is a chump, not a champ. Any man who puts his women and children on the front lines is a chump, not a champ.” This was Malcolm’s most inglorious hour. It will take him months of hard work to regain the ground he lost among non-Muslim Negroes with that single statement. Even the Negro moderates, those who disapprove of the direct-action technique, were silenced by the dogs, fire hoses, and club-swinging policemen. Since Birmingham I have been on a lecture tour that carried me to eight major cities in as many states; I found that Negroes were melted into one by the fire of that battle; I saw a unity I have never seen in rank-and-file Negroes before; I felt a mutual love that is all but unknown among Negroes; I sensed a dislike for white people that borders on the disgraceful. Martin King--and we know his strengths as well as his weaknesses--triggered Birmingham. This nation’s Negroes were with him. If he was a “chump,” so were we all. Malcolm’s statement had the effect of making every Negro who wept when he saw dogs attacking Negro children feel like a moral idiot; Malcolm’s analysis--if proper--means that every Negro woman who shouted resentment when she saw her black sisters knocked to the ground is spiritually illiterate and intellectually stupid. Malcolm--in a contorted way, to be sure--allowed himself to become one with Bull Conner. Malcolm X, the brilliant student of mass psychology, blundered badly.