It is time for all of us--CORE, the NAACP, Dr. Martin Luther King, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Black Muslims--to sit down together behind closed doors and unite. Negro leaders must now stop calling each other names. We must stop calling Dr. King names, and he must stop talking about us before the enemy. We may not be able to walk all the way to freedom together, but we can walk half the way together, so let’s unite and walk together as far as we can. The audience began to warm to his strange message. The notion of unity among Negro leaders--including the Muslims--was not new. Malcolm X had launched the same theme three years ago but found no takers among established Negro leaders. Recently, however, the breach had widened; Malcolm called Martin Luther King “a chump, not a champ”; King took to a New York pulpit and denounced “those among us who would have us live in a separate state.” The night of that sermon King was pelted with eggs as he entered the church. Malcolm X denied that the Black Muslims were responsible for the incident but he also refused to say he was sorry that it had happened. All this was less than two weeks before the speech by Akbar. I watched the setting as Akbar continued to speak. The stage obviously had been readied for him. This was no ordinary rally: Elijah Muhammad, Jr., had flown in from Chicago to be present, along with John X Ali, National Secretary for the movement. Ministers Jeremiah (Baltimore), Louis X (Boston), and Thomas J. (Hartford) were there. Minister Woodrow (Atlantic City) was on hand with his camera crew, and Joseph X, captain of the New York Fruit, turned his men out in full dress. This was clearly a major move, and the Muslims had worked hard to underscore its importance. But what did it all mean? “Now if we can unify,” Akbar continued, “we can get help. I have just come from Africa,” he said with a sly smile, “and I bring you a message from our African brothers. Now you newsmen get this correct. I am only bringing a message to the people, a message sent by their brothers in Africa. This is the message: Spokesmen from African states--I’ll even go so far as to tell you that they are on the west coast of Africa--told me to tell you that if you unite, they are ready to help us win our freedom. They are ready to help us with arms, men, and know-how!” The crowds at such street rallies in Harlem are always infiltrated with black nationalists, and the mere thought of Africans sending arms, men, and know-how to aid the American Negro was enough to set off rejoicing. To the dismay of newsmen, who hoped he would go into the who, what, when, where, and how of all this, Akbar let the matter drop. Instead he turned to a discussion of the white man. “I don’t hate any man because of the color of his skin,” Akbar said. “I look at a man’s heart, I watch his actions, and I make my conclusions on the basis of what he does rather than how he looks.”