telegraph

I just found out that Upton Hill Regional Park, where I used to go to use the batting cage and play put-put golf when I was a teenager, was the barracks of the US Nazi Party during the sixties, and that the founder of the party, George Lincoln Rockwell, was assassinated around the corner at Dominion Hills Shopping Center. I am surprised that we didn't figure this out in middle school when my friends were obsessed with the mafia, nazis, and serial killers. The discovery of this geographical overlap of us led me to this photo from 1961 of Rockwell at a Nation of Islam meeting:

Apparently Rockwell tried to form a coalition with the Nation of Islam because of both groups' support for racial separation; he praised Elijah Muhammed as the "Black Peoples' Hitler," and Malcolm X as the next promising leader. In spite of which, while on a "Hate Bus" tour in the South in 1965 Rockwell received the following amazing telegraph from Malcolm X:
"This is to warn you that I am no longer held in check from fighting white supremacists by Elijah Muhammad's separatist Black Muslim movement, and that if your present racist agitation against our people there in Alabama causes physical harm to Reverend King or any other black Americans who are only attempting to enjoy their rights as free human beings, that you and your Ku Klux Klan friends will be met with maximum physical retaliation from those of us who are not hand-cuffed by the disarming philosophy of nonviolence, and who believe in asserting our right of self-defense – by any means necessary."