In the mid-1960s, my sister, her son, and I were invited to the Black Muslim mosque in Los Angeles to hear the boxing champion Muhammad Ali (formerly Cassius Clay) speak. At the time he refused to be inducted into the army and possibly shipped off to Vietnam, to participate in a war he opposed.
We were invited to the mosque by a man who ran a TV-radio repair shop next door to my sister's house on Compton Boulevard in Compton and who was a member of the religious group. I remember him giving my sister a copy of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad's book, Message to the Black Man.
When we got to the mosque, a member removed my retractable ballpoint pen from my shirt pocket and aimed it at me, clicking the top with his thumb several times. The late Afro-Caribbean writer Orde Coombs, in an essay in one of his books, reported a similar experience. At the time I didn't understand why that was done. It wasn't until I recently read a biography of the late black journalist, Louis Lomax, that it started to make sense.
Thomas Aiello, in his book The Life & Times of Louis Lomax: The Art of Deliberate Disunity (Duke University Press, 2011), wrote that Lomax "claimed that during Malcolm [X]'s final trip to Los Angeles, he and a friend were followed by a black limousine and that Malcolm carried a 'zip-gun ball point pen' so as to take one of them with him when he went."
