Part 4 (1/2)

When Joseph stepped up, Malcolm sternly announced, ”This is the day of manifestation of defects.” He then addressed Joseph: ”You are charged with putting your hands on your wife. Guilty or not guilty?” Joseph curtly replied, ”Guilty.” Malcolm ruled that Joseph had been convicted of a ”cla.s.s F” judgment, meaning that he was no longer considered in good standing. For the next ninety days, he was stripped of his FOI rank and banned from temple functions and even from speaking with other members except officials. Malcolm used Joseph's shame as an opportunity to instruct his congregation about the standards that were expected: You know the laws of Islam, brother. You teach them. You taught them. You were Captain of the Fruit in Boston, and you've been Captain of the Fruit in Philadelphia, and you've been Captain of the Fruit right here. . . . You know, as well as I, and better perhaps than most brothers here, that any brother that puts his hand on his wife . . . if it comes to my knowledge, automatically has ninety days out of the Temple of Islam. . . . I hope and pray Allah will bless you to remain strong and come back into the Temple of Islam and do the good work for Allah and his Messenger in the Nation.

Joseph was asked if he had anything to say in his own defense; he declined to speak, and was told to leave the room. Malcolm informed temple members that the original charge of spousal abuse had been filed eight months before-implying that the case had been considered by the Messenger himself, so delaying the final decision. Then he launched into a vigorous defense of Joseph's character. ”Many of you may not like him. Many of you may have grievances against him . . . But also, many of you won't make the sacrifice that he would make.” Without question, Joseph was a ”good brother,” but for the next three months he was to be treated as an outcast. ”And all of those Muslims that follow him are outcasts.”

The FBI watched these internal conflicts with interest. On October 23 its New York office reported to the director that Gravitt had been removed as Temple No. 7's FOI captain, but that he had been allowed to hold a job as a night cook at the temple's restaurant. A second report, dated December 12, indicated that Gravitt still remained under suspension; if accurate, this was beyond the ninety-day period that Malcolm had mandated. By the celebration of Saviours Day in Chicago in late February 1957, Joseph had been fully restored to his rank. Yet the experience of becoming a temple ”outcast” likely left him feeling a profound sense of humiliation and a loss of status. He was no longer, at least within the confines of the temple, Malcolm's partner and equal; he was his subordinate, a hardworking but flawed lieutenant who had proven incapable of adhering to Malcolm's high moral standards.

While Joseph grew angrier, Malcolm continued to be unhappy with the slow growth of Harlem's Temple No. 7. He had begun making overtures to the Abyssinian Baptist Church, and also recruited several members from Powell's powerful Baptist church. The most productive fis.h.i.+ng grounds by far had been the tiny Pentecostal churches, whose members were working-cla.s.s blacks. But Malcolm must have seen that the most well-attended inst.i.tutions in Harlem were those involved in civil rights advocacy, electoral politics, and social reform. The NOI's culture was designed to look inward, to reject the ”devil” and all his works. However, if neither heaven nor h.e.l.l existed, as Elijah Muhammad taught, and the Negro's ”h.e.l.l” was here, in the United States, did not Muslims have an obligation to wage jihad?

Despite the absence of legal Jim Crow, New York City in the mid-1950s remained highly segregated. As the New York Times New York Times observed, ”There is gross discrimination against Negroes here, and in many respects they are the oppressed cla.s.s of the city.” Blacks as a rule were barred from most private housing, and were shepherded into ghettos like Harlem. The zoning of public schools confined most of their children to a substandard education, and there were frequent examples of police brutality toward blacks. For the NOI to break through to a ma.s.s audience, Malcolm would have to speak directly to these issues. Like Powell and other political ministers, he would have to leave his sanctuary and s.h.i.+ft his focus beyond simply recruiting congregants for the Nation. He would have to address the real-world conditions of African Americans. observed, ”There is gross discrimination against Negroes here, and in many respects they are the oppressed cla.s.s of the city.” Blacks as a rule were barred from most private housing, and were shepherded into ghettos like Harlem. The zoning of public schools confined most of their children to a substandard education, and there were frequent examples of police brutality toward blacks. For the NOI to break through to a ma.s.s audience, Malcolm would have to speak directly to these issues. Like Powell and other political ministers, he would have to leave his sanctuary and s.h.i.+ft his focus beyond simply recruiting congregants for the Nation. He would have to address the real-world conditions of African Americans.

Though he did not realize it at the time, Malcolm's career as a national civil rights leader began late on the afternoon of April 26, 1957, near the corner of Lenox Avenue and 125th Street, in the heart of Harlem. Two police officers were attempting to arrest a black man, Reese V. Poe, of 120 West 126th Street, following a street altercation. They were working over Poe with their nightsticks when three black men attempted to intervene: Frankie Lee Potts, twenty-three, as well as two members of Temple No. 7, Lypsie Tall, twenty-eight, and Johnson Hinton, thirty-two. The men yelled, ”You're not in Alabama. This is New York.” One of the patrolmen, interpreting this as a provocation, attempted to arrest Hinton, on the grounds of failure to move and resisting arrest. He delivered several powerful blows to Hinton's face and skull, which surgeons later diagnosed as causing lacerations of the scalp, a brain contusion, and subdural hemorrhaging. The three Muslims were then arrested along with Poe and hauled to the 28th Precinct station house.

A woman who had observed the a.s.sault rushed to the NOI's restaurant several blocks away with the news. Captain Joseph promptly mobilized members by telephone. At sundown, Malcolm and a small group of Muslims went to the station house and demanded to see brother Johnson. At first, the duty officer denied that any Muslims were there, but as a crowd of angry Harlemites swelled to about five hundred, the police changed their minds and Malcolm was allowed to speak briefly with him. Despite his pain and disorientation, Hinton explained that when they had arrived at the station house and he attempted to fall down on his knees to pray, an officer struck him across the mouth and s.h.i.+ns with his nightstick. Malcolm quickly took in Hinton's physical condition and demanded that he be properly treated. The police relented; Hinton was transported in an ambulance to Harlem Hospital-followed by about a hundred Muslims who walked in formation north up Lenox Avenue. Malcolm knew exactly what effect this march would have down the busiest thoroughfare in Harlem. While Hinton received treatment, the crowd outside swelled to two thousand. Alarmed, the NYPD called ”all available cops” to provide backup. Then, amazingly, they released Johnson X Hinton from the hospital-back to the 28th Precinct jail. The protesters marched back to the station house angrier than before, returning this time down West 125th Street, Harlem's central business corridor. Within an hour, at least four thousand people were jammed in front of the station house. A confrontation appeared inevitable.

When Malcolm finally walked into the station house, it was well past midnight. Escorting him was Harlem attorney Charles J. Beavers, who made bail arrangements for Potts and Tall and asked to see Hinton. The police allowed this but adamantly refused to return Hinton to the hospital, insisting that he had to be incarcerated overnight to appear in court the next day. At about two thirty a.m., with thousands of angry Harlemites still gathered outside, Malcolm sensed a stalemate. As if to underscore his authority in front of the police, he walked outside and gave a hand signal to his FOI phalanx. Silently and immediately, the FOI marched away, with orders to regroup at the NOI restaurant at four a.m. Following their lead, the protesting Harlemites also dispersed in minutes.

The police had never seen anything like it. One stunned officer, groping for an explanation, admitted to the New York Amsterdam News Amsterdam News editor James Hicks, ”No one man should have that much power.” editor James Hicks, ”No one man should have that much power.”

The next morning, bail of $2,500 was paid by the NOI, but the police still refused to deliver Hinton to his attorney or to Malcolm. Still bleeding and disoriented, he was dumped out into the street outside the city's felony courthouse. Malcolm's men subsequently drove him to Harlem's Sydenham Hospital, where doctors estimated that he had a fifty-fifty chance of surviving. The next day, a crowd of more than four hundred Muslims and Harlemites gathered for a vigil at a small park facing the hospital; NOI members from Boston, Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., Baltimore, Hartford, and other cities had driven in to take part. In a private meeting with a delegation of police administrators, Malcolm made the Nation's position clear: ”We do not look for trouble . . . we do not carry knives or guns. But we are also taught that when one finds something that is worthwhile getting into trouble about, he should be ready to die, then and there, for that particular thing.” As James Hicks observed, ”Though they were stern in their protest they were as orderly as a battalion of Marines.”

All three men who had been arrested were subsequently acquitted. Johnson X Hinton and the Muslims filed a successful lawsuit against the NYPD, receiving more than seventy thousand dollars, the largest police brutality judgment that a New York jury had ever awarded. But the incident had also set in motion the forces culminating in Malcolm's inevitable rupture with the Nation of Islam. Elijah Muhammad could maintain his personal authority only by forcing his followers away from the outside world; Malcolm knew that the Nation's future growth depended on its being immersed in the black community's struggles of daily existence. His evangelism had expanded the NOI's members.h.i.+p, giving it greater impact, but it was also forcing him to address the problems of non-Muslim black Americans in new ways. Eventually, he would have to choose: whether to remain loyal to Elijah Muhammad, or to be ”on the side of my people.”

CHAPTER 5.

”Brother, a Minister Has Has to Be Married” to Be Married”

May 1957-March 1959

The Johnson Hinton controversy introduced the Nation of Islam to hundreds of thousands of blacks, and Malcolm was quick to take advantage. He had already begun publis.h.i.+ng a regular column outlining the NOI's views, ”G.o.d's Angry Men,” in the Amsterdam News Amsterdam News, and now he worked to broaden the group's appeal. Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm argued in one column, was ”a modern-day Moses who . . . would ask G.o.d . . . to destroy this wicked race and their slave empire with plagues of cancer, polio, [and] heart disease.”

Hundreds of new blacks, both those who had been inspired by the Hinton incident and those who were simply curious, started attending temple lectures. Instead of preaching to the converted, Malcolm now gave more attention to crafting a popular message, and he rarely failed to deliver a command performance. Slowly, he began to incorporate into his talks his growing awareness of global events, merging the situations and goals of repressed peoples around the world with those of blacks in America. At his June 21 sermon at Temple No. 7, for example, he linked Bandung's theme of Third World solidarity with Elijah Muhammad's apocalyptic vision: Who is the Original Man? . . . It is the Asiatic Black Man. . . . The brown, red and yellow man along with the black outnumber the white man eleven to one. And he knows it. If ever they all got together to reclaim what the white man has taken from them the whites would not have a chance. How blind we are that we cannot see how badly our people, all our people, need to unite. But the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is here to unite us. The day is near. In the UN there is a pact of nations called the African-Asia block. It is a block comprised of some of the black nations on this earth. They are becoming stronger and it is just a bit more proof that the Black Men are beginning to realize that there is strength in numbers.

The summer of 1957 was one of tremendous growth for Malcolm, as he continued to make inroads to building greater legitimacy for the Nation while keeping up a demanding speaking schedule. In July, Temple No. 7 hosted an extravagant event, the Feast of the Followers of Messenger Muhammad, at Harlem's Park Palace dance club. More than two thousand attended, including Rafik Asha, leader of the Syrian mission to the UN, and Ahmad Zaki el-Barail, the Egyptian attache. The presence of the Muslim diplomats was an indication that Elijah Muhammad's long-standing efforts to acquire greater legitimacy in the Islamic world were producing results. The featured speaker was not Malcolm but twenty-four-year-old Wallace Muhammad, born on October 30, 1933, and seventh among the children of Clara and Elijah. Wallace was an a.s.sistant minister in the Chicago temple, and his partic.i.p.ation in New York City was significant. He had been tutored in Arabic as a teenager, and by the mid-1950s, troubled by the inconsistencies between his father's teachings and the cla.s.sical tenets of Islam, he relished the opportunity to make overtures to officials of Muslim nations. He may have expressed his doubts to Malcolm; what is certain is that this event initiated a closer relations.h.i.+p between the two young men.

In August, Malcolm took great strides toward bringing an older generation of Harlemites into the NOI fold. That month, a festival in honor of Marcus Garvey was organized in Harlem by a committee of local activists, including James Lawson's African Nationalist Movement and the United African Nationalist Movement. A huge outdoor stand was erected to accommodate the performers, and an impressive lineup of speakers was present. Without question, however, Malcolm stole the show. ”Moslem Speaker Electrifies Garvey Crowd,” reported the local Harlem paper, noting that ”the fiery Mr. X . . . attacked the white race for being 'responsible for the plight of the so-called Negroes in America' and condemned the Negroes' political and religious leaders as being nothing but 'puppets for the white man.'” His bravura performance in front of the police station had captured respect, but it was his speech at this festival that converted hundreds of old-line Garveyites to his cause.

Malcolm and the Nation's rising profile helped boost members.h.i.+p significantly, but it also put them more prominently in the sights of local and federal authorities. In the aftermath of the Hinton beating, the NYPD's secret operations unit, the Bureau of Special Services and Investigation (BOSS or BOSSI) began to take a special interest. BOSS was an elite unit staffed with detectives and charged with providing security to dignitaries and public leaders visiting the city. It also engaged in covert activities, such as the wiretapping of telephones and the infiltration of organizations deemed politically subversive. On May 15, 1957, NYPD chief inspector Thomas A. Nielson sent a series of urgent telegrams and letters to various law enforcement agencies around the country requesting information about Malcolm. He wrote the Detroit Police Department; the Michigan parole commission; the police chiefs of Dedham and Milton, Ma.s.sachusetts, and of Lansing, Michigan; and the superintendent of the Ma.s.sachusetts Reformatory at Concord. From each, Nielson asked for ”complete background [of] criminal information with photo showing full description.” The NYPD also began (or stepped up) tracking Malcolm at NOI public gatherings.

Late that summer, Elijah Muhammad gave Malcolm permission to deliver a four-week series of lectures at Temple No. 1 in Detroit, by now relocated to significantly larger quarters at 5401 John C. Lodge Street. Interest in the series was so extensive that the Pittsburgh Courier Pittsburgh Courier, one of the country's most prominent black newspapers, ran an interview with Malcolm in which he denounced the Eisenhower administration, particularly its failure to support the desegregation of public schools across the South. ”The root of the trouble and center of the arena is in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.,” he declared, ”where the modern-day 'Pharaoh's Magicians' are putting on a great show, fooling most of the so-called Negroes by pretending to be divided against each other.” The worst offender was Eisenhower himself, ”the 'Master Magician'” who was ”too busy playing golf to speak out-and with the expert timing of a master general, when he does speak out, he is always too late.” Unlike Elijah Muhammad, who after his spell in prison rarely criticized the government and almost never cited individual officials, Malcolm was both outspoken and named names.

The Detroit public lectures were both a long-awaited homecoming and an announcement of what the future had in store for black militancy. Through family and friends, Malcolm's remarkable story from criminality to public leaders.h.i.+p was well known in black Detroit. The reporter for the Los Angeles Dispatch Los Angeles Dispatch covering Malcolm's talk on August 10, 1957, noted, ”More than 4,000 Moslems and non-Moslems filled Muhammad's Detroit Temple of Islam to capacity to hear young Malcolm X.” The paper quoted Malcolm describing the position of black Americans within the U.S. political system as covering Malcolm's talk on August 10, 1957, noted, ”More than 4,000 Moslems and non-Moslems filled Muhammad's Detroit Temple of Islam to capacity to hear young Malcolm X.” The paper quoted Malcolm describing the position of black Americans within the U.S. political system as both strategic and unique. For, although the Negroes are deprived of most of their voting powers yet their diluted vote will swing the balance of power in the Presidential or any other election in this country. What would the role and the position of the Negro be if he had a full voting voice? . . . No wonder, then, the freedom or equal rights struggle of the Negro people is so greatly feared. . . . If the present leaders of the so-called American Negro don't unite soon, and take a firm stand with positive steps designed to eliminate immediately the brutal atrocities that are being committed daily against our people, and, if the so-called Negro intelligentsia, intellectuals and educators won't unite to help alter this nasty and most degrading situation; then the little man in the street will henceforth begin to take matters into his own hands.

This is an extraordinary pa.s.sage on several levels. First, it antic.i.p.ates the presidential election of 1960, which Kennedy narrowly won with 72 percent of the black vote. Years before the successful pa.s.sage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Malcolm appears to be linking the general empowerment of African Americans to the struggle for voter registration and education. Years before King, Malcolm understands the potential power of black bloc voting. Second, it proposes a broad-based coalition of civil rights organizations and other groups-presumably including the NOI-to address the collective problems of blacks. Third, the final sentence of the pa.s.sage implies a stark warning to the Negro intelligentsia and middle cla.s.s that the truly disadvantaged among the black ma.s.ses might, out of impatience or despair, rise up violently. This theme would become the basis for Malcolm's most famous address, his ”Message to the Gra.s.sroots,” delivered in Detroit on November 10, 1963. The speech also antic.i.p.ates his April 3, 1964, ”Ballot or the Bullet” speech that envisioned a bloodless revolution led by blacks exercising their democratic voting rights.

What was truly paradoxical about the August 10, 1957, address was that the NOI was at this time strictly opposed to its members becoming involved in electoral politics, or even registering to vote. What remained paradoxical about the Nation was that, despite being organized to achieve power, its core philosophy was apolitical. Temple members were never encouraged to register in civil rights demonstrations or disrupt public places by engaging in civil disobedience. They were hardly ”revolutionaries.” Perhaps one explanation is Congressman Powell's growing influence on Malcolm. Abyssinian's fifteen-thousand-strong voting bloc ill.u.s.trated just how powerful a single black inst.i.tution could be in the context of New York City's fractious politics. Malcolm may have floated these ideas as part of an attempt to change Elijah Muhammad's rigid antipolitics position.

Finally, the speech's flowing construction displayed Malcolm's growing rhetorical confidence. Although the talk was formally hosted by the Nation of Islam, its focus and style were profoundly secular: Malcolm no longer saw himself exclusively as an NOI minister, but someone who could speak to black politics.

The FBI of course monitored this and later lectures. One of its spies advised the Bureau that in September Malcolm had been named acting minister of Detroit's temple. The informant added that ”Little is well liked in Detroit and the meetings at which he spoke were well attended.” Two months on, Wilfred X Little would become head minister of Temple No. 1. The Amsterdam News Amsterdam News also followed Malcolm's Midwest road tour, reporting back that he had ”been a great hit with the general Detroit Public.” His speaking venues in that city were ”packed to capacity,” and his evangelical drive, the paper noted, had produced major gains for the Nation. also followed Malcolm's Midwest road tour, reporting back that he had ”been a great hit with the general Detroit Public.” His speaking venues in that city were ”packed to capacity,” and his evangelical drive, the paper noted, had produced major gains for the Nation.

Malcolm's high-impact speaking schedule kept members flowing in and media interest high, but it also battered his already weakened body. For a month after the Detroit lectures, he got by on only two to four hours of sleep each night, eating once daily, and keeping himself awake on coffee. Several days after a lecture on October 23, he began to feel severe pains in his chest and stomach. Fearing that he might have a coronary condition, he checked himself in to Harlem's Sydenham Hospital. The physicians diagnosed heart palpitations and inflammation around the ribs, but attributed the problems to exhaustion and stress. They strongly advised that he take time off, but he adamantly refused.

Checking out of Sydenham after a two-day stay, he rushed up to Boston to preside over the dedication of a new temple and to offer support for his protege Louis X, the Boston temple minister. Introduced as ”the founder of the Boston temple,” Malcolm reminded his audience about the inequality that existed throughout America. Blacks ”have died for this country and yet we are not [full] citizens.” Even other discriminated-against groups, such as the Jews, received better treatment. ”A Jew is in the White House, Jews in the State House, the Jews run the country. You and I can't go into a white hotel down south,” he argued, ”but a Jew can.”

Malcolm continued his public criticisms of New York's police department, writing a telegram to the police commissioner in which he demanded that the officers directly involved in the Hinton incident be suspended. In October, when a New York County grand jury opted not to indict those responsible, Malcolm condemned the decision. ”Harlem is already a potential powder keg,” he warned. ”If these ignorant white officers are allowed to remain in the Harlem area, their presence is not only a menace to society, but to world peace.” BOSS considered Malcolm's words as a threat against the police and increased its surveillance by placing black undercover officers inside the Nation. On November 7, BOSS detective Walter A. Upshur visited William Traynham, the administrator of Sydenham Hospital in Harlem, to investigate Malcolm's recent hospitalization. The detective learned that Malcolm's ”admitting diagnosis was coronary” and obtained the name and address of his private physician.

By November 10, Malcolm was back in Detroit, and soon after departed on a nearly three-week-long tour of the West Coast with the goal of establis.h.i.+ng a strong temple in Los Angeles. Following this, he made an unscheduled return stop in Detroit to tell a standing-room-only audience that Islam was ”spreading like a flaming fire awakening and uniting Negroes where it is heard.” Although Malcolm usually spoke at Muslim temples, his audiences increasingly consisted of both Muslim and non-Muslim blacks. In his language and style, Malcolm reached out to recruit black Christians to his cause.

His breakthrough as a national speaker generated a financial windfall for the Nation. Between five hundred and one thousand African Americans were joining almost every month. The demand for new temples must have seemed endless. Much of the new revenue went into commercial ventures overseen by Raymond Sharrieff, mostly in Chicago: a restaurant, a dry cleaning and laundry establishment, a bakery, a barbershop, a well-stocked grocery store. The Nation also purchased an apartment building on Chicago's South Side, as well as a farm and a house in White Cloud, Michigan, valued at sixteen thousand dollars. The economic success of these ventures may have been responsible for Elijah Muhammad's decision to stop mentioning some of the original tenets of Wallace D. Fard's Islam-in particular the bizarre Yacub's History-and to give greater emphasis to the Garveyite thesis that a self-sustainable, all-black capitalist economy was a viable strategy.

Malcolm's popularity gave him unprecedented leverage with Muhammad, allowing him to achieve major concessions, such as NOI ministers being permitted the surname Shabazz rather than the standard X. Since, according to NOI theology, Shabazz was the original tribal ident.i.ty of the lost-founds, it could be claimed as a legitimate surname. Contrary to the perception that ”Malcolm Shabazz” emerged only after Malcolm's break with the Nation in 1964, he was using this name widely by 1957.

Muhammad's pride in Malcolm's strategic judgments allowed the young minister to develop regional recruitment campaigns in areas where the NOI had never previously canva.s.sed. The best, and in many ways the most problematic, example was in the South. Despite Malcolm's establishment of the Atlanta temple in 1955, the NOI had virtually no presence below the Mason-Dixon line. Yet in the recent years of the Nation's greatest growth, the region had become a racial powder keg. In Montgomery, Alabama, the successful bus boycott of 1955-56, initiated by Rosa Parks's refusal to surrender her seat on a segregated bus, had brought to national attention the struggle to abolish legal Jim Crow. Since the Nation of Islam's position favored racial separation, Malcolm thought it important that integrationist reformers like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., not be allowed to exercise too great an influence-Elijah Muhammad's message of black solidarity, black capitalism, and racial separatism had to be carried into Dixie. These arguments made sense to Muhammad, who gave him permission to launch a Southern campaign. Though eager, Malcolm moved with some caution: when the press asked his opinions on the Montgomery boycott, he praised Rosa Parks's courage, describing her as a ”good, hard-working, Christian-believing black woman.” Rarely would he directly criticize the protests espoused by King.

Malcolm already had some experience stumping for the Nation of Islam in the South. In August 1956, one year after establis.h.i.+ng the Atlanta temple, he had been the featured speaker for the first Southern Goodwill Tour of the Brotherhood of Islam. The convention attracted hundreds of people across the region, but to ensure an impressive turnout NOI temples from as far away as Atlantic City and Lansing sent their members. By the conclusion of the tour, the Atlanta temple had doubled its members.h.i.+p. The next February, Malcolm was again called to the South, this time to Alabama. While en route to attend the Saviours Day convention in Chicago that year, a group of NOI members tangled with police at a train station in the small town of Flomaton. Two Muslim women had violated an ordinance by sitting on a whites-only bench, and police moved to confront them. When two young Muslim men, Joe Allen and George R. White, sought to protect the women, the local police chief, ”Red” Hemby, pulled his revolver. In the struggle, Allen and White disarmed and severely beat the officer. Minutes later they were arrested and charged with attempted murder. Arriving in Flomaton, Malcolm used his influence to secure their release with only minor fines.

His second major Southern tour, the centerpiece of the campaign that Muhammad had approved, took place in September and October of 1958, beginning in Atlanta, which, with its flouris.h.i.+ng temple, remained one of the few urban centers in the region to have a significant NOI presence. By September 29 he was in Florida, and over the next two weeks the state's NOI members coordinated public lectures for him in Miami, Tampa, and Jacksonville. Apparently Malcolm did not modify his talks to address regional issues that were particularly relevant in the South. Nevertheless, his speeches did attract modest media coverage, and the tour enhanced the Nation's profile, especially in Miami.