L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City

Jingles pushed away Kensic’s hands. Although he wasn’t fighting back, the attitude worried Kensic, who promptly grabbed Jingles’s arm and spun him around, slamming the man onto the trunk of the Buick. A bystander ran into the temple to call for help. Instead of going limp, Jingles fought back. Jones now slipped away from Officer Tomlinson and pulled Kensic off his friend. A fight broke out. As Tomlinson ran to help his partner, he was grabbed by another Muslim. The scene was briefly interrupted when a black off-duty special deputy driving down Broadway stopped and fired a warning shot. Officer Tomlinson now had a chance to regain control of the situation. But instead of composing himself, drawing his gun, ordering the crowd to freeze, and then radioing for help, Tomlinson pulled out his sap and attempted to hit the nearest Muslim. At that very moment, the black special deputy motorist fired into the crowd, wounding Jingles. In the confusion, Jones grabbed Kensic’s gun—and shot Tomlinson. An African American policeman who happened to be driving by jumped out and fired a shot into the air to disperse the crowd. Then he radioed for help. Meanwhile, Black Muslims were racing back to the temple from across the neighborhood.

Police cruisers poured into the neighborhood. Instead of sealing off the area and ascertaining just what had happened, officers charged the building, swinging nightsticks wildly. Two Muslims who fought with the police were shot. So were two who sought to flee or surrender. One died; another was permanently disabled. Four more men were badly injured. Other Muslims fought back, ineffectually. Inside the men’s room, police beat a dozen of the men who’d been involved in the melee. The battle was over.

The following day, Chief Parker went to visit Officer Kensic at Central Receiving Hospital. Afterward, Parker called the Friday-night incident “the most brutal conflict I’ve seen” in his thirty-five years on the force and described Kensic’s injuries as the result of a vicious attack by a “hate organization which is dedicated to the destruction of the Caucasian race.”

The Nation of Islam sent in one of its most prominent leaders too—its “national minister,” Malcolm X. At a press conference at the Statler Hilton Hotel (which Malcolm X began with the sobering words “Seven innocent, unarmed black men were shot in cold blood”), the controversial Black Muslim leader denounced Chief Parker as a man “intoxicated with power and his own ego.”

But Malcolm X wasn’t there for funeral publicity. He was determined to bring the LAPD to justice. Suspecting that police would seek to prosecute the men it had arrested in order to justify the seven shootings, he set to work lining up the services of one of the city’s most respected African American attorneys, Earl Broady. A former policeman and now a proud resident of Beverly Hills, Broady initially rejected these overtures. He thought of Black Muslims as riffraff and saw Parker as a reformer, albeit an autocratic one. However, Malcolm X’s persistence and his lucid explanations of what was at stake—plus the largest retainer fee Broady had ever been offered—eventually prevailed.^[22]

Malcolm X’s efforts put the NAACP in an awkward situation. Although he was loath to associate his organization with the Nation of Islam, executive director Roy Wilkins suspected there was considerable truth to Malcolm X’s version of what had happened. Eventually, the NAACP decided to join the civil suit. Meanwhile, the LAPD counterattacked. Parker arranged for a group of Negro leaders, many of them ministers hostile to the Black Muslims, to endorse a campaign to eradicate the Nation of Islam. But when the group convened before the county board of supervisors on May 8, protesters shouted them down. Both the ministers and the supervisors were shaken. Not since the days of the Zoot Suit Riots, said one supervisor, had he felt such tension. The ministers decided to amend their request. Now, they proposed to work with the police to eradicate the Nation of Islam and police brutality. Three days later a group of twenty-five ministers met with Chief Parker. But when one of the participants, Rev. H. H. Brookins, broached a recent order to require two officers per car in Negro areas, Chief Parker declared, “I didn’t come here to be lectured,” and stalked out. Horrified, the head of the Police Commission persuaded Parker to return. But at the end of the meeting Parker complained that “the Negro people” seemed unable to conduct a civil exchange with him.