But Cooke sees white audiences as a means for capturing a portion of the music market share and white businesses as a model for making money.
Cooke’s roots in Chicago may be a way to explain his view on life and his money-over-everything mentality. Born in Clarksdale, Miss., Cooke’s family settled in the city’s Black Bronzeville neighborhood when he was two years old. Most of his formative years were spent in Chicago, where he witnessed much of the corruption today’s Black Chicagoans cite: aldermanic privilege, Black leaders who are unable to pass the torch to younger generations, and industries that are difficult — if not impossible — to break into.
For Cooke, there’s hypocrisy in Malcolm X telling him to ignore economics while being financially supported by the Nation of Islam, whose leader was living in an-almost 10,000-square-feet house also used as the organization’s home base, valued at over $2 million today. Cooke says he sees families like his on the South Side of Chicago struggle while Black leaders live like “pharaohs.”
“I know where Elijah Muhammad’s house is—it’s the biggest one for miles around, looks like the mayor’s residence,” Cooke tells Malcolm X. “[Muhammad] never says nothing about the crooked Black aldermen who’s running numbers, pushing drugs, doing all the things to hurt the community, meanwhile condemning those white devils.”
And even in 2021, the fact that poverty is still so heavily concentrated in the city’s Black communities, it absolutely does not feel like we’ve reached liberation.
So Cooke was a product of a Chicago system that pushed him to hustle, one that made him work harder and smarter than anyone else—especially if you’re young, and gifted, and Black. —and it makes you a student of how other businesses thrive so that you can use those funds to support your community.
Like Brown explains to Malcolm X when urging him to lay off of Cooke, “If the goal is to really be free, then we have to be economically free … [and] no one is more economically free than him.”
But Malcolm X’s focus on Cooke and his constant judgment is not because he doesn’t like him: It’s because he very much loves him. And, as we can clearly see, Malcolm X believes it’s his responsibility to push Cooke and to hold him accountable for what he is or is not doing with his influence. To him, Cooke might have the best outlet of all of the men.
“You can move mountains without lifting a finger,” he tells him.