Blood Brothers (10 page)

Liebling captured Clay's light, whimsical quality—the way he glided through his training regimen, skipping rope without a rope, toying good-naturedly with his sparring partners, talking nonstop at record speed. Nothing about Cassius smacked of a traditional pugilist. He even dressed like a nineteenth-century man of letters from the school of Oscar Wilde. After his workout he retired to the locker room and reappeared in a snuff-colored suit and lace-front shirt, the sort Liebling had seen in shop windows on Broadway but had never “known anyone with nerve enough to wear.” The overweight, sharp-eyed journalist had spent much of his life around boxers and their retinues and had lived in France and England, but he had not met anyone quite like Cassius Clay.
³²

Clay, he judged, might just be the fighter who could save boxing, a “new Hero,” coming along “like a Moran tug to pull it out of the doldrums.”
³³

A
COLD
F
EBRUARY
wind lashed New York on the night of the bout, making it feel even colder than the fifteen-degree temperature. And for all of Clay's ballyhoo, only a smattering of people showed up at the Garden—Liebling wrote that the attendance was “so thin that it could more properly be denominated a quorum. . . . Only fans who like sociability ordinarily turn up for a fight that they can watch for nothing on
television, and that night the cold had kept even the most gregarious at home.”
³⁴

As Clay moved to the center of the ring for the referee's instructions, he saw a boxer very different from the ones he had been fighting. Unlike Miteff or Besmanoff, Banks carried no excess weight around his middle. He was as tall and as heavy as Clay, and only a year and a half older. But where Cassius's face was round, Banks's was thin, with a long pointed chin. His body was hard and muscular, with “the kind of inverted-triangle torso the pro-proletarian artists like to put on their steelworkers,” wrote Liebling. His record was 10–2, and his career was on the upswing.

At the bell, Clay glided across the ring like a ballet dancer, his high, white buckskin boots seeming to barely touch the canvas as he moved toward Banks, who fought out of a crouch, advancing toward Cassius like a crab with one pincer out front and the other close to its body. “Wrapped in certitude,” Clay circled, jabbed, moved, and talked, nimbly avoiding Banks's slow maneuvers. For a minute or so it looked like a contest between a skillful matador and an awkward bull.

Then, for only a moment, the matador took his eyes off the bull and the fight took a sudden, dramatic turn. Forcing Banks into a corner, Cassius carelessly left himself open and Banks lashed out with a hard left hook. It was a solid punch, knocking him to the canvas for the first time in his professional career. In Clay's corner Dundee turned pale, as if he had just dropped an heirloom Ming vase.

At the count of two, Clay got up, appearing more embarrassed than hurt. At that moment, when it was most needed, he demonstrated his professionalism. He was cool. He didn't charge Banks in a fit of anger or back away from him. Instead he boxed smartly, “cuff, slap, jab, and stick, the busy hands stinging like bees,” observed Liebling. It was Banks who became overly excited, throwing wild punches and receiving punishment for his efforts. By the end of the round he was spitting blood and was bone-tired from throwing and missing haymakers.

For the rest of the fight Clay was in complete control. His speed frustrated Banks, who fought defensively, “like a man trying to fight off wasps with a shovel.” As Banks's legs tired, his face became his primary defensive weapon. Near the end of the second, Clay floored him with a
hard right hand. And in the third, Cassius continued the punishment, cutting Banks's eye so badly that the ring doctor had to examine it at the end of the round.

The physician permitted the fight to continue, but it did not last long. Clay had predicted he would end it in round four, and so he did. A quick flurry of punches staggered Banks, rendering him defenseless. That was enough to convince the referee to stop the contest. Afterward, Banks tried to explain what had happened: “Things just went sour gradually all at once. . . . You got to respect a boxer. He'll pick you and peck you, peck you and pick you, until you don't know where you are.”
³⁵

Ringsiders had booed Cassius throughout the match, taking particular objection to his “hospital-white shoes,” which they thought no self-respecting fighter would wear. And the sportswriters were more impressed by Clay's antics than his ability. “Cassius Marcellus Clay has the personality of a Roman candle and the potential to light up the drab skies of boxing,” wrote Milton Gross, “but the brilliance of the young heavyweight's tongue still outstrips his talent.”
³⁶

T
HE
B
ANKS VICTORY
earned Clay his first top-ten ranking. The National Boxing Association and
Boxing Illustrated
ranked him tenth, and
The Ring,
ninth. He still had not fought an active contender, but he had climbed into the elite group. Some sportswriters insisted that he belonged near the top, while others thought that he was a loudmouth fraud. But they all wrote about him. The combined strategies of Dundee and Clay had succeeded almost effortlessly.
³⁷

By spring 1962, Cassius Clay had become one of the leading draws in boxing. He fought only has-beens and never-has-beens, none ranked among the contenders, without taking substantial risks, and his reputation soared. His appeal was so great that promoters vied to put him in yet another sure-bet match. In Los Angeles, matchmaker Joe Louis arranged for Clay to headline a card of contenders.
³⁸

Louis selected George Logan, a battered veteran fighter from Idaho, to fight Cassius. In contrast to Clay's flawless face, which gave no hint of his profession, Logan's displayed grim souvenirs of his ring wars. He was a fighter, columnist Jim Murray wrote, whose “face makes him look like he wasn't born, he was knitted. . . . He has taken more punches than a time clock because he fights with the unorthodox style of a dart
board.” Everyone involved in the fight understood that Logan was included because he moved ponderously, bled freely, and had no chance of harming Cassius's record or face.
³⁹

Cassius was the show. “I'm fighting the main event on Louis' first show,” he said. “And what's the secret?” Stretching his mouth wide with his index fingers, he said, “Boca Grande.”
⁴⁰

Fight night was a booming success for the promoters, but the actual contest was less spectacular. Clay made a royal entrance, accompanied by the house organist's rendition of “Pomp and Circumstance.” Preening and mugging for the cameras, he actually looked more like popular singers Chubby Checker and Sam Cooke than a professional prizefighter. Jim Murray wrote, “The love of Cassius for Clay is so rapturous no girl could come between them. Marriage would be almost bigamy.”
⁴¹

Logan was less interested in aesthetics. He climbed into the ring with a large gob of Vaseline smeared over his eyebrows and had the look of a man being taken to the woodshed for a beating. Once the match began he gamely went to work, stolidly pursuing his elusive opponent. But he had no answer for Clay's speed. He could not get close enough to hit him or stay far enough away to avoid getting socked. “He had less protection than a guy facing a Castro firing squad,” wrote Sid Ziff.
⁴²

By the end of the first round Logan's face looked like “raw hamburger,” and by the end of the second spectators called for the referee to stop the slaughter. It was gruesome. Clay's punches sliced into the soft scar tissue above Logan's eyes like a hot knife into butter.

Blood ran down Logan's chest, stained his trunks, and soaked the canvas. His cut man worked feverishly between rounds to stop the flow, putting an astringent into the wound then smearing it with Vaseline, but the fix only lasted until Clay went back to work. Finally, midway through the fourth round, Logan's manager threw in the white towel of surrender. Logan protested the decision, not knowing how bad he looked. “It couldn't have been much worse if Clay had used knives,” wrote a reporter. In his corner seconds later, Logan realized his condition and tried to hide his face while the ring doctor examined it.

“I'm trying to keep my pretty looks,” Clay told writers in his dressing room. Then his mind flew away from the mundane present and landed in the fabulous future.

H
E CONTINUED TO
talk long after the fight had ended and most of the reporters had left to file their stories. He chatted about himself—his plans and his future. More interesting was what he wasn't talking about. Only days before a major racial conflict in Los Angeles, Clay had still said nothing about the civil rights movement or the plight of black Americans. Far from reflecting a lack of interest, he kept much of who he was hidden away from reporters, buried inside himself.

In April 1962, one could still only glean kernels of that hidden self. Publicly, he emphasized his Christian virtues. “I live by the Bible,” he told
Los Angeles Times
reporter Paul Zimmerman. “My mother and father taught me to live right. ‘No stealin', no cussin', no drinkin', no smokin',' the Bible says that he who reads the good book will understand to tell the truth.”
⁴³

But other times he hinted that his religious beliefs were not exactly the ones he had learned in Louisville. Even when he was not in Miami, he pondered what he had learned at the mosque and in his conversations with Sam Saxon and the Black Muslim ministers. During several talks with reporters he addressed the subject of pork. Once at dinner during a long train ride, Clay witnessed sportswriter Myron Cope cut into a roast pork loin. Cassius shuddered: “Poke give me a headache. . . . Doctors tell me poke ninety percent live cell parasites. Poke ninety percent maggots. . . . You let that poke lay two days, it get up and crawl. The hawg is an unclean animal. Cat, rat, dog, hawg—add 'em up.” It was the language not of his Baptist mother or his father but of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X.
⁴⁴

Chapter Four

IN COLD BLOOD

            
Because a man doesn't throw a punch doesn't mean he can't do so whenever he gets ready.

—MALCOLM X

W
hen Cassius Clay answered the telephone one day in early June 1962, he had no idea that the call would change his life. It was Sam Saxon, calling to invite him and his brother Rudy to Detroit for a Black Muslim rally. Over the past year, Cassius had attended more Muslim meetings outside Miami, but he had not yet heard Elijah Muhammad preach in person. With more than five weeks until his next scheduled fight, Clay could afford to spend a weekend with Saxon. So Cassius eagerly accepted his invitation, and a few days later, Sam picked up the Clay brothers in Louisville and drove them to Detroit. There was someone very important Saxon wanted Cassius to meet.
¹

When they arrived on Sunday, June 10, they stopped at a luncheonette crowded with black patrons. Sitting at a back table where he could watch the front door, surrounded by Muslim officers and an assortment of supplicants, Malcolm X noticed Sam Saxon accompanied by two handsome, athletic men walking straight toward his table. Malcolm could see that they were anxious to meet him. One of the brothers, a confident young man with the face of a matinee idol, pumped the minister's hand and announced, “I'm Cassius Clay,” which he assumed said it all.
²

For more than two years Cassius had been repeating his name, usually adding that he was “the greatest” and “the prettiest fighter” who had
ever laced on a pair of gloves. When Malcolm met the Clay brothers, however, he did not realize that one of them was famous. He had not followed boxing, bet on matches, or read the sports page since he left prison. “Up to that moment . . . I had never heard of him,” he said later. “Ours were two entirely different worlds.” They spoke only briefly, as Malcolm had only a few minutes to finish preparing his opening remarks for the rally. But Clay had already made an impression on him. There was something about the young fighter—some “contagious quality . . . simply a likeable, friendly, clean-cut, down-to-earth” charm—that intrigued Malcolm. He did not know it yet, but he would soon understand that there was a place for Cassius Clay in his world.
³

I
N THE EARLY
1960
S
, as the civil rights movement intensified, so, too, did Malcolm's violent rhetoric. The Muslims, he claimed, lived by
lex talionis
. “We believed in a fair exchange,” he said. “An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. A head for a head and a life for a life. If this is the price of freedom, we won't hesitate to pay the price.” When anyone questioned the Nation's willingness to retaliate, he replied that a Muslim was like a boxer in the ring with his fist cocked, just waiting for the right opening. He warned, “You might see these Negroes who believe in nonviolence and mistake us for one of them and put your hands on us thinking that we're going to turn the other cheek—and
we'll put you to death just like that
.”
⁴

The time had arrived for the Muslims to punch back. On April 27, 1962, about six weeks before Cassius Clay met Malcolm X, a melee broke out between police officers and members of the Nation's Los Angeles mosque. It all began when two black men standing behind the open trunk of a car were stopped by white policemen in a parking lot a few doors away from the mosque. As the officers frisked them, a crowd of angry Muslims gathered. In a matter of minutes, chaos erupted, shots were fired, and the Muslims retreated for safety. Squad cars of backup officers rushed to the scene. Policemen raided the mosque and randomly struck black men with nightsticks. The next morning, the
Los Angeles Times
announced in bold print: “‘muslims' riot: Cultist Killed, Policeman Shot.”
⁵

When the gun smoke cleared, one Muslim—Ronald Stokes, the secretary of the mosque—was dead, another was paralyzed, and five others had been wounded. All but one of the policemen's bullets hit
the Muslims in their backs. The LAPD booked fourteen black men on suspicion of assault with intent to kill. The
Times
described “the blazing gunfight” like it was the shootout at the O.K. Corral. Beneath the newspaper headline was a picture of Stokes, handcuffed and lying facedown in a pool of blood.
⁶

When Malcolm heard the news, he wept for Stokes, whom he had known since 1960. Enraged, he swiftly buried his sadness and prepared for revenge. In Harlem, he confided to his assistant ministers that he planned to organize vigilantes. But Elijah Muhammad ordered him to stand down. “Brother, you don't go to war over a provocation,” he told him. “They could kill a few of my followers but I'm not going to go out and do something silly.” Muhammad sent Raymond Sharrieff to Los Angeles, where the Supreme Captain of the Fruit ensured that there was no coordinated retaliation.
⁷

Without authorization to retaliate, Malcolm instead escalated his rhetoric. On May 4, a week after the shooting, Malcolm held a press conference in Los Angeles at the Statler Hilton Hotel and accused the police of murdering Stokes. “Seven innocent unarmed black men were shot down in
cold blood
by Police Chief William Parker's Los Angeles City Police,” he charged. He thought that Parker, who sometimes pronounced
Negroes
as “Niggras,” was guilty of “filling his own men with hatred of the black community” and spreading lies about the Muslims. In Los Angeles, Malcolm argued, blacks lived under a “police state,” just like the “Jews in Nazi Germany.”
⁸

The following morning, Malcolm conducted Stokes's funeral at the two-story mosque, where more than two thousand blacks packed the old stucco lodging hall. Although white journalists were barred from entering the building, black reporters told the
Los Angeles Times
that the minister delivered a moving tribute for the Muslims' “fallen warrior.” Outside the mosque, hundreds of mourners lined both sides of Broadway, watching the pallbearers carry Stokes's body in a gray casket. Some men bitterly complained about Elijah Muhammad's warning against revenge. Others were so angry that they renounced Muhammad and left the Los Angeles mosque all together. If the black man was ever going to be truly free, they declared, he had to defend himself.
⁹

Standing near the hearse, a tall, lean black man with a shaved head, dressed in a dark suit, faced a photographer from the
Times
. Fixing his
gaze on the camera, he struck a militant pose, raising his fist in what would later become known as a Black Power salute. His clenched fist signified defiance, assertiveness, and liberation. The
Times
didn't identify the man by name, but in his silent rage for justice, his gesture spoke eloquently about a burgeoning movement that had no name.

Muhammad sent word that the Muslims should head out into the street and “begin the war with the devil.” But it was not the kind of war his followers expected. They would fight the white man by exposing his crimes, letting the world know that he was the devil by selling newspapers.
¹⁰

Selling newspapers? The men could not believe what they had just heard. What were they going to do with newspapers? Roll them up and swat armed policemen like flies? Edward 2X Sherrill, the captain of the mosque, exhorted, “I want all of you brothers to take at least fifty newspapers! Be sure you pay for them right now at the door.”
¹¹

Malcolm shared the brothers' frustration with Muhammad's passivity. He was even more outraged when an all-white coroner's jury took less than thirty minutes to acquit the LAPD of killing an unarmed black man, claiming his death was “justifiable homicide under lawful performance of duty and in self defense.” The police shooting radicalized the black community, galvanizing the movement toward greater militancy and confrontation.
¹²

The Stokes case further elevated Malcolm into a national political figure. He began thinking of himself as a leader, a grassroots organizer, and a voice for the masses. He spoke less and less about Muhammad's religious teachings and more about politics and current events. Most importantly, the murder made him reconsider the Nation's role in the larger struggle. Calling for wider racial unity that transcended religion and ideology, he urged blacks to “come together against the common enemy.”
¹³

The events in Los Angeles deepened Malcolm's internal conflict within the Nation. When Muhammad heard that Malcolm had called for greater cooperation with civil rights groups, he demanded that his minister return home. “Brother, stay where I put you because [the civil rights organizations] have no place to go,” he said. Muhammad did not want him leading demonstrations, agitating authorities, or arousing greater attention from the FBI. The risk was too great. Malcolm was the
Nation's most prized asset, and Muhammad could not afford for him to go to jail or get himself killed. The Supreme Minister instructed him to “play dead on everything.”
That
was an order.
¹⁴

Malcolm seethed. He felt like a tiger on a leash, reduced to nothing more than an empty roar. His critics complained that he sure talked a good game, but he never
did
anything. In Harlem, people saw him standing across the street from picketers, distancing himself from demonstrations. Sometimes he showed up at civil rights meetings, slouching in the back of the room with his hat pulled low.
¹⁵

Elijah's passive response to the assault on the Los Angeles mosque was an embarrassment. For years, he had been telling his followers that if they were attacked, they must be willing to sacrifice their lives in the name of Allah. Every mosque had captains, lieutenants, and soldiers in the Fruit, preparing for the Battle of Armageddon. Now Muhammad ordered retreat just as the battle was about to begin. “The Messenger,” Malcolm bitterly complained to his assistant ministers, “should have done more. People in the civil rights movement have been brutalized, and we haven't done anything to help them. Now we have our own brothers killed and maimed, and we
still
haven't done anything.”
¹⁶

FBI agents listening in on Muhammad's phone calls learned that he had become alarmed about his young minister's restlessness. He worried that there was no one who could “control Malcolm,” not even the Messenger himself. During a phone call Elijah warned Malcolm, just before he hung up, “I hope Allah will keep you wise.”
¹⁷

O
N
A
PRIL
26, 1962, the FBI's Chicago office sent a report to J. Edgar Hoover offering valuable information that could be “used to discredit Elijah Muhammad with his followers.” Informants divulged that Muhammad had engaged in extramarital affairs with women who belonged to the Nation. Of those, at least seven mistresses, most of them former secretaries, claimed that the Messenger had fathered their children.
¹⁸

Muhammad's harem was the worst-kept secret inside the Nation. Over the past year, the FBI had collected sensitive information about his affairs. Agents noted that Muhammad had strict rules about adultery, forbidding married men from “taking up time with other sisters.” A Muslim man accused of fornicating outside his marriage risked facing not only a trial before the Fruit but also complete banishment from
the Nation. Brothers were supposed to respect Muslim women, glorify them, and guard their purity with their lives.
¹⁹

Although Muhammad claimed that Muslim women should be elevated on pedestals, they were also instructed to show absolute obedience to their husbands. Women were segregated from men during rallies and taught domestic skills in comprehensive courses, where they learned about cooking, sewing, and raising children. They were prohibited from wearing cosmetics, short skirts, or pants. Nor did women conduct religious services, organize meetings, or make decisions about the family. If a woman questioned her male partner in any way, she could receive a hard slap across the face.
²⁰

In some cases, Muhammad made his lovers endure farcical trials, charging them with immorality for bearing children out of wedlock and violating the Nation's moral code. In other instances, he lavished his mistresses with gifts using money donated from the Nation's followers. He promised some of his young paramours that they would raise a family together. But most often those promises went unfulfilled, and bitter women threatened to expose his lies. Some even showed up at his Chicago doorstep, ringing the bell and leaving their babies on the stoop.
²¹

The FBI realized that if Muhammad's followers learned about his affairs, the hypocrisy could lead to the downfall of the Nation. The Bureau's agents recommended using “carefully selected informants” who would plant “the seeds of dissension through anonymous letters and/or telephone calls.” Specifically, they suggested mailing letters to his wife, Clara, even though she already knew all about his trysts.
²²