Blood Brothers (5 page)

Clay may have been a boxer, but he was not a fighter. He disliked confrontations and avoided violence outside the ring. He preferred Overtown, where he felt safer among his own people. Throughout the neighborhood blacks greeted him warmly and made him feel important. And soon enough, one man in particular standing at the corner of Northwest Second Avenue and 6th Street, in front of Muhammad's Temple of Islam, caught Cassius's attention.

Sam Saxon, a burly, thirty-year-old, light-skinned black man with the arms of a blacksmith, waved a copy of
Muhammad Speaks
, the Nation of Islam's newspaper. The two men started talking about the
teachings of Elijah Muhammad. As he listened to Clay speak, it was clear to Saxon that he had already heard of the Nation's leader, though he had never seen or met Elijah before. “Hey, you're into the teaching,” Saxon said. “Well, I ain't been to the temple, but I know what you're talking about,” Clay replied. Then the boxer introduced himself as he always did: “I'm Cassius Clay. I'm gonna be the next heavyweight champion of the world.” Saxon, a boxing fan, recognized the name. “I know you, man,” he said, “I followed you in the Olympics.”
²²

The fact that Saxon knew his name engendered a level of trust from Clay. A former gambler and poolroom hustler turned missionary, Saxon had become a devout Muslim. When he was not selling copies of
Muhammad Speaks
or teaching in the temple, he ran concessions at the Miami racetracks and worked as a bathroom attendant, handing towels to white men and shining their shoes. But his primary objective in life, his real love, was fishing for converts.
²³

Wherever there were large concentrations of “so-called Negroes,” as the Black Muslims called them, those “lost souls” in the Kingdom of Allah, Elijah Muhammad's ministers cast their lines. On Sundays, young Muslim men, clean-shaven and hair close-cropped, dressed in dark suits, waited outside churches, inviting Christians to hear the truth about God at the local temple. On weeknights, Muhammad's foot soldiers, armed with Muslim literature, canvassed the streets of the ghetto, “fishing for the dead,” those “deaf, dumb, and blind—brainwashed of all self-respect and knowledge of kind by the white Slavemaster.” In nearly every large American city, Muslim officers trolled in bars, liquor stores, pool halls, barbershops, and diners. Standing on soapboxes and stepladders, Muhammad's articulate followers preached, captivating the curious.
²⁴

In their meetings at Temple No. 29, a vacant storefront converted into a makeshift mosque, Saxon noticed that Clay was curious about the Muslim faith. In Miami, most blacks viewed the Muslims with skepticism, rarely entering the temple. When Clay first started attending meetings there were only about thirty members. In his first visit, he heard a preacher named Brother John deliver a sermon on the history of the black man. Cassius learned that white slave owners stripped the black man of his identity, his heritage, his language, and his true name and replaced it with a slave name, a name that belonged to the white
man. According to the Muslims, the word
Negro
derived not from the Latin
niger
, meaning “black,” but rather from the Greek
nekros
, meaning “corpse.” Thus, the man who called himself a “Negro” remained spiritually dead, buried in the grave.
²⁵

Brother John's sermon helped Cassius make sense of his family's history and his own identity as a black man. He later recalled, “I could reach out and touch what Brother John was saying. It wasn't like church teaching, where I had to have faith that what the preacher was preaching was right. And I said to myself, ‘Cassius Marcellus Clay. He was a Kentucky white man who owned my great-granddaddy and named my great-granddaddy after him. And then my granddaddy got named, and then my daddy, and now it's me.'”
²⁶

For the first time in his life, Clay's name didn't sound so magical. At that moment, when Cassius began questioning the origins of his name, Sam Saxon knew that he had hooked a big fish.

D
EPENDING ON THE
day of the week and the whim of the moment, Cassius claimed to have first learned about the Nation of Islam in Atlanta, Chicago, or New York in 1958, 1959, or 1960. Over the years, whenever reporters asked him about his conversion to Islam, his answers were inconsistent. In his stories, Clay created an origin myth based on his scattered memories and affection for tall tales. There were hardly any witnesses who could testify about his accounts, creating a sense of mystery about his activities with the Nation. In all of his anecdotes about meeting the Muslims, one thing remained constant: whenever he left Louisville and found freedom from supervision, he gravitated toward the temples. No one understood this better than Clay's own mother. “The big mistake was when [the Louisville Sponsoring Group] sent him to train at Miami all by himself,” she said. “That's when the Muslims got him. That's how Sam Saxon got him and talked that Muslim stuff to him every day.”
²⁷

Odessa was unaware that her son had started listening to the Muslims long before he ever met Sam Saxon. As a teenager, when Cassius traveled for amateur boxing tournaments, he came across Muslim preachers proselytizing for the teachings of Elijah Muhammad. In October 1958, Clay and his brother Rudy traveled to Atlanta for a vacation. At the time, the FBI had assigned Special Agent Robert R. Nichols
to investigate the activities at Muhammad's Temple No. 15 in Atlanta. Nichols set up wiretaps on the temple's phones and hired college students to record the minister's speeches.
²⁸

Nichols learned that Clay had talked with the Muslims outside the Atlanta temple on Piedmont Avenue. At the time, the information seemed unimportant. After all, Cassius was just a sixteen-year-old kid from Louisville. Yet that day in Atlanta marked the beginning of his indoctrination. That was the moment, he said, “I was fished off a street corner.”
²⁹

When he traveled to Chicago for the Golden Gloves tournament in March 1959, he once again ran into the Muslims outside their temple. Near the Nation's headquarters, the Muslims gave Clay a record that they said would explain everything he needed to know. When he returned to Louisville, he played the record repeatedly. Performing “A White Man's Heaven Is a Black Man's Hell,” Louis Eugene Wolcott, a charming and talented calypso singer, crooned over piano and guitar. Wolcott, who was then known as Louis X and would later become recognized as Louis Farrakhan, became so popular singing the song at the Nation's rallies that it became the anthem of the Muslim movement.
³⁰

Clay played the record over and over, memorizing the lyrics and absorbing the message. In Miami, Sam Saxon and the other members of the mosque echoed the song's central theme, reminding him that there was no heaven or hell after death. While the black man lived in hell, they said, white Christians enjoyed heaven on earth. For a young man who dreamed of riches, Cadillacs, and mansions, the lyrics made him question his Baptist upbringing. As early as 1961, he began talking about what he had learned from the Muslims, though he was careful to ensure that not even the sharpest reporter could recognize that he was sharing what the Muslims had taught him.

When Clay started telling
Sports Illustrated
's Huston Horn what he thought about heaven and hell, the writer had no idea that the boxer's interpretation of the afterlife came directly from the Black Muslims. “Like last Sunday,” he said, “some cats I know said, ‘Cassius, Cassius, come on now and let's go to church; otherwise you won't get to Heaven.' ‘Hold on a minute,' I said to them, ‘and let me tell you something else. When I've got me a $100,000 house, another quarter million stuck in the bank and the world title latched onto my name, then I'll be in
heaven. Walking around making $25 a week, with four children crying at home 'cause they're hungry,
that's
my idea of Hell.”
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Clay already knew from experience that merely talking about the Muslims could jeopardize his future. During his senior year of high school, he had written a paper about the Nation for his English class. At night, he and his brother Rudy sometimes listened to Elijah Muhammad's national radio address. On the streets of Louisville, Cassius noticed black men dressed in dark suits, similar to the men he had seen in Atlanta and Chicago, selling copies of
Muhammad Speaks
. Yet when he wrote his paper, his teacher was so alarmed that she threatened to fail him, though the principal ultimately overruled her.
³²

Clay continued his education about the Nation in Miami. His most important teacher was Ishmael Sabakhan, minister of the local temple. Nearly once a week, he visited with his spiritual mentor. At their meetings, he listened more than he talked. Sabakhan taught him the basic tenets of the Nation, an esoteric religious movement fabricated from Black Nationalism, Christianity, Islam, and cosmology. He explained that God was a black man—a real man on earth—and that the devil was a white man, who also inhabited the earth. Blacks and whites must separate because there could be no peace between God and the devil.
³³

The Muslims' views about God and the devil, heaven and hell, helped Cassius understand the cruel world his father had described. Clay Sr. had told him how whites had segregated, abused, and tortured his people, and the history lessons Cassius learned from the Muslims offered further proof of the white man's wicked ways. The devil, they said, had kidnapped, shackled, and enslaved his ancestors. When the slaves arrived from Africa, whites forced them to abandon their native culture. Being black, the whites preached, was a curse; they convinced the slaves to hate everything that was black, including themselves. The devil imposed Christianity onto their slaves, manipulating them into worshiping the white man and the white man's God—a “God having the same blond hair, pale skin, and blue eyes as the slavemaster.”
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It all made sense to Cassius. Growing up he never understood why everything associated with blackness was considered bad. “When I was a little kid, I always knew something was wrong,” he said. “Everything good was supposed to be white. And I'd ask my mom, why is Santa Claus white? Why is Jesus white?” He continued, “Miss America was
white. The good cowboy always rode on a white horse. Angel food cake is white and devil's food cake is black . . . even the President lived in a
white
house.”
³⁵

Listening to Muhammad's radio addresses, Cassius heard something that he had never heard before, a message that he would begin repeating over the course of his career: blacks were the strongest, most intelligent people in the world. The black man, Muhammad proclaimed, was
the greatest
. “The Black people in America have for many years been made to feel that they were something of a Divine Curse,” he preached. “You must not think that about yourself anymore. We the Black Nation of the Earth are the
NUMBER ONE
owners of it, the best of all human beings. You are the Most Powerful, the Most Beautiful, and the Wisest.”
³⁶

T
HE SON OF A
poor sharecropper turned Baptist preacher, Elijah Poole was born in 1897 in south-central Georgia. Raised on his father's fiery sermons, he became enraptured with scripture, though he struggled to read the Bible after dropping out of school around the fourth grade. Laboring on farms, at a sawmill, and as a bricklayer, he matured into a frustrated young man, disillusioned by meager wages, harsh employers, and the humiliation of Jim Crow. Seeking relief from discrimination and poverty, in 1923 Elijah followed the Great Migration north, settling in Detroit with his wife, Clara, and dreaming of a better life.
³⁷

Failing to find work in Detroit's auto factories, he found himself living on the dole, drinking away his misery. A tiny, light-skinned man with a pinched face and sad, almond-shaped eyes, Elijah found salvation in 1931 when he heard Wallace D. Fard (pronounced FA-rod) deliver a lecture at an old lodging hall. A year earlier, Fard, an ex-convict turned door-to-door silk salesmen, had founded the Nation of Islam. He claimed that he was a Muslim from the Holy City of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and began using a variety of names: Wali Farrad, Professor Ford, Farrad Muhammad, and Wallace Fard Muhammad. He lectured on the history of the black man, biblical prophecy, and an unorthodox doctrine of Islam. Preaching out of basements and rented halls, he emphasized self-help and racial pride. Gradually, with Poole becoming his most devoted apostle, he built a sect with a few thousand members. Fard rewarded Poole by appointing him “supreme minister” and bestowing upon him a new name: “Elijah Muhammad.” But in 1933, Fard vanished amid accusations that he had
ordered a human sacrifice. Shortly afterward, Muhammad proclaimed Fard's deification as Allah incarnate.
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After Fard's disappearance, Muhammad anointed himself the Messenger of Allah and continued to build the Nation, despite dissension and death threats against him from some members. Muhammad preached about the “Original Man,” Allah, a black man who created the universe. The Muslims believed that the “so-called Negro” was a descendant of the Original Man, who belonged to the Tribe of Shabazz, an ancient group that founded the Holy City of Mecca and eventually migrated to Africa.
³⁹

According to Muhammad, the origins of the white man could be traced back to Yacub, an evil “big head scientist.” Nearly 6,600 years ago, Yacub began preaching a dangerous version of Islam in the streets of Mecca. When authorities learned about his distortion of true Islam, he and his 59,999 followers were exiled to the island of Patmos in the Aegean Sea. There, Yacub sought revenge by creating a “devil race” that would dominate the Black Nation through tricks, lies, and deception. Mutating the germs of the black man, Yacub produced “pale-faced, blue-eyed” men who were weaker morally and physically. He planned for these devils to rule the earth for more than six thousand years, testing the strength of the Black Nation.
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