Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight (13 page)

Ali was shocked by what he considered the betrayal of the man who had been a father figure to him, publicly denouncing Malcolm to the media. “You just don’t buck Mr. Muhammad and get away with it,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about him anymore.”

A major battle in the power struggle was over: the Messenger had successfully pried Ali away from Malcolm X. Only now did he realize the enormous boon Ali would bring to the Black Muslim cause. Elijah Muhammad’s biographer Claude Clegg summarized Ali’s new appeal:

Notwithstanding the Muslim proscription against sports, Muhammad now viewed the twenty-two-year-old boxer as a timely addition to the Nation. Having publicly announced his affiliation with the movement, Clay brought instant, but not always favorable, press coverage to the program of Muhammad and his followers. He also brought to the coffers of the Nation considerable tithes that would make the remittance of the average believer appear paltry. Most importantly, Clay was invaluable for recruitment. He revitalized the appeal of the movement among angry urban youth as well as college students, young professionals, and sports enthusiasts. His outspoken media image, though it perhaps bristled some conservative believers, was exactly the portrait of defiant black manhood that many African Americans found refreshing, especially as the civil rights movement headed toward a bloody Freedom Summer. In short, Clay was the perfect poster boy.

If the announcement of the world heavyweight champion’s conversion had rankled white America and the media, then his name change gave them an excuse to exact a petty revenge. Virtually every American newspaper refused to call him by his new name. “I remember I would turn in stories referring to him as Muhammad Ali and some editor would always change it to Cassius Clay” recalls
New York Times
sports reporter Robert Lipsyte. “I apologized about this once to Ali and he just patted my head and told me not to worry, saying, “You’re just the white power structure’s little brother.” In person, some reporters—refusing to call him Muhammad but knowing they’d be rebuffed if they used the name Cassius—compromised by calling him “Champ.”

“Sports figures,” notes sportswriter Thomas Hauser,“were supposed to be one-dimensional quasi-cartoon characters. Reporters were used to fighters telling them how much they weighed and what they ate for breakfast.”

On March 20, 1964, Ali attended a fight between his friend Luis Rodriguez and Holly Mimms at Madison Square Garden. It was traditional for well-known boxers in attendance at a bout to be publicly introduced, but the Garden’s president, Harry Markson, refused to have Ali introduced by any other name than Cassius Clay. Ali threatened to walk out if his “slave name” was used. When he heard himself introduced as Clay, he carried out his threat and left the arena to a chorus of boos from the fans.

Today Markson regrets his action, but he explains his feelings at the time: “The Black Muslims stood for some pretty awful things. There was a positive side to what they were trying to accomplish, but I felt then and still feel that a lot of what they preached was wrong. But if I had to do it over, I’d introduce him as Eleanor Roosevelt if that’s what he wanted.”

For Ali the name change was highly symbolic, and he was determined that his decision be respected. “Changing my name was one of the most important things that happened to me in my life,” he reflects. “It freed me from the identity given to my family by slave-masters. If Hitler changed the names of people he was killing, and instead of killing them made them slaves, after the war those people would have changed their names back. That’s all I was doing. People change their names all the time and no one complains. Actors and actresses change their name. The Pope changes his name.”

Indeed, well-known fighters such as Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson had changed their names and the press never gave it a second thought. But to white America, the name change was a slap in the face, a defiant signal that Ali would not be what they wanted him to be.

A number of papers, eager to make Ali look foolish, traced his family tree and discovered the Clay lineage was quite distinguished. His ancestors took their name from the well-known Clay family of Kentucky. His namesake, Cassius Marcellus Clay, was a three-term Kentucky legislator who freed his slaves and edited an emancipationist newspaper, crusading for the end of slavery. The misguided boxer should be proud to carry the name of a man who did so much for Negroes, the media chided.

It is true that the nineteenth century Clay campaigned for the end of slavery, but his views on race were not quite so noble. “I am of the opinion that the Caucasian or white is the superior race,” he wrote in 1845. “They have a larger and better formed brain; much more developed form and exquisite structure.”

Ali continued to speak his mind, despite the continuing attacks against him in the media. “People are always telling me what a good example I could set for my people if I just wasn’t a Muslim. I’ve heard over and over, ‘how come I couldn’t be like Joe Louis?’ Well, they’re gone now and the black man’s condition is just the same, ain’t it? We’re still catching hell.”

George Plimpton remembers the furor. “People seemed to believe this man was a threat to America’s values because of his affiliation with the Muslims, which was seen as a racist organization. What they didn’t seem to realize is that Ali himself wasn’t going around calling whites ‘devils.’ He seemed to have a mind of his own on that matter.”

Indeed, Ali very publicly espoused a doctrine different from Elijah Muhammad’s on the subject of whites. Talking about integration, he told
Boxing & Wrestling Magazine
in July 1964, “I don’t believe in forcing integration. I don’t want to go where I’m not wanted. If a white man comes to my house, then he’s welcome. But if he doesn’t want me to come to his home, then I don’t want to go. I’m not mad at the white people. If they like me, I like them. Milton Berle invited me to the hotel where he was performing and I went.” Publicly, Ali denounced integration but he seemed to have great respect for the efforts of Martin Luther King Jr., who was regularly denounced by the Black Muslim movement. Around this time, he secretly phoned King to express his admiration—a phone call that would later figure prominently in Ali’s legal battle. To the chagrin of his Muslim handlers, many prominent members of Ali’s entourage, including his trainer, Angelo Dundee, and his fight doctor Ferdie Pacheco, were white. His first teacher, Jeremiah Shabazz, recalls teaching Clay the concept of white devils and having his student respond, “What about babies? How can they be devils?”

According to sportswriter Pat Putnam, “Ali never hated another human being in his life, black, white, or yellow. He never got caught up in all that hate bullshit.”

Ali even seemed to have a special fondness for Jews, despite the notorious anti-Semitism of the Nation of Islam, which preached that Moses taught white people to oppress blacks and that Jews were the first slaveholders. Malcolm X, too, was virulently anti-Semitic, even after he supposedly renounced his former racist ways. But Ali included a number of Jews in his entourage, regularly ate in kosher restaurants—Jews and Muslims share similar dietary laws—and he occasionally suggested that Jews might be spared when the prophesied white Armageddon took place.

What was the appeal for Ali, then, in a movement whose defining philosophy—its views on race—he didn’t really share? Some commentators have suggested the Nation provided him with a family and fulfilled in him a desperate need to be taken seriously, a longing for respect. Today, Ali attributes the appeal of the Nation to its ability to raise the aspirations of American blacks.

“Elijah Muhammad was a good man, even if he wasn’t the Messenger of God we thought he was. If you look at what our people were like then, a lot of us didn’t have self-respect. We didn’t have banks or stores. We didn’t have anything after being in America for hundreds of years. Elijah Muhammad was trying to lift us up and get our people out of the gutter. He made people dress properly, so they weren’t on the street looking like prostitutes and pimps. He taught good eating habits, and was against alcohol and drugs. I think he was wrong when he talked about white devils, but part of what he did was make people feel it was good to be black.”

When he announced his conversion to Islam, Ali was prepared for the wrath of the white establishment. Steeled by Malcolm X, he even welcomed it. He was somewhat taken aback, however, when a number of black leaders publicly condemned his decision.

First, the leader of Kentucky’s largest Baptist church, the Reverend D. E. King, said the new champion, who had been raised a Baptist, was “not helping the soul of America.” Then, Lyman Johnson, president of the Louisville chapter of the NAACP, issued a statement decrying his affiliation with the Nation. “I hope Clay will shake himself out of this delusion, lest he ruin his chance to be a great champion,” Johnson said, adding that the Negro leadership was “embarrassed for Clay, who is naive.”

Most leaders of the growing civil rights movement kept their views to themselves, fearful that Blacks openly criticizing Blacks would further polarize the movement.

Two weeks after Ali defeated Liston, Martin Luther King Jr. led 650 marchers through Selma, Alabama—one of the South’s most notoriously racist cities. Shocked Americans watched on television as police attacked the peaceful marchers with tear gas, clubs, and bullwhips, hospitalizing more than seventy black and white participants. A nation’s consciousness was profoundly moved, and polls showed a huge increase in support for integration.

While Dr. King and his followers were putting their lives on the line, however, Muhammad Ali was publicly preaching a conflicting doctrine. Julian Bond was one of the pioneers of the civil rights movement as one of the founders of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. He marched with King in Selma that day and recalls the sentiments of his fellow activists. “You have to remember that most of our activities were confined to the South, where Jim Crow still dominated,” he says. “The Nation of Islam never really attracted much attention there; it was more of a Northern movement. Then when Ali announced his conversion, here was a very appealing figure to young Blacks all over the country. A lot of my colleagues resented him at first but we never really saw it as a threat.”

Most American Blacks were uneasy with the militancy of the Nation of Islam and were more comfortable with the accomodationist goals of the civil rights movement. But in the North, where Blacks faced very different issues and where the style of Martin Luther King Jr., was never warmly embraced until after his assassination, many young Blacks privately sympathized with the aims of the Nation even if they didn’t formally join the movement.

The prominent African-American writer Jill Nelson, who grew up in Harlem, told David Remnick, “We weren’t about to join the Nation, but we loved Ali for that supreme act of defiance. It was the defiance against having to be the good Negro, the good Christian waiting to be rewarded by the righteous white provider. We loved Ali because he was so beautiful and powerful and because he talked a lot of lip. But he also epitomized a lot of black people’s emotions at the time, our anger, our sense of entitlement, the need to be better just to get to the median, the sense of standing up against the furies.”

King himself, who had been labeled by the Muslims as “hungry for a place among the white race instead of his own race,” was pressed for his reaction to Ali’s conversion and finally offered a mild condemnation, which he would later take back. “When Cassius Clay joined the Black Muslims and started calling himself Cassius X, he became a champion of racial segregation and that is what we are fighting against.”

The late African-American tennis champion is Arthur Ashe, himself a pioneering sports activist, recalled Ali’s impact on some of King’s colleagues. “I can tell you that Ali was definitely, sometimes unspokenly, admired by a lot of the leaders of the civil rights movement, who were sometimes even a bit jealous of the following he had and the efficacy of what he did. There were a lot of people in the movement who wished they held that sort of sway over African Americans but who did not.”

Ali was bothered by some of the criticism, but his commitment to his new movement didn’t founder. “I just spoke my mind; that’s all,” he explains. “I said things black people thought, but were afraid to say. I didn’t hate. Not then; not now. What I was doing was like a doctor giving someone a needle and hurting them a little to kill an infection. In the end it helps.” He traveled the country speaking at mosques, proselytizing for Elijah Muhammad.

The first indication that his conversion might have more serious repercussions than just alienating the white and black establishments came when the World Boxing Association announced it was stripping Ali of his title because of “conduct detrimental to the best interests of boxing.” WBA commissioner Abe Greene issued a statement explaining the decision. “Clay should be given a chance to decide whether he wants to be a religious crusader or the heavyweight champion. As champion, he is neither a Muslim or any other religionist because sports are completely nonsectarian. Clay should be given the choice of being the fighter who won the title or the fanatic leader of an extraneous force which has no place in the sports arena. Of course Clay might be reinstated in five or six months if his conduct improves.”