Engraved on the wall of the gymnasium at West Point are the words of General Douglas MacArthur, paraphrasing the Duke of Wellington: “Upon the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds that, on other days in other fields, will bear the fruits of victory.” In linking the benign pointlessness of sport to the death struggles of the battlefield, the public-school games ethic managed to debauch sport while lending warfare a spurious nobility. Early in their parallel evolution, a link was forged between modern sport and the destiny of the nation-state. Sport became both preparation and substitute for war, a theater of competition not merely between individuals and teams, but between nations and peoples.
During the Cold War, the sporting arena, notably the Olympic Games, became a field of battle by proxy, an arena in which competing social systems sought to demonstrate their superiority. Sporting success was viewed as a barometer of dynamism and modernity. In this context, the most significant moment of the 1960 Rome games was the victory of the barefoot Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia in the marathon—the first black African to win a medal. But in America (and the Soviet Union) the spotlight fell on the Cold War medals table, which the Soviets topped. “The triumph of the Soviet athletes is a victory for the man of the new socialist society,” crowed Khrushchev. Irritated American commentators urged the incoming Kennedy administration to take action. “The United States must take a new and hard look at its Olympic movement and efforts,” declared the chairman of the US Olympic Development Program. “The Cold War and present international climate demand that we make the strongest possible showing to uphold the prestige of the United States.” Here sports officials and politicians agreed. Both feared “the success, / Although particular, shall give a scantling / Of good or bad unto the general.” It was simply assumed that the function of American athletes was to shoulder the burden of national representation on the global sporting stage. Not for the first time, the games ethic served to subordinate sports to nationalist propaganda. Curiously this did not seem to offend those officials and commentators who were later to object so volubly to Muhammad Ali “using sport to make propaganda” for the Nation of Islam.
Cassius Clay had been one of America’s successes at the Rome Olympics. Asked by a Soviet reporter about the condition of blacks in the US, Clay fired back, “To me, the USA is still the best country in the world, counting yours.” In those days he was proud of his Christian name: “Don’t you think it’s a beautiful name? Makes you think of the Colosseum and those Roman gladiators.” On his return to Louisville he celebrated his Cold War triumph in his first published poem:
To make America the Greatest is my goal
So I beat the Russian and I beat the Pole
And for the USA won the Medal of Gold.
The good-looking eighteen year old turned professional and signed a sponsorship deal with a syndicate of white Louisville businessmen, who added the boxer to their interests in tobacco, bourbon, racehorses and baseball and football teams. Over the next three years, he fought and won nineteen bouts, culminating in his fifth-round knockout of Henry Cooper in London (his first professional fight overseas). Keeping his hands low, moving backwards, he looked unorthodox but stylish. He made errors and was punished for them, but his opponents kept falling as he predicted and, amazingly, often in the round he predicted. In November 1963, after a barnstorming publicity campaign, he signed to fight Sonny Liston for the title.
Clay was already one of the most famous faces (and voices) in America. He had made the front pages of Time and Life and recorded an album of his verse. Hungry for publicity and always relishing an audience, he appeared at bowling alleys and coffee houses, nightclubs and television talk shows. He was well aware that progress in the boxing hierarchy—and with it a coveted world-title shot—depended on more than performance in the ring. Some boxers relied on connections, including mob connections; Cassius Clay relied on his mouth.
In the early sixties, boxing’s popularity and prestige had taken a battering. Congressional hearings had given a high profile to its long-standing links with organized crime, and the image had been further sullied by the deaths of Davey Moore and Benny Paret from injuries inflicted in the ring. Television ratings had fallen, and network executives were losing interest in a pastime they regarded as depressingly down-market. In this context, the quick-talking, clean-cut Cassius Clay appeared as a godsend to the moguls of prizefighting.
Yet even before he became Muhammad Ali, Cassius Clay was beginning to change the way sports stars presented themselves. Hitherto, they were expected to be seen and not heard; modesty and deference had been the norm, for whites and especially for blacks. Of course, the swagger, the bragging, the manic competitive zeal had always been part of the subculture of big-time sports; but it was Cassius Clay who brought these qualities out of hiding and fashioned them into a saleable image. His egotism was bold and risky, but above all playful, and always softened by an undercurrent of self-mockery. The braggadocio which perplexed so many was a type of playground foolery orchestrated for the modern media circus. Ali later claimed to have copied his hyperbolic promotional style (“I’m the fastest thing on two feet”) from a professional wrestler he encountered in a Las Vegas radio studio.
They asked Gorgeous George about a wrestling match he was having in the same arena, and he started shouting, “I’ll kill him; I’ll tear his arm off. If this bum beats me, I’ll crawl across the ring and cut off my hair, but it’s not gonna happen because I’m the greatest wrestler in the world.” And all the time, I was saying to myself, “Man, I want to see this fight. It don’t matter if he wins or loses; I want to be there to see what happens.” And the whole place was sold out when Gorgeous George wrestled. There was thousands of people including me. And that’s when I decided I’d never been shy about talking, but if I talked even more, there was no telling how much money people would pay to see me.
It was typical of the young Clay to draw inspiration from that hardy survivor, professional wrestling, an ancient sport transformed into a post-modern entertainment. Clay relished, and learned from, its larger-than-life melodrama, its mix of comedy and violence, its inducements to spectator partisanship and vocal participation. Clay was a child of the popular audio-visual culture of the fifties. His monologues were studded with references to Hollywood movies, television and radio comedies, pop records, baseball as well as boxing and professional wrestling. In the early sixties, he seemed to share something of the apolitically irreverent spirit of Mad magazine. On TV his zany antics and mugging for the camera made him seem a cartoon-like figure, Bart Simpson in the flesh, immensely but somehow innocently pleased with his own mischief-making.
In the beginning, it was the dictates of the marketplace, and of boxing’s peculiar place within it, that compelled Clay to dramatize his fights. He learned from the wrestlers how to rouse curiosity by making outlandish claims about himself and his opponents; and as he fought his way up the ladder, crisscrossing the country, he began to master the art of infusing a contest with significance for the casual spectator. As Muhammad Ali, he was to deploy these skills, this commercial instinct, to shape the meanings of his fights and to redefine the duties of the role model.
The voluble self-aggrandizing style was also an expression of the man’s own gregarious spontaneity, which some have seen as over-compensation for a natural shyness. Even at the height of his fame, most people who enjoyed a one-to-one encounter with Ali found him subdued, thoughtful and focused. But in company he was never able to resist the urge to put on a show. He loved to act out and to play up, his mind and his mouth darting from topic to topic. And through boxing, above all through promoting boxing matches, he found an outlet for this quicksilver theatricality. In fact, at this time, among bona fide sports (as opposed to hybrid entertainments like wrestling and the Harlem Globetrotters) only boxing permitted this kind of vaudeville. Certainly it wouldn’t have been tolerated by the baseball owners.
“I’m too beautiful to be a fighter,” he boasted, casually breaking the taboo against exhibitions of male vanity. He was not only “the Greatest” but “the prettiest,” a superlative usually associated with female attractiveness. For a black man to speak in this manner upturned so many assumptions—about both black and male physicality—that people just didn’t know what to make of it. It was one of several exotic traits that made journalists wonder how seriously they were supposed to take this one-man circus. Yet the feminine side of this master pugilist was always an essential element of his popular chemistry. It fleshed out his humanity. It was an early and unthinking transgression, and it helped him undertake other, more jarring and perilous transgressions later on.
In fashioning his style, Cassius Clay drew heavily on black America’s rich oral tradition, a tradition spanning North and South, pool hall and church. In the boasting, the doggerel, the predictions, it’s easy to see traces of “the dozens,” that playful competitive exercise in insult and hyperbole, verbal dexterity and metaphorical invention. Ali re-worked “the dozens,” along with other features of black American oral culture, and projected them through the modern media to a new, mass audience. So it might be said that the young Cassius Clay was performing blackness for white spectators. In a curious comment in a 1963 profile of the young contender, Tom Wolfe claimed that “Cassius treats the fact of color—but not race—casually … he has a pronounced Negro accent of his own, which he makes no attempt to polish. He only turns it on heavier from time to time for comic effect.” Clay faced his audience under the shadow of minstrelsy, the shadow that fell on so many innovative black entertainers, among them Louis Armstrong, Jack Johnson and even Paul Robeson. Yet often there were hidden messages in the minstrelsy, messages intelligible to black audiences, who thus shared a secret rapport with black entertainers, even as their “blackness” was commodified for white consumption. The young Clay was not afraid to make a fool of himself and quite reckless in courting the spotlight. No one in those days thought this crass comedian would become a worldwide symbol of black dignity. Indeed the very idea that he might do this without losing his sense of fun and his love of performing violated all the known stereotypes. A year before his title fight with Liston, he asked reporters:
Where do you think I’d be next week, if I didn’t know how to shout and holler and make the public take notice? I’d be poor and I’d probably be down in my home town, washing windows or running an elevator and saying “yes suh” and “no suh” and knowing my place. Instead, I’m one of the highest paid athletes in the world. Think about that. A southern coloured boy has made one million dollars.
In other words, the clowning, the minstrelsy, was a way of breaking out of the racist stranglehold. It was Ebony, in March 1963, which first reported the real significance of the emerging Clay story: “Cassius Marcellus Clay—and this fact has evaded the sports-writing fraternity—is a blast furnace of racial pride. His is a pride that would never mask itself with skin lighteners and processed hair, a pride scorched with memories of millions of little burns.” But even Ebony could not have guessed that Cassius Clay, an ambitious, likeable young man beckoned by wealth and fame, had joined the Nation of Islam, the most vilified black organization in America.
Ali says he first heard about Elijah Muhammad during a Golden Gloves tournament in Chicago, the Nation’s headquarters, in 1959, when he was seventeen. Two years later, while training in Miami, he ran into Captain Sam Saxon selling Muhammad Speaks on the street. Saxon, who ran a string of shoeshine concessions at Florida’s racetracks, had converted to the Nation in 1955. As a boxing fan he recognized the young heavyweight and invited him to the nearby mosque. Clay was impressed by what he heard, and began reading Muhammad Speaks and listening to an LP called A White Man’s Heaven Is a Black Man’s Hell, recently released by the ex-calypso singer turned Muslim minister Louis X (later Louis Farrakhan). Saxon put Clay in touch with Jeremiah Shabazz, a prison convert who was now the Nation’s Atlanta-based minister for the Deep South. Initially, Elijah Muhammad took little interest in the new recruit, not least because the Nation of Islam disapproved of commercial spectator sports. Muhammad reprimanded Shabazz, reminding him he had been sent south “to make converts, not fool around with fighters.” But Shabazz and Saxon persisted with Clay, and from late 1961 Saxon was traveling regularly with the young fighter. From 1962, Shabazz arranged for a Muslim cook to prepare all Clay’s meals, in camp or on the road. As he moved around the country, building his career, he was able to take advantage of the Nation’s far-flung network of restaurants and mosques. “He just sat there, wanting to learn,” Saxon recalled. “He was a beautiful young man. All he wanted was what was right for our people.”
Clay considered himself a member of the Nation from at least 1962, but he kept his link with the organization secret, and the Nation, for its part, was happy to guard that secret. A known Black Muslim had no chance of signing for a title fight. In the early sixties, Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X were probably the two most hated men in America, feared and loathed by most whites and by nearly all the “respectable” members of their own community. In 1959, a television documentary, “The Hate that Hate Produced,” had introduced white America to the Nation and its “reverse racism.” The program-makers estimated the organization’s membership at 250,000 (at least five times the real number) and used Elijah’s lurid vision of America’s impending Armageddon to stoke fears of a “race war.” As a result of the television exposure, for several years the Nation became the focus for the media’s salacious interest in “black racism.” Civil rights leaders were asked to denounce the “hatemongers,”and most complied. Thurgood Marshall told an NAACP conference that the Nation was “run by a bunch of thugs organized from prisons and jails and financed, I am sure, by Nasser or some Arab group.” In reply, Muhammad dubbed Marshall “the Ugly American.”
The organization that Clay joined in 1962 was at the time the largest, richest, most disciplined and longest-lived black nationalist formation in the country. Since its origins in Detroit in the early thirties, it had emerged as the principal custodian of the black nationalist tradition in America, but the form of black nationalism it promoted was idiosyncratic in the extreme. Elijah Muhammad assembled elements of the Qur’an, the Bible, Garveyism, the Moorish Science Temple of Noble Drew Ali, eugenics and popular science fiction, and attributed the exotic mix to the mysterious Wallace Fard, the incarnation of Allah who had anointed Elijah his Messenger. In many respects, the Nation was a typically American religious cult. With its homespun eschatology, emphasis on self-reliance and clean living, autocratic organization, pride in the fellowship of the elect and contentious engagement with the modern, secular world (and the nation-state), the Nation stands in a long line of hybrid millenarian American sects, including the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
What was distinctive about this characteristically American cultural product was that it demonized America. The descendants of African slaves were not “American negroes” but “the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in the Wilderness of North America.” The sect’s imagery and rhetoric re-enforced the Manichean duality. On the one side were “Christianity, Slavery, Suffering, Death”—illustrated with the stars and stripes and the silhouette of a lynch victim hanging from a tree—and on the other, “Islam, Freedom, Justice, Equality”—illustrated with the crescent. The Nation was a religious and social movement predicated on a political analysis, black nationalism, and a political program, separation. But its special appeal resided in its fusion of the personal and the political. Its promise of redemption linked the individual to the collective, self-discovery to nationhood. It was through the Nation of Islam that Cassius Clay first experienced that lived linkage, that social awakening of the self, and it was to transform him and his career inside and outside the ring. The Nation gave Cassius Clay more than a potted history and cosmology; it gave him a sense of his and his people’s right to a place in the world.
In 1961 James Baldwin identified “the two most powerful movements in this country today” as the student integrationist movement whose goal was “nothing less than the liberation of an entire country from its crippling attitudes and habits,” and “the Muslim movement” whose members “do not expect anything at all from the white people of this country.” In this argument, Baldwin sided with the civil rights activists, though he conceded, “the Muslim movement has all the evidence on its side.” Surveying the streets of Harlem, Baldwin concluded, “it is quite impossible to argue with a Muslim concerning the actual state of Negroes in this country—the truth, after all, is the truth. This is the great power a Muslim speaker has over his audience. His audience has not heard the truth of their daily lives honored by anyone else.”
In joining the Nation of Islam, Clay was turning his back on the principal actors in the social drama of his day, the black youth whose challenge to Jim Crow was the first salvo in what was to become an international upsurge in youth protest, sprawling across the First, Second and Third Worlds. Clay made this rejection explicit when he told reporters after the Liston fight, “I know how to dodge boobytraps and dogs. I dodge them by staying in my own neighborhood.… I have never been to jail. I have never been in court. I don’t join any integration marches.… I don’t carry signs.” Although he chose not to emulate them, Clay was only too aware of the efforts and sacrifices made by his contemporaries, and his choice was informed by that awareness. His negative reaction to their example did not deny their heroism but questioned, in Malcolm X’s tart phraseology, their “intelligence.”
As Baldwin observed, the activists risking life and limb in the freedom rides and sit-ins were trying to compel America to live up to its democratic credo. To the Nation of Islam, this strategy defied the logic of history. Malcolm told his audiences, “You’re not an American, you’re a victim of America.” In keeping with its vision of white people as “devils” and America as an inferior civilization doomed to extinction, the Nation disapproved of all forms of political participation, not only voting, but also sit-ins, pickets and marches. Incompatible as these two strands of black thinking seemed, in practice they frequently intertwined. Paradoxically, the Nation benefited from the civil rights movement. The agitation in the South and the brutal white response seemed to confirm two of the Nation’s central tenets: the beauty and strength of black people and the irredeemable racism of white America. Both the civil rights movement and the Nation of Islam were products of “the racial consciousness which has been so mercilessly injected into the negro” which, C.L.R. James noted in 1960, “is today a source of action and at the same time of discipline.”
The particular form of racial solidarity preached by the Nation exercised an obvious appeal to the dispossessed and alienated. In the person of Malcolm X they saw a living example of the power of Elijah Muhammad, who had reached out to the thief and junkie in prison and redeemed him from the depths of self-hatred. But what accounts for the Nation’s appeal to the law-abiding Cassius Clay, a talented young man with a bright future? The oft-told story of how, on returning from Rome, “with my gold medal round my neck I couldn’t get a hamburger in my home town,” can only be part of the answer. After all, there were other, highly publicized responses to racism available at the time.
Clay was far from an anomaly in the Nation. From the late fifties, Muhammad increasingly sought recruits among middle-class professionals. Garveyism had flourished in a time of despair and voicelessness. In contrast, the Nation’s most dynamic period took place against a backdrop of comparative prosperity and apparent black progress. The genius of Elijah Muhammad was to play simultaneously on the hopes and the fears, the aspirations and the frustrations of a minority that was both insurgent and embattled. At the 1960 Savior’s Day convention, the premier occasion in the Nation’s annual calendar, the Messenger addressed a group of well-heeled blacks conspicuously seated directly in front of the rostrum. “Get behind me you professional people. Back me up. Why do you tremble when I ask you to join me? Join up with me and you won’t have to open your mouth. I’ll do all the talking and take all the chances.”
It has to be remembered that by 1960 the Nation had become the largest black-owned business in America, with interests in a wide variety of commercial enterprises, including farming, publishing, banking and retail food and clothing outlets. For all his studied unworldliness, Muhammad himself was now a rich man (between 1955 and 1960, he purchased four new Cadillacs and a Lincoln). He disapproved of “the white man’s greed,” but subscribed to the capitalist system and frequently spoke of the benefits of black-owned enterprise. He lauded thrift and modesty, but also endorsed the pursuit of wealth and career advancement. “You won’t have to open your mouth. I’ll do all the talking and take all the chances.” To young, educated, ambitious blacks confronting the obstacles of racism at every turn, this was a tempting invitation. They were being offered a recipe for black dignity and personal success, and a means of reconciling the two. Though Clay came from a working-class background (his father was a sign-painter), he was very much one of the upwardly mobile new black elite to whom Muhammad was speaking. Ironically, in the end it was to be Muhammad Ali, and not Elijah Muhammad, who did most of the talking and certainly took all the chances.
The ritual and regimen of the Nation appealed to Clay for some of the same reasons he loved the discipline of training and the gym. Both demanded care and respect for the body and rewarded deferred gratification. More importantly, both offered a whole way of life, a shelter from the world outside and a means of prospering within it. Like many contemporary religious movements, the Nation of Islam was in part a protest against secular modernity. It offered personal purity, hierachical family values and race consciousness as a means of negotiating the rapids of social flux. Formally, it pitted the individual against the temptations of the modern world, while informally allowing him to come to an accommodation with it, even to exploit and master it. The Nation grew within and against the culture of the ghetto. It set itself up as a counter-attraction to all the temptations of ghetto life: drugs, gambling, prostitution, prizefighting. Yet for all Elijah Muhammad’s contempt for “sporting life,” his adherents knew the ropes. Long-standing Nation-member Booker Johnson worked for Archie Moore, and Wali Muhammad worked for Sugar Ray Robinson before becoming Ali’s security man. Other members of the Nation worked in show business. Joining Elijah Muhammad’s organization was a difficult choice for all these individuals, but it obviated other choices—between personal integrity and social participation, between acceptance of and opposition to racism—and that was no small part of its appeal.
Among the many paradoxes of the Nation’s accommodation to the “America” it formally repudiated, none is as startling as its attempt to negotiate a pact with white supremacism. In a brief-lived common front of segregationists, George Lincoln Rockwell, the American Nazi leader, appeared at a Nation rally presided over by Elijah Muhammad himself. In January 1961, around the same time Clay first encountered Sam Saxon in Miami, Jeremiah Shabazz and Malcolm X were meeting secretly with the Ku Klux Klan in Atlanta. For several months, Shabazz attended Klan meetings as an official representative of Elijah Muhammad. For Shabazz, there was no contradiction between sitting with the Klan and the doctrine he was teaching Cassius Clay. In keeping with a persistent strand of conservative black nationalism, the Nation’s aim was to survive, not transform America. In that context, a pact with the overtly racist Klan seemed less insidious than Martin Luther King’s pact with the covertly racist liberal Democrats.
But creating a refuge from racism in the heart of a racist society proved a tortuous, contradictory business. It plunged the followers of Elijah Muhammad into conflict with the state and the stark reality of political engagement. Inexorably, Cassius Clay was drawn into that engagement, even as he sought to quickstep his way around it.
In 1961 the Nation of Islam was officially declared “un-American” by a committee of the California state legislature. In April 1962, an altercation on the streets led to an invasion of Mosque No. 27 by the Los Angeles Police Department. Ronald X Stokes, a twenty-eight-year-old Korea veteran and one of the first college-educated males to join the Nation, was shot through the heart from a distance of eight feet. He was unarmed and had raised his hands in the air. Six other Muslims were shot that day, and more beaten and arrested. Malcolm X flew in to take charge of the Nation’s response. He conducted a vigorous investigation of the shootings and launched an uncompromising assault on the LAPD and Sam Yorty’s city administration. In an unprecedented move for a Muslim, he sought out allies in southern California’s Mexican and American Indian communities, and even among mainstream black churches and politicians. In May, an all-white coroner’s jury declared the killing of Ronald Stokes “justifiable homicide.” Malcolm wanted to press ahead with his campaign, but Elijah Muhammad was wary. He prohibited any retaliatory violence, or even any talk of armed self-defense, and sent a message to Los Angeles urging Malcolm “to cool his heels” and lay off the white politicians.
In June, an air crash in Europe took the lives of more than one hundred white citizens of Atlanta, Georgia. Malcolm seized on the tragedy as evidence of divine retribution for the Stokes murder. With an impish smile, he told a Los Angeles rally, “We hope that every day another plane falls from the sky.” The remark precipitated the familiar avalanche of media hysteria and bolstered Malcolm’s status as a national hate figure. Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders rushed to assure America that their movement was built on goodwill and human brotherhood, but beyond the rhetorical battle between “love” and “hate” there lurked a more decisive strategic division. The message Malcolm had found himself compelled to preach in Los Angeles was one of trust in the will of Allah and patience here on earth. Nothing could be more at odds with the spirit of activism—of direct confrontation with the evil of white supremacy—that was fueling the civil rights movement, and Malcolm knew it.
For several years Malcolm had mocked the creed of non-violence and cast aspersions on the “manhood” of civil rights leaders who turned the other cheek while their flocks were clubbed and incarcerated. On his return to New York City, he confided to friends, “We spout our militant revolutionary rhetoric and we preach Armageddon … but when our own brothers are brutalized and killed, we do nothing.… We just sit tight on our hands.”
During 1962, Cassius Clay, steadily building his reputation in the ring and his marketability outside it, fought three times in Los Angeles. He had knocked out George Logan in the fourth round only three days before the Stokes killing. He returned to Los Angeles in July, when he knocked out Alejandro Lavorante in the fifth. In November, he met the legendary Archie Moore, who was then in his late forties. It was Clay’s first high-profile professional bout and his first big payday. By knocking out Moore in the fourth round, he established himself as a contender and set off on his madcap campaign for a title shot.
Clay had broken off training for the Moore fight to drive from Miami to Detroit to hear Elijah Muhammad speak in person for the first time. There he was introduced to Malcolm X, whose brother was a minister at the local mosque. It was the beginning of a sporadic but intense eighteen-month association which was to end abruptly with Malcolm’s departure from the Nation in March 1964. Malcolm had never heard of the young boxer, but gave him his attention and treated him with respect. “Malcolm was very intelligent, with a good sense of humor, a wise man,” Ali told Thomas Hauser three decades later. “When he talked, he held me spellbound for hours.” In his autobiography, Malcolm recalled:
I liked him. Some contagious quality about him made him one of the few people I ever invited to my home. Betty liked him. Our children were crazy about him. Cassius was simply a likeable, friendly, clean-cut, down-to-earth youngster. I noticed how alert he was even in little details. I suspected there was a plan in his public clowning.
Both Clay and Malcolm were performing bugbears for the white press. What outrageous thing would they say or do next? In Clay’s case, it turned out to be nothing less than associating with Malcolm himself.
As he stripped back the layers of white hypocrisy and pried open his listeners’ consciousness, Malcolm seemed to confront racism as no other black man had, and in an idiom intelligible to all. It’s not hard to imagine the attraction of Malcolm’s personality to the young Clay. He mixed deadly gravity with wry humor, didactic catechisms with folksy analogies. Indeed, in fusing the oral call-and-response traditions of the black church, the hard-headed realism of the streets and the rigors of the press conference and the television and radio studios, Malcolm forged a rhetoric Clay was to adopt and revise. Like others, Clay was also seduced by Malcolm’s gentle, indulgent, intimate side; this hard, righteous teacher loved to tease and be teased. What made both Malcolm and Clay, future icons of black masculinity and patriarchy, so appealing was their humility and humor, their sense of play, indeed their “feminine” qualities. It was this side of both men that befuddled interviewers over the years and left observers muttering “enigma.”
The crossing of Malcolm’s and Ali’s paths is the stuff of legend—though it is left out of both Spike Lee’s Malcolm X and When We Were Kings. The problem is that the legend becomes merely an accoutrement of the icons; the living interplay of complex personalities in a rapidly changing environment is glossed over. Although many questions about Ali’s relationship with Malcolm remain unanswered, what is undeniable is that these months witnessed both Malcolm’s own transformation—a period of agony and uncertainty for him—and the gathering together within and around Cassius Clay of the threads he would later weave into the resplendent figure of Muhammad Ali.
Malcolm arranged for one of his followers, Osman Karriem, to act as Clay’s road manager. Karriem had done the same job for the Platters and, like other Muslims, understood the pressures of black life in the commercial fast-lane. He disliked boxing and was initially skeptical about Clay, but agreed to keep an eye on him for Malcolm, and in particular to safeguard the young fighter from the predatory attentions of white businessmen. Karriem was well aware of the tensions within the Nation, as were many of the other Muslims Clay met as he traveled round the country.
By March 1963, the internal discord had grown so acute that the FBI’s Chicago office advised J. Edgar Hoover to cease “disruption tactics” and leave the Nation to its own devices. Malcolm had become aware that Muhammad had conducted sexual affairs with young female members of the Nation in his employ and fathered several illegitimate children. This awareness distressed Malcolm and threatened Muhammad. But just as important in the making of the great schism was Malcolm’s response to dramatic developments during a crucial phase of the civil rights movement.
“In three difficult years, the southern struggle had grown from a modest group of black students demonstrating peacefully at one lunch-counter to the largest mass movement for racial reform and civil rights in the twentieth century,” wrote Manning Marable. “Between autumn 1961 and the spring of 1963, 20,000 men, women and children had been arrested. In 1963 alone another 15,000 were imprisoned; 1000 desegregation protests occurred across the region, in more than 100 cities.” The epicenter of this social earthquake was Birmingham, Alabama. On 3 April 1963, the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) launched its assault on this citadel of segregation with sit-ins in restaurants and department stores. Marches and vigils were broken up by police, and the jail cells began to fill. On Good Friday, Martin Luther King was arrested. In response to criticism from “moderate” local clergymen, King composed his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” a classic formulation of the urgent righteousness of the sixties, issued from the belly of the beast:
The Negro’s greatest stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is … the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice … who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.… There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.
On 2 May, six thousand young blacks—aged from six to sixteen years—marched through the city. In front of national television, police dogs were set on children as they knelt to pray, and marchers were dispersed with firehoses and clubs. Nine hundred and fifty-nine children were jailed. The nationwide cry of protest, and not least America’s global embarrassment, forced the hitherto inert Kennedy administration to act. On 10 May, under pressure from the federal government, Birmingham’s white business and municipal leaders acceded to desegregation; black prisoners were released.
The bravery of the black youth of Birmingham posed a stern challenge to black celebrities, the symbolic representatives of their people. Shortly after the peace agreement, Floyd Patterson joined King to address a meeting at Birmingham’s Sixth Avenue Baptist Church. Patterson had broken off his training for the second Liston fight to attend the meeting. “I felt very guilty … that here I was sitting in my camp watching you people, my people, go through this.… And I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart.” Jackie Robinson also spoke at the meeting: “I don’t think you realize down here in Birmingham what you mean to us up there in New York.” So while the two future icons of black militancy, Malcolm X and Cassius Clay, sat on the sidelines, those two “Uncle Toms,” Robinson and Patterson, took themselves to the front.
The Birmingham agreement was one of the major victories of the civil rights movement, but in its wake racist violence and resistance to desegregation intensified. On 11 June, Medgar Evers, a local NAACP official, was assassinated on his doorstep in Jackson, Mississippi. The next day Kennedy announced his plan to introduce a civil rights bill; his hand had been forced by the insistence of the black upsurge in the South and the intransigence of white southern reaction to it. Reluctant as he was to jeopardize the southern white Democratic block, he was also driven by the demands of Cold War propaganda and competition with the Soviets in the newly independent African and Asian nations.
The March on Washington, on 28 August 1963, when 250,000 gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington to hear an array of black leaders and white allies call for speedy passage of the president’s civil rights bill, is usually considered the apogee of the movement. “We came here because we love our country,” the SCLC’s Fred Shuttleworth told the crowd, “because our country needs us and we need our country.” But the more militant youth of the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC)* took time off from the march to meet with Malcolm X, who poured scorn on what he called the “farce on Washington.”
Two weeks later, Birmingham’s white supremacists exacted revenge. On the morning of 15 September, dynamite ripped apart the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four black girls attending Sunday school. In the days that followed, hundreds of black youths battled with local police. Black communities across the country wept and raged, as did black artists like Langston Hughes:
It’s not enough to mourn
And not enough to pray.
Sackcloth and ashes, anyhow,
Save for another day.
The Lord God himself
Would hardly desire
That men be burned to death—
And bless the fire.
Looking back at the Birmingham crusade from a distance of thirty years, Taylor Branch commented, “Never before was a country transformed, arguably redeemed, by the active moral witness of schoolchildren.” This moral witness—in which the self was defined, even redeemed, through selfless political action—was the decade’s most resonant exemplar. Later, in his stand against the Vietnam War, Muhammad Ali was to deploy this sixties motif in spheres of popular culture that had never before felt its power. But in 1963, he turned away from the challenge of direct confrontation with white racism. As he explained to the press eight months later in Miami, “I ain’t no Christian. I can’t be when I see all the colored people fighting for forced integration get blowed up. They get hit by stones and chewed by dogs and they blow up a Negro church and don’t find the killers.”
The cascade of events in 1963 was inspiring, bewildering, frustrating. “Every movement forward had been purchased at great cost. Bleeding ulcers, nervous breakdowns, mysterious ailments took their toll on young lives,” wrote Vincent Harding, who knew the travails of the activists at first hand. “Every time they smashed away some obstacle to black freedom and equality, another larger, newly perceived hindrance loomed before them, challenging the last ounce of their strength and their spirit.” The intermingling of victory and defeat, empowerment and disempowerment, the wild rhythm of advance and rebuff (the stuff of which the sixties were made) generated a new radicalism and broader sympathy for militant nationalism. Yet during this period the man most widely associated with that militancy, Malcolm X, sat silent at the command of Elijah Muhammad, a silence he bitterly regretted in his autobiography:
When a high-powered rifle slug tore through the back of NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers in Mississippi, I wanted to say the blunt truths that needed to be said. When a bomb was exploded in a Negro Christian church in Birmingham, Alabama, snuffing out the lives of those four beautiful black girls, I made comments—but not what should have been said about the climate of hate the American white man was generating and nourishing.
Despite Elijah Muhammad’s prohibition, Malcolm continued to flirt with civil rights activism, while retaining his skepticism about non-violence and his opposition to integration. Muhammad made Malcolm apologize for organizing a demonstration in Newark, New Jersey, but he went ahead with other discreet actions, visiting a picket line at a Brooklyn construction site that wouldn’t hire blacks and making contacts with left-wing groups—a move which alarmed the FBI and Elijah Muhammad alike. Privately, Malcolm told Louis Lomax, “The Messenger has seen God.… He’s willing to wait for Allah to deal with this devil. Well, sir, the rest of the black Muslims have not seen God. We don’t have this gift of divine patience with the devil. The younger black Muslims want to see some action.”
In September 1963, the Philadelphia Daily News reported that Cassius Clay had attended a Nation of Islam rally in the city. Clay told reporters he was not a Muslim, and the media seemed happy to write off the incident as another one of Cassius’s bizarre stunts. On 5 November, the deal for the Liston fight was signed. For Malcolm, this was an obvious opportunity for the Nation, but Elijah urged Malcolm to keep his distance from the new challenger. He believed Clay would lose to Liston and that the Nation would be diminished by its association with him, a belief which betrayed his own creeping cynicism and lack of imagination. Unlike the rest of the black press, Muhammad Speaks failed to report the build-up to the fight and sent no reporters to cover it.
Malcolm did not keep his distance from Clay, nor did he respect a weightier injunction which issued from Chicago in the hours following the Kennedy assassination on 22 November. Elijah had decided that there was no milage to be had in bucking the tide of national grief. Accordingly, he ordered his ministers to refrain from any critical comments about the president whom they had routinely denounced as a “devil” for three years. In New York City on 1 December, in answer to questions from the press, Malcolm reminded Americans that the Kennedy administration had practiced political violence in Africa and Asia, and had sanctioned the assassinations of Lumumba in the Congo and Diem in Vietnam. The killing of JFK was, he said, a case of “chickens coming home to roost.… Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad. They’ve always made me glad.”
Press and politicians reacted to Malcolm’s shock tactics with outrage. More significantly, so did Elijah Muhammad, who summoned Malcolm to Chicago to tell him, without a trace of irony, that “the president of the country is our president too.” Malcolm’s statement, Elijah said, was a major blunder for which his fellow Muslims would pay dearly. It was imperative that the Nation distance itself from his ill-judged comments, and therefore he would be suspended for ninety days, during which time he was not to make any public statements. Muhammad Speaks eulogized the slain president and gave prominence to the Messenger’s decision to discipline his most famous apostle.
Elijah’s response to the JFK assassination reflected both short- and long-term considerations. Bitter experience had taught him to fear the power of the federal government and the ire of the media. In particular, he wished to avoid another House Un-American Activities Committee investigation, not least because of the scrutiny his business empire would come under. His fear of repression was matched by his fear of schism. In the coming weeks, Elijah would come to see Malcolm X as the biggest threat to his carefully husbanded authority, his status in the movement and his personal wealth. He proceeded step by step to isolate Malcolm, undercutting his base in the organization, testing the loyalties of the membership.
The first death threat reached Malcolm’s ears in late December. In his autobiography, he says that learning of Elijah Muhammad’s order to eliminate him “was how, finally, I began to arrive at my psychological divorce from the Nation of Islam.” In the first week of January 1964, Muhammad replaced Malcolm as minister at the Harlem mosque, and at their last private meeting he accused his disciple of plotting against him. Meanwhile, Muslim ministers whom Malcolm had trained were denouncing the Messenger’s former favorite in mosques across the country.
On 15 January, under increasing pressure from both the Nation of Islam and the FBI, who dogged his every step, Malcolm phoned Clay in Miami, where he was training for the Liston fight, and told him he wanted to take up his offer to visit the challenger’s camp with his family. According to the FBI report of the monitored phone call, Clay said, “That’s the best news I’ve heard all day!” and offered to pick up Malcolm and his family at the airport. The next day Clay, Osman Karriem and Clarence X Gill, a Muslim bodyguard, met Malcolm’s party and, with an FBI tail in tow, drove them to the black hotel where the challenger’s entourage was staying.
Clay told reporters he had given Malcolm and his wife Betty the round-trip all-expenses-paid vacation as a present for their sixth wedding anniversary. Later, Malcolm’s daughters were to recall the Miami escapade as a rare interlude of family togetherness in the hectic and highly public life of their father. The day after their arrival, they helped Cassius celebrate his twenty-second birthday. Two days later Betty and the children flew back to New York, but Malcolm remained. Clay must have been aware that Malcolm was under suspension, that he had been barred from talking to the press and that the Messenger would frown on any association with him. Yet he kept Malcolm in his camp and made no secret of it.
On 21 January, Clay interrupted his training routine to fly to New York with Malcolm. There he addressed a rally at Rockland Palace, where Robeson had once breathed defiance to the white world. (Only a month before, Robeson had returned to the United States after six years abroad, ill and depressed, and promptly retreated into seclusion.) Malcolm helped Clay prepare his speech, but because he was under suspension, he was not allowed to attend the rally. Clay delivered a twenty-minute address to the 1600 Muslims packed into the hall. He asked for their support in his fight against Liston and read them some poetry. “I’m training on lamb chops and that big ugly bear is training on pork chops,” he declared to loud applause. He also mentioned Malcolm X, perhaps the last time anyone was to say anything pleasant about the one-time national minister from an official Nation of Islam platform. Clay insisted he was “proud to walk the streets of Miami with Malcolm X.” He noted, as he often did in the coming years, that Muslims refrained from smoking and drinking. “This is a miracle for the so-called Negroes, and this is why the white man is all shook up.” An FBI informant was in the hall, noted Clay’s presence and rushed outside to tip off the local media. Clay’s apparent link to the Nation of Islam, a story which had been gestating for several months, was now out in the open and made front-page news the next day. In a revealing formulation, Clay was repeatedly asked by the press whether he was “a card-carrying member of the Black Muslims.” “Card-carrying; what’s does that mean?” he answered. “I’m a race man and every time I go to a Muslim meeting I get inspired.” In a banner headline, the Amsterdam News reported the story, “Cassius Clay Almost Says He’s a Muslim.” The front pages of the black press were splashed with photos of the young fighter playing with Malcolm X’s family. Elijah Muhammad must have been beside himself. The press hardly noticed when Clay took his military qualifying examination on 24 January. His results were so poor—he placed in the sixteenth percentile, way below the qualifying standard—that they roused suspicion, and Clay was asked to re-take the test after the Liston fight.
George Plimpton, who was to spend more than a decade covering Ali’s career, was perplexed by Clay’s connection with the Muslims and sought out Malcolm for an interview. Despite Elijah’s proscription, Malcolm met Plimpton at the Hampton House Hotel in the heart of black Miami. A deep discomfort runs through the published version of the encounter, which appeared in Harper’s in June 1964. “He often smiles broadly,” Plimpton noted, “but not with humor.” Behind the articulate exterior, Plimpton descried a “truly intractable” character. But, as the writer faithfully records, this “intractable,” “caustic” man was also the first to detect the seriousness underlying Cassius Clay’s antics, and to see in the loudmouth underdog the lineaments of the future Muhammad Ali. “Not many people know the quality of the mind he’s got in there,” Malcolm explained. “He fools them. One forgets that though a clown never imitates a wise man, the wise man can imitate the clown. He is sensitive, very humble, yet shrewd—with as much untapped mental energy as he has physical power.” Noting that “our religion removes fear,” he predicted Clay would topple Liston, then added, “We believe in exercise, physical fitness, but as for commercial sport, that’s a racket. Commercial sport is the pleasure of the idle rich. The vice of gambling stems from it.… The Negro never comes out ahead—never one in the history of sport.”
Malcolm liked to speak of himself as Clay’s “older brother,” a political mentor and spiritual guide. According to Malcolm’s wife, Betty Shabazz, he spent hours talking with Cassius about the meaning of the title fight and the fighter’s destiny in his people’s future. As always, Malcolm’s aim was to clear his disciple’s mind of the disabling preconceptions bred by a racist society, to inculcate self-confidence through a deep, guiding sense of purpose. Like Frantz Fanon and C.L.R. James, Malcolm had studied the psychology of the oppressed, and much of his teaching was aimed at overcoming the psychological advantages that the rich and powerful always enjoy over the poor and weak. He believed that freedom demanded nothing less than a radical recreation of the self. What he was doing with Clay was what he had been doing in the Nation and what he was to continue to do in the last year of his life: preparing the actors of history for their role in it.
But for Malcolm himself, these days in Miami passed in a haze of anxiety and growing despair. “Whatever I was saying at any time was being handled by a small corner of my mind. The rest of my mind was filled with a parade of a thousand and one different scenes from the past,” he reported to Alex Haley. “I told the various sportswriters repeatedly what I gradually had come to know within myself was a lie—that I would be reinstated within ninety days.” Despite Malcolm’s claims of reticence, it seems unlikely that he never discussed his worries with his host, the man with whom he was sharing the media spotlight. The depiction of Clay in these months as an innocent, unaware or unaffected by the struggle between Malcolm and Muhammad, is not credible. He was providing shelter and publicity to, and spending hours in private conversation with, a Muslim known to be at odds with the Messenger.
In early February Clay told the Louisville Courier-Journal, “I like the Muslims. I’m not going to get killed trying to force myself on people who don’t want me. I like my life. Integration is wrong. The white people don’t want integration. I don’t believe in forcing it, and the Muslims don’t believe in it. So what’s wrong with the Muslims?” According to the paper, Clay’s father, Cassius Sr., said both his sons had joined the organization, and accused the Nation of “ruining” his boys. As rumors circulated, panic gripped the fight promoters. Ticket sales had been slow, and it was feared that the challenger’s association with the Muslims could generate a backlash against the fight. Clay was quick to spot the potential for a role reversal and told Liston: “I make you great. The fans love you because I’m the villain.” Clay may have been amused, but his publicist, Harold Conrad, despaired: “The whole sales pitch for the fight had been Clay against Liston, white hat against black hat, and now it looked like there’d be two black hats fighting.”
It was a measure of Malcolm’s symbolic power in the mind of white America that his mere presence by the side of the challenger could transform the values hitherto attached to the contest, and threaten its future. For Cassius Clay, this was a moment of truth, the first of many which he was to face in the coming years. It was made clear to him by friends, managers, promoters and journalists that it would be in his interest to renounce the Muslims. They told him he would be crazy to let this association jeopardize the chance of a lifetime, a chance he himself had worked so hard to secure. Quietly but firmly, the young fighter stood his ground. A compromise was agreed: there would be no statement, but Malcolm X would leave the camp, at least for the time being.
Meanwhile, the FBI was circulating details of the rift between Malcolm and Muhammad, reports of which began to appear in the mainstream press. Malcolm returned to Miami on 23 February, and was once again met by Clay at the airport, accompanied by Osman Karriem and Clarence X Gill. According to the FBI, Clay asked, “Any word from Chicago?” and Malcolm replied, “Nothing positive.” Later, when the two men were approached by a Miami Herald reporter, Malcolm would make only one comment, “If you think Cassius Clay was loud, wait until I start talking on the first of March.”
On the morning of the fight, 25 February, Malcolm phoned Elijah Muhammad. Muhammad accused Malcolm of attempting to blackmail him; Malcolm denied the charge. That night, in the dressing room before the fight, Malcolm prayed with Cassius and his brother Rudolph (later Rahaman Ali). Unlike almost everyone else, including Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X had always believed that Clay could win the fight. “It was Allah’s intent for me to help Cassius prove Islam’s superiority before the world—through proving that mind can win over brawn.” He fortified Clay to face Liston by retelling the tale of David and Goliath. For Malcolm, Liston’s whole life and career were proof that the struggle for integration was futile and debilitating. Clay, he felt, could represent something different. “Clay … is the finest Negro athlete I have ever known, the man who will mean more to his people than Jackie Robinson, because Robinson is the white man’s hero.” Malcolm saw Clay’s symbolic power more clearly than anyone else at the time, and he helped Clay to realize that power in the ring:
“This fight is the truth,” I told Cassius. “It’s the Cross and the Crescent fighting in a prize ring—for the first time. It’s a modern crusades—a Christian and a Muslim facing each other with television to beam it off Telstar for the whole world to see what happens!” I told Cassius, “Do you think Allah has brought about all this, intending for you to leave the ring as anything but the champion?”
Malcolm sat prominently at the ringside, where he chatted to Clay’s other star guest, Sam Cooke. Live attendance was disappointing but over one million people watched the fight on closed-circuit TV. A somewhat mystified New York Times reporter described the atmosphere at the screening in Harlem: “The general support for Clay seemed to transcend any betting considerations and even the normal empathy for an underdog.”
In Miami, Clay danced his way around a lumbering Liston, his speed, footwork and amazing 360-degree ring-vision nullifying the champion’s advantages in power and reach. When a bewildered and dejected Liston failed to come out for the seventh round, Clay was jubilant. “I want everyone to bear witness,” he shouted. “I am the greatest! I shook up the world!” Many sportswriters, however, regarded the upset victory as a fluke. Malcolm was more perceptive: “The secret of one of fight history’s greatest upsets was that, months before that night, Clay had out-thought Liston.” Because of his rejection of the prevailing stereotypes of black sportsmen, Malcolm was able to see in Clay what the sportswriters refused to see: a supremely intelligent and inventive boxer inspired by more than just a lust for money. That night Clay received a telegram from Martin Luther King, the only black leader, besides Malcolm, to congratulate him on his victory.
Back in the Hampton House Hotel, in the euphoric hours after the fight, Malcolm phoned Alex Haley to share the good news. Haley recalled Malcolm’s childlike delight that the new heavyweight champion was sitting next door. Perhaps at this juncture he entertained a flickering belief that this spectacular turn of events would sway the balance in his struggle with Elijah Muhammad. But even as Malcolm exulted on the telephone, Clay was telling Jim Brown that he would have to break with Malcolm and follow Elijah. Judging by his behavior in the next few days, however, Clay’s mind was not entirely made up, and he may have hoped for some reconciliation between the two leaders.
On the day after Clay’s public embrace of the Nation of Islam, both the FBI and the Department of Defense began inquiries into the new champion’s Selective Service status. At a press conference, the Louisville draft board chairman said he expected Clay to be called up “within weeks.” No one paid much attention because of the furore surrounding Clay’s conversion to the Nation, which at that time seemed more likely to scupper his boxing career than the US military.
For the first time in a decade, Malcolm X was absent from the annual Savior’s Day rally, held that evening in Chicago. In Malcolm’s place, warming up the crowd for the Messenger, was Louis X of Boston. In front of an ecstatic crowd of five thousand, Muhammad confirmed to the world that Cassius Clay was his follower and claimed credit, with Allah, for his great victory. “I’m so glad that Cassius Clay was brave enough to say that he was a Muslim.… He was able, by confessing that Allah was his god and by following Muhammad, to whip a much tougher man. They wanted him to get his face torn up, but Allah and myself said ‘No!’ … Clay has confidence in Allah, and in me as his only messenger.” Through his brother Rudolph, who had flown up from Miami, Clay sent a message to the faithful, thanking them for their prayers.
Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.
James Baldwin
In his comments to the press in the days that followed the shock triumph over Liston, Clay groped towards a new self-definition, while making vain efforts to reassure the white press. “I’m no troublemaker.… I’m a good boy. I never have done anything wrong. I have never been in jail. I have never been in court. I don’t join any integration marches. I don’t pay any attention to all those white women who wink at me. I don’t carry signs.” In another context, these words would have been taken for the most slavish Uncle Tomism. But notice how Clay argued his case. In telling the press that he had never been in jail or court, he was saying, “I’m no Sonny Liston.” In forswearing white women, he was saying, “I’m no Jack Johnson.” In denouncing integration, he was saying, “I’m no Floyd Patterson.” And most crucially, in saying he did not want to “carry a sign,” he was repudiating the duties of representation. He seemed to be arguing that for all these reasons white people should not be threatened by him. But for all these reasons, many white people could not but regard him as a menace to their most precious assumptions. In this context, “I don’t have to be what you want me to be” became nothing less than an outrageous provocation.
Clay undermined his own attempt to paint his conversion as purely religious and personal by his constant references to American racism, to dogs and firehoses and the four girls murdered in a Birmingham church. Perusing Clay’s statements of the time, it is clear he saw the Nation of Islam as a means of black survival in a hostile racist world. “I don’t believe Muhammad’s conversion was a religious experience,” said the born-again Christian George Foreman, years later. “I’ll believe until the day I die that it was a social awakening.… It was something he needed at the time, something the whole country needed.”
Malcolm flew back to New York City, where he told Captain Joseph, his former subordinate at the Harlem mosque, “The Nation is finished.” Because of his fear of flying, Clay drove up from Miami and experienced the familiar roadside segregation as he passed through the South. On his arrival in New York he went straight to the Hotel Theresa in Harlem to meet with Malcolm. The two men then toured Times Square, where they were mobbed. “Malcolm X got more requests for autographs than I did,” the new heavyweight champion told the press. “He’s the greatest.”
That was the evening of 29 February, four days after Clay’s triumph over Liston. Malcolm’s ninety-day suspension was to expire the next morning, but he received no word from Chicago. The next day, he and Clay toured the offices of the Amsterdam News. “Elijah Muhammad is the sweetest man in the world,” Clay told the admiring staff. “Malcolm X? I fell in love with him on television discussing Islam with those educators—leaving them with their mouths right open. I will not be identified as an Uncle Tom. I will be known as Cassius X. The whole world recognizes me now that they know my religion is Islam. The religion is the truth and I am ready to die for the truth.” He announced that he would be hiring a black lawyer to represent him in his future dealings with the Louisville syndicate.
On 4 March, he accompanied Malcolm on a two-hour tour of the United Nations. “I’m champion of the whole world,” Clay explained, drawing out the adjective to emphasize his enlarging vision of his domain. “And I want to meet the people I am champion of.” Malcolm introduced him to delegates from Mali, Liberia, Gambia, Congo—contacts he had been cultivating for several years. Indeed, Malcolm had become such a familiar figure at the UN that guards had standing instructions to admit him at will. The visit of this remarkable pair of African-Americans was reported to have set off the greatest tumult among UN delegates and officials since Khrushchev pounded his shoe on the table in 1960. Malcolm seized the opportunity to brief foreign journalists on the dire state of American race relations. Clay announced that he planned to tour Africa and Asia, and that “my companion on my world tour will be Minister Malcolm X.”
Communication with UN and foreign diplomats was supposed to be conducted through official channels. Yet here were two black men taking themselves off to confer with the representatives of foreign powers without so much as a by-your-leave to the US government. Certainly no US sports star had ever contemplated such autonomous action. Like Robeson, Malcolm X and Cassius Clay met on an equal footing with foreign diplomats, as representatives not of “America” but of a people trapped within America. Their UN visit attracted the attention of both the CIA and the FBI, who began preparations to monitor the forthcoming foreign trip.
In the midst of personal and political crisis, Malcolm made spending time with Clay his priority. History was to prove that in doing so, he was at his most far-sighted. When he escorted the new heavyweight champion to the UN, Malcolm planted the seed of a great regeneration of popular pan-Africanism. Meanwhile, Elijah fumed at Malcolm’s palpable defiance. He sent Louis X to replace Malcolm as Minister at Mosque No. 7. The day after the UN visit, on 5 March, Malcolm received a letter from Muhammad informing him that his suspension would be “indefinite” because he had not “shown sufficient desire” to be “rehabilitated.” That afternoon the government announced that Clay’s Selective Service re-examination would be “expedited.” Pressed by reporters about his poor performance in his first attempt, Clay insisted, “I tried my hardest to pass.” Though it went largely unnoticed at the time, Clay was also asked if he would request exemption as a conscientious objector. “I don’t like that name. It sounds ugly—like I wouldn’t want to be called,” he said, then added, “I’d need two hours on the radio—with a national hook-up—to explain my position.”
Early the next morning, Malcolm and Clay met at the Theresa. Malcolm told Clay how he had evaded the draft in World War II, and insisted that it was possible for a clever man to beat the system. Together they returned to the UN at lunchtime. Here they met with the Nigerian delegate, who urged Clay to use the championship “in the name of world brotherhood.” Outside the UN, Clay signed autographs. “My name is Cassius X Clay,” he told a New York Times reporter. “X is what the slavemasters used to be called.” Malcolm nudged Clay, who seemed to have realized he’d made a blunder, and fended off further questions.
After dropping off Clay at the Theresa, Malcolm returned home, where he was phoned by Leon 4X Ameer, who had been assigned to act as Clay’s press secretary. Ameer had learned from Captain Joseph that Malcolm “had to be taken down.” Clarence X Gill, Clay’s bodyguard, had indicated there would be a reward for anyone who eliminated Malcolm. That night, in his regular radio broadcast, Elijah Muhammad announced that he was renaming Cassius Clay. “Muhammad Ali is what I will give to him, as long as he believes in Allah and follows me.” Listening to the speech on the radio in his car, Malcolm immediately saw the renaming as “a political move.” That evening he told friends, “He did it to prevent him coming with me.” Malcolm tried to phone Clay at the Theresa, but from this night on—only hours after their second tour of the UN—all communications between the two men were blocked by Nation loyalists who had quickly moved into place around the new champion.
The awarding of an “original name” was a rare honor in the Nation of Islam, one not bestowed even on Malcolm X. The latter’s immediate assumption that it was a gesture to secure the loyalty of the new heavyweight champion was probably correct. Only days before, the FBI had tapped a conversation between Clay and Elijah Muhammad in which the ageing Messenger tried to convince a reluctant Clay to accept this special honor. Clay said he knew that many members waited ten years or more before being awarded an original name and he preferred the more modest Cassius X Clay. Muhammad persisted, arguing that an Arabic name would be more suitable for an international representative of the faith, a role which Clay would have to assume by virtue of his new title.
For the stunned white press the name change was yet another sinister transgression. As Ali himself was quick to point out, name changes were commonplace in American sports and entertainment: Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson had done it; so had Edward G. Robinson and John Garfield. Professional wrestlers routinely adopted noms de guerre. But this was different. This was a black man signaling by his name change not a desire to ingratiate himself with mainstream America, but a comprehensive rejection of it. By adopting the name Muhammad Ali at the command of Elijah Muhammad, Cassius Clay claimed a new heritage, a new nation, a new family. And in doing so, he exposed the American order as something other than a fact of nature. Ali may have accepted his new name reluctantly, but he was to prove tenacious in its defense. A week after the re-naming, he walked out of Madison Square Garden when the announcer insisted on introducing the new heavyweight champion, a ringside guest, as “Cassisus Clay.” He had already seized on “Muhammad Ali” as a badge of pride and in battling to assert that pride, inside and outside the ring, he paved the way for millions. Today, it is commonplace for African-Americans to adopt Islamic or African names, and easy to forget what a bold step it was in 1964. Certainly it’s not to be compared to the facile exercise in re-branding attempted by Mike Tyson during his time in prison. Johnson and Louis, Patterson and Liston had been endowed with their public identities by the white press; in assuming the name Muhammad Ali, the champion declared his intention to create his own, highly individual yet charged with social resonance.
He faced entrenched resistance. The New York Times insisted on calling him Cassius Clay throughout the 1960s. Ali could only have overcome such resistance with the wind of a great movement at his back. He tried to make a virtue of the Muslims’ abstention from the civil rights movement, but, in the end, he would fight all the battles he sought to avoid, and on a grand scale. He would “carry a sign” by becoming a sign—a living symbol of African-American and ultimately global insurgency.
On 8 March, at a press conference in the Hotel Theresa (booked by Leon Ameer, who was still working for Ali), Malcolm announced his departure from the Nation of Islam and linked it to his quest for a new freedom of political action. “Internal differences within the Nation of Islam forced me out of it,” he declared. “I did not leave of my own free will.” He restated his commitment to black nationalism as a political, economic and cultural philosophy, but added that he would aim “to co-operate in local civil rights actions in the South and elsewhere … because every campaign for specific objectives can only heighten the political consciousness of Negroes and intensify their identification against white society.” He pledged to “fight wherever Negroes ask for my help.” He also noted—since he now found himself without an income of any kind—that he would once again make himself available to speak at colleges. “I find most white students are more attuned to the times than their parents and realize that something is fundamentally wrong in this country.”
In Chicago, Elijah Muhammad wept before the white press. The New York Times reported Malcolm’s resignation on its front page, alongside the opening of the Senate debate on the civil rights bill. Malcolm was called by an aide to Herbert Muhammad, who informed him that Herbert was now Ali’s manager, and that Ali would not be traveling to Africa with him. Malcolm called Ali at his hotel eight times on 9 March, but was told each time that the champ wasn’t there. On 10 March, Malcolm received a demand from the Nation of Islam for the return of the house he lived in with his wife and children. Two days later he held another press conference—to “clarify my position in the struggle.” For the first time he publicly attacked officials of the Nation of Islam, while asking civil rights leaders to forgive the many bad things he’d said about them, as he would forgive the many bad things they had said about him. An editorial in the New York Times described him as an “embittered racist” and “irresponsible demagogue.”
One week after their UN visit, Muhammad Ali broke with Malcolm X forever. “You just don’t buck Mr. Muhammad and get away with it,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about him anymore.” He reveled in his “original name, black man’s name” and praised the Nation of Islam as “the most cleanest, most unified, most respected black people in America.” On 13 March, he re-took the Selective Service examination, and failed again. A psychiatric report cleared him of malingering and two weeks later he was classified 1-Y, ineligible for service. Ali, who always had difficulty with the written word, was embarrassed. “I said I was the Greatest, not the smartest.”
Cassius Clay was a ready-made young star, as macho and seductive as Malcolm X, but better known, richer and more pliable. His victory over Liston may well have hastened Muhammad’s decision to finish with Malcolm. Muhammad’s biographer, Claude Clegg, believes that his “willingness to jettison Malcolm X” owed much to “the upset victory of Cassius Clay.” Yet initially, as Clegg points out, Clay was Malcolm’s ace in the hole, his best bet to re-establish his eminence in the Nation of Islam, or at least to precipitate a major split in which he could take with him a substantial section of the organization. Malcolm’s critics have claimed that he sought to use Ali politically, and that Elijah Muhammad intervened to stop him. Certainly, Malcolm devoted a great deal of time and thought to the young boxer, and he would not have stayed by his side during these most decisive, difficult months of his own life had he not seen Clay as a significant part of his evolving vision of the black freedom movement. Yet Malcolm also seems to have seen his main role as providing solidarity and disinterested guidance to a young man in extraordinary circumstances. He insisted to Alex Haley that he wished to avoid adding to the pressures on Ali. Haley himself believed “he simply wanted Ali to be free and strong.”
Elijah Muhammad adopted a different tactic. Once he had established direct contact with the new champion, sometime during that week in New York, the last week of Cassius Clay, Muhammad applied himself to securing the loyalty of his new recruit, whose fame far exceded his own. Shortly after Malcolm’s resignation, Ali visited the Muhammad mansion in Chicago and was photographed playing with Elijah’s grandchildren, just as six weeks before he’d played with Malcolm’s daughter. For Elijah Muhammad, Cassius Clay arrived propitiously, filling the public vacuum left by Malcolm X. But unlike Malcolm X, Cassius Clay was free of political ambitions and happy to be just another one of the Messenger’s humble followers. Like many young, talented black men he succumbed to the old man’s sweet sternness. Skeptics used to say that Elijah was just a picture on the temple wall, while Malcolm was a living man interacting with his congregations. But as Clegg explains, “more important than fiery oratory or a dynamic stage presence, he had the power to command the loyalty, services and resources of others.” Elijah Muhammad never attended an Ali fight. He continued to deride boxing while freely taking his tithe of Ali’s professional earnings. Yet Ali paid him public homage as the Messenger of Allah till the day of his death.
From the beginning, Ali was told by friends, family and business associates that the Nation of Islam was out to get his money. But giving away money, even being fleeced by friends, never bothered Ali. He was not unaware that he was a source of finance for the Nation, and for numerous individuals who flitted in and out of his entourage, but he believed that it was a small price to pay for what he got in return.
The bond between Malcolm and Ali was real and intense, for all that divided them. Malcolm was an ascetic, and Ali was definitely not. The gap between the puritanical code of the Nation and the actual practice of its leadership deeply distressed Malcolm, but Ali, who was later to flout his adulteries while spouting Muslim pieties, may have felt differently. After all, it was to some extent the institutionalized hypocrisy of the Nation, its complex accommodation to the modern world, that attracted him to it in the first place.
I suspect that at the core of Ali’s decision to break with Malcolm and follow Elijah Muhammad was his suspicion that Malcolm would lead him deeper into political activism, expose him to greater danger. He kept saying he didn’t want to face firehoses and dogs, and he meant it. Malcolm, on the other hand, was preparing to reach out to those facing the hoses and the dogs, and to join their struggle, on his own terms.
Later in 1964, Malcolm told BBC television that the reason Ali was hated by the white establishment was “they knew that if people begin to identify with Cassius and the type of image he was creating they’d have trouble out of these Negroes because they’d have Negroes walking around the streets saying ‘I’m the Greatest’ and also Negroes who were proud of being black.” Unlike Malcolm, Elijah Muhammad was careful to defend his new convert not as a racial but a religious hero. “America is upset over his being a Muslim,” Muhammad told his followers. The criticism of Ali was “an open manifestation of the hatred of Muslims and Islam in America.” He declined even to treat Ali as a sporting hero. “He is giving up the world of the Christian, which is a world of sport and play, as being nothing. The hereafter is what he seeks.” Like so many others in boxing’s history, Muhammad wanted to cast his fighter in a role; he wanted Ali to represent something beyond and besides himself, just like the high priests of Americanism in the halls of Congress and the newspaper offices. But Muhammad wanted Ali to represent not “America,” and not black people, but Islam or, more precisely, his version of it. “Islam will get the Negro recognition in the world,” he argued, “and this is what America fears” in Muhammad Ali.
At a press conference on 26 March, Philbert X, reading a statement prepared by the Nation’s Chicago headquarters, denounced his brother Malcolm as a Judas, a Brutas, a Benedict Arnold, and suggested that he was mentally ill. The next day Malcolm was in Washington, listening to the Senate debate on the civil rights bill. There he met Martin Luther King, for the first and only time, and the legendary photograph was snapped. Malcolm told the press, “I’m here to remind the white man of the alternative to Dr. King.” King warned that if the bill was not passed, “our nation is in for a dark night of social disruption.”
Another photograph of two charismatic black men—Elijah Muhammad and Muhammad Ali—appeared on the front page of the next week’s Muhammad Speaks. Above it ran a bold injunction: “WALK THE WAY OF FREE MEN!” Inside, the paper noted that Ali was a “new type heavyweight champion” and praised him for staying in black hotels in black neighborhoods. “Too many of our actors, fighters and entertainers move to neighborhoods where their own people are not.” Ali praised Elijah Muhammad for teaching “the truth about black people and the history of black people.”
Why did Ali stay with Elijah Muhammad? He was a world-famous twenty-two year old who had just committed himself publicly to a highly controversial religious cult. This organization promised to protect and cherish him. Malcolm could offer him nothing but increasingly daunting challenges. Besides, if a strong-willed spirit like Malcolm X was only able to break with the Nation and Elijah Muhammad after years of tortured compromise, why should we expect more from the neophyte Ali, who was without Malcolm’s intellectual resources or his political ambitions? And if Malcolm’s own brother denounced him, why expect Ali to defend him?
Floyd Patterson thought Ali later found himself “trapped.… He could not get out of the Black Muslims even if he wanted to, I think, because he’d never know what might happen as a result.” Certainly, as the split with Malcolm grew more bitter during the course of 1964, and as apostates were hunted down and punished, Ali must have been made aware that any attempt to follow Malcolm would be dangerous in the extreme. But I think Leroi Jones came closer to the truth about Ali in June 1964:
His choice of Elijah Muhammad over Malcolm X means that he is still a “homeboy,” embracing the folksy vector straight out of the hard spiritualism of poor negro aspiration. Cassius is right now just angry rather than (socio-politically) motivated.
Ali and Malcolm walked side by side for only a few months. They separated abruptly and decisively (though their paths were to cross one last time, in Africa). Yet I believe Malcolm exercised a long-term influence on Ali. Malcolm knew about self-invention; his autobiography is a long and stirring exercise in it. But he also knew that unless self-invention was shaped by higher loyalties, by an absorption of the self in a greater mission, it would degenerate into mere self-promotion. Malcolm was the first to intuit Ali’s seriousness, to see the wisdom in the clowning. He taught Ali that it was only by cultivating an inner strength that he could hope to overcome the vast forces opposed to him in the world outside. He re-defined the arrogance of the ambitious young fighter as a deep pride, not merely in himself and his abilities, but in his people, and showed him how to honor and draw courage from their collective past and future.
A great song arose, the loveliest thing born this side of the seas. It was a new song. It did not come from Africa, though the dark throb and beat of that Ancient of days was in it and through it. It did not come from white America—never from so pale and thin a thing, however deep these vulgar and surrounding tones had driven.… It was a new song and its deep and plaintive beauty, its great cadences and wild appeal wailed, throbbed and thundered on the world’s ears with a message seldom voiced by man.… America’s one gift to beauty; as slavery’s one redemption, distilled from the dross of its dung.
W.E.B. Du Bois
As a teenager, Cassius Clay was an R&B fan, and when singer Lloyd Price passed through Louisville in 1959, the seventeen-year-old Golden Gloves champion waited outside his motel for an autograph. Price had been one of the first R&B singers to cross over to the white charts, and that year he’d had a huge hit with his version of “Stagger Lee,” the oft-told tale of the bold black criminal, rehearsed with a buoyant amorality. Price was also a bandleader, record producer and ambitious entrepreneur. He was charmed by the insouciance of the young Clay, who in the next few years would often stay with Price on his visits to New York City.
One of Price’s early stablemates at Specialty Records, the country’s most successful gospel label, was the young Sam Cooke, who by 1957 had established himself as the pre-eminent male star of the gospel circuit. That year he decided to make his own crossover bid for the white youth market. This was not only a shift from black to white, but also from religious to secular, and many of his long-standing fans felt betrayed, just as Dylan’s folk acolytes did when their hero went electric. Cooke’s first effort, “You Send Me,” was a number-one chart success, and he followed it up with a string of hits, including million-sellers “Wonderful World,” “Chain Gang,” and “Twistin’ the Night Away.” R&B performers like Ray Charles and Fats Domino had already shown that white kids would pay money for black sounds. Cooke was more ambitious. His aim was to become nothing less than an all-American star on the scale of Crosby or Sinatra. He recorded a series of middle-of-the-road albums stuffed with standards, played nightclubs and appeared on television. With his Ivy League sweater, smooth good looks and relaxed manner, he ingratiated himself with white audiences, while at the same time flirting discreetly with Malcolm and the Nation.
Cooke first met Cassius Clay in late 1963, when both men were staying at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem. The singer was in the middle of a week’s stand at the nearby Apollo, where he treated black audiences to a sensuous, ecstatic and blues-soaked sound that was considered altogether too much for the white teen audience which had snapped up his carefully crafted pop records. Clay was an unabashed admirer of Cooke’s music—all of it—as well as his style and success. The two men struck up a friendship, and both spent time that week with Malcolm X, whose office was at the Theresa. Two weeks after the Kennedy assassination, and days after Malcolm’s notorious “chickens coming home to roost” remark, Cooke and Clay met up again in a television studio (appearing together on Jerry Lewis’s short-lived national talk show); Clay invited Cooke to be his guest in Miami for the upcoming Liston fight.
Although neither Cooke nor Clay had taken any direct part in the civil rights movement, their ambitions for themselves, which would have been inconceivable in an earlier era, reflected the broader upsurge of black aspirations and black self-confidence that the movement both expressed and encouraged. Both also nurtured ambitions for their people which, at this stage, they were careful to conceal. Like Clay, Cooke married a strong race consciousness with an equally strong drive for personal success. Although he wanted to make it in the white world, he did not accept white values or white definitions of black people. He believed in black enterprise and put his belief into action by establishing a black-owned and -managed studio in Los Angeles.
Malcolm liked to think of himself as Clay’s “older brother,” but it was to men like Cooke and Lloyd Price that the young fighter turned for lessons in living. Both were sophisticated men about town who knew how to make money and how to spend it. They were attractive to the most attractive women. The youth from Louisville was impressed by their nonchalant sexual promiscuity, which he was to emulate in the years to come.
For all his easy-going hedonism Sam Cooke was a proud black man who took himself very seriously indeed. Like Clay, he was trying to work in a genre in which blacks performed for whites, and like Clay, he was trying to do so without sacrificing his personal dignity, without descending to minstrelsy. Cooke was determined to cross over, but he was also determined to retain his autonomy, both creative and financial. To some extent he succeeded, through pained efforts to cultivate a variety of audiences with a variety of sounds. Broadway show tunes, folk, calypso, rock and roll, Tin Pan Alley, sagas of teen romance, dance crazes, supper-club standards—Cooke recorded them all and enriched each with his supple voice and formidable musicianship. But in the long run, Cassius Clay was to achieve crossover appeal beyond even his old friend’s most extravagant dreams. While retaining and even strengthening his home base in black America, he built a huge multi-racial and multi-national following, and did so without tailoring his act for anybody.
Like nearly all the early stars of R&B and soul, Cooke kept his distance from the demonstrations and pickets. Although the music, like the movement, had roots in the southern black church, it was also a creature of commercial realism. The received wisdom at the time was that politics and popular culture didn’t mix. It was assumed that music buyers, like movie-goers, were seeking escape from the cares of the world, not a high-minded civics lesson. Like Hollywood, the music business had felt the cold hand of McCarthyism throughout the fifties, and it was considered wise to steer clear of sensitive issues in general, not to mention the explosive politics of racial justice.
The folk vogue of the early sixties precipitated a re-think. Peter, Paul and Mary had a hit with Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” a song which was soon covered in a bizarre array of styles by artists in several countries. One of them was Sam Cooke. More significantly, Dylan’s song (and success) inspired Cooke to a bold leap forward in his own songwriting. Cooke remarked to friends that it was an embarrassment for black performers that it had been a white boy who first dared talk about race and politics in popular music. In January 1964, he wrote and recorded “A Change Is Gonna Come,” perhaps the first masterpiece of socially conscious soul. Its long, sinuous, suspenseful melodic line is pregnant with the burdens of history and charged with the imminence of liberation. With its roots in the millennial longings of the southern black church, and its face turned boldly toward the modern world, the song trembles in the precarious balance between patience and impatience that characterized this phase of the movement, as pious yearning passed over into profound determination.
I go to my brother and I say, brother, help me please
but he winds up knockin me back down on my knees
it’s been a long time coming but I know
a change is gonna come, oh yes it will.
In February, Cooke premiered the song to a national audience on the “Tonight Show.” Two days later, the Beatles made their historic appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Southern black R&B had crossed the Atlantic and found a following among British youth, who blended it with music hall and other elements, and re-exported it to America. Cooke liked the Beatles (he considered their music “emotional”) and saw their advent as yet another opportunity to expand his market, but their impact on the fortunes of black American artists was ambivalent. Between 1955 and 1963, there had been a 50 percent increase in the number of top ten hits by black performers. By the end of 1964, however, one third of top ten hits were British. Despite the fertile crossover activity that marked the decade, it also entrenched the racial bifurcation of the American pop market, which persists to this day.
At the instigation of promoter Harold Conrad, the Beatles visited one of Clay’s training sessions in Miami. There was a brief exchange of banter and a publicity shoot which, at the time, seemed nothing more than two novelty acts trying to cash in on each other. A few days later Cooke flew to Miami to join the Clay camp. At ringside, Cooke’s new financial manager, Allen Klein (who was later to take a controversial hand in the Beatles’ finances), sat between Cooke and Malcolm X. In the mayhem that followed Liston’s defeat, an exuberant Clay interrupted a television interview to hug Cooke and proclaim him “the world’s greatest rock n’ roll singer!” Cooke, along with Malcolm, seems to have been one of the few observers unruffled by the evening’s events. “Once he got by the first round, I just settled back and watched him work,” the singer told the Los Angeles Sentinel. “Cassius Clay is one of the greatest entertainers and showmen I have ever seen. And he’s a good example for our youth.”
Cooke was one of the exclusive group of black men who spent that night with Clay in Malcolm X’s rooms at the Hampton House. On his return to New York, he told his friend Rosko, the legendary DJ, about his growing interest in the Nation of Islam and his belief that black people in America were the victims of “colonial oppression.” A few days later, the new champion, with Malcolm at his side, announced that he’d signed a recording deal and was going to work with his friend Sam Cooke—“He’s the greatest too!” Cooke took Clay into the recording studios, where Cooke’s band cut a rock and roll version of “Hail, Hail the Gang’s All Here” as a tribute to the new champ. Within days, Malcolm had made his public break with the Nation and the newly christened Muhammad Ali had broken with Malcolm.
In April, Cooke appeared on “American Bandstand,” where he was asked how he had managed to sustain his string of hit records over a seven-year period. “I think the secret is really observation,” Cooke replied. “If you observe what’s going on—try to figure out how people are thinking and determine the times of your day—I think you can always write something that people understand.” Here Cooke was speaking both as an astute observer of commercial trends and as an artist responding to the changing political climate.
In June he headlined at New York’s Copacabana Club, where he was visited backstage by Ali. Besides his own hits, Cooke treated his well-heeled audience to standards like “Bill Bailey,” “Tennessee Waltz,” “If I Had a Hammer” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” The show was a success (the album, Sam Cooke at the Copa, stayed in the charts for a year); the next month, this musical chameleon played an equally successful (if less remunerative) week in the Harlem Club in Atlantic City, where his 95 percent black audience reveled in a blazing string of gospel, R&B and throaty soul classics. In July, Cooke donated a version of “A Change Is Gonna Come” to an SCLC fund-raising LP. In August, he stopped by Gary, Indiana, to congratulate Ali on his recent marriage. Cooke’s next target was a headline gig in Las Vegas, the seal of crossover legitimacy.
In December 1964, he was shot dead in a cheap hotel in Watts, Los Angeles, following a dispute over an alleged theft by a prostitute. A copy of Muhammad Speaks and a bottle of whiskey were found in his car. Cooke’s murder was front-page news in the black press, but little noted in the white, for all his efforts to cross over. Among Cooke’s legions of black fans, there was dismay. How could this urbane, wealthy young man have come to such a brutal, squalid end? Many doubted the police version and questioned the decision not to prosecute the hotel manageress for murder, among them Muhammad Ali, who was one of the thousands attending Cooke’s Chicago funeral. “I don’t like the way he was shot. I don’t like the way it was investigated,” he told a local radio reporter. “If Cooke had been Frank Sinatra, the Beatles, or Ricky Nelson, the FBI would be investigating yet and that woman would have been sent to prison.”
Three days after the funeral, “A Change Is Gonna Come” was released as a single. However, with Cooke’s permission, one verse had been excised:
I go to the movies and I go downtown
somebody keeps telling me don’t hang around
it’s been a long time coming but I know
a change is gonna come, oh yes it will.
As late as 1964, it seems, even such an oblique reference to the battles being waged in the streets of southern cities could be considered controversial. Comparing these mild-mannered, color-blind lyrics to the kind of upfront declamations which were to become commonplace in black popular music within the decade, I am struck once again by both the scale of the change in popular culture wrought by pioneers like Cooke and Ali, and its sheer rapidity.
* For readers with no personal recollection of the sixties, it may be necessary to explain that this organization was commonly referred to simply by its acronym—SNCC—which was pronounced “snick.”