One three centuries removed
From the scenes his fathers loved,
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
What is Africa to me?
Countee Cullen
“Leading American Negroes are today widely ignorant of the history and present situation in Africa and indifferent to the fate of African Negroes,” W.E.B. Du Bois complained in 1955. “This represents a great change from the past.” He was referring to a rich history of transatlantic interchange, in which ideas and aspirations circulated between Africa, North America, Europe and the Caribbean, a history always marginalized, but over which a veil had now been drawn by the Cold War, with its two great opposing blocks, both dominated by white people.
Du Bois’s own efforts to build a pan-African organization—and pan-African consciousness on both sides of the Atlantic—were no small part of this history. He helped organize the first Pan-African Conference in London in 1900 and the second in Paris in 1919. Through two world wars, the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of fascism, Du Bois struggled to keep alive the idea of a common interest and a common future of freedom for Africans and people of African descent.
Du Bois’s great cadences invoked and echoed across what Paul Gilroy has called the Black Atlantic world. With its origins in the horrors of the middle passage, the Black Atlantic evolved, rarely noticed by the white world, through an interchange of political and religious ideas, music, literature, dance and sport. Although for most of its existence only tiny minorities on either side of the ocean were conscious of it, the Black Atlantic nonetheless produced what Gilroy has called “structures of feeling, producing, communicating and remembering” on which many millions have drawn—among them Muhammad Ali. Indeed, it is impossible to understand Ali fully unless he is placed within the Black Atlantic, which shaped him and which he helped to shape and ultimately to project into popular consciousness as never before.
Among the early trailblazers of the Black Atlantic were intellectuals and agitators like Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell and Martin Delany, as well as a steady stream of black American boxers, from Bill Richmond, Tom Molineaux and Massa Sutton to Bobby Dobbs and Jack Johnson himself. In London and Paris, traveling black Americans—seamen, musicians, fighters, clergy—encountered small concentrations of African students. In 1873, the Fisk Jubilee Singers brought Europe (and Africans living in Europe) their first taste of the gospel sound, the “sorrow songs” which Du Bois praised as the only authentically American art form, even as he celebrated its African source. In Europe, black Americans came to see more clearly the anomaly of their position in the United States, as well as their link to an Africa then under near total colonial domination. In other words, they acquired a world picture of themselves. In Dusk of Dawn, published in 1940, Du Bois contemplated both the mystery and the potency of this emerging vision:
As I face Africa I ask myself: what is it between us that constitutes a tie that I can feel better than I can explain? Africa is, of course, my fatherland. Yet neither my father nor my father’s father ever saw Africa or knew its meaning or cared overmuch for it.… The badge of color [is] relatively unimportant save as a badge; the real essence of this kinship is its social heritage of slavery, the discrimination and insult; and this heritage binds together not simply the children of Africa, but extends through yellow Asia and into the South Seas. It is this unity that draws me to Africa.
However, it was not through the reasoned appeals of the erudite Du Bois, but the charismatic populism of the Jamaican Marcus Garvey, that pan-African ideas burst into the mainstream of African-American life. Founded in 1917, his United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) demanded “Africa for the Africans, at home and abroad,” spread rapidly across the African diaspora in North America and the Caribbean, and found adherents in West and Southern Africa. Garvey’s speeches made their way even into the African bush, where the young Jomo Kenyatta was stirred by them. Garvey declared himself “provisional president of Africa.” By 1920 the UNIA claimed two million members and had become the first mass organization of black Americans and of the African diaspora. However, in the early twenties, faced with the rise of the Klan and harassment from the federal government, Garvey began to downplay his political challenge to colonialism and Jim Crow, and emphasized instead racial purity and “repatriation” to Africa as the answers to black misery. Like Elijah Muhammad in 1961, he even made overtures to white supremacists, including the Klan.
Initially, Du Bois had welcomed Garveyism’s assertive racial spirit and its commitment to pan-Africanism. But Garvey’s mercurial egotism alarmed him, and he was outraged by the “unholy alliance” with the Klan. “He is either a lunatic or a traitor,” Du Bois declared. Garvey replied by calling Du Bois “a lazy dependent mulatto.” Du Bois attacked Garvey as a corrupt autocrat, and Garvey labeled Du Bois a white man’s negro. The feud between these two great champions of pan-Africa was dubbed by A. Philip Randolph (himself a recent apostate from Garvey’s “magic romanticism of color”) the “Heavyweight Championship Bout for the Afro-American–West Indian Belt, Between Battling Du Bois and Kid Garvey.”
The boxing analogy was not accidental. Boxing—more than politics, the performing arts or other sports—was at this time black America’s dominant public arena, the place where black heroes met in battle, either with each other or with representatives of the white majority. What’s more, in the twenties it was becoming one of the major features of the Black Atlantic, a common interest binding together blacks in the US, the Caribbean, western Europe and West Africa. After serving in the French Army in World War I, the Senegalese known as Battling Siki had made a name for himself as a pugilist. In 1922, he fought Georges Carpentier for the light heavyweight title in Paris (becoming the first black to fight for a title in any division since Jack Johnson’s defeat). It has been alleged that the fight was fixed for Carpentier, but after a few desultory rounds something in Siki snapped and he thrashed Carpentier from one corner to another. Carpentier fell, but the referee ruled he had been fouled by Siki. The Frenchman was declared the winner. The crowd reacted angrily, the boxing commissioner stepped into the ring, reversed the referee’s decision and awarded the fight and title to Siki.
Siki basked in his sudden wealth and fame, and in doing so earned the enmity of the Parisian press. The next year he lost his title in Dublin and departed for America. There, he gained a popular following among the black populations of the northern cities, and his extravagant lifestyle and frequent brushes with the police were extensively covered by the black press. He was found shot dead in Harlem in December 1925. In The Greatest, Muhammad Ali recalled: “I used to hang around the gym and hear the pros talk about famous old fighters and their feats, and it sounded more exciting and daring to me than any tales of the Wild West: stories about Black Deacon, Tiger Flowers, Boston Tar Baby, Kid Chocolate, Joe Gans, Battling Siki, and others just as good who fought all across the country, almost always in places where the audience wanted to see them stomped.”
As Gerald Early has pointed out, though Siki was embraced by black America, he was often seen as a wild primitive, an impression strengthened by his style in the ring and his adventures outside it. Black Americans might view Africans and Africa with sympathy, but by and large they also viewed them as uncivilized, wanting in the refinements and restraint introduced by Christianity and industrialization. As Du Bois sadly observed, black Americans had been taught that “Africa has no history and no culture and they became ashamed of any connection with it.”
But it was difficult even for those who were proud of the connection to grasp the reality of the continent, and even the most worldly black Americans still tended to see Africa through a veil of exoticism. The obstacles to building a pan-African consciousness and an authentic African presence in modern popular culture can be gauged by a glance at Paul Robeson’s career in the cinema. Initially, Robeson’s interest in Africa was primarily cultural. His musicological and linguistic studies were part of a search for “an art that was purely Negro.” In London in the late twenties, Robeson, relishing his freedom from Jim Crow America and in search of his roots, began a study of African languages at the University of London. Over the next decade he met and worked with African and Caribbean students and future leaders, among them Nnamdi Azikiwe, Kenyatta and C.L.R. James. As he grew more deeply involved with the anti-colonial activists, Robeson’s cultural curiosity became increasingly tied to political commitment. In the mid thirties, he starred in C.L.R. James’s dramatic adaptation of the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture in London’s West End. The Black Atlantic had found a niche in British culture, but it was still a remote and largely unimagined reality to the masses of black people.
When the Korda brothers offered Robeson a leading role as an African prince in their epic, Sanders of the River, the actor-activist was delighted. At last, a popular film promised to treat the African reality with a degree of integrity. Jomo Kenyatta was among the African students in London who earned much-needed cash as an extra on the film, and Robeson hoped their presence would enhance the film’s authenticity. He was to be bitterly disappointed. Despite Robeson’s efforts, his character—Bosambo—remains a caricature, and the film as a whole takes for granted the benevolence of the white man’s rule over the grinning and fearful natives. Robeson was embarrassed, but the experience did not deter him from trying repeatedly in the coming years to inject the African presence into popular cinema. In Song of Freedom, he plays a London dockworker whom fate (and a convoluted plot) transforms first into a famous concert singer and then into an African king. In King Solomon’s Mines, his character reclaims an ancient royal right—though still under the aegis of imperialism. In Jericho, Robeson portrays a medical student in the army who, unjustly court-martialed, escapes to Africa, where he becomes the leader of a tribe and a benefactor of the people. In all of these, the African landscape is merely an exotic background for crude melodrama and African peoples are depicted as childlike and in need of guidance from a higher authority. Watching Robeson struggle with a series of improbable characters drawn largely from the stock supply of stereotypes is a chastening experience, an object lesson in the limitations imposed on even the most extraordinary individual talents by the hierarchies which shape popular culture.
It was impossible, even for the rich white men who made the movies, to see Paul Robeson as other than a free man, graceful, intelligent, proud, composed, authoritative. But there was simply no place in the popular cinema for this type of black man at this time. So it became necessary to encase his undeniable qualities in a framework of subordination. It is this dilemma (one for the filmmakers as much as for Robeson) that accounts for the magical transformations, in social status and even ethnic identity, which his characters of the thirties repeatedly undergo. Where qualities of leadership or intellect are discovered, unexpectedly, among the lowly, they must be explained away, either—as in Shakespeare—by hidden royal lineage or—in a more modern twist—by the virtues of (white) western education. Robeson remained profoundly dissatisfied with his film roles. As the thirties progressed, he came to believe that there could be no freedom for himself as an artist as long as there was no freedom for his people.
Just as Robeson believed that “in every black man flows the rhythm of Africa,” so many commentators believed they intuited this rhythm, this germ of Africa, in Robeson’s performances. This had the effect of turning an exquisite and cultivated artist into a pure force of nature. Far from being immune to this racist reductionism, the left shared and even celebrated it. Neruda sang Robeson’s praises in precisely those terms: “You have been the voice of man, / the story of the germinating earth, / the river and the movement of nature.”
While Robeson was in Europe exploring and trying to give artistic expression to his African heritage, Kwame Nkrumah crossed the Atlantic and immersed himself in black America. At the age of twenty-five, he left the British colony of the Gold Coast in West Africa to live for a decade in the United States, studying at Lincoln University and later at the University of Pennsylvania, and founding the African Students’ Organization, the first organization of Africans in North America. Nkrumah was only one of several future African and Caribbean leaders to study at black American institutions in the thirties and forties, among them Azikiwe and George Padmore. Nkrumah’s colleague and critic, C.L.R. James—Trinidadian Marxist, pioneer student of popular culture and embodiment of the Black Atlantic—believed these years in the US were crucial in the development of the man who was to lead Africa’s first successful anti-colonial revolution:
This African lived an intensely active life among all classes of the coloured people in the United States, and that life is the life of a very advanced and highly civilised community, sharpened and broadened by its incessant conflict against the domination and persecution of official society. Not only in books but in his contact with people and his very active intellectual and political life, he was the inheritor of the centuries of material struggle and intellectual thought which the Negro people in the United States had developed from all sources in order to help them in their effort to emancipate themselves.
Nkrumah studied black American music, investigated the churches and social institutions, and dabbled in black nationalism. He was briefly an adherent of the messianic cult of Father Divine, encountered proselytizers from the Nation of Islam while working as a fish seller in Harlem in 1936 and became an admirer of Garvey. Some twenty years later he arranged for the new Ghanaian government to purchase the UNIA’s Black Star Liner.
In 1945, he moved to London and worked with George Padmore, James and Du Bois in organizing the historic Pan-African Conference, held in Manchester that year. In 1947, he returned to the Gold Coast. Declaring that “freedom is not something one people can bestow on another as a gift,” he launched the decade-long political insurgency that would make Ghana Africa’s first independent, post-colonial state.
In 1951, the eighty-two-year-old Du Bois was indicted for “failure to register as an agent of a foreign principal.” With anti-Communist hysteria at its height, even the ACLU refused to defend him. Although the case against him was dismissed, his passport was withdrawn for five years. As the Cold War intensified, the State Department and the CIA grew ever more hostile to adverse comments by traveling black Americans on the state of race relations back home. The boundaries delineated in the Robeson affair remained in force. Only black American leaders who subscribed to those boundaries—Randolph, Walter White and Roy Wilkins—were licensed to speak for and about America abroad.
Stripped of their passports, neither Du Bois nor Robeson was able to attend the historic Bandung conference of non-aligned, emergent nations, organized by Nasser, Nehru and Sukarno in 1955. Alarmed at the very idea of an autonomous block of African and Asian nations, American officials boycotted the conference and dissuaded mainstream black leaders from participating. As a result, the only American voice heard at Bandung belonged to Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the maverick congressman from Harlem and pastor of the Abyssinan Baptist Church. A close ally of the Communist party during the thirties and forties, Powell had swum with the anti-Communist tide, but in the eyes of the establishment he remained unpredictable and untrustworthy. They viewed with unease his solid black political base, his independently cultivated ties to African and Asian leaders, as well as his non-puritanical attitudes towards alcohol, sex and money. Like Jack Johnson, Powell was a victim of double standards; like Johnson, he infuriated whites and unsettled mainstream black leaders while winning the affection of millions of poor and working-class blacks. But at Bandung, Powell chose to play the loyal American. In his speech to the conference, he lauded US progress in race relations, illustrated by his own family’s rise from slavery to a seat in Congress in just two generations. The American media were delighted by Powell’s patriotic performance. He was congratulated by southern congressmen, but his judgement was questioned in the black press.
In May 1956, Louis Armstrong undertook a State Department-sponsored tour, with a CBS crew in tow, of what was then still the Gold Coast colony. Thanks to his recordings and radio and movie appearances, Armstrong was probably at this time the best known black American outside the United States, and he received a rapturous welcome in Accra, where he told the crowds, “I still have African blood in me.” Armstrong’s genius was well known to Nkrumah, who received the American jazz master as an honored guest not of the dying colonial regime (whose officials urged Armstrong not to stir up the natives by playing too fast), but of the emergent free people of Ghana. Thus Nkrumah, with the help of the American State Department, brought jazz back to its roots and opened yet another channel for the currents of the Black Atlantic. At the same time, Armstrong’s visit was part of the official repackaging of jazz as “America’s music,” a means of selling the American dream to the emergent Third World.
The tour was regarded as a diplomatic success for the US and a personal triumph for “Ambassador Satchmo,” then at the height of his fame. Nothing could better illustrate the tragic contradictions facing the African-American performer in the first half of this century than Armstrong’s remarkable career, combining modernism and minstrelsy, genius and buffoonery, an elliptical, knowing, consciously black style with a shameless pandering to white assumptions. Yet even the eternally wary and ever-pragmatic Armstrong was not immune to the stirrings of black revolt. In September 1957, Armstrong watched scenes from Little Rock on television. “The way they are treating my people in the South,” he told a reporter, “the government can go to hell.” Then he added, unknowingly echoing the remark that had brought Paul Robeson down only ten years before, “It’s getting so bad, a colored man hasn’t got any country.” He canceled a second overseas “goodwill tour,” explaining, “The people over there ask me what’s wrong with my country, what am I supposed to say?”
Armstrong’s remarks provoked an outcry from right-wing columnists, a short-lived radio boycott of his recordings and a spate of concert cancellations. He was denounced by Powell and Sammy Davis, Jr. Initially, at least, the adverse reaction only fueled his anger. He declared he’d rather play in the Soviet Union than in Arkansas and that he wouldn’t play at all in New Orleans, the cradle of his art, because of a Louisiana state law banning inter-racial performances. “I don’t care if I ever see that city again. They treat me better all over the world than they do in my hometown.” The FBI opened a file on Armstrong and his managers feared he would suffer Robeson’s fate. But Armstrong was too popular with white audiences, and ultimately too accommodating, to linger long outside the circle of official approval. In 1959, he was formally designated an American Goodwill Ambassador. In 1960, he and his band returned to Ghana, then proceeded, at the State Department’s urging, to the Congo, where Patrice Lumumba awaited martyrdom.
The independence of Ghana in 1957 inaugurated a major shift in the balance of the Black Atlantic. In the West Indies, the calypsonian Lord Kitchener celebrated the epoch-marking event:
This day will never be forgotten,
The sixth of March 1957,
When the Gold Coast successfully
Got their independence officially.
Ghana, Ghana is the name
Ghana, we wish to proclaim
We will be jolly, merry and gay,
The sixth of March, independence day.
Among Nkrumah’s American guests were not only Vice-President Nixon, but A. Phillip Randolph, Ralph Bunche, Adam Clayon Powell and the young Martin Luther King, whom Nkrumah invited for a private luncheon. On his return to America, King spoke of the lessons he’d learned, principally that “privileged classes never give up their privileges without strong resistance … freedom comes only through persistent revolt.” Nkrumah had invited Du Bois and Robeson to the ceremonies, but both were still barred from foreign travel by the US government. Du Bois wrote to Nkrumah expressing his hope that independent Africa would “teach mankind what non-violence and courtesy, literature and art, music and dancing can do for this greedy, selfish and war-stricken world.” But much to Du Bois’s disappointment, Nkrumah (strongly influenced by Padmore’s virulent anti-Sovietism) initially pursued pro-American policies. In March 1958, seeking aid from the Eisenhower administration, he visited the United States. In an attempt to appease the government he argued—contrary to his own experience and commitment—that “the racial question in the United States” had been “exaggerated deliberately.” Such statements did not deter Harlemites from staging a grand reception for their adopted son, attended by both Powell and Malcolm X, who met with Nkrumah again later that year when the Ghanaian returned for another visit to the United Nations. Their communication aroused the suspicions of the CIA, which asked for and received the FBI dossier on the Nation of Islam.
In 1960, Martin Luther King published an essay called “The Rising Tide of Racial Consciousness,” in which he attributed “the new sense of dignity and self-respect on the part of the Negro” in part to “the awareness that his struggle is a part of a world-wide struggle. He has watched developments in Asia and Africa with rapt attention. [His] drama is being played out on the stage of the world with spectators and supporters from every continent.” Although King here placed himself in the internationalist tradition of Du Bois, his concern remained the liberation of black Americans as Americans, and he made no mention of the role black Americans might play in the liberation of Africa or Asia. Yet with the emergence of new nations in Africa, an increasingly vocal black American minority began re-conceiving the ancient link. Africa was no longer merely a collection of mysterious images, vague folk memories or messianic aspirations; and Africa was no longer looking to the diaspora to articulate itself. The new Africa came to Harlem, to black America, living and breathing fire—in the persons of Nkrumah and above all of Patrice Lumumba, who was to have a huge impact on Malcolm X, and therefore an indirect impact on Muhammad Ali.
In June 1960, Lumumba, a former civil servant, trade unionist, pan-Africanist and founder of the Mouvement National Congolais (MNC), became the first (and last) democratically elected prime minister of the newly independent Democratic Republic of the Congo. He was immediately faced with a challenge to his rule from a breakaway Katanga republic, headed by Moise Tshombe, defended by Belgian mercenaries and funded by western interests. On 24 July, after conferring with Nkrumah in Accra, Lumumba flew to New York City, where he was besieged by reporters demanding to know if he was a Communist. He replied that he was a nationalist and that his new nation would pursue a policy of “positive neutralism.”
For the Congo there are no blocs, because we are an African people.… We desire no political programs from the US or USSR; we seek only technical assistance.
But he was also seeking, more controversially—and ultimately unsuccessfully—the withdrawal from the region of all foreign forces, including Belgian mercenaries. He expounded his case in speeches at Howard University and to a gathering in Harlem, after which he met with Malcolm X, who was deeply affected by Lumumba’s vision of an autonomous, cohesive Africa charting its own course of modern development. Personally, Malcolm was overwhelmed by Lumumba, whom he called “the greatest black man who ever walked the African continent.” It was not an accident that he referred to Lumumba in his response to the JFK assassination, nor that he would invoke his name again and again during his own final months.
Joseph Mobutu had joined Lumumba’s MNC in 1958 and was appointed a defense minister—effectively the army’s paymaster—in Lumumba’s first cabinet. Acting with CIA encouragement, Mobutu staged a coup on 5 September, and placed Lumumba under house arrest in the capital, Léopoldville. At the State Department’s request, Louis Armstrong, then completing an eight-week African tour, made an unscheduled visit to the city. He was received enthusiastically, hoisted on a chair and paraded through the streets. Armstrong’s visit provided a timely diversion from the political crisis and Lumumba’s plight. It may also have helped camouflage the presence in the country of other Americans, some of whom were involved, at that moment, in plotting the liquidation of both Lumumba and the democratic experiment in the Congo. Armstrong himself struck up a friendship with Tshombe. “The cat was so nice to me,” Armstrong later recalled. “Kept me in his big palace and all, fed me good, stayed up all night gassing. I had this little tape recorder that cost me several big bills and Tshombe dug it so much I laid it on him.”
In October, Nkrumah attended the UN General Assembly session and met with Nasser, Nehru and Sukarno. All had been pressing Lumumba’s case, and all were disturbed by big power machinations in Africa. In Harlem, Nkrumah addressed a crowd of one thousand in front of the Theresa. “The twenty million Americans of African ancestry constitute the strongest link between the people of North America and the people of Africa,” he told them. Malcolm X also addressed the rally, praised the imprisoned Lumumba and warned that black Americans would not accept US meddling in the Congo.
In late November, Lumumba escaped house arrest, only to be re-arrested by Mobutu’s troops on 2 December. In collusion with CIA operatives and Belgian and British mercenaries, he was delivered into Tshombe’s hands on 17 January, tortured and murdered. Under the new western-backed regime in Léopoldville, Mobutu became commander in chief of the armed forces. The conflict in the Congo reverberated around the Black Atlantic. In Trinidad, people danced to the new global politics recounted in Lord Briner’s ska hit, “Congo War,” which wryly recites the names of the contestants for power, Kasavubu, Mobutu, Tshombe, Lumumba.
My father made me to know
that my great great grandfather
came from the Congo
in the western province of Katanga
but I can’t remember his name
because it was so long
and if I call the name
I might have to bite me tongue.
News of Lumumba’s execution was concealed for some weeks, but the people he’d touched in Harlem had not forgotten him. On 14 February 1961, they demonstrated in front of the UN and had the effrontery to disrupt US ambassador Adlai Stevenson’s speech to the General Assembly. Although this was only one—and by no means the largest or most violent—of the pro-Lumumba demonstrations staged across the world in these weeks, it alarmed and appalled the American establishment. These weren’t the usual “anti-American elements” burning US flags in foreign streets. These were “American negroes.” And they were protesting against their government’s policy on a world stage, before the United Nations. The UN demonstration was denounced by Roy Wilkins, who declared, “Belgian colonizers should not be replaced by Soviet colonizers.” The next week Ralph Bunche used his speech to the NAACP conference to berate the “misguided misfits” who had demonstrated at the UN and to apologize for their behavior. Questioning Bunche’s “mandate from his people,” Lorraine Hansberry caustically replied, “I hasten to publicly apologize to Mme. Pauline Lumumba and the Congolese people for our Dr. Bunche.”
Reflecting on the events at the UN, James Baldwin reported that “the impact of this political assassination on Negroes in Harlem had—has—captured the popular imagination there.” There was no use blaming “outside agitators,” Baldwin argued, because “the Negroes who rioted at the UN are but a very small echo of the black discontent now abroad in the world.” He still believed that “the American Negro deludes himself if he imagines himself capable of any loyalty other than to the United States. He is an American, too, and he will survive or perish in this country.” But he also now insisted that the old terms of black adaptation to America were changing irrevocably: “The American Negro can no longer, nor will he ever again, be controlled by white America’s image of him. This fact has everything to do with the rise of Africa in world affairs.” Young blacks, Baldwin wrote, are no longer “merely the descendants of slaves,” but are “also related to kings and princes in an ancestral homeland, far away. And this has proved to be a great antidote to the poison of self-hatred.”
The UN demonstration had been the initiative of three talented young black women, the singer Abbey Lincoln and the future writers Rosa Guy and Maya Angelou. They had been inspired by Malcolm’s speeches on Africa and African-Americans and sought him out in his office at the Theresa. To their surprise, Malcolm told them they were wasting their time. “The people of Harlem are angry. And they have reason to be angry. But going to the United Nations, shouting and carrying placards, will not win freedom for anyone.” Although he disguised it from the young women, Malcolm’s enforced inaction in response to Lumumba’s murder was one of several gut-wrenching abstentions which were to help turn him away from Elijah Muhammad over the next three years.
Kwame Nkrumah was also affected by Lumumba’s fate. From 1960, his government turned away from America in order to chart an explicitly neutralist course. In 1960, a plebiscite made Ghana a republic; the government adopted a policy of “Africanization” and prioritized infrastructure development in city and countryside. Nkrumah invited Du Bois to live as his personal guest in Accra and to edit an authoritative Encyclopedia Africana, a project Du Bois had been promoting for half a century. Nkrumah also invited Paul Robeson to assume the chair of music and drama at Accra University, but his health was poor and he was never able to set foot in independent Africa.
In October 1961, the ninety-three-year-old Du Bois applied for membership of the US Communist party. A month later he moved to Ghana. Shortly before his death in Accra two years later, on the eve of the great March on Washington, he became a Ghanaian citizen. It had been a long, tortuous road from his articulation of black America’s “double consciousness” at the turn of the century to this late transcendence of American national identity. In America itself he was nearly a forgotten man. Nonetheless, a young black vanguard was even then beginning to re-examine his work in the light of their own traumatic experiences in the struggle for civil rights. As Lorraine Hansberry observed, “His ideas have influenced a multitude who do not even know his name.” And one of those was surely Muhammad Ali.
In establishing the Organization of African Unity in 1963, Nkrumah fulfilled an old pan-Africanist dream. But even as his stature in the Third World grew (accompanied by escalating American displeasure), his regime at home came under severe economic and political stress, fed in part by external, Cold War pressures. Nkrumah assumed ever greater presidential powers. C.L.R. James observed that “in 1957 over a large part of Ghana Nkrumah could have walked for days without a single attendant.” Now he moved nowhere without an armed guard. In 1962, in response to an assassination attempt, draconian security legislation was introduced. In 1963, Nkrumah dismissed the hitherto independent chief justice. “Africa had crossed a Rubicon,” James remarked presciently. “By this single act, Nkrumah prepared the population of Ghana for the morals of the Mafia.” Early in 1964, shortly before the visits of Ali and Malcolm, Ghana was officially designated a one-party state, with Nkrumah as life president and Osgeyafo (Messiah). Two years later, he was overthrown by the army while on a visit to China. “Like Cromwell and Lenin, he initiated the destruction of a regime in decay—a tremendous achievement,” James said in his final assessment of the man, “but like them, he failed to create a new society.”
In 1962, James noted that among black Americans “there is a greater knowledge of the real history of the development of Africa than exists proportionately in any other sector of the world.” But, he lamented, “they too have been contaminated by the prevailing myth and, try as they may, cannot rid themselves of it.” Among the “contaminated” were not only the white-god-worshipping black American Christians, but also the black-god-worshipping non-American Muslim Elijah Muhammad, who derided Africans’ “bushy hair” as “the style of savages” and who in the heyday of American pan-Africanism in the late sixties prohibited the wearing of dashikis, beards and Afro hairstyles. In Muhammad’s mythology, black Americans were not merely ex-slaves, nor the descendants of heathen African tribes, but members of “the Lost-Found Nation of Islam,” an extension of the prelapsarian Arab-Islamic culture which had once been shared by all dark peoples, before the disastrous rise of the uncivilized whites. It was precisely because Elijah put such emphasis on the “civilized” character of the “original people” that he made a point of distinguishing them from the black Africans his followers had seen in Hollywood films.
The Nation itself was a distinctive product of the Black Atlantic: it is self-consciously a belief system of, by and for the diaspora. And it celebrated the emergence of independent black Africa and urged black Americans to emulate their brothers by claiming part of the United States as their own independent territory. But it remained aloof from the highly politicized version of pan-Africanism promoted by Du Bois, Padmore, James and Nkrumah.
From the days of the early black American missionaries, and even in the works of the founding prophets of black nationalism, Crummell and Delany, Africa was perceived as a backward land in need of western values and skills, ranging from Christianity to technology. “Deep down in the soul of many American Negroes,” Harold Cruse observed in 1967, “is ingrained the conviction that the African has just barely emerged out of his primitive-tribal past.” This profound ambivalence about Africa remains strong among African-Americans, and indeed among Afro-Caribbeans in Britain, to this day. Ali shared it. Black Americans, as creatures of the modern world, wrestled with the reality of modern Africa. Here was a source of redemption that itself required redemption.
In its celebration of the glorious triumph of Ali’s second trip to Africa in 1974, When We Were Kings makes no mention of his first trip, undertaken only weeks after his victory over Liston and public conversion. During the course of this trip Ali fought no title fights, and was for the most part ignored in the United States, but the journey remains one of the formative events of his career.
Malcolm X planted the seed of Ali’s first trip to Africa, but others gathered the fruit. Arrangements were made by Malcolm’s friend Osman Karriem, who had remained with the Nation and who hoped that the time away from America would give the young champion a chance to relax. On the eve of their departure, Ali told a Boston crowd that “many negro celebrities take State Department goodwill tours of Africa or Asia, but few have received personal invitations from so many world leaders.” For Elijah Muhammad, Ali’s tour was principally a promotional exercise for the Nation of Islam. In the pages of Muhammad Speaks, Ali was presented as Elijah’s emissary, and his enthusiastic reception as evidence of the stature of Elijah Muhammad in the Islamic world. But something much deeper was happening, to both Ali and the world’s vision of Ali.
Ali and his companions—Karriem; Ali’s brother Rudolph; his friend, photographer Howard Bingham; and his new advisor, Herbert Muhammad, Elijah’s son—first touched African soil in Accra, where they were welcomed by a high-level delegation of ministers and businessmen, and garlanded by the Ghana Young Pioneers. “I am anxious to get around and see Africa and meet my brothers and sisters,” Ali told the local press. “I haven’t been home for four hundred years.” The foreign minister informed Ali that since he had arrived on a Saturday, he would be given the additional name Kwame, in honor of the founder of the nation, who had been born on a Saturday.
Ali and his friends then proceeded into the city in an open-top convertible, cheered by thousands along the way. They took note of the placards reading, “Welcome Home, King of the World” and “Ghana is your motherland, Cassius Clay.” Later, at an elite reception at the Ambassador Hotel, Ali spoke quietly to Ghanaian journalists. “We are glad to be back home to see things for ourselves, meet pretty Ghanaian girls, take pictures and then go back to the States and tell our people that there are more things to be seen in Africa than lions, tigers and elephants.” Like Malcolm, Ali made much of the presence in Africa of familiar American technology—cars, airplanes, television—and especially of the sight of black people working at technical or professional jobs that were still the preserve of white people in America. “I’m surprised to find the beautiful cities with their tall buildings and other modern features,” he said, pleased that the motherland was also a modern land.
The next day the front page of the Ghanaian Times featured a photo of Ali in his car, under the headline “‘King’ Clay Waves Back.” The caption read: “Muhammad Kwame Ali feels completely at home as he makes his triumphal entry into his motherland—Africa.” The local Daily Graphic celebrated the occasion with a simple banner headline, “‘King’ Clay in Ghana.” The champion was granted an instant audience with Nkrumah, who presented him with copies of his books on colonialism and the African future. Ali was dressed in traditional Ghanaian kente cloth. His brother wore a suit and tie. Nkrumah wore his trademark open-necked shirt, traditional yet modern, casual yet formal. Ali told the president he hoped to buy a home in Ghana and spend time there each year. Nkrumah, the newspapers reported, welcomed this news as “an indication of the ties of friendship between black Americans and Africa.” Nkrumah, of course, was not a Muslim, and for the Nation of Islam his meeting with Ali was of significance only in so far as it re-enforced the world standing of Ali’s master, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. But Nkrumah was at this time the acknowledged leader of the pan-African movement and an arch foe of the US State Department. Ali’s visit with him was viewed with suspicion by the CIA. Nkrumah was the first head of state, in fact the first major politician anywhere, to embrace Ali. Over the next decade he would be embraced by many more, but it was not until late 1974, after his triumph in Kinshasa, that an American president would shake his hand.
The Ghanaian Times diarist noted the simultaneous presence in town of Malcolm X. This “complex, intriguing figure,” the diarist reported, had mesmerized a group of young Ghanaian intellectuals for two hours. The American had donned African dress and was pictured eating African-style—with his hands—a meal of yams, plantains and rice.
Malcolm had been traveling in the Middle East and Africa for more than a month. In Mecca, he had completed the hajj and discovered, in the words of poet Robert Hayden, “Allah the raceless one in whose blazing Oneness all / were one.” The hajj has loomed large in the mythology of Malcolm X, the final act in his drama of self-discovery, a reconciliation with the white race and repudiation of the most unpalatable elements of the Nation of Islam. Religious faith was central to Malcolm (as it was to Martin Luther King) and his conversion to orthodox Islam was a genuine one. But he had already visited the Middle East in 1959, as Elijah’s emissary, and he had long been aware of the multi-racial character of the Muslim world and the theological gulf between its beliefs and practices and those advocated by Elijah Muhammad. Malcolm was able to use his hajj to rise above the parochialism of the Nation, to reinvent himself as a member of a world religion; paradoxically, the hajj was also the prelude for a move away from obscurantist religion and toward a secular, political agenda. In the end, the hajj was only one of the epiphanies Malcolm was to experience during the foreign peregrinations that were to consume half the life remaining to him when he left the Nation of Islam on 8 March 1964. It was part of a broader outward evolution, an evolution that owed more to pan-Africanism than pan-Islamism.
After the hajj, Malcolm visited Egypt, Nigeria and Ghana; he met with students, journalists and government leaders. In Accra, he was warmly welcomed by the small but lively colony of black American expatriates. In her memoir of her time in Ghana, Maya Angelou recalls a light-hearted, talkative Malcolm, immensely excited by his travels, somehow breathing more freely now that he had escaped the constrictions of the Nation of Islam. He was already building support for the project that was to preoccupy him for the rest of his life, a petition that would place the grievances of black Americans before the United Nations. By re-forging the link between Africa and African-Americans, American blacks, Malcolm believed, would gain a new global leverage against their domestic oppressors. Instead of appealing to American whites, they would appeal to the vast, non-white, non-American majority, a majority in revolt against American economic and military power.
In Accra, Malcolm talked to editors and educators, students and ministers, and diplomats from Africa, Europe, Cuba and China. He charmed everyone. The Ghana Press Club threw him a party (where he refused to dance). “I don’t consider myself American,” he told his hosts. “I am a black Muslim man of African heritage.” Thanks to Shirley Du Bois, whose husband had died in Ghana less than a year before, he was granted an audience with Nkrumah (who had already received Ali) on the morning of his last day in Accra. Malcolm considered the meeting one of the high points of his pilgrimage, as inspirational politically as the visit to Mecca was spiritually. After leaving Nkrumah, he rejoined American friends at the Ambassador, where a convoy of limousines waited to escort him to the airport. Among their passengers were Nigerian, Chinese, Cuban, Algerian and Egyptian diplomats. To the expatriate Americans, it was an extraordinary sight—a black man isolated and vilified at home honored as a leader and teacher abroad. Maya Angelou remembered the moment, and the even more extraordinary encounter that followed.
We were all laughing with pleasure when we heard the familiar sounds of black American speech. We turned around and saw Muhammad Ali coming out of the hotel with a large retinue of black men. They were all talking and joking among themselves. One minute after we saw them, they saw Malcolm.
The moment froze, as if caught on a daguerreotype, and the next minutes moved as a slow montage. Muhammad stopped, then turned and spoke to a companion. His friends looked at him. Then they looked back at Malcolm. Malcolm also stopped, but he didn’t speak to us, nor did any of us have the presence of mind to say anything to him.
Malcolm had told us that after he severed ties to the Nation of Islam, many of his former friends had become hostile. Muhammad and his group were the first to turn away. They started walking toward a row of parked cars. Malcolm, with a rush, left us and headed toward the departing men. We followed Malcolm. He shouted, “Brother Muhammad. Brother Muhammad.”
Muhammad and his companions stopped and turned to face Malcolm.
“Brother, I still love you, and you are still the greatest.” Malcolm smiled a sad little smile. Muhammad looked hard at Malcolm, and shook his head.
“You left the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. That was the wrong thing to do, Brother Malcolm.” His face and voice were also sad. Malcolm had been his supporter and hero. Disappointment and hurt lay on Muhammad’s face like dust. Abruptly, he turned and walked away. His coterie followed. After a few steps they began talking again, loudly.
Malcolm’s shoulders sagged and his face was suddenly gloomy. “I’ve lost a lot. A lot. Almost too much.” He led us back to my car.… Julian asked him if Muhammad’s actions at the hotel came as a surprise, and Malcolm did not answer directly. “He is young. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad is his prophet and his father, I understand. Be kind to him for his sake, and mine. He has a place in my heart.”
In Ghana, Ali’s training sessions attracted huge crowds. He traveled up country to fight an exhibition in Kumasi, where five thousand people greeted him at the makeshift local airport, and a mile-long convoy of horn-blowing vehicles escorted him into town. The local Harlem School of Boxing made him an honorary member and presented him with a copy of the Qur’an. As always, he played with the children—vast crowds of them laughing and leaping in excitement—and told the press, “I want them to learn how beautiful and great they are.”
The warmth of the spontaneous welcome he received from the poor in Africa had a huge impact on the young champion. It was one thing to meet diplomats at the UN; it was another to be confronted with the African masses, without protocol and without a common language. Ali learned for the first time that he could overcome the barriers and clown and tease and mime his way into people’s hearts. His constituency was broader than the ghettos and television studios of America, and the more he came to realize that, the more he felt responsible to this broader constituency. The African crowds helped deepen his sense of mission.
After Ghana, Ali visited Nigeria and Egypt, where he toured the pyramids and was welcomed by Nasser, another stalwart of the non-aligned movement and American bogeyman. Ali later claimed that Nasser had offered him a palace on the Nile and one of his daughters to marry—a typical example of his flip fusion of Hollywood exoticism and international politics. The reception in Egypt was more subdued than in Ghana. This was an Islamic country. Elijah Muhammad had cultivated clerical and business contacts there for some time, and the official itinerary took precedence over unscripted interaction with people in the streets. What’s more, Egypt, unlike Ghana, had no boxing culture, and Ali was more admired there as a hero of the faith than of the ring. But wherever he went, Ali noted the contrast between the respect he was accorded abroad and the insults heaped on him at home. Years later, Osman Karriem, who was removed from Ali’s camp shortly after the African trip because of his suspected links with Malcolm, told Hauser: “I’ll remember that trip to Africa as long as I live, because that was where I saw Cassius Clay become Muhammad Ali.… It was in Africa that he became something he hadn’t been before.”
One of the few American journalists to cover Ali’s African journey was Charles P. Howard, a veteran pan-Africanist who had been among Paul Robeson’s most vocal defenders, and who was now working as an international correspondent for Muhammad Speaks and other black newspapers. Noting that the new heavyweight champ already boasted “the strongest international following of any American fighter in history,” Howard praised him as “basically a democratic, grassroots type of Afro-American, although he wears at all times the unseen mantle and the dignified demeanor befitting his rank.” Ali may be an “assertive, cocksure, determined and don’t-fence-me-in type, but isn’t the new African-American all of this? Isn’t this the pattern of thousands of black youth who are being beaten, kicked, arrested, mistreated all across the United States? They are making it plain to white America that they have had enough and that they are not asking the white man for a thing—they are going to take what is rightfully theirs come hell or high water.” All of which sounded a lot more like Malcolm’s vision of insurgent black America than Elijah Muhammad’s “Lost-Found Nation of Islam.”
The irony of Ali’s curt and bitter meeting with Malcolm in Accra was that both men were, in their different ways, heading towards the same destiny, a fusion of black pride with universal humanism. Malcolm confessed to Alex Haley that he had been deeply wounded by the encounter and by Ali’s later comment to the press about it: “No one listens to Malcolm any more.” But Ali was wrong about Malcolm. The renegade was not alone. From Accra he had flown to Liberia, Senegal, Morocco and Algeria. On his return to New York in late May, he announced his plans to take the plight of American blacks before the UN. In June, he founded his Organization of Afro-American Unity, inspired by Nkrumah’s Organization of African Unity, which in turn had been inspired by Du Bois’s pan-African conferences. Just as black American song had been exported to Britain, repackaged and sold back to America, so a black American political project had been relocated to Africa, and from there returned to America in an invigorated form. In both music and politics, these cycles of the Black Atlantic interchange catalyzed artistic and political vanguards and, ultimately, changes in popular consciousness.
In July 1964, Wallace Muhammad publicly denounced his father and the Nation of Islam as “ruthless and fanatic.” His studies of the Qur’an had led him to reject Elijah’s heterodox version of Islam, and he disapproved of his father’s adulteries and the luxurious lifestyle of his intimate circle. After his statement, Wallace was left without an income or a job, without friends or family, and subject to a steady stream of menaces. His brother Herbert, a more easy-going personality, had by now assumed charge of Ali’s financial affairs. According to Jeremiah Shabazz, Herbert liked “the boxing business and the money that was involved.” He ran a photography studio and introduced Ali to one of his models, Sonji. Forty-one days later she became Ali’s first wife.
Meanwhile, Elijah Muhammad’s attorney, Chauncey Eskridge, had become Ali’s legal representative and was trying to organize a replacement for the Louisville syndicate. Eskridge was not a member of the Nation of Islam. He was a former IRS agent and accountant who was now a partner in a prestigious Chicago law firm, a worldly and wealthy black professional. He had already represented both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, and had formed a close friendship with the latter (four years later, when King was assassinated in a Memphis hotel, Eskridge was at his side). In September, while visiting Ali in his Miami training camp, Eskridge called King to discuss business matters, then put Ali on the phone. Thanks to the FBI, we have an agent’s summary of the conversation:
MLK spoke to Cassius, they exchanged greetings, MLK wished him well on his recent marriage, C invited MLK to be his guest at his next championship fight, MLK said he would like to attend. C said he is keeping up with MLK, that MLK is his brother, and he’s with him 100% but can’t take any chances, and that MLK should take care of himself, that MLK is known worldwide and should watch out for them whities, said that people in Nigeria, Egypt and Ghana asked about MLK.
Ali spoke to King at the end of one of the civil rights movement’s most bruising summers. In May 1964, outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner had been murdered by the Klan in collusion with local police. The killings were meant to serve as a warning to outside agitators and their local black allies, but failed to deter hundreds of volunteers, black and white, flooding into the state to play their part in “Freedom Summer”—a mass campaign of voter education and registration. The volunteers faced mob violence, arrests and arson. By the summer’s end there were 6 dead, 1000 jailed, 30 buildings bombed and 36 black churches burned. Yet for all their pains the activists had succeeded in registering only 1600 blacks, while 16,000 more had been turned away by obdurate local authorities.
In the course of that summer, however, 80,000 blacks did join the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party (MFDP), which challenged the official, whites-only Mississippi state delegation at that year’s Democratic convention in Atlantic City. The refusal of Johnson and the official party machine to seat the MFDP was a traumatic setback for the movement. Significantly, the blow was delivered by the movement’s own white liberal allies: Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Walter Reuther. It seemed that Humphrey’s vice-presidential nomination, LBJ’s determination to hold the South in the coming presidential election and the moderate civil rights leaders’ desire to placate Johnson would supersede the MFDP’s unanswerable case for enfranchisement. It was a bitter defeat for the workers of the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC), which had emerged from the sit-ins of 1960 and whose grass-roots organizing efforts were at the heart of the MFDP. Their mood was summed up by Charles Sherrod: “We are a country of racists with a racist heritage, a racist economy, a racist language, a racist religion, a racist philosophy of living and we need a naked confrontation with ourselves.” Harry Belafonte, the black celebrity who most consistently supported the freedom movement, arranged for the activists to take a much-needed break in Ghana, where they were received as heroes of the African-American struggle. Two of the SNCC tourists, John Lewis and Don Harris, proceeded further into Africa. In Nairobi, they ran into Malcolm X, who was staying at the same hotel, and spent several hours in discussion with him.
Malcolm had returned to Africa in July to attend the second meeting of the Organization of African Unity in Cairo. The invitation to this gathering, issued by Nkrumah and Nasser, was the chief fruit of Malcolm’s visit earlier in the year and had been issued in defiance of State Department pressure. Like both Garvey and Du Bois, Malcolm had decided that “the time has come to internationalize the American Negro problem. This can only be done by linking the fate of the new African states with that of American Negroes.” He found African leaders sympathetic, but reluctant to take on the United States, especially given the chain of events in the Congo.
Malcolm had remained in Egypt until the end of the summer. He then moved on to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. In Ethiopia, he was spurned by Haile Selassie, a State Department ally, but in Tanzania he enjoyed a three-hour audience with Nyerere. He was in Kenya to meet Kenyatta when he ran into Lewis and Harris. “The man who sat with us in that hotel room was enthusiastic and excited—not angry, not brooding,” Lewis recalled. “He seemed very hopeful.” Malcolm spoke of the need to shift the movement’s focus “from race to class.” “He said that was the root of our problems, not just in America but all over the world.” Lewis also observed that “beyond his excitement and blossoming optimism, there was fear in the man, a nervousness that was written all over him.” Throughout his travels, he had been under CIA surveillance. A State Department memorandum noted that Malcolm X “has for all practical purposes, renounced his US citizenship.” From Kenya, Malcolm proceeded to Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia and Guinea, where he was Sekou Turé’s house guest. After stops in North Africa and Europe, he returned to New York City on 24 November.
The day before, Johnson had ordered air strikes in the Congo, allegedly to protect American citizens caught in the civil war. Malcolm was quick to denounce the US intervention, which, he said, was designed to assist “Moise Tshombe’s hired killers,” who had now assumed control in Léopoldville. En route to receive his Nobel Prize, Martin Luther King called for the withdrawal of all “foreign elements” from the region. Randolph, Young and Wilkins also expressed concern. Malcolm threw himself into a whirlwind of public and private meetings with African and Asian diplomats, who were mounting an attack on US “neo-colonialism” in the United Nations. At the end of December, he shared a platform with MFDP leader Fannie Lou Hamer in Harlem. Hamer asked why the US could intervene to protect white settlers in the Congo but not negro citizens in Mississippi. Malcolm measured American claims against American realities and concluded that the US was “the most hypocritical government since the world began.”
Ali was in Boston training for his rematch with Liston when he suffered a hernia. The match was postponed. In a Boston hotel on Christmas Day 1964, Leon 4X Ameer, Ali’s “press secretary,” was beaten up by members of the Nation of Islam posing as newsmen. Among the assailants was Ali’s bodyguard, Clarence X Gill. Ameer was treated in hospital, but assaulted again on his return to the hotel.
Although Ameer had been a confidant of Malcolm X, he had remained in Ali’s employ. On 9 January 1965, he called a press conference in the Theresa to publicize his ordeal, including his fractured skull, broken ribs and ruptured eardrum. He claimed the champion was “beginning to have grave doubts about” powerful figures in the Nation of Islam and said he feared Ali might be injured or killed in “Black Muslim in-fighting.” “I joined the movement in 1956 and was a member of the inner circle. I taught the Muslims karate from Miami to Buffalo,” Ameer told the press. “Clay is being used to woo young men and women into the Muslim fold. He is a dedicated young man who believes in the spiritual movement of the Muslims, but the truth is that the spiritual sense of the organization is just about dead and a strong ruthless structure has taken over.” In another room in the hotel, Ali held a press conference of his own. “Ameer’s nothing to me,” he said. “He was welcomed as a friend so long as he was a registered Muslim, but not anymore. And he was never my press secretary. I do my own press work and publicity.” A few days later, at a Fruit of Islam dinner-dance at the Audubon Ballroom, Ali told the faithful, “Malcolm believed the white press which referred to him as the number two man, and became disillusioned.”
In February, Muhammad Speaks claimed Ameer was plotting to kill Elijah Muhammad and ran the headline “WANTED” over his photograph. According to Ameer, the Nation was out to get him for two reasons. First, because they knew he had broken his oath of secrecy by informing Malcolm of the plans to kill him. Second, because he had told Muhammad Ali that the Nation was “milking him,” and as a result Ali had complained to the Chicago office. Around the same time, Betty Shabazz ran into Ali at the Theresa. She recalled to Hauser how she had reproached the former family friend. “You see what they’re doing to my husband, don’t you?” “And he said to me with his hands in the air, ‘I haven’t done anything. I’m not doing anything to him.’”
On 4 February, Malcolm made his first visit to the frontlines of the civil rights battle in the South. In the previous week, hundreds of Selma schoolchildren had been attacked by George Wallace’s Alabama state troopers. King himself had been arrested. Malcolm met with King’s wife and warned the media that if the moderate Dr. King wasn’t listened to, the white man would have to deal with “other factions” who would “try to do it another way.” Malcolm then flew to Britain, where he addressed the Council of African Organizations and a meeting at the London School of Economics. He proceeded to Paris, where he was denied entry as an “undesirable.” He returned to New York on 13 February; the next day, his home was firebombed.
In one of his last press conferences he tried to explain his evolving philosophy:
We are living in an era of revolution, and the revolt of the American Negro is part of the rebellion against the oppression and colonialism which has characterized this era.… It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a racial conflict of black against white, or as a purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter.
In the end, Robert Hayden wrote, Malcolm X “became / much more than there was time for him to be.” On 21 February, he was gunned down in front of his own supporters, the Organization of Afro-American Unity, on his own turf, the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, in the presence of agents of the New York Police Department and the FBI. Elijah Muhammad called the act “divine chastisement.” That night, a fire of unknown origin blazed in Ali’s apartment. Asked if he feared an act of vengeance by Malcolm’s people, Ali sneered, “Malcolm ain’t got no people.” If this was so, it raised the question of just who staged the arson attack that same night on the Nation’s Mosque No. 7, Malcolm’s old Harlem pulpit. In Africa, the US Information Agency did its best to play down Malcolm’s significance, reminding foreign editors that he had enjoyed no sizeable following in the US. But his assassination was front-page news in the countries he had visited. The Ghanaian Times praised him as a man in the tradition of John Brown and Patrice Lumumba.
A week later, at the annual Savior’s Day rally in Chicago, Elijah Muhammad told his followers, “We didn’t want to kill Malcolm and didn’t try to kill Malcolm. They know I didn’t harm Malcolm. They know I loved him. His foolish teaching brought him to his own end.” Ali sat behind the Messenger on the platform and cheered with the rest. What must he have thought as the repentant Wallace was paraded before his father’s followers to confess his “great mistake” and declare his acceptance of all his father’s views?
On 10 March, Leon 4X Ameer called the FBI to discuss Malcolm’s death and to offer help in identifying the assassins. A meeting was arranged for 12 March. On 11 March, a maid found him dead in his hotel room. It was later ruled that the thirty-two year old had died from unspecified natural causes.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X was rushed into print. It sold 250,000 copies in paperback and laid the basis for his posthumous legend. “It was a pity and a disgrace he died like that,” Ali told Thomas Hauser, twenty-five years on, “because what Malcolm saw was right, and after he left us, we went his way anyway. Color didn’t make a man a devil. It’s the heart, soul and mind that counts.”
Ali did not fight for fifteen months after winning the title, which gave the press plenty of opportunity to snipe at his private life. Although Ali had met Sonji through Herbert Muhammad, she bridled at the Nation’s strict rules about women’s dress and demeanor. As she tells the story, she was also beginning to ask awkward questions about Elijah Muhammad and his lieutenants, and found herself “frozen out” of her husband’s life. The couple separated and filed for divorce.
On 25 May, in Lewiston, Maine, Ali at last defended his title, knocking out Liston in the first round. The famous “phantom punch” that put Liston on the mat did little, however, to enhance Ali’s fighting reputation or his standing with the press. He signed to fight the long-time white favorite, Floyd Patterson, in Las Vegas.
Shortly after Ali’s first victory over Liston, Patterson had declared that, “as a Catholic,” it was his duty to “reclaim the title for America”—as if a foreigner had won it. Three weeks later, the earnest advocate of integration was forced to sell his $140,000 house in Yonkers, New York, for a $20,000 loss after white neighbors subjected his family to racist abuse. In October 1965, Patterson wrote in Sports Illustrated, “Cassius Clay is disgracing himself and the Negro race.… The image of a Black Muslim as the world heavyweight champion disgraces the sport and the nation. Cassius Clay must be beaten and the Black Muslim scourge removed from boxing.” Patterson initiated the battle of the role models, but Ali met the challenge head-on, subjecting Patterson to weeks of verbal abuse.
Patterson says he’s gonna bring the title back to America. If you don’t believe the title already is in America, just see who I pay taxes to. I’m American. But he’s a deaf dumb so-called Negro who needs a spanking. I plan to punish him for the things he said; cause him pain.… The little old pork-chop eater don’t have a chance.
According to Arthur Ashe, “No black athlete had ever publicly spoken so disparagingly to another black athlete.” Ali’s doggerel was cruel:
I’m gonna put him flat on his back,
So that he will start acting black,
Because when he was champ he didn’t do as he should,
He tried to force himself into an all-white neighborhood.
At the fight itself, Patterson was outclassed. Heedless of the mounting outrage of ringside commentators, Ali dragged the fight out to the twelfth round, punishing Patterson with his fists, then stepping back and allowing him time to recover while taunting him, “Come on America! Come on white America!” The white press denounced it as a cruel and malicious performance. At the other extreme, Eldridge Cleaver called the fight “ideologically, a pivotal event, reflecting the consolidation of certain psychic gains of the Negro revolution.… Symbolic proof of the victory of the autonomous over the subordinate Negro … the victory of a new world over an old world, of life and light over Lazarus and the darkness of the grave.” Patterson’s partisans could have accepted that last, Manichean view of the forces in conflict in this fight, only they would have reversed the polarity. Discounting the trademark Cleaver hyperbole, this passage in Soul on Ice does reveal how symbolically charged Ali’s fights had become, even at this early stage of his career. He had re-configured all the values previously associated with black men in the ring, and had done so with not a little assistance from Floyd Patterson.
In retrospect, Gerald Early believes that Patterson was “the most disturbed and disturbing black presence in the history of American popular culture.” Certainly, he embraced the duties of the role model with ardor, and lived out its contradictions in pain. Patterson himself commented later: “There is so much hate among people, so much contempt inside people who’d like to think they’re moral, that they have to hire prizefighters to do their hating for them. And we do. We get into a ring and act out other people’s hates. We are happy to do it. How else can Negroes like Clay and myself, born in the South, poor, and with little education, make so much money?”
Despite the avalanche of press criticism, Ali remained unrepentant. “People are always telling me what a good example I could be if I just wasn’t a Muslim,” he said. “I’ve heard it over and over, how come I couldn’t be like Joe Louis and Sugar Ray. Well, they’re gone now, and the black man’s condition is just the same, ain’t it? We’re still catching hell.”
In the Congo, three days after the Patterson fight, Joseph Mobutu staged a coup d’etat with American support. The former army paymaster announced he was assuming the presidency for five years. Moving quickly to consolidate power, he employed Belgian, South African and British mercenaries to crush rivals and rebels. Moise Tshombe, who had backed Mobutu, was forced into exile in Europe, where he confessed his role in Lumumba’s execution.
In early July 1963, the twenty-one-year-old Bob Dylan flew from New York to Greenwood, Mississippi, where SNCC activists were conducting a voter registration drive. For decades, the black population in the delta country around Greenwood had been terrorized by one of the most tyrannical Jim Crow regimes anywhere in the South. In the six months before Dylan’s visit, civil rights workers had faced beatings, shootings, arson and imprisonment. They needed outside support and media attention, and Dylan’s visit, which had been organized by Pete Seeger, promised both.
It was Dylan’s first close-up look at Jim Crow and at the people who had risen to challenge it. Like others, his evolution was to be profoundly affected by his brief encounter with the era’s premier agents of social change. But distressed as he was by his first sight of a whites-only water fountain, Dylan did not come unprepared. For at least two years he had been writing songs inspired by the freedom struggle (“Death of Emmett Till,” “Oxford Town”) and by the emergent new left critique of the Cold War (“Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” “Let Me Die in My Footsteps”). In the early sixties, the folk revival and the civil rights movement had become intimately linked, not only because the folk singers were more prepared than other entertainers to put their time at the disposal of the activists, but also because they shared a self-consciously American idealism (“This land is our land . . .”), sharply counterposed to the fast-buck America epitomized by the cynical pop music industry.
Dylan’s early topical protest songs are sometimes dismissed as derivative and didactic, but the best of them have proved remarkably durable. They are rarely without flashes of acid originality and are less sentimental than other products of the folk revival. What’s more, the issues they deal with have remained topical, thanks to the radical edge of Dylan’s political perspective. This is most strikingly revealed in his narratives of racial and class oppression, “Hollis Brown” and “Hattie Carroll,” and in his indictment of the hidden profiteers of the Cold War; his “Masters of War” was written five years before students across the country rose up against university collusion with the military-industrial complex: “You that build the death planes / you that build the big bombs / you that hide behind walls / you that hide behind desks.” In “With God on Our Side” Dylan subjected the whole of American history and national identity to an iconoclastic revision worthy of Malcolm X. Even before his break with the liberals, he was no liberal.
Dylan spent two and a half days with the spartan SNCC workers and their poverty-stricken local allies, and by all accounts was awed by their courage and commitment, suffering and directness. He exchanged ideas with Jim Foreman, Julian Bond and Berenice Johnson Reagon of the SNCC Freedom Singers (and later of Sweet Honey in the Rock), whom he’d already met at the Newport Folk Festival. Along with Seeger and others, he performed on the back of a truck at the edge of a cotton field to a crowd of three hundred, mostly local blacks, plus a TV crew from New York, which captured Dylan’s raw performance of a new protest classic, “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” a song composed just weeks before in response to the assassination of Medgar Evers. In contrast to the moralistic and utopian rhetoric favored by the movement at this time, Dylan’s song argued that racist violence was the product of political manipulation and an unjust social system. As it happened, the killer of Medgar Evers, the wealthy and well-connected Byron de la Beckwith, was not “only a pawn in their game.” Nonetheless, Dylan’s exposé of the white elite’s divide-and-rule strategy and his insistence on the link between poverty and racism struck powerful chords among the SNCC activists, whose thinking about the nature of the challenge they faced was undergoing rapid evolution.
After his brief stay in one of America’s poorest and most oppressed communities, Dylan was whisked off to a Columbia Records sales conference in Puerto Rico. Freewheelin’, his second album, just released, was on its way to selling more than 200,000 copies—unprecedented for a folk singer. Peter, Paul and Mary’s cover of “Blowin’ in the Wind” had become the first “protest song” to achieve chart success. Dylan was a hot commercial property. But he was clearly, also, not just another studio-manufactured pop star. His audiences were young but serious, and they came not just for the music but for the message. To the media, Dylan quickly became “the voice of a generation,” one of the earliest of a succession of youth cult heroes, a social phenomenon requiring interpretation and interrogation. This status was re-enforced in August, seven weeks after his visit to Greenwood, at the March on Washington, where Peter, Paul and Mary sang “Blowin’ in the Wind” and Dylan himself performed “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” a song more in tune with the bitter and impatient mood of John Lewis’s partially censored speech than with King’s dream of racial reconciliation.
Dylan’s class-based approach was welcomed by the veterans of the old left, the torch-bearers of the Popular Front through years of repression. Many saw in Dylan the people’s artist they’d been seeking since Robeson was silenced, someone who could speak to the masses in an accessible idiom while at the same time placing his art at the service of the crusade for social justice. In recognition of his achievement, Dylan was awarded the 1963 Tom Paine Award by the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (ECLC), an organization that had battled McCarthyism at its height. On 13 December, three weeks after the Kennedy assassination, Dylan attended the ECLC’s annual Bill of Rights dinner in New York to receive the award. He drank heavily during the course of the evening, and his rambling acceptance speech managed to offend just about everyone in the house. “It’s took me a long time to get young and now I consider myself young and I’m proud of it,” he told this conclave of ageing left-wingers. He wanted “to see faces with hair on their head” because “old people when their hair grows out they should go out.”
I’ve never seen one history book that tells me how anybody feels.… And it don’t help me one little bit to look back … there’s no black and white, left and right to me anymore.… I was at the March on Washington up on the platform and I looked around at all the negroes there and I didn’t see any negroes that looked like none of my friends. My friends don’t wear suits. My friends don’t have to wear any kind of thing to prove they’re respectable negroes.
Dylan claimed he was accepting the award on behalf of SNCC, James Foreman and a socialist youth group that had gone to Cuba, all of which enhanced his left-wing, grass-roots credentials. He also declared himself in favor of free travel to Cuba, a sentiment which must have pleased most of those present, though it would have terrified his record executives. Still, Dylan had not said all he had to say:
I’ll stand up and to get uncompromiseable about it, which I have to be to be honest, I just got to be, as I got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, I don’t know exactly where, what he thought he was doing, but I got to admit that I too—I saw something of myself in him.
The young singer was vigorously booed by his elders. At that moment, to speak ill of the dead president—worse yet, to identify with his killer—was to breach the most daunting taboo in America, a taboo which neither the old left nor the liberals were prepared to violate. Interestingly, it was the same taboo that Malcolm had breached two weeks earlier, thereby precipitating his final split with Elijah Muhammad.
Dylan’s impromptu speech outraged many of his admirers, and at this distance it seems fair to describe it as the drunken, spiteful outburst of an immature young man. But there was method in it, and even in the identification with Oswald there was more than just the desire to shock. Six months later, commenting on the incident to Nat Hentoff, Dylan repudiated his role as political spokesperson and insisted, “I just can’t make it with any organization.” As for his behavior at the Bill of Rights dinner, he blamed it on a negative reaction to finding himself in a room full of well-heeled whites salving their social consciences. “Here were these people who’d been all involved with the left in the thirties and now they’re supporting civil rights drives. That’s groovy, but they also had minks and jewels, and it was like they were giving their money out of guilt.… These people at that dinner were the same as everybody else. They’re doing their time. They’re chained to what they’re doing.”
Clearly, even as he was lauded as the voice of an awakening social conscience, something was being born inside Dylan which could not be squeezed into the identities fixed for him either by the record execs or the political missionaries. The tangled themes of Dylan’s rant at the Bill of Rights dinner, which reappear in his master songs of the mid sixties, tell us much about this central figure of the decade at a critical moment in his development. The contempt for liberalism, which informs Dylan’s writing from the earliest days, seems driven here by hip anti-intellectualism as much as by impatient radicalism. His assertion of the pre-eminence of youth might be taken as a declaration of independence, echoing the messianic generational challenge of “The Times They Are A-Changin’” (released a month after the dinner). But there is also something despairing and embittered in this repudiation of history and all existing political categories, and not surprisingly Dylan was to be repeatedly accused of nihilism in the years to come. The concern with class guilt is intertwined with a search for personal authenticity, an authenticity embodied for Dylan in Foreman and the SNCC activists, whose immediate involvement in the struggle exposed the comfortable detachment of middle-class do-gooders. The example of black youth in the South and America’s violent response to their challenge posed probing questions for Dylan, as they did for Ali. Strangely, for different reasons and in different ways, in both cases the example served as a pretext for withdrawing from active political struggle. In “11 Outlined Epitaphs,” the liner notes for The Times They Are A Changin’, Dylan addresses Foreman:
Jim, Jim
where is our party?
where is the party that’s one
where all members’re held equal
an’ vow t’infiltrate that thought
among the people it hopes t’serve
an’ sets a respected road
for all of those like me
For Dylan, the incandescent purity of SNCC’s face-to-face struggle in the South had exposed the emptiness not only of traditional politics, but of the entire discourse of American democracy. Dylan criticized the ECLC patrons because “they’re doing their time,” making an accommodation with American materialism, whose grasp he had come to see (under the influence of Allen Ginsberg) reaching into the deepest recesses of the soul. His identification with Oswald was a powerful means of registering an alienation from American norms that had gone way beyond disquiet over racism and nuclear arms. It was also in keeping with Dylan’s fondness for the outlaw conceit (“I may look like Robert Ford but I feel just like Jesse James”), a conceit that crops up throughout the history of popular culture, not least in the blues and country traditions which Dylan had studied so well. Above all, in declaring his independence from the movement, and disdaining the “protest singer” appellation, Dylan was spurning his symbolic and representative role, the role both the media and the movement had assigned to him.
In early February 1964, Dylan embarked on a long, wayward, drug-fueled road trip. He visited coal miners in Harlan County, Carl Sandburg in Asheville, Berenice Johnson Reagon in Atlanta, Bob Moses and Tom Hayden in Mississippi. He was in New Orleans for Mardi Gras and in Dallas he haunted Dealey Plaza. On the night Cassius Clay deposed Sonny Liston in Miami, Dylan performed his first major West Coast gig, at the University of California at Berkeley, which was to be convulsed by the Free Speech Movement later that year. In May, he traveled to London, Paris and Greece. Shortly after his return in June, he recorded in two nights the eleven songs that make up Another Side of Bob Dylan.
When the album was released in late 1964 it distressed many of his most passionate defenders, confirming rumors of Dylan’s apostasy from the political and aesthetic creed of the folk revival. Not only did much of it seem excessively personal (“It Ain’t Me Babe,” “Ballad in Plain D”), and some of it expressly anti-intellectual (“All I Really Want to Do”) and anti-political (“My Back Pages”); worse yet, much of it was obscure—an unforgivable sin for a people’s artist. Even “Chimes of Freedom,” conceived as Dylan drove through a stormy Mississippi night, was damned for its profuse imagery and metaphysical conundrums. Here, as the thunder and lightning of contemporary history clash and flash in the background, Dylan invokes the SNCC workers he’d met in Greenwood (“the warriors whose strength is not to fight”), but links their fate to an epic cast of the dispossessed, ranging from “the mistreated mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute” to “each unharmful gentle soul misplaced inside a jail,” and ultimately embracing “the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse.” It was Dylan’s most sweeping vision of solidarity with the oppressed, and one of the most moving expressions of the broadening of sympathies that was an underlying (but by no means uncontested) trend of the era. Yet it appears on the same album as “My Back Pages,” in which Dylan transmuted the rude incoherence of his Bill of Rights rant into the organized density of art. Here, he recants his own political past, those days (not long before) when, “proud neath heated brow,” his time was consumed by “memorizing politics of ancient history,” before he discovered, “I’d become my enemy in the instant that I preach.”
A self-ordained professor’s tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty
Is just equality in school
Equality I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow
Oh but I was so much older then,
I’m younger than that now.
Like Malcolm (and Ali), Dylan had come to see the integrationist struggle (“equality in school”) as an irrelevance. He had discovered that “liberty” was more elusive than he had assumed. But, unlike the black radicals, he turned this political crisis into an existential one: “Good and bad I define these terms, quite clear, no doubt, somehow.” Was anyone ever as quickly, or as tenderly, disillusioned as the young Dylan? And was anyone ever more arrogant?
One of the lesser songs on Another Side is “I Shall Be Free No. 10,” a light-hearted exercise in doggerel in which Dylan takes sideswipes at liberals, conservatives and just about anyone who takes themselves too seriously. I have to admit I had totally forgotten it until, in the course of researching this book, I listened to the album for the first time in years and its second verse leapt out at me:
I was shadow-boxing earlier in the day
I figured I was ready for Cassius Clay
I said fee, fie, fo, fum, Cassius Clay, here I come
26, 27, 28, 29, I’m gonna make your face look just like mine
5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Cassius Clay you’d better run
99, 100, 101, 102, your ma won’t even recognize you
14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, gonna knock him clean right out of his spleen
The topical reference to the new heavyweight champion was in keeping with the folk tradition, but in his efforts to match the Louisville Lip rhyme for rhyme, boast for boast, Dylan strayed into new territory. This serious young man was on a quest to transcend seriousness; it’s not surprising that the wise fool Cassius Clay should enter his fantasies.
The dour elements of the folk set resented Dylan’s love of nonsense, his manic humor, his compulsive need to puncture the solemnity of public ritual—traits he shared with Ali, and which were to become as much the hallmarks of the sixties (and not only in America) as po-faced political protest. In the face of violence and disorder at home and abroad, and the corruption of official discourse, absurdist humor flourished; in context, it appeared a form of radical honesty, promising even at times an alternative rationality. Dylan and Ali shared a love of the shaggy dog story, but it is important to note that even as the embittered Dylan elaborated his persecution fantasies (“Look out kid / It’s something you did / God knows when / but you’re doin’ it again”), it was the more accommodating Ali who was actually being persecuted.
The saga of Dylan’s going electric, and the response of his erstwhile fans, is an oft-told tale, but it was his earlier repudiation of “the movement” that really broke his ties with the folk revival and the older generation, and unleashed his innovative genius. Dylan’s turn away from politics was to become a recurring motif in the years to come, as wave after wave of young people engaged in and were scarred by political activity. Strange as it may sound when speaking of such a politically polarized era, Dylan’s shift from the political to the personal was one of the defining moments of the American sixties, as surely as Ali’s embrace of the Nation of Islam. “I don’t have to be what you want me to be.” It could almost be a line from a Dylan song:
Well I try my best
To be just like I am
But everybody wants you
To be just like them
Dylan’s rejection of political involvement and his conversion to rock and roll put him beyond the comprehension of the traditional left as surely as Cassius Clay’s embrace of the Nation of Islam. Yet ultimately both proved more in tune with an evolving mass audience than their critics could even begin to imagine. All the clout, the social reach, that the “people’s artists” of yesteryear had sought in vain, all the cultural ambitions of the Popular Front, these kids seemed to achieve without solemnity, without humility, without ideology.
Dylan and Ali were born within eight months of each other. In the early sixties, they emerged simultaneously into a remarkable historical conjuncture in which economic growth, demographic change (the emergence of youth as a market for consumer goods) and technological innovation (in broadcasting and recording) collided with an insurgent mass politics founded in resistance to racism and war. Sports and popular music were both entering into a more intimate relationship with the newly dominant medium, television, which was then taking its first tentative transcontinental steps. It is impossible to imagine either the careers or the mystiques of these two “sixties icons” unfolding outside this conjuncture. In their very early twenties they found themselves enmeshed in a formative phase of today’s global celebrity culture. Even as fame of unprecedented dimensions enveloped them, they were just embarking on their individual journeys of self-discovery.
Like Ali, Dylan had changed his name; unlike Ali, he did so quietly and covertly, in the old show-business tradition. Later, the press delighted in exposing the exotic Bob Dylan as the ordinary Robert Zimmerman. Both Dylan and Ali were avid for self-definition and dissatisfied with the available models of pop celebrity. Both struggled to control their own careers and to retain their personal integrity amid the demands of commerce and the media. Swept up in the vortex of the American success machinery, and intensely aware of its perils, Dylan and Ali remained determined to set their own goals and speak in their own voices. Both felt themselves part of a separate culture, wedded to values at odds with America’s mainstream; and both were aware, often uncomfortably, that they were expected to speak for a separate, silent constituency. But here their ways parted, as they seized upon radically divergent strategies to deal with fame and the burdens of representation.
Dylan had sought celebrity, as determinedly as Ali, but he found its impositions and intrusions painfully disorientating. This twenty-two year old wanted the freedom to experiment with life—not easy under the klieg lights. In an effort to recapture and protect his identity—and not least his capacity to change and grow—Dylan retreated behind a mask of truculent enigma (“Don’t ask me nothin’ ’bout nothin’—I just might tell you the truth”). The opening scene of that magnificently mordant sneer, “Ballad of a Thin Man,” sums up Dylan’s mid-sixties view of the media:
You walk into the room
With your pencil in your hand
You see somebody naked
And you say, who is that man?
You try so hard
But you don’t understand
Just what you’ll say when you get home
Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is,
Do you, Mr. Jones?
Confronted with Dylan and Ali, bewildered older journalists wondered how seriously they were supposed to take these pop-poet clowns. How seriously did they take themselves? Even George Plimpton wondered if the whole Ali show was no more than a “gigantic put-on.” However, while Dylan could be obnoxious toward interviewers (and members of his own entourage), Ali, who was probably more goaded and provoked, preferred to extend the benefit of the doubt. Where Dylan was suspicious, withdrawn and hostile, Ali was expansive, accessible and usually good-humored. As Dylan came to speak less and less, and in ever more gnostic riddles, Ali came to speak more and more, and ever more plainly. Dylan’s response to misrepresentation by the media was to abandon all attempts to communicate outside his music, to satirize and fracture the very idea of a shared public discourse that could say anything meaningful about individual lives. Ali’s response was to seize and master the tools of the trade—the press conference, the photo opportunity, the television lens and the radio microphone—in an attempt to construct his own image and reach out to his own public. Ali loved to bait and tease the journalists, but if they played along with him they were in for the ride of their lives. This rapport was to stand him in good stead during his long battle with the government and boxing officialdom, when Lipsyte, Cosell, the BBC’s Harry Carpenter, McIlvanney, Plimpton, Mailer, Wolf and others ensured his case was heard. For anyone with eyes to see it, there was always self-doubt beneath Ali’s bravado, and it was a measure of his trusting humanity that he was able to preserve and even share this trait under the glare of the limelight, just as it was a measure of Dylan’s very different nature that he was not.
Ali and Dylan were first-generation children of the burgeoning electronic audio-visual culture, which was still at that time largely unrecognized as anything other than an inferior and distant cousin to the mature forms of western “high culture.” Their public achievements and the controversies that surrounded them helped compel the intelligentsia to take pop culture seriously. By their boldness, their ambitions and, paradoxically, their playfulness, they made their disciplines—sport and popular music—worthy of study. Dylan himself liked to toy with this theme of high and low, elite and popular culture, reminding us that “Mona Lisa must’ve had the highway blues, you can tell by the way she smiles.”
And Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot,
Fighting in the captain’s tower,
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers.
In 1965, Dylan told an interviewer, “Music is the only thing that’s in tune with what’s happening. It’s not in book form, it’s not on the stage.… It’s not the bomb that has to go, man, it’s the museums.”
Out of this spirit of wise-guy iconoclasm and lofty superiority (and the loneliness and vulnerability they concealed) Dylan fashioned his three great albums of the mid sixties, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde. In these works, Dylan wears his bewilderment as a badge of truth-telling. Even as Dylan’s earlier style was at its peak of popularity—adapted by Sonny and Cher, the Byrds, Buffy Sainte Marie, the Turtles, Barry McGuire and Donovan—he was heading off into the musical unknown, spewing out an astonishing flow of unique and powerful songs. Like Ali, he derived from the era an extraordinary self-confidence that enabled him to go his own way. His restlessness was a reflection of the age and became a stimulus to it. Even as he repudiated his representative function, his retreat into enigmatic silence induced his fans to scrutinize his every utterance and gesture for representative significance. Figuring out what Dylan was saying or thinking, where he was really at, became a preoccupation of the era.
From its ersatz hillbilly and Greenwich Village hipster origins, Dylan’s voice evolved into a distinctively expressive instrument, soaring among the rock and roll clatter. Mixing magisterial put-downs and an aching sense of loss, delirious self-pity and ecstatic glee, Dylan really did become the voice of a generation. He mapped the inchoate emotional confusion of young people growing up amid the mayhem of a violent era marked by clashes over fundamental values. It is striking how often political events and concerns surface in these avowedly non-political songs. Dylan’s critique of American society had broadened and deepened, so much so that it had gone beyond the merely political, but the targets can still be clearly identified: phone taps and paranoid DAs, lying media (“propaganda all is phoney”), omnipresent commercialism (“money doesn’t talk, it swears”), affluent liberals with their “tax deductible charity organizations.” In “Maggie’s Farm”—inspired by “Penny’s Farm,” a protest song of the twenties—Dylan produced a masterpiece of anti-authoritarian venom, laced with class and generational contempt. Throughout this innovatory and demanding period, he was propelled (like Malcolm X) by the conviction that “he not busy being born / is busy dying.”
Like Ali, Dylan took his fans on a journey. At times they traversed common terrain, but in the end reached different destinations. Dylan never spoke out against the Vietnam War. There’s a brief reference in the liner notes for Bringing It All Back Home, where Dylan imagines a “middle-aged druggist up for district attorney” who “starts screaming at me, you’re the one, you’re the one that’s been causin’ all them riots over in Vietnam.” But he wrote this in early 1965, and through the remaining eight years of direct American participation in the war, and more than a hundred published songs, he avoided the subject. The poet Michael McClure recalled discussing Vietnam with Dylan in 1966 and characterized the singer’s beliefs at that time as Pentagon-style “first strike capability.” For years Dylan ignored appeals from Allen Ginsberg and Joan Baez to appear at anti-war events. In the summer of 1968, he snapped at a presumptuous interviewer, “How do you know that I’m not, as you say, for the war?”
Even as the flags and draft cards were burned, Dylan sought a deeper engagement with American culture. In his flight from the escalating social conflict of the second half of the sixties, he abandoned the exotic and baroque elaboration of Blonde on Blonde for the conservatism of The Basement Tapes and John Wesley Harding. Here, he invoked a vanished, pre-commercial America of eccentrics and wastrels, thwarted hopes and buried suffering, an America assembled, as Greil Marcus has explained, from the fragments of a dark-tinged folk tradition neglected by the propagandists of the folk revival. Vietnam remains unmentioned, yet it’s impossible to listen to Dylan’s music of this period without feeling the war and the disorder it engendered hovering somehow in the background; and it’s hard to see The Basement Tapes as other than a cry of loss from a secluded bunker. Dylan made art out of the chaos of the era, but for him that chaos was painful. Increasingly, he yearned for simplicity and permanence, and sought escape in an imagined America from the fires of fame and the demands of a social movement. History, not least the history of blackness in America, was to deny Ali that option.
Much as he may have disliked it, Dylan’s music continued to provide the inescapable soundtrack to the student-based anti-war movement. In early 1964, “The Times They Are A Changin’” was fanciful hyperbole; by 1970, as the select band of earnest and idealistic students swelled into a youth army comprising millions, the lyrics seemed no more than an account of the salient facts of the era. It was no accident that toward the end of the decade one of his anti-authoritarian aphorisms—“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”—provided a name for America’s most notorious band of youth guerillas. Dylan once said the sixties were “like a flying saucer landed.… Everybody heard about it, but only a few really saw it.” But thanks in part to Dylan himself, and Ali, and the mass market they served, many in fact did see it and felt themselves part of it.
In the mid seventies, Dylan returned briefly to protest. In “Hurricane,” his ballad about the black boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, Dylan stressed the endurance of racism as the American norm:
All of Rubin’s cards were marked in advance
The trial was a pig-circus, he never had a chance,
The judge made Rubin’s witnesses drunkards from the slums
To the white folks who watched he was a revolutionary bum
And to the black folks he was just a crazy nigger.
No one doubted that he pulled the trigger.
And though they could not produce the gun,
The DA said he was the one who did the deed
And the all-white jury agreed.
Ali and Dylan made their only joint public appearance at a mid-seventies benefit for the “Hurricane” at Madison Square Garden. “I know you all came here to see me,” Ali declared buoyantly, “because Bob Dylan just ain’t that big.” Surveying the wealthy audience, whose diamonds and furs would have put the ECLC Bill of Rights gathering to shame, he reminded them: “You’ve got the connections and the complexion to get the protection.” Despite his friends in high places, Carter was to spend another decade in jail before finally being freed following a judge’s ruling that his earlier trial had been compromised by “appeals to racism.”