Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight (9 page)

The movement’s rapid growth and the influence of Malcolm X took place for the most part off the media’s radar screen—until 1959, when Mike Wallace produced a five-part TV series called “The Hate that Hate Produced.” The highly inflammatory series vaulted the Black Muslims into the consciousness of the American public, using sensational terms to imply a threat that didn’t really exist. “Black supremacy,” “gospel of hate,” “hate-mongers in our midst”; the series claimed the movement had at least 250,000 members “preaching hatred for the white man” and implied that the Nation was readying for a race war. Wallace chose to focus attention on Malcolm X as the chief spokesperson of the Muslims rather than the leader Elijah Muhammad. Overnight, the Nation of Islam became a national phenomenon; recruitment flourished, and the ranks of the movement swelled close to the exaggerated figure the series had portrayed.

Although this was the first time most Americans learned of the Nation’s existence, it was already very familiar to one man—FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Long before Hoover took over the FBI, he had worked as an official in the Justice Department’s General Intelligence Division. Among his assignments, he directed counterintelligence operations against the black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey. His intense racism—he alternately referred to Garvey as a “nigger” or a “jigaboo”—led to a near obsession with black militancy. During his early years at the Bureau of Investigation—the forerunner of the FBI—he refused to involve the Bureau in preventing the increasing number of lynchings rampant in the South, saying it had “no authority to protect citizens of African descent in the enjoyment of civil rights generally,” according to one department memo. During the 1960s and the increasing militancy of the civil rights movement, Hoover would combine his other obsession, anti-communism, to persecute Martin Luther King Jr.—who he was convinced worked for Moscow—as “public enemy number one.” But before King came to national prominence, Hoover targeted the Nation of Islam and its leaders Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X for special scrutiny

As early as 1952, the FBI began tapping Muhammad’s phones. The same year, Hoover unsuccessfully attempted to convince the government to place the Nation of Islam on the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations. In 1959, the Justice Department refused his request to prosecute the Nation for subversive activities and concluded that the group was not a threat to national security.

Hoover insisted that all surveillance reports on the activities of Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad be forwarded to him personally. For two decades, the FBI unsuccessfully attempted to locate W. D. Fard in an effort to prove him a hoax and discredit the movement.

After years of surveillance, the FBI could find no concrete evidence of a threat to national security. Despite their hostility towards the “white devils,” members of the Nation were generally law-abiding. In 1960, agents questioned Malcolm X after he gave a particularly inflammatory speech about the spaceship that will “descend on the United States, bomb it, and destroy all the devils.” An FBI account of his interrogation calls him “uncooperative” but quotes Malcolm as saying “Muslims are peaceful and they do not have guns and ammunition and they do not even carry knives.”

In spite of Hoover’s continuing obsession with the movement, it is clear the U.S. government didn’t see a particular threat in the Nation of Islam as long as it could be successfully isolated and discredited. Malcolm X, notwithstanding his success in recruiting new members from the disenfranchised youth of the ghettoes, had no widespread national following or influence among the mainstream of black Americans and no significant forum to reach a larger audience.

That forum was about to present itself in the unlikeliest of places.

In the canon of Muhammad Ali, much of the biographical information available has to be approached with caution because it has been filtered through the self-serving lens of the Nation of Islam. Even his 1975 autobiography,
The Greatest,
was ghostwritten by Richard Durham, a former editor of the Nation’s newspaper,
Muhammad Speaks,
and is notoriously unreliable in places.

Among the murkiest, and most important, chapters of the early life of Cassius Clay is the question of how he first became a member of the Nation—as pivotal a moment in his life and career as the theft of his red-and-white Schwinn back in 1954.

Ali mythology traces his conversion to Miami in 1961, where he met a follower of Elijah Muhammad named “Captain Sam” while he was training for a fight. He told Thomas Hauser he had heard about Elijah Muhammad as far back as 1959 and that he once saw a copy of
Muhammad Speaks
before he went to Rome. But his first formal encounter, he insisted, was that day in Miami, “the first time I felt truly spiritual in my life.”

Abdul Rahman, formerly known as Captain Sam Saxon, also recalled the alleged encounter. “I met Ali—I think it was in March of 1961—when I was selling
Muhammad Speaks
newspapers on the street. Ali saw me, said, ‘Hello, brother,’ and started talking. And I said, ‘Hey you’re into the teaching.’ He told me, ‘Well, I ain’t been in the temple, but I know what you’re talking about.’ And then he introduced himself. He said, ‘I’m Cassius Clay. I’m gonna be the next heavyweight champion of the world.’ He was interested in himself and he was interested in Islam, and we talked about both at the same time. He was familiar in passing with some of our teachings.”

There was a good reason Clay was familiar with the Nation’s teachings. He had in fact been a member for at least three years prior to that day in Miami.

While Cassius Clay was making a name for himself as an amateur boxer in Louisville in the years prior to winning the Olympic gold medal, he had ample opportunity to travel and expand his horizons. Every few weeks, he would travel around the East Coast of the United States competing in boxing tournaments, usually driven by Christine Martin, the wife of his amateur coach. In October 1958, during his junior year in high school, the sixteen-year-old Clay was in Atlanta for a tournament when he stumbled upon a Nation of Islam recruiter outside a mosque, according to FBI agent Robert Nichols, who had the temple under surveillance. Ali later confirmed this encounter. “I was fished off a street corner,” he recalls.

Venturing inside, he heard a message of black pride that hit home. Apart from the rantings of his father at the dinner table, he had never encountered anything like this—black people who weren’t afraid to speak out against white injustice. Coming from segregated Louisville, the words were a wake-up call. Explaining the appeal years later, he said it was easy to shed the “spooks and ghosts” of his Baptist upbringing, calling traditional religion merely a white man’s trick to enslave the black man on earth with a promise of “pie in the sky when you die by and by.”

Returning home, he was still mesmerized by the experience. When, the following week, his high school English teacher assigned his class to write an essay about any topic about which they felt strongly, Cassius knew what he would write about—the Nation of Islam. He had no idea what kind of an uproar his choice of essay topic would cause.

When he turned in the essay a few days later, his teacher, a black woman, was livid. She marched right into principal Atwood Wilson’s office and demanded disciplinary action be taken. The Principal turned the matter over to the school’s guidance counselor Betty Johnston.

“You have to understand,” recalls Johnston forty years later, “that most educators were usually middle of the road. When Cassius turned in a paper about the Black Muslims, his teacher was quite alarmed. She wanted to fail him. At the time, most blacks in Louisville were disturbed by the Black Muslim movement. I was quite an activist and I felt they had a place in the overall scheme of things, but most people didn’t agree with me.”

Nevertheless, Johnston admits she was also concerned over his choice of essay topic.

“I didn’t want him to become a Black Muslim because I didn’t want him to become angry. They were preaching some very negative things and he was such a gentle boy. I went to school with his parents and knew the family quite well. It was obvious from the paper that he was well-versed in the doctrine of the Muslims and that he admired them. The Principal and I talked to the teacher and defused the situation. We weren’t going to let him fail. People had a feeling he was going to do something important. That’s when Mr. Wilson had a meeting and made it clear Cassius was not going to fail in his school.”

Previously, this meeting has been cast by Ali chroniclers as an attempt by the principal to graduate Clay despite his poor marks (see Chapter One), rather than in defense of his right to free speech.

Clay learned a lesson that week. For the time being, it was safer to keep his admiration for the Nation of Islam to himself. He didn’t stop visiting the Nation’s mosques; indeed, whenever he travelled to a city with a black population that was large enough and militant enough to support one, he would quietly attend the service. But, as he digested the message and as his thinking matured, they were not visits he talked about.

When he returned to the States from Rome in 1960, Clay stayed for a week in New York, where—between sightseeing—he found time to go to Harlem and watch the by-then infamous Malcolm X deliver a sermon. The new Olympic champion was captivated by the charismatic minister but was too shy to introduce himself. It would take another two years before he had the courage to approach the man who would become his mentor.

In his autobiography, Malcolm X recalled the first time the two met: “I had met Cassius Clay in Detroit in 1962. He and his brother Rudolph came into the student’s luncheonette next door to the Detroit Mosque where Elijah Muhammad was about to speak at a big rally. Every Muslim was impressed by the bearing and the obvious genuineness of the handsome pair of prize-winning brothers. Cassius came up an pumped my hand, introducing himself as he later presented himself to the world, ‘I’m Cassius Clay’ He acted as if I was supposed to know who he was. So I acted as though I did. Up to that moment, though, I had never even heard of him.”

From the moment of their first meeting, Malcolm and Clay formed a special bond. “I liked him,” Malcolm wrote. “Some contagious quality about him made him one of the very few people I ever invited into my home. Our children were crazy about him.” For the next two years, Clay would arrange his itinerary so he could come see Malcolm speak as often as possible. After the sermon, the two would spend hours discussing the Koran. Malcolm carefully nurtured his new protégé in the ways of the Nation.

Ali later described Malcolm’s appeal. “He was very intelligent, with a good sense of humor, a wise man. When he talked, he held me spellbound for hours.”

But Malcolm’s influence over Clay extended beyond the spiritual realm. Early on, he sensed the young fighter’s potential and he was quick to cultivate it. He appointed one of his officials, Archie Robinson, to act as an administrator and road manager, going over contracts and helping to run Clay’s training camp.

The prominent African-American historian Jeffrey Sammons explains why Malcolm X would devote so much effort to a boxer, despite the Nation of Islam’s long standing aversion to sports. “Malcolm considered prizefights exploitive affairs, in which whites gleefully permitted blacks to act like animals,” he writes. “But, reasoning that mechanisms of social control worked both ways, he knew that power flowed in many directions. He sensed that the time was right to exploit the obvious link between sport and society.”

As Clay inched closer to a heavyweight title fight and came increasingly under the scrutiny of the nation’s sportswriters, his association with the Muslims proved harder to keep a secret. The first hint came in September 1963, when the
Philadelphia Daily News
reported that Clay attended a Nation of Islam rally in Philadelphia at which Elijah Muhammad presided. “Clay stood out in the crowd of some five thousand that heard Elijah Muhammad unleash a three-hour tirade against the white race and popularly accepted leaders,” it announced. In the article, Clay denied being a Muslim but said he thought Muhammad was “great.”