These stark messages of strength resonated with Cassius Clay. He had grown up in segregated Louisville and now he was living in segregated Miami, where even Joe Louis couldn’t get a room at the Fontainebleau Hotel. Clay was also a seeker, a man of drama, and the self-drama of the Muslims also resonated with him, the notion that the black man was the original man, that he had established great civilizations when the white man was still in caves. Cassius and his brother, Rudy, would go to the mosque or to Red’s barbershop in Overtown to listen to the Muslims read from the Koran or recite the creation myth.
Gradually, Clay learned more about the Muslims and the strange and complicated man who proclaimed himself the Messenger. Elijah Muhammad was born in 1897 in rural Georgia. His name then was Elijah Poole, and he was the grandson of slaves. The Georgia of Poole’s youth made the Louisville of Clay’s look benign. The poverty was hopeless, and lynchings of young black men were so common that they often went unnoticed by the local papers. In 1923, Poole joined the northward migration, settling in one of the poorest sections of downtown Detroit. The poverty in Detroit was in many ways worse than in Georgia—jobs in the automobile industry came and went, came and went, all with miserable wages—and Poole soon found himself on relief lines, drinking away his life.
Poole was a religious seeker, and like many other poor blacks in Detroit he began hearing about a preacher named W. D. Fard, a door-to-door salesman who had developed a theology, a history, and a worldview for the black man. Fard was a light-skinned man who said he was born near Mecca. In truth, he had never been to Mecca and had arrived in Detroit in 1930 by way of California and Chicago. Fard founded his sect, the Nation of Islam, with himself as its center, its light, the incarnation of Allah. He preached the recovery of the black man’s ancient Islamic heritage and cultural superiority; he proposed an ethic of self-regard and self-help, of cleanliness and work. Fard was not an original. His thinking came from a variety of American sources and a rich history of black nationalism. The theme of self-help and upright moral behavior derived from Booker T. Washington and from countless sermons in the black churches. His version of Islam had roots in Noble Drew Ali’s Moorish Science Temple of America, a popular sect among blacks in the 1910s and 1920s, which strictly forbade gambling, sports, drinking, and all manner of libertine activity. His emphasis on black pride derived from the back-to-Africa gospel of Marcus Garvey, who formed the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1914 and came to the United States from Jamaica two years later to begin a spectacular career as the editor of the weekly Negro World and as a publicist for his nationalist ideas. Garvey was a spiritual descendant of nineteenth-century nationalists such as Edward Wilmont BIyden, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner (who claimed that God was black), Martin R. Delany (who explored the possibility of massive repatriation of black Americans to East Africa or even South America), and the Utopians Isaiah Montgomery and Edward P. McCabe. But it was Garvey, the son of a Jamaica bricklayer, who truly popularized the essential questions that would fire Cassius Clay’s consciousness:
“Where is the black man’s government? Where is his king and his kingdom? Where is his president, his country, and his ambassador, his army, his navy, his men of big affairs?”
Like BIyden before him and the Muslims who came later, Garvey sought to instill pride in his people by arguing that while white men were still savages living in caves, “this race of ours boasted of a wonderful civilization on the Banks of the Nile.” (Garvey is caricatured in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as the character Ras the Exhorten.) When Garvey won enormous popularity while based in New York in the twenties—one Garveyite rally was held in Carnegie Hall—the FBI pursued him endlessly and finally got a conviction on mail fraud. Garvey sat in prison for two years and was deported to Jamaica in 1927, never to return to the United States—except as a lingering influence on groups that most definitely included the Nation of Islam.
Elijah Poole was one of some eight thousand people who were following Fard by the middle and late thirties. (He had previously been a member of a Garvey organization in Chicago.) Poole’s devotion to the sect was so intense, so disciplined, that Fard made him a top aide-de-camp. When they had known each other for a few years, Poole pressed Fard on the question of who he really was. Fard replied, “I am the one the world has been waiting for for the past two thousand years. I have come to guide you into the right path.” Fard called himself a Muslim and the Koran his holy book, but he developed a cosmology far different from the Islam practiced in the world beyond Detroit. His religious universe was stitched out of bits of Islam, Christianity, the Book of Mormon, political need, and various other elements. For many poor blacks in Detroit, men and women whose grandparents were slaves and now found themselves in the most degrading circumstances, Fard’s narrative offered hope, pride, and historical meaning.
According to Fard, and to lectures and books published by Elijah Muhammad in years to come, 76 trillion years ago, when the universe was lifeless and void, before the concept of time, a single atom began to spin, and out of that atom came the earth and then a man, a black man, the “Original Man” we now know as Allah. In turn, Allah created the known universe and then created the black race. The black man, therefore, had primacy in the universe and was divine. Life for him was a paradise of plenty and righteousness.
Fard declared that 6,600 years ago a black child named Mr. Yacub was born, a child with an unusually large cranium, known as “big head scientist.” Mr. Yacub was a prodigy, a diabolical genius, who finished the university course of study by the time he was eighteen, but because he also began preaching dangerous theology, he and 59,999 of his followers were exiled to the island of Patmos in the Aegean. There Dr. Yacub proceeded to kill off his fellow black men and create a “devil race” born of lies, deception, and murder. Mr. Yacub knew that black men had a dominant black “germ” or gene and a weaker brown gene, but he was able to create lighter people by feeding the blacks to wild beasts (or sticking needles in their brains) and mating the lighter men and women. After two hundred years, Mr. Yacub was dead and there were no blacks left on Patmos. Six hundred years or so later, the men and women on Patmos had evolved from black to brown to yellow to white—whites with pale hair and blue eyes. Fard called them “white devils,” a sickly people, with thin blood and weak bones, prone to disease and incapable of righteousness, if only because of their unusually skimpy six-ounce brains. The whites were rebuffed from returning east from exile by the Fruit of Islam and sent to Europe. For a long time, the whites degenerated into primitives, living like animals, even engaging in sexual congress with animals, until Moses was sent to civilize them. Eventually the whites came to be dominant, first in Europe, then in the New World, where they imported slaves from Africa and treated them brutally—force-feeding them swine and Christianity, making them lose touch with the radiant civilization of their ancestors, the Original Men.
That was the Nation of Islam’s version of history. Its myth of redemption involves a wheel-shaped half-mile-wide spacecraft called the Mother Plane. The plane is piloted by the finest black men, who use their psychic powers to steer. Between eight and ten days before Allah’s day of retribution, the Mother Plane will litter the planet with pamphlets written in Arabic and English telling all God-fearing righteous people where to hide from the imminent attack from the heavens. The attack will be brutal and complete: fifteen hundred planes will take off from the Mother Plane and unleash bomb after bomb and, as in the story of Noah and the ark, leave only the righteous alive. Borrowing from the rhetoric of the Book of Revelation, the story goes that America will burn in a lake of fire for 390 years and then will cool only after 610 years. Finally, the black man, the righteous man, will build a new civilization on the ashes of the old.
Clay imbibed these Muslim tales with fascination but with a notably casual grasp of the specifics. It was not surprising that when he described some of Fard’s principles, noninitiates found them strange. One night, Ferdie Pacheco was driving around Miami in
his vintage Cadillac convertible with Clay and two girls in the backseat. Clay leaned forward and tapped Pacheco on the shoulder.
“See that?” he said pointing at the sky. “It’s the spaceship.”
“What spaceship is that?” one of the girls asked.
Clay looked at her stunned.
“One day about seven thousand years ago, a bad, mad scientist named Dr. Yacub created the white race off the black.… The mad doctor made the whites superior, and pushed the blacks down into slavery. That period is coming to an end now.”
“What’s that got to do with a spaceship?”
“Well, a spaceship took off with twenty-six yellow families living on it, circling the globe. They called it the Mother Ship. The non-white races are being oppressed by the whites, and soon they will come down and wipe out the white race.”
One of the girls smiled slyly.
“What they been waiting for, child?”
“Once a year,” Clay went on, “they come down on the North Pole, put down a big plastic hose, and scoop up enough oxygen and ice to last them a year.”
In the beginning, Clay did not discriminate much between what was and was not useful to him in Muslim ideology, but with time he did not talk much about these stories. What swept him up was the Muslims on earth, their sense of self, their upright military bearing, their pride. In Elijah Muhammad, he found a father substitute, a gnomish font of wisdom and magic who sat on plastic-covered couches and explained the world of black goodness and white evil. Elijah Muhammad, however, was deeply ambivalent about Clay at first; the Nation of Islam regarded boxing as no better than drinking, a worthless indulgence performed for the merriment of white men. By the time Clay came to know him in the early sixties, Elijah Muhammad had become an established leader, if little known among whites. In 1934, Fard had disappeared and Poole, now known as Elijah Muhammad, had taken over the Muslims as Fard’s Messenger. After being arrested in Detroit for contributing to the delinquency of minors by not sending his children to accredited schools, he moved his family, and the sect, to Chicago. One of his legendary gestures was to refuse the draft and to accept a jail term instead.
“For Ali there was something in the notion of black superiority and the spaceship that was comforting and nourishing to him,” said Robert Lipsyte, the New York Times reporter who knew him best in the early sixties. “After all, his father had spouted Marcus Garvey stuff. Ali moved away from his father, but he was influenced by him, felt white society was oppressive. Also, what would Ali have been without the Nation? It gave him a sense of self, a connection to something larger and more important at the time. It was the time of white anger at integration, and the Nation of Islam told a narrative of self-sufficiency.”
“Ali was a searching guy, really young and filled with pain and curiosity and looking for specific answers,” Ferdie Pacheco said. “He was looking for a teacher to tell him what to do, and the Muslim answer was definitive and sharp: don’t trust anyone who is white. Black is best, black is beautiful, what do we need white people for. It hardly mattered that he had the Louisville Group and me and Angelo, all these white people around him. He’s not a hater. But he’s always marched to his own drummer. He sees things as he wants to. Whatever is best for him, whatever ideology is best for him, whatever program is best for the way he thinks his life should be. Ever since he went up to Detroit in ’62 and met Elijah Muhammad he had a real fixation on him. He really conquered his mind. About the only one he felt he really had to listen to was the old man.
“Ali also understood strength. Just like Sonny Liston understood the Mafia, Ali understood that you did not fuck with the Muslims. He liked their strength. He turned his head away from the fact that, especially in the early days, the Nation was filled with a lot of ex-cons, violent people who would go after you if you crossed them.”
By 1962, Clay had invited Captain Sam and a few other Muslims to the Fifth Street Gym to help with odd jobs and to provide spiritual support. Clay had accepted the dietary restrictions of Islam, and the Nation set him up with cooks. Some people at the gym, like Pacheco, knew that Cassius and his brother, Rudy, were spending much of their free time with members of the Nation, but Cassius was not eager to advertise his new loyalties. He was well aware that the few white people who did know something about the Nation of Islam saw it as a frightening sect, radical Muslims with a separatist agenda and a criminal membership, “I was afraid if they knew, I wouldn’t be allowed to fight for the title,” he said many years later.
When Clay went to a Muslim rally on the South Side of Chicago, some reporters asked him if he was a member. Clay, who usually welcomed reporters, now took their persistence as rudeness and turned defensive. Muslims, he said, are clean and hardworking, they don’t cheat on their spouses, they don’t drink or take drugs. Again they asked if he was a member.
“No I’m not, not now,” he said. “But the way you keep pressing me I just might be. They’re the cleanest people next to God.”
CASSIUS CLAY EXPERTLY DIVIDED HIS DEVOTIONS. AS HIS CONCENTRATION on the Nation of Islam increased, so did his attention to boxing. On January 24, 1963, he went to Pittsburgh to fight Charlie Powell, a former football player with a bad temper. Powell baited Clay at the weigh-in, and for the first time, Clay seemed to fight in anger. Clay fought without his usual sense of art-before-power, and Powell, lucky for him, was through in the third round. He spent the next hour vomiting blood in his dressing room.
As far as Clay was concerned, he had now dealt with enough top contenders and also-rans to win the notice of Sonny Liston. In fact, he had not really beaten anyone of moment. Archie Moore, the best-known of his opponents, came into the ring looking like a spent whale. Sonny Banks had floored Clay. The trick was to keep active and continue learning. Time was on Clay’s side, after all; Liston had devastated Patterson twice, but had peaked as a fighter probably two or three years before that. Nor had his title done much for the living habits of the champion. Liston trained only sporadically, and while in the main he kept out of serious trouble, he drank, he stayed out all night. He had long since given up the notion of being a paragon of his sterling profession.
Clay signed to fight a clever boxer named Doug Jones at Madison Square Garden in March 1963. The event would be more notable for Clay’s achievements in public relations than in the ring. As the fight approached, all the major newspapers in the city went on strike for 113 days. Clay, Jones, and the Garden were left to promote the fight through television and by whatever “alternative” media they could invent.
“This is unfair to the many boxing fans New York City has,” Clay complained. “Now they won’t be able to read about the great Cassius Clay.”
Clay went on every television show that asked him, but his cleverest stroke was an appearance at the Bitter End, an outpost of Greenwich Village hip for folk singers, comedians, and other performers of the Zeitgeist. The occasion was poetry night, and Clay appeared onstage with six women and another man, though it was obvious that he was the reason for the occasion. Robert Lowell, much less Allen Ginsberg, was not in the competition. The fix was in. The first poet was a bearded gentleman named Howard Ant, who recited his immortal “Sam, the Gambler, Talks to a Losing Horse.” It became more obvious that the evening would be devoted to boxing when a woman called Doe Lindell recited her own “Poem for Cassius.” Finally, Clay himself came to the microphone to recite an ode to himself:
Marcellus vanquished Carthage,
Cassius laid Julius Caesar low,
And Clay will flatten Doug Jones
With a mighty, muscled blow.
So when the gong rings
and the referee sings out, ‘The Winner,’
Cassius Marcellus Clay
Will be the noblest Roman of them all.
Happily for poetry and for the art of self-promotion, the Bitter End performance was not televised. New York hungered for a big fight now that the championship bouts were starting to migrate to Las Vegas, and the Garden (the old
Garden, at Fiftieth Street) was sold out. By fight night, Clay had worn himself out trying to make up for the newspaper strike. He invited Newsday’s superb boxing writer, Bob Waters, up to his room at the Hotel Americana and told him, “It’s all this running around that gets me. Last week or so it’s been ‘Cassius, will you be on my TV show?’ ‘Cassius, will you cut a tape for radio?’ ‘Cassius, will you pose for pictures?’ Man, I’m tired. And all the time I gotta talk, you know. People expect it. Reporters say, ‘We don’t want to ask you questions, man. Just talk.’ My mouth is tired.”
The only thing that energized Clay before the fight was that he’d met a new friend, a mystical character with a long scar on his cheek named Drew Brown. Brown, who went by the nicknames Bundini and Fastblack, had spent seven years in Ray Robinson’s entourage as a professional cheerleader and court jester. (At the height of Robinson’s career, his entourage also included a voice coach, a drama instructor, a barber, a golf pro, a masseur, a secretary, and a dwarf mascot.) Bundini was a converted Jew married to a woman named Rhoda Palestine. He called God “Shorty” and believed deeply in Shorty’s majesty. One day, Brown came up to Clay’s hotel room and to Clay’s surprise immediately went after him for predicting the ends of his fights.
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