by Jonathan Eig
Dick Gregory, the comedian and activist who spent time in 1964 with Ali, King, and Malcolm X, explained it this way: “When you saw King, you saw sound bites. Most folks never heard, ‘I have a dream.’ They heard little tidbits of it.” Ali was different because he was a boxer, Gregory said, and boxing put him in a realm white men couldn’t control. “This motherfucker would be in your fucking face for as many rounds as the fight last. King never got that kind of time. You watch him beat a white boy down to the ground and there ain’t a goddamn thing you can do about it. Then he’d go and talk, praising Allah! This had never happened before. Never, ever happened before in the history of the planet . . . Ali was everything everybody wanted their child to be, except some ignorant-ass white folks, and they don’t count.” Gregory said that black men and women all over the world saw Ali doing these outrageous things, things black people were never supposed to do, saying things black people were never supposed to say, saying it all on live television — and getting away with it. And it made them ask, “C’mon, Ali, who you praying to?”
In the campaign to win Ali’s loyalty, Malcolm X enjoyed greater intimacy, but Elijah Muhammad had the power. Malcolm himself had once told Ali: “Nobody leaves the Muslims without trouble.” Ali knew that choosing the Nation of Islam would cost him his friendship with Malcolm. But he may have feared that choosing Malcolm would cost him his life. In the end, he chose the father figure over the brother. In fact, Cash Clay and Elijah Muhammad were not entirely dissimilar. They both bewailed the tyranny of white men. They both enjoyed the company of women other than their wives. But Cash Clay had been violent, physically threatening and attacking his wife and children, while Elijah Muhammad was Cash Clay’s opposite in that respect, a man who seemed to never raise his voice, who was never seen drunk, a man whose power rested in quiet confidence and calm deliberation. In that way, Elijah Muhammad represented more than a father figure; he was also a powerful jab to the face of Cassius Sr. What better way for a son to punish the father than to replace him — and to drop his name, too?
All over the country, followers of the Nation of Islam were being forced to choose between the Messenger and his disciple. When Malcolm announced he was forming his own organization, Muslim Mosque, Inc., the Nation of Islam lost about 20 percent of its membership in a matter of weeks, according to Karl Evanzz’s biography of Elijah Muhammad. Louis Farrakhan, then known as Louis X, recalled it as a trying time for many in the organization. “I, who was mentored by brother Malcolm, and Ali, who was mentored by brother Malcolm, had to make a decision,” he recalled as he sat in a gazebo outside his home one recent day in southern Michigan. “A very painful decision. I didn’t just love brother Malcolm. I adored him, and would have given my life to protect his life because of the great value that he was to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. I had to decide to break my relationship with brother Malcolm or break my relationship with my teacher, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. And it was a no-brainer; I had to go with the man that taught brother Malcolm, that taught me. I didn’t come to follow brother Malcolm. I came to follow Elijah Muhammad . . . So I stayed the course. And so did Ali.”
Malcolm was already in danger. But when Muhammad Ali stopped taking his calls, Malcolm became more easily expendable. Elijah Muhammad ordered Malcolm to vacate his house and turn over his car, both of which had been paid for by the Nation of Islam. The Messenger predicted in his public statements that Malcolm was sure to return, begging forgiveness. Privately, however, he warned that the only way to stop Malcolm was “to get rid of him the way Moses and the others did their bad ones,” according to an FBI report. That report, dated March 23, 1964, continued, “ELIJAH states that with these hypocrites, when you find them cut their heads off.”
Although he knew there were rumors that he would be killed, Malcolm grew more rebellious once separated from the Nation of Islam. He positioned his new organization as an alternative to Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent movement and urged black activists to stop worrying about their “personal prestige, and concentrate our united efforts toward solving the unending hurt that is being done daily to our people here in America.” By 1964, groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality were adopting more militant stances. Race riots would soon erupt in several cities in the Northeast. In one of its early statements released to the press, the Muslim Mosque declared, “Concerning nonviolence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks. It is legal and lawful to own a shotgun or a rifle . . . When our people are being bitten by dogs, they are within their rights to kill those dogs.”
The reinvented Malcolm X expressed support for desegregation and voter registration. He studied proper Muslim rituals and learned that Elijah Muhammad’s version of Muslim theology and practice was far from orthodox. He also began telling reporters with no trace of doubt that the Nation of Islam was plotting to murder him.
In April, Malcolm flew to Egypt, traveling under his own new Muslim name, El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz. From Cairo, Malcolm went to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Soon after, he began the Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca that is often described as the most important event in the life of a Muslim. After seeing Muslims of every color, Malcolm expressed regret for past statements in which he condemned the entire white race. “I am not a racist, and I do not subscribe to any of the tenets of racism,” he wrote in a letter to the Egyptian Gazette. He continued, “My religious pilgrimage to Mecca has given me a new insight into the true brotherhood of Islam, which encompasses all the races of mankind.”
Malcolm also traveled to Lagos and Ibadan in Nigeria, and then on to Ghana, giving lectures and meeting with religious and political leaders at every stop. At the Hotel Ambassador in Accra, as he was preparing to go to the airport for a flight to Morocco, Malcolm spotted Ali, who was making his own month-long visit to Africa. It had been almost three months since Ali’s fight with Sonny Liston. He had done little training in that time, and it showed. His gut was soft and his cheeks full. No date had been set for his next fight, and, as a result, the boxer was enjoying his first sustained rest in years. Even with a few extra pounds on his frame, Ali was instantly recognized everywhere he went, and he was thrilled to know that accounts of his latest boxing triumph and his conversion to Islam had made him an international celebrity. Thousands greeted him at the airport in Ghana, and more lined the street to watch him wave from his convertible on the way to the hotel.
“Brother Muhammad!” Malcolm called out upon spotting his friend in the lobby. “Brother Muhammad!”
Malcolm was in a white robe and carried a walking stick. He had let his beard grow out. Ali greeted his former mentor coldly.
“You left the Honorable Elijah Muhammad,” he said. “That was the wrong thing to do.”
Malcolm said nothing.
Once Malcolm was out of earshot, Ali turned on him. “Man, did you get a look at him?” the fighter asked his traveling companion, Herbert Muhammad, the son of Elijah. “Dressed in that funny white robe and wearing a beard and walking with that cane that looked like a prophet’s stick? Man, he’s gone. He’s gone so far out he’s out completely. Doesn’t that just go to show, Herbert, that Elijah is the most powerful? Nobody listens to that Malcolm anymore.”
It was no way to treat a friend, and it was a sign of Ali’s complexity and contradictions. From the depths of the kind and loyal Ali, the jovial Ali, up rose the cruel Ali, the self-centered, insolent young man who flared in anger when he felt threatened.
This was Ali’s first full day in Africa, and he was eager to begin his tour. He told a reporter from the New York Times he looked forward to visiting the United Arab Republic (the outcome of a political union between Egypt and Syria), where the law would allow him to take four wives. He planned to bring them home and put them up in a new, $100,000 house. “It’ll be like a castle and I’ll have a throne room for my heavyweight crown. One of my wives — Abigail �
�� will sit beside me feeding me grapes. Another one — Susie — will be running olive oil over my beautiful muscles. Cecilia will be shining my shoes. And then there’ll be Peaches. I don’t know yet what she’ll do. Sing or play music, maybe.”
With that settled, he returned to another favorite topic: money.
“Hey, Herbert,” he said, looking at his watch. “When’s the man coming to take us diamond hunting?”
“What man?” Herbert Muhammad asked.
“That man we met last night who told us about the diamond mines here. I heard they got a lake somewhere so full of diamonds you just wade in and feel around.” Perhaps he thought he would soon need four engagement rings. In any case, a Ghanaian overheard Ali and told him there were no such lakes.
“Well,” he said, “I’m still going to go diamond hunting wherever they hunt them here.”
After breakfast, Ali went looking for admirers. He ran from the dining room to the terrace, where he shouted to waiters, bellboys, hotel guests, and a group of small boys loitering in the driveway. He called for their attention.
“Who’s the king?” he shouted.
“You are,” came voices from the crowd. “You are.”
“Louder!” Ali demanded. “Now, who’s the greatest?”
“You are!” came the answer.
“Okay,” he said, headed for his convertible. “Let’s go to the beach.”
Ali met with political leaders and made headlines everywhere he went, although some of his hosts were struck by his shaky command of Islamic customs. On May 18, he met Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s president, who presented the boxer with a kente cloth and a copy of his books, Africa Must Unite and Consciencism. The books were more than symbolic gifts; they were meant to show that Nkrumah and Ali shared the desire to fight the white powers that had subjugated black people for so long, that the civil rights movement in America shared common goals with the postcolonial liberation movement in Africa.
In Accra, Ali and his brother performed a demonstration of how Ali had beaten Sonny Liston. Next he flew to Lagos, Nigeria, but he offended the people of the continent’s most populous country by cutting short his visit, canceling a boxing exhibition, and declaring that Egypt was more important. In Cairo, he watched a film about the 1956 battle with Israel over the Suez Canal and said that if another such aggression against Egypt occurred, “I should be pleased to fight on your side and under your flag.”
Not long after their encounter in Ghana, Ali received a telegram from Malcolm. Although he’d been spurned, Malcolm was not giving up on his protégé.
“Because a billion of our people in Africa, Arabia, and Asia love you blindly,” Malcolm wrote, “you must now be aware of your tremendous responsibilities to them. You must never say or do anything that will permit your enemies to distort the beautiful image you have here among our people.”
Malcolm was beginning to see how the American civil rights movement could become a black freedom movement and how it could connect to freedom movements around the world. Whether Ali had the same sense or not, his trip to Africa provided a signal moment. Until then, when he’d boasted and cried for attention, he’d done it with youthful innocence, with a glimmer in his eye that said he was only having fun or only wanted to make himself more rich and famous. He was a kid, just twenty-two years old, still scared of girls, incapable of balancing a checkbook, relying on benefactors to pay his taxes and make his business decisions, not sure of how to do anything but box and make noise. But here he was, nearly six thousand miles from home, visiting countries he had scarcely heard of before the trip, where Muslims came in all different shades of skin, where world leaders were bestowing gifts, where people in remote villages lined the dusty roads and chanted his new name, and where he could thrill the masses with a mere wave of the hand.
“You should’ve seen them pour out of the hills,” he said, “the villages of Africa, and they all knew me. Everybody knows me in the whole world.”
16
“Girl, Will You Marry Me?”
Muhammad Ali did find a wife in Africa, but it wasn’t Abigail, Susie, Cecilia, Peaches, or any other members of his make-believe harem. Instead, it was a Chicago barmaid and part-time fashion model. Her name was Sonji Roi. Herbert Muhammad carried her picture in his briefcase on their African journey, showed it one day to Ali, and promised to make an introduction when they returned to the United States.
Why would Herbert Muhammad keep a Chicago girl’s picture in his briefcase as he traveled to Africa? The simple answer: Herbert operated a photo studio on Chicago’s South Side. He enjoyed taking pictures of scantily clad women and showing off his work. At the time, the FBI was closely following Herbert Muhammad and others in the Nation of Islam as part of a program to disrupt organizations that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover considered subversive. The bureau’s reports were not always accurate, as they reflected the biases of mostly white agents eager to please their supervisors. FBI memos said Herbert plied women with expensive gifts to disrobe before his cameras, making not only portraits but also pornographic films, which he kept in the basement of his home and showed to friends. According to Muhammad Ali’s brother, Herbert had already slept with Sonji, and so had other members of the Nation of Islam. Showing off the photo was Herbert’s way of bragging and promoting the young woman’s services. According to the FBI and one of Herbert’s closest friends, Sonji Roi may have been a prostitute.
“She was a feisty little thing,” said Lowell Riley, a photographer who shared the Star Studio with Herbert on 79th Street.
Ali and Sonji had their first date on July 3, 1964. Ali was staying in room 101 at the Roberts Motel on East 63rd Street in Chicago when Herbert knocked on the door of his room and ushered her in. She wore a straight, black wig; tight blue jeans; and a long-sleeved sweater-jacket with red stripes. As Sonji recalled the moment years later, Ali leapt from his bed and said, “I swear to God, Herbert, you know what I was doing? I was laying across the bed praying to Allah for a wife, and here she comes through the door. Here she comes with the Messenger’s son, so she’s gotta be the one.” Then he turned to Sonji, with whom he had yet to exchange a word, and asked, “Girl, will you marry me?”
“Just that quick?” she shot back.
“Just that quick,” he said.
They went across the street for ice cream, then to a Chinese restaurant for chop suey, and then back to Sonji’s apartment at 71st and Crieger, where Sonji turned on music and slipped off her clothes.
The next morning, Ali took her back to the Roberts Motel, installed her in room 102, and told her they would never part. Later that day, he removed her wig and shampooed her hair.
“The way you touched my head,” she recalled, “I never thought a prizefighter could have such a tender touch.”
Less than a week later, they drove to Louisville to meet Odessa and Cash.
“I still couldn’t believe it,” Sonji recalled. “All so sudden . . . so sudden.”
Sonji was alone in the world, with no parents. And she sensed that Ali needed someone, too. He was a man who overflowed with love and lust, a man who was not afraid to talk about his feelings, to express his desire for marriage, and to talk among friends about his appetite for sex. “He was young,” said Ali’s cousin Charlotte Waddell. “He was green. He hadn’t been exposed to any fast-track women.” But all his life he had displayed a stronger than usual need to be wanted, admired, loved — so it follows as no surprise that he would strongly want sex, and lots of it, and that marriage would follow.
Sonji Maria Roi was twenty-seven years old and beautiful — short, slender, brown-eyed, with a stylish, long, straight wig. She dressed in high heels and short, tight, brightly colored skirts, as if she were a backup singer for one of Berry Gordy’s Motown acts. Sonji’s father had been killed in a card game when she was two. Her mother had earned her living singing and dancing in nightclubs and had died when Sonji was eight. By the time she was fourteen, Sonji had given birth to a son and dropped out of school
. Soon after she had entered a few beauty contests and gone to work in nightclubs as a barmaid. Her life changed when she met Herbert Muhammad, a short, fat man who made up for a lack of formal education with pluck and guile. With his father’s backing, Herbert owned or operated three businesses on 79th Street — a Muslim bakery that specialized in bean pies from his mother’s recipe; Star Studio, where glamorous portraits decorated the shop window; and the Nation of Islam’s newspaper, Muhammad Speaks. After she posed for pictures in Herbert’s studio, Sonji was hired to make telephone solicitations for Muhammad Speaks.
But a part-time sales job with Muhammad Speaks did not make Sonji a Muslim. According to the rules of the Nation of Islam, Muslim women weren’t supposed to apply makeup, wear revealing clothing, or drink alcohol. Sonji did all those things and more. Herbert knew his father would not approve of Ali’s choice in a bride. The Messenger would have wanted his most famous follower to marry a member of the flock.
“We were trying to get him not to marry her,” Lowell Riley recalled one day as he flipped through a photo album containing pictures of Sonji in swimwear. “But she whipped that sex out on him, and he thought there was nobody else who could do what she was doing.”
