Ali

by Jonathan Eig

  “DOWN WITH EVERYTHING”: that was the message on a popular T-shirt. At the time, it seemed everything was up for grabs, under attack. Everybody had something to protest. Some young men and women protested in the broadest way. They attacked conformity. They dropped out — of school, of marriage, of life. They did drugs. They grew their hair long. They took to the road and lived out of their cars, beholden, they said, to no one but themselves. Others went to Mississippi and Alabama, into territory at the heart of the civil rights struggle, to register voters and organize protests. But as the fight for Black Power grew more radical and riots erupted in big cities, many white activists turned their energies to the antiwar movement. As that movement grew, protesters sensed, increasingly, that their voices might be heard, that if they were bold enough and numerous enough and determined enough, they might just force the U.S. government to leave Vietnam.

  “I’m expected to go overseas to help free people in South Vietnam,” Ali said in one lecture, “and at the same time my people here are being brutalized; hell no! I would like to say to those of you who think I have lost too much: I have gained everything. I have peace of heart; I have a clear, free conscience. And I am proud.” He said he would face a firing squad before renouncing Elijah Muhammad and Islam.

  He adapted his remarks depending on the makeup of his audience. For an all-black crowd at the University of Pennsylvania, he said integration would never work. “There’s no sense in Negroes wanting to integrate with whites,” he said. “White folks don’t want any black babies walking around in their neighborhood and we don’t need any white babies walking around in ours.” No white man wanted a kinky-haired, light-brown son, he said, just as no black man wanted a cream-colored child.

  At Appalachian State University in North Carolina, he once again expressed admiration for the white segregationist George Wallace and repeated his refrain about all the animals and people of the world preferring to be among their own. “Chinese like to be with Chinese,” he said, “because they eat with chopsticks and they like that pling, ting, tong, ting music. They don’t dig Johnny Cash.” In the same lecture, he said, “The black man was robbed of his language, the slaves were mated like animals . . . he was robbed of his religion, he was robbed of his god, he was robbed of his culture. So we have a nation of people called Negroes who are suffering a mental death. And this death is going on 500 long years.”

  In Los Angeles, he mocked the Black Power movement as nothing but a fad, saying the modern Negro radical “has an African haircut and African clothes and a white girl on his arm.” Haircuts mattered. Black activists made “Black Is Beautiful” a rallying cry, fighting back against longstanding prejudices. For many young men and women in the 1960s, being black and beautiful meant letting their hair grow high and wide. Ali’s own hair was something of a compromise. He wore it longer than most members of the Nation of Islam, but not nearly as long as other young radicals.

  “We’re not Negroes,” he said at a stop in Richmond, Virginia. “All people on this planet are named after a country. People from Mexico are called Mexicans. People from Russia are called Russians. People from Egypt are called Egyptians . . . Now what country is named ‘Negroes’?” That one always got a great laugh, although many of the people who laughed scratched their heads later when they realized it didn’t entirely make sense. Race and nationality were two different things.

  In Springfield, Massachusetts, Ali compared the black American who rioted in protest to a bull who charged a train. “He’s a brave, brave bull,” Ali said. “But his tracks are his only monument.”

  In Phoenix, he said he was through with boxing, declaring that he intended to do nothing else but “fight for my people.”

  Hecklers occasionally interrupted, calling him a draft-dodger. Critics occasionally called out some of the flaws in his logic, pointing out, for example, that redbirds and bluebirds belong to different species, which makes mating extremely unlikely. But most of Ali’s audience members — liberal white college students, in all likelihood — were charmed by his sincerity and good humor. Ali challenged them to reconsider their prejudices, but he did not issue threats of violence as Black Panther leaders did. He closed his remarks, usually, by rallying the crowds to shout his name as he asked, over and over again until the answer grew loud enough to satisfy him, “Whooooo’s the greatest? Whooooo’s the champ? Whooooo’s the champ? Whooooo’s the greatest of alllll tiiiiimes?”

  On June 18, 1968, Belinda gave birth to her first child. Elijah Muhammad visited the hospital and suggested the baby’s name: Maryum.

  Ali loved Maryum, but he considered it Belinda’s job to raise the child, and he grew impatient when Maryum fussed. “Allah,” he said, “made men to look down on women and women to look up to men; it don’t matter if the two are standin’ up or layin’ down. It’s just natural.” He told a reporter for Ebony that he had no special career ambitions for his daughter. “All I want her to become is a clean, righteous person, a good Muslim woman, a good sister, maybe a teacher of black children.”

  While Belinda stayed home in Chicago with the baby, Ali continued touring campuses. He also agreed to become a partner in a new, Miami-based fast-food restaurant chain called Champburger. Three white men — a stockbroker, an accountant, and a lawyer — founded the corporation and brought aboard Ali for his ability to market the brand and attract investors. When asked how he felt about going into business with white partners, Ali said, “We Muslims do business with the white man every day. But we don’t depend on him and we don’t Uncle Tom . . . They know that I believe that they are devils and I don’t deny it when they ask me.”

  Champburger went public on the New York Stock Exchange at five dollars a share before the first of its restaurants opened its door. The goal was quick expansion, with restaurants located exclusively in black neighborhoods and with franchises owned predominantly by black franchisees, although the stock prospectus warned that growth might be inhibited if Ali were imprisoned for draft evasion. Ali owned 6 percent of the stock, and in exchange for those shares he was expected to promote the restaurants and allow his image to be used in advertisements. He told one reporter he expected the company to open five hundred restaurants within its first year of operations. The first Champburger was scheduled to open in December at 62nd Street and Northwest 17th Avenue in Miami. The restaurant’s specialty would be the quarter-pound “Champburger with Soul Sauce,” selling for forty-nine cents. The menu would also offer hot dogs, fried chicken, and fried fish.

  “This is something to help black people go into business and get into the economical system,” Ali said. “Everybody that you see working in these places will be black.”

  On December 16, with the opening of the first Champburger less than two weeks away, Ali was locked up in Dade County Jail for outstanding traffic charges.

  “Maybe this will be good for me,” he said, referring to his ten-day jail term. “I’ve never suffered.” He added that his short jail sentence might be good practice if he wound up serving five years for draft evasion. As it happened, Ali was released early for Christmas and in time for the grand opening of Champburger.

  Ali earned another paycheck — this time for about ten thousand dollars — by filming a fake fight with former heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano. A computer was supposed to determine the winner, but producers filmed two endings — one with Ali stopping Rocky on cuts, the other with Marciano scoring an unconvincing knockout against the much bigger, much faster Ali. Marciano had dropped forty pounds to get in shape for the production, but the whole thing was a joke, and the sight of Ali in boxing trunks again proved only one thing: that the champ had been eating too many Champburgers.

  Ali didn’t seem to miss boxing, not as long as he could continue to attract crowds and capture the attention of reporters. One day he drove his pink Cadillac from New York City to Monmouth College near the Jersey Shore for a lecture, with a New York Times reporter in the passenger seat. Ali, the reporter observed, “is not a conv
ersationalist, but a monologist. When he begins a subject that he has obviously been asked about repeatedly before, it is as though he simply activates a tape in his head, and out pour the words.” When he reached the most quotable passages in his soliloquy, Ali would reach up and turn on the overhead light, signaling to the reporter that this was the good stuff and he should take notes.

  In Chicago one day, the sports journalist Dick Schaap invited Ali to join him for dinner. Tom Seaver, the star pitcher for the New York Mets came along, too. Seaver had just finished a spectacular season in which he’d won twenty-five games and led the Mets to a World Series triumph. The conversation was loud, with Ali doing most of the talking. About halfway through the meal, Ali paused in the middle of one his monologues, turned to Seaver, and said: “Hey, you a nice fella. You a sportswriter?”

  That was how it went, day after day. Every street and sidewalk was a red carpet, unfurled just for Ali. By traveling mostly in big cities and lecturing mostly on college campuses, where antiwar protests were common, Ali insulated himself from the Americans who deemed him unpatriotic. He likely didn’t read the critical letters that appeared in newspapers, and he certainly didn’t see the hundreds if not thousands of letters received by the White House and U.S. Justice Department from ordinary Americans who couldn’t understand why a man convicted of draft evasion had not been jailed for his crime. One such letter, sent to the Justice Department from a husband and wife in Tampa, Florida, encapsulated the sentiment of many. It read,

  Dear Sirs:

  Respectfully asking why that “super-patriot” Cassius Clay or whatever he calls himself now is still running around loose while other American boys are being killed, maimed, and shot at in Viet Nam. We have one son in Viet Nam and another about to go there.

  Could it be that our great Justice Dept. is afraid of jerk Clay and the Negro populace in general? We think so.

  Army Specialist Bill Barwick, a black man, wrote to President Johnson from Vietnam, saying that “Cassius Clay, pardon me, Muhammad Ali,” was a topic of much discussion among the troops. “There are very few people who speak of anything else over here,” he wrote in a letter dated June 24, 1967. “If Cassius Clay can get away with something like this than my brother, or the kid downtown, or any darn fool wise-guy will want to try the same thing.” To Barwick, Ali’s case proved that the law worked differently for those, like Ali, who were “more powerful and financially successful than the people who are now serving in the Armed Forces.”

  Ali carried on in spite of the controversy. In New York one day, he exited a hotel lobby and, instead of moving swiftly to his waiting car, looked around, waiting for people to recognize him. They did. Most celebrities preferred to avoid autograph seekers and back-slappers. Not Ali. All his life, whenever people offered to sneak him out a back door or take him down a service elevator to avoid attention, he would refuse. When a limousine driver waited for him, he instructed the driver to park on the busiest stretch of the most congested street he could find. When there people around to admire him, he was never in a hurry.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, “that’s right. You are lookin’ at Muhammad Ali, the heavyweight champion of the whole world.”

  The crowd in front of the hotel thickened and spread.

  “See my new limousine?” he asked. “Just bought it last week for $10,000 — I mean cash, baby. They think they can bring me to my knees by takin’ away my title and by not lettin’ me fight . . . Shoot! I ain’t worked for two years and I ain’t been Tommin’ to nobody and here I’m buyin’ limousines — the President of the United States ain’t got no better one. Just look at it! Ain’t it purty? Y’all go and tell everybody that Muhammad Ali ain’t licked yet.”

  27

  Song and Dance and Prayer

  One day in March 1969, Muhammad and Belinda Ali were summoned to the home of Elijah Muhammad on Chicago’s South Side. Although they had both been to the Messenger’s home before, it was unusual to be called on short notice. They were anxious.

  As usual, the Messenger’s tastefully furnished home was crowded with people: grim men in suits, quiet women in white dresses. They sat at a long dining room table, where almost every seat was filled with a high-ranking official of the Nation of Islam. Clara Muhammad and some of the women in white served tea and small dishes of food. Normally, Belinda would light up in the presence of Elijah, whom she addressed as “grandfather.” Normally, Ali would work the room, slapping backs and shaking hands. But not this time.

  “It was terrifying,” Belinda recalled years later.

  Elijah Muhammad was small and thin — tiny, compared to Ali — with big, warm eyes and a disarming smile. It was a smile, James Baldwin wrote, that “promised to take the burden of my life off my shoulders.” But Elijah Muhammad showed little of the smile in this meeting. Speaking softly and calmly, he explained why he had asked the Alis to come to his home. A few days earlier, Elijah Muhammad said, he had seen Ali on TV with Howard Cosell and heard Ali say to the television journalist that he hoped to fight again soon because he needed the money. Elijah Muhammad had always followed Ali closely. As the most recognizable public figure in his movement, the boxer’s words and actions mattered. Elijah had not been upset when Ali went into business with men to sell Champburgers with Soul Sauce. He had not been upset when Ali had exchanged pleasantries with Martin Luther King. Nor had he been upset when Ali had begun his tour of mostly white college campuses. But the sight of Ali on TV saying he wanted to fight again because he needed money had enraged the Nation of Islam leader.

  Ali listened quietly as the Messenger explained. The Nation of Islam, he said, had always disapproved of the sporting life. The sporting life was worse than frivolous. The sporting life corrupted men’s souls. The sporting life promoted greed and violence. The sporting life distracted men from religious observance. Elijah Muhammad said he was disappointed to hear that Ali wished to return to the sporting life, and he was even more disappointed to hear that he wished do so merely for the money. Hadn’t the Messenger told him that Allah would provide for him? Had he lost faith?

  Ali’s punishment, Elijah Muhammad said, would be a one-year banishment from the Nation of Islam. Neither Ali nor his wife would be permitted to attend services or to fraternize with members in good standing. The matter was not open to discussion, and Ali accepted the verdict without argument. The Messenger often used expulsion to discipline his followers. He had banished one of his own children, Wallace D. Muhammad, for questioning some of the Nation’s teachings, and, most famously, he had suspended Malcolm X — a suspension from which Malcolm had never returned.

  For Belinda, who had grown up in the Nation of Islam and whose parents both belonged, the penalty was almost unbearable. “It was like going to prison,” she said. A few days later, when Elijah Muhammad publicly announced his decision, he hit Ali where he knew it would hurt most: he took away the boxer’s name. “We shall call him Cassius Clay,” Elijah declared. “We take away the name of Allah (God) from him, until he proves himself worthy of that name.”

  At first glance, Elijah Muhammad’s logic seemed strange. Ali had been a boxer when he had joined the Nation of Islam. He had fought nine times since announcing his religious conversion. He had often bragged about his love of money and the cars and houses he would buy. He had abandoned the Louisville Sponsoring Group so that the Messenger’s son could manage his boxing career and help him earn more money. John Ali, the national secretary of the Nation of Islam, and Herbert Muhammad were each personally earning great sums of money from Ali’s boxing career. Muhammad Speaks had celebrated Ali’s pugilistic success with dozens of laudatory articles. So what did Elijah Muhammad’s vitriolic statement mean, and why did it come now?

  One day shortly after the announcement of Ali’s suspension, Louis Farrakhan visited Elijah Muhammad’s home. The Messenger asked John Ali to read his pronouncement aloud so Farrakhan could hear it. “That was one of the hardest moments I had at the table of my teacher,” Farrakhan recall
ed. “I didn’t fully understand. And after John Ali read the article, Elijah Muhammad looked at me as I am looking at you and said, ‘Brother, I did that for you.’ ”

  Farrakhan wasn’t sure what that meant, at least not at first. But Elijah Muhammad knew that Farrakhan, a gifted musician, had given up his career as an entertainer because the Nation of Islam considered music and entertainment frivolous. Years earlier, Malcolm X had delivered a letter to Farrakhan saying Farrakhan had thirty days to “get out of music or get out of the temple.” Elijah Muhammad knew that other members of the Nation of Islam had given up singing, acting, dancing, and other activities, professional and recreational, because their activities were deemed distractions. Elijah Muhammad understood that others in the Nation resented the fact that Ali was permitted to box. “He was the type of leader,” Farrakhan said, “who kept one eye on the scripture and one eye on the person to whom he was speaking, so that he would know where you fit.”

  In his book Message to the Blackman in America, Elijah Muhammad wrote that sport and play caused “delinquency, murder, theft and other forms of wicked and immoral crimes.” He added, “The poor so-called Negroes are the worst victims in this world of sport and play because they are trying to learn the white man’s games of civilization. Sport and play (games of chance) take away the remembrance of Allah (God) and the doing of good, says the Holy Qur-an.”

  Elijah Muhammad had made an exception for Ali — perhaps because he had thought the boxer would boost recruitment and drive more sales of his newspaper, perhaps because Ali had donated money to the Nation of Islam, perhaps because Elijah had feared that Ali would ally himself with Malcolm X, or perhaps because he had seen potential in the young man. There can be no doubt that the Nation of Islam profited by its association with Ali. The boxer once fought an exhibition with Cody Jones as a fundraiser for the Nation, with tickets selling at prices between $1.50 and $10 each. On another occasion, Muhammad Speaks sponsored a contest for its readers: whoever sold the most subscriptions in a month would get a free trip to one of Ali’s fights. Beginning in 1965, the newspaper ran a regular column called “From the Camp of the Champ,” detailing Ali’s daily routines and philosophies. At the same time, when Ali bragged about his abilities and failed to credit Allah for his victory over George Chuvalo, the newspaper criticized Ali, and Ali apologized.