“See my new limousine?” he asked them. “They think they can bring me to my knees by takin’ away my title and by not letting me fight in this country, and by taking my passport so I can’t get to the $3 million worth of fight contracts that are waiting for me overseas. Shoot! I ain’t worked for two years and I ain’t been Tommin’to nobody and here I’m buying 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. I don’t care if I never get another fight. I say, damn the fights and damn all the money. A man’s got to stand up for what he believes, and I’m standin’ up for my people, even if I have to go to jail.”
A week later, Random House gave him a $200,000 advance for the book that would appear five years later as The Greatest. Ali was once again a millionaire. This time he was determined that his funds would not be frittered away as they had the last time. During his two-year stint as an impoverished celebrity, he had dreamed about what he would do if he ever came into the kind of money he had before. Once again, however, his trusting nature proved his undoing.
“As soon as he was back on his feet again,” laments Gene Dibble, “the vultures came right out of the woodwork. And Ali never seems to learn. He had all this money from the hamburger chain and he was starting to make big bucks on the lecture circuit. He wanted to use his money to help the poor blacks in the ghetto. He had been talking to people like Jim Brown and reading a lot about economic justice, helping blacks start their own businesses, stuff like that. He was very excited about it, he thought he was going to eliminate poverty. All these lawyers got involved helping him put together a foundation or something but in the end it was the same story. They ripped him off.”
Ali was so passionate about his dream that in early 1970 he decided that he had no desire to ever box again. Instead, he would devote his life to his plan for black economic justice. In May, Esquire magazine—a long-time supporter of his anti-war stand—offered Ali its pages to outline his economic plan and explain what he would do if he were President of the United States. In a five-page treatise headlined I’M SORRY, BUT I’M THROUGH FIGHTING NOW, he announced that the only way he would go back into the ring would be to fight a series of exhibitions with the current heavyweight champion Joe Frazier to help relieve poverty.
“We can go to Jim Brown, Lew Alcindor, Arthur Ashe, and all the top black athletes, and all of us can go down to Mississippi and do something to help the poverty people,” he wrote. “We’ll take all this fame the white man gave to us because we fought for his entertainment, and we can turn it around. Instead of beating up each other, and playing ball games, and running miracles for the entertainment of white folks, we will use our fame for freedom. I want Joe Frazier to join me. I’m getting together a dope-addict program, rehabilitating addicts. And there are some black welfare women in Los Angeles who want my help because they don’t have clothes for their children. They’re trying to buy a shop where they can make their own clothes, but they can’t get the money. All they’ve got is the seven dollars the government gives them to live on. Me and Joe could put on one boxing exhibition and get them more sewing machines than they could use in a life-time.”
In response to the question of what he would do if he were President, he envisioned his State of the Union address to the American people: “Now, fellow Americans, we owe these black people for four hundred years of back labor,” President Ali would announce. “They’ve done a lot for us. They died in the Japanese war, the German war, the Korean War, the Vietnam War. We’re repaying them. I’m going to take this $25 billion I was gonna spend on helicopters in Vietnam, and it’s going to Alabama and Georgia and Mississippi, and pay for $25 billion worth of houses, nice brick houses. Each black man who needs it is going to be given a home. Now, black people, we’re just repaying you. We ain’t giving you nothing. We’re guilty. We owe it to you.”
At the time, much critical attention was being given to the American government’s policy of destroying huge quantities of food and paying farmers not to grow crops as a means of keeping agricultural commodity prices artificially high. President Ali reserved his harshest words to address this situation: “Now, after all the boys get back to America [from Vietnam], I’m going to tell you people that’s been getting paid for not growing food that you’ll get the electric chair if I catch you destroying any more food. We need that food. I’m gonna hire a bunch of people with all those billions we’ve been spending on the war. I’m going to pay them $300 a week to help their brothers. And I’m gonna say, ‘General Motors, listen here. I want you to make 50,000 diesel trucks. I’m gonna fill those trucks up with canned goods and all the food that you people have been throwing away. We’re gonna take it all down to the people of Mississippi and charge them nothing.’”
For the rest of his career, Ali would continue to speak out on and fight for economic justice, later extending his efforts to help poor whites as well. He also repeatedly challenged other successful black celebrities to help revitalize the ghettoes. But this side of Ali’s personality and character, perhaps the most serious and important, was consistently ignored by the media or denigrated as “naive.”
Once, after witnessing one of Ali’s anti-poverty speeches, which were traditionally relegated to a paragraph on the sports pages if they were written about at all, celebrated American author Roger Kahn complained, “Christ, I thought, here is someone who wants to give away a fortune. Here is a man who cannot read without the most painful pauses between words making a stirring and even profound speech. Here is a black millionaire, socialist, populist and revivalist and most of all idealist. Yes mostly that. Idealist. And in a society that forever confuses value and net worth, this aging, baby-faced champion, this dreamer finely tuned to reality, throws out a mighty blow with his checkbook. What do the papers report? Ali to concentrate on body blows [in his next bout].”
Jerry Izenberg was also intrigued by Ali’s burgeoning economic philosophy. “He told me something very interesting around this time,” recalls the sports columnist. “He told me that his boxing career was only a tool. He said, ‘Fighting hunger, fighting illiteracy, these are the things I really want to do. That’s what my boxing fame made possible.’”
Ali may have been publicly announcing his intention never to box again professionally, but his friends had other ideas. They sensed that the political and social climate had changed sufficiently since 1967 and that America was ready to accept the exiled fighter back in the ring.
Fight publicist Harold Conrad especially believed he could arrange a comeback. As far back as 1968, he had put out feelers, approaching twenty-eight different states about granting Ali a license, only to be turned down each time. He came closest to success in California, where the chairperson of the state athletic commission polled its members and discovered they had enough votes to let Ali fight. Before the decision was announced, however, California Governor Ronald Reagan got wind of the impending fight and declared, “That draft dodger will never fight in my state, period.”
Chicago Tribune sports editor Arch Ward’s description of Ali as the “unpopular, undefeated, heavyweight monster-in-exile” seemed to capture the mood as Conrad persisted in his quest. One of the most ironic rejections he suffered during this period came from Nevada. The governor believed an Ali fight would be good for tourism and was ready to sanction the Las Vegas bout. At the time, however, the Chief Executive didn’t pull that much weight. Instead, the desert state was controlled by two forces: the mob and right-wing billionaire Howard Hughes. The former had no problem with the fight. Not so Hughes. He had strong political connections with Richard Nixon and let it be known that he strongly disapproved of Ali’s politics and would not tolerate the boxer’s presence in Las Vegas—the American capital of gambling, prostitution, and vice. Once again, Conrad was rebuffed. When Ali was informed of the decision, he seemed genuinely puzzled. “Me corrupt Las Vegas?” he asked with a bemused grin.
&
nbsp; Meanwhile, on the legal front, the United States Court of Appeals had rejected Ali’s appeal of the wiretap ruling, leaving him only one chance to stay out of prison, the U.S. Supreme Court, which had once before refused to hear his case. A decision was not expected until early 1971, giving the boxer at least one more year of freedom.
Conrad’s next stop was an unlikely setting—Mississippi, America’s most racist state, where there was no love lost for Ali, at least among the governing elite. Still, after two weeks of negotiations, the intrepid promoter had an agreement with the state’s governor and the mayor of Jackson along with a bona fide boxing license. In return, Ali had to pledge to donate the entire gate receipts of the fight to the Salvation Army.
The long exile appeared to be finally over. But when the citizens of the state and, in particular, the American Legion got wind of the deal, the political firestorm was too much for the politicians to bear. Despite the fact that his signature appeared on the license already in Conrad’s possession, the governor promptly denied its existence.
A similar deal came close to being struck in Michigan before the governor there also pulled a hasty about-face after public opposition once again made the fight politically unpalatable. The Detroit Free Press described the atmosphere that continued to thwart Conrad’s efforts. “Approving a fight for Clay would appear to the public to be approving of his way of life,” the paper editorialized, “and this includes draft evasion. This is a difficult thing for anyone to do, especially a public figure … the public sentiment against him seems to be so strong that no one wants to take the responsibility for sanctioning a fight against him.”
But Ali was never convinced public opposition was really behind the repeated attempts to deprive him of his livelihood. When Conrad informed him of his latest setback, blaming public opinion for his troubles, Ali cut him off.
“It’s not the public,” he protested. “It’s never been the public, not the mainstream of the people. I travel all the time. Wherever I go, whether the Deep South like Alabama or Louisiana, or from Maine to California, since the day I left the draft board, people white, black, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, welcome me, crowd around me, tell me they’re with me. They tell me how ashamed they are about what’s happening to me….It’s not the public, it’s political, from somewhere big.”
Ali was only partially right in this assessment. Despite growing support for the exiled fighter throughout the country, millions of Americans still reviled him. But, as he sensed, there also seemed to be powerful political forces behind the continuing rejections.
In May 1970, Conrad appeared to have finally found a city to host his fight. Charleston, South Carolina, had approved a charity boxing exhibition involving Ali and a fighter to be named later. The contracts had been signed and it looked inevitable that Ali would finally get his chance to step into a ring. Suddenly, however, the Charleston city council announced the fight was off. It seemed that the mayor had received a phone call from longtime Ali detractor and South Carolina Congressman L. Mendel Rivers, who headed the powerful House Arms Appropriation Committee. “You’re making me the laughing stock of Washington by letting that draft-dodging black sonofabitch fight in my hometown,” Rivers complained. The fight was off.
If America didn’t want the fight, however, plenty of other places were all too happy to host Ali’s comeback. Tijuana, Mexico, only minutes away from the American border, offered its bullring for a match. Ali would have only been required to leave the United States for two hours. The State Department refused to grant permission.
Toronto, Canada, made a similar offer. This time, Chauncey Eskridge petitioned the Supreme Court for approval. He offered to put up a $100,000 cash bond. Ali would travel by car, which the Justice Department could staff with as many U.S. marshals as it deemed necessary to assure the boxer’s return. Seventy percent of the total onemillion-dollar purse would be put in escrow. In his petition, Eskridge pointed out that Ali had never failed to make an appearance in federal court since he was indicted three years earlier. Justice Hugo Black was unimpressed and turned down the petition. These rejections were particularly suspicious because there was ample precedent of Americans being given permission to leave the country while their sentences were being appealed. Only the year before, radical activist Abbie Hoffman was allowed to travel to communist Cuba for twenty-six days while his own five-year sentence for inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention was being appealed. Once again, it appeared that Muhammad Ali, whose only previous offense was a traffic violation, was being singled out for special treatment.
Just when it appeared that any further attempts to secure a license were futile, Ali received a call from Georgia State Senator Leroy Johnson, the first black to be elected to the state senate in the South since Reconstruction. Johnson let it be known that he was in a position to arrange an Ali-Frazier title bout in Atlanta if the right strings were pulled. Georgia was one of the few American states without a state licensing commission. A year before, when Conrad had secured an agreement with the city of Macon, Georgia, to stage an Ali bout, it had been vetoed by the state’s conservative firebrand governor Lester Maddox On that occasion, Maddox vowed, “I’il give Clay a license after he serves his term in the Army, or his term in jail. Then maybe I’ll think of allowing him in Georgia.”
But Johnson was insistent that he had the clout to arrange the Atlanta match. The senator was indeed influential. He had recently delivered the votes that enabled a liberal Jew named Sam Massell to win the Atlanta mayoral race. Massell’s support would be crucial to securing the fight and Johnson could assure it. For years, Leroy Johnson trumpeted his role in arranging the fight as altruistic. But Harold Conrad would later reveal that Johnson insisted on being cut in for a piece of the action.
When the idea of an Atlanta match was first floated, memories of the Macon rejection still lingered. Chicago Sun-Times columnist John Carmichael poured water on the prospect, writing, “I advise Muhammad Ali to call it quits. He is an outcast, a fistic pariah. Maddox, will never let him fight in Georgia.”
But Carmichael and the other doubters underestimated Johnson’s clout. His ability to control the state’s black vote intimidated even Maddox, and the governor surprised everyone when he took to the airwaves and announced his approval for the fight. “There has been a lot of controversy about this fellow Clay. When he rejected the draft, I’m sure it hurt him. He’s paying for it. We’re all entitled to our mistakes. This is the way I see it. I see nothing wrong with him fighting here.”
The governor’s approval took everybody off guard, from the state’s large racist population to Ali’s detractors in Washington, who believed Maddox had betrayed patriotic Americans. Within days, the governor was inundated with hate mail from his constituents and phone calls from members of Congress demanding he reverse his decision. Reports out of the Georgia Statehouse had Maddox fielding a call from the U.S. Justice Department exerting pressure on the governor to stop the fight by any means at his disposal.
Meanwhile, Joe Frazier—the reigning heavyweight champion and pretender to Ali’s old throne—announced he would not fight Ali in Atlanta. Instead, promoters enlisted a leading white contender, Jerry Quarry—a genuine “Great White Hope.” It was to be the first time Ali would fight a white opponent since 1962. The prospect of a white boxer silencing the uppity Negro added significantly to the anticipated fight revenues.
The pressure being exerted on Maddox finally became too much for him to resist. Two weeks before the scheduled bout, the Governor’s office issued a statement announcing that Maddox “urges all Atlantans to boycott the fight of Clay and Quarry. He further urges all patriotic groups in the city to let promoters know how they feel about it. We shouldn’t let him fight for money if he didn’t fight for his country.”
Jerry Izenberg was in Atlanta to cover the fight.
“Maddox was feeling a lot of heat,” he recalls. “One moment he was supporting the fight, the next he was trying to stop it. The pres
sure was coming from pretty high up. We didn’t know if the fight was going to actually take place. I remember I was in his office when he declared the day of the fight to be an official’Day of Mourning.’ It was a bit much.”
With the license issued, it seemed to be too late to stop the fight. What Maddox didn’t know was that Atlanta still had an old ordinance on its books that would have made the Ali-Quarry fight illegal. Section 28 of the Rules and Regulations Governing all Boxing Contests in the City of Atlanta stated, “No mixed bouts shall be permitted between white and black contestants in the city of Atlanta and said rules shall be binding and made a part of the agreement of all matchmakers and promoters.”
When Leroy Johnson learned of the obscure regulation, which dated back to the post-Civil War period, he quickly moved to get the city council to delete it before Maddox got wind of the loophole and declared the license null and void.
The fight was on, scheduled for October 26, 1970. But in Georgia, and across the nation, news of Ali’s return to the ring sparked intense and divisive emotions. The night before he was scheduled to leave for Atlanta, Ali received a gift-wrapped package, which was opened by his sparring partner. Inside the box was a black chihuahua with a severed head. A message accompanying the package read, “We know how to handle black draft-dodging dogs in Georgia. Stay out of Atlanta.” It was signed with a small Confederate flag.
While he was staying at the cabin of Leroy Johnson a few days later, Ali was woken by gunshots ringing out of the Georgia night. Moments later, the phone rang. “Nigger, if you don’t leave Atlanta tomorrow, you gonna die. You Viet Cong bastard! You draft-dodging bastard! We won’t miss you the next time!”
On the day of the fight, the anticipation was boiling over. The implications of the upcoming match were not lost on the array of black celebrities—including Bill Cosby, Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, and Julian Bond—who flooded Atlanta, the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr., to see the black knight begin the long march back to reclaim his throne.
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