King of the World

by David Remnick

  Clay drove out to the Hampton House motel and hung out for a while with Malcolm X and Jim Brown, the great running back for the Cleveland Browns, and ate a huge dish of vanilla ice cream. Clay took a nap on Malcolm’s bed and then finally went home. He was planning for a change, he told his friends. “I made the noise I had to make while I was campaigning for election,” he said. “Well, the vote is in now, and I won. I’m going to play it cool for a while.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Changeling

  CLAY ARRIVED FOR HIS MORNING PRESS CONFERENCE AT THE Veterans Room of Convention Hall. He answered all the traditional questions about how he felt, about which fighter he might take on next, about whether Liston was tougher than expected, less tough than expected, or precisely as tough as expected. The session was, by Clay’s standards, remarkably subdued: no verse, no monologues, no taunts. “All I want now is to be a nice, clean gentleman,” he said. “I’ve proved my point. Now I’m going to set an example for all the nice boys and girls. I’m through talking.”

  Loud, ironic applause greeted that declaration, and even Clay had to smile. But the thing about Clay was that he never really lied to the press; he believed what he was saying at the moment he was saying it. And at this moment he saw his career as a limited venture.

  “I only fight to make a living, and when I have enough money I won’t fight anymore,” he went on. “I don’t like to fight. I don’t like to get hurt. I don’t like to hurt anybody.… I feel sorry for Liston. He’s all beat up.” Clay said he would be a people’s champion and would go back home to Louisville and “roam the streets, talk to the poor folk and the drunks and the bums. I just want to make people happy.”

  Finally, a reporter interrupted with a barbed question. Wasn’t it true, he wanted to know, that Clay was a “card-carrying member of the Black Muslims?”

  Egypt, 1964.

  Clay recoiled not so much from the idea of breaking news—he had assumed by now that everyone knew he was a convert to the Nation of Islam—but rather from the terminology. “Card-carrying” had the ring of McCarthyism, and “Black Muslim” was a term repugnant to members of the Nation.

  “ ‘Card-carrying.’ What does that mean?” Clay said. “I believe in Allah and in peace. I don’t try to move into white neighborhoods. I don’t want to marry a white woman. I was baptized when I was twelve, but I didn’t know what I was doing. I’m not a Christian anymore. I know where I’m going and I know the truth, and I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be what I want.”

  That was enough to confirm all the stories that had been in the press: Clay was a member of the Nation of Islam. But whether the press understood it or not, he had quietly forsaken the image of the unthreatening black fighter established by Joe Louis and then imitated by Jersey Joe Walcott and Floyd Patterson and dozens of others. Clay was declaring that he would not fit any stereotypes, he would not follow any set standard of behavior. And while Liston had also declared his independence from convention (through sheer don’t-give-a-shit truculence), Clay’s message was political. He, and not Jimmy Cannon or the NAACP, would define his blackness, his religion, his history. He was a vocal member of an American fringe group and America would soon be learning about it.

  The sporting press, which knew barely a thing about the Nation of Islam, required more details, and so the next morning some reporters descended on Clay and Malcolm X as they were eating breakfast at the Hampton House motel. If any of the reporters thought Clay would back off from his previous day’s statements, they were mistaken. Now he made the news plainer.

  “A rooster crows only when it sees the light,” Clay said. “Put him in the dark and he’ll never crow. I have seen the light and I’m crowing.”

  Malcolm declared, “Clay is the finest Negro athlete I have ever known, the man who will mean more to his people than any athlete before him. He is more than Jackie Robinson was, because Robinson is the white man’s hero. The white press wanted him to lose. They wanted him to lose because he is a Muslim. You notice nobody cares about the religion of other athletes. But their prejudice against Clay blinded them to his ability.”

  For the rest of the day, Clay was quick to fill everyone’s notebooks. As the reporters stood around him, Clay felt himself in an instructive mood.

  “ ‘Black Muslims’ is a press word,” he said. “It’s not a legitimate name. The real name is ‘Islam.’ That means peace. Islam is a religion and there are seven hundred and fifty million people all over the world who believe in it, and I’m one of them. I ain’t no Christian. I can’t be, when I see all the colored people fighting for forced integration getting blowed up. They get hit by stones and chewed by dogs, and they blow up a Negro church and don’t find the killers. I get telephone calls every day. They want me to carry signs. They want me to picket. They tell me it would be a wonderful thing if I married a white woman because this would be good for brotherhood. I don’t want to be blown up. I don’t want to be washed down sewers. I just want to be happy with my own kind.

  “I’m the heavyweight champion, but right now there are some neighborhoods I can’t move into. I know how to dodge booby traps and dogs. I dodge them by staying in my own neighborhood. I’m no troublemaker. I don’t believe in forced integration. I know where I belong. I’m not going to force myself into anybody’s house.…

  “People brand us a hate group. They say we want to take over the country. They say we’re Communists. That is not true. Followers of Allah are the sweetest people in the world. They don’t carry knives. They don’t tote weapons. They pray five times a day. The women wear dresses that come all the way to the floor and they don’t commit adultery. All they want to do is live in peace.

  “I’m a good boy. I never had done anything wrong. I have never been to jail,… I love white people. I like my own people. They can live together without infringing on each other. You can’t condemn a man for wanting peace. If you do, you condemn peace itself.…”

  On the day Clay announced his conversion, at a Savior’s Day event at the Chicago Coliseum, Elijah Muhammad ended his public ambivalence about Clay and welcomed him to the fold. Until then, Muhammad had kept his distance, thinking Clay would lose and disgrace the Nation, but now, in victory, he was all good grace, all welcome. Indeed, Elijah Muhammad declared that Clay had won his fight thanks to Allah and his Messenger. And by coming out as Clay’s friend and spiritual light, Elijah Muhammad had also stepped up his struggle with Malcolm X.

  JUST ABOUT THE ONLY PEOPLE TO REACT TO THE NEWS OF Clay’s conversion with a shrug were the men in his corner. “What’s in a name?” Dundee said by way of Shakespeare. “To me he’s still the same individual, same guy. Actually, I didn’t know what Muslim was, really, because I thought it was a piece of cloth.” Probably no other trainer would have been so foolish as to alienate his new champion—there was too much money to be had. But Dundee really didn’t care what religion his fighter belonged to as long as he showed up at the gym. “I learned that much when I was a kid,” Dundee said years later. “One thing you don’t mess with in a fighter is his religion. And his love life. You don’t mess with that either. How to throw the left—you’re better off sticking with that stuff.”

  But outside of that small circle of handlers, Clay’s conversion was a shock, not least to his family. His father, though never exactly a devout Christian, made clear his wrath in person and in the press. Clay senior told reporters that his son had been “conned” by the avaricious Muslims. “I’m not changing no name,” he said. “If he wants to do it, fine. But not me. In fact, I’m gonna make good use of the name Cassius Clay. I’m gonna make money out of my own name. I’ll capitalize on it.” The relationship between father and son deteriorated to such a degree that the next time Clay went home to Louisville, he stayed in a hotel downtown. “He came out to visit us,” his mother, Odessa, said, “but he only stayed twenty-five minutes and kept a cab waiting outside in the driveway. He’s been told to stay away from his father because of
the religious thing, and I imagine they’ve told him to stay away from me, too. Muslims don’t like me because I’m too fair-complected.”

  The leading columnists reacted with almost as much outrage as Cassius Clay, Sr.

  “The fight racket, since its rotten beginnings, has been the red-light district of sports. But this is the first time it has been turned into an instrument of hate,” Jimmy Cannon wrote. “It has maimed the bodies of numerous men and ruined their minds but now, as one of Elijah Muhammad’s missionaries, Clay is using it as a weapon of wickedness in an attack on the spirit. I pity Clay and abhor what he represents. In the years of hunger during the Depression, the Communists used famous people the way the Black Muslims are exploiting Clay. This is a sect that deforms the beautiful purpose of religion.” Cannon’s point of racial orientation would always be Joe Louis. Clay’s association with the Nation of Islam, Cannon declared, was a “more pernicious hate symbol than Schmeling and Nazism.”

  Lipsyte’s coverage in the Times was of a different order, partly because the paper’s news columns did not allow for much opinion, but also because he was of a different generation and possessed of a far different set of experiences, not least his close friendship with Dick Gregory. “It’s true that I wasn’t freaked out about the conversion the way Cannon or Smith were,” he said, “but you have to remember how scary Malcolm X was to some people, and not just white people. The New York Times, for one, never really knew how many people he could put on the street for a revolution.”

  Malcolm appreciated the depth and restraint of Lipsyte’s coverage and told him so. Back at the newsroom on West Forty-third Street, Lipsyte recounted the compliment to one of his editors.

  “Well, that’s great,” the editor said. “Maybe we should put huge ads on the side of all our trucks saying, ‘Malcolm X Likes Bob Lipsyte!’ ”

  The World Boxing Association suspended the new champion for “conduct detrimental to the best interests of boxing.” However, the suspension had no real force to it after the key state commissions in New York, California, and Pennsylvania made it clear they would ignore it. Members of the Louisville Sponsoring Group reacted first with visceral shock. They realized, quite rightly, that Clay’s conversion would cost him, and them, hundreds of thousands of dollars. What was more, they realized rather quickly that Clay would not likely renew his contract with them once it expired in 1966. “We guessed that the Muslims would want to control things on their own,” said Gordon Davidson. “And it was a pretty good guess.”

  Just about the only white politician to speak out in support of the new heavyweight champion was Richard Russell, senator from Georgia and a segregationist. Russell thought it was splendid that the Nation of Islam’s goal of separating the races coincided with his own. (In fact, in 1961, Elijah Muhammad had initiated contact with the Ku Klux Klan leadership, the idea being that both groups favored the separation of black and white.)

  The most complicated reactions came from black commentators and political actors. Black-run newspapers were deeply involved in and supportive of the civil rights movement, and most were suspicious of the Nation of Islam. It was February 1964, and the country had already witnessed a decade of civil rights landmarks: the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955–56, the Little Rock schools crisis in 1957–58, the student sit-ins in Nashville in 1960, the Freedom Rides of 1961, James Meredith’s integration of Ole Miss in 1962, the Birmingham struggle and the Sixteenth Street Church bombing in 1963, the march on Washington. Many middle-class blacks, especially, privately admired certain aspects of the Nation—the way it rehabilitated men coming out of jails, the way it represented a certain upright morality in the home and safety on the street—but worried that such a vehement rhetoric of confrontation and a religious style so alien to mainstream America would jeopardize the movement.

  In Clay’s hometown paper, the black-run Louisville Defender, Frank Stanley wrote, rather delicately, “Our difference is not with Clay’s choice of a religious group, although we have our reservations about the motives of this particular sect. We are dismayed at the Louisville youth’s disassociation from the desegregation movement.” King himself, who was now at the zenith of his power and appeal in the movement, indulged no such delicacies. “When Cassius Clay joined the Black Muslims and started calling himself Cassius X he became a champion of racial segregation and that is what we are fighting against,” he said. “I think perhaps Cassius should spend more time proving his boxing skill and do less talking.” Eventually King called Clay to congratulate him on his boxing triumphs—a phone call that was overheard by the FBI. According to the bureau’s wiretap log of King’s conversations, Clay assured King that he was “keeping up with MLK, that MLK is his brother, and [Clay is] with him 100 [percent] but can’t take any chances.” Clay told King to “take care of himself” and “watch out for them whities.”

  A month after the fight, Jackie Robinson wrote a piece for The Chicago Defender, the most prominent of all black-run papers, in which he insisted on the magnitude of the new champion’s victory in the ring and a cool acceptance of his conversion to the Nation of Islam. While Robinson’s putative admirers among the white columnists brayed with anger and confusion about this self-assertive new champion, Robinson himself, who did not require their fatherly acceptance, saw some virtue in this young man’s decision, even if he did not share it.

  “I don’t think Negroes en masse will embrace Black Muslimism any more than they have embraced Communism,” Robinson wrote. “Young and old, Negroes by the tens of thousands went into the streets in America and proved their willingness to suffer, fight, and even die for freedom. These people want more democracy—not less. They want to be integrated into the mainstream of American life, not invited to live in some small cubicle of this land in splendid isolation. If Negroes ever turn to the Black Muslim movement, in any numbers, it will not be because of Cassius or even Malcolm X. It will be because white America has refused to recognize the responsible leadership of the Negro people and to grant to us the same rights that any other citizen enjoys in this land.”

  In the late sixties, when he was making his stand against the draft and went into exile, many voices, radical and not, celebrated Ali as a figure of defiance and courage. Eldridge Cleaver described him as a “genuine revolutionary” and the “first ‘free’ black champion ever to confront white America.” Athletes like Lew Alcindor would be radicalized to the point of conversion. Even Red Smith would come around. But at the time, in 1964, very few people, black or white, openly celebrated Clay’s transformation. “I remember in the early sixties how we felt at home about Ali,” said the writer Jill Nelson, who grew up in Harlem and on the Upper West Side. “We weren’t about to join the Nation, but we loved Ali for that supreme act of defiance. It was the defiance against having to be the good Negro, the good Christian waiting to be rewarded by the righteous white provider. We loved Ali because he was so beautiful and powerful and because he talked a lot of lip. But he also epitomized a lot of black people’s emotions at the time, our anger, our sense of entitlement, the need to be better just to get to the median, the sense of standing up against the furies.”

  CLAY DROVE NORTH TO NEW YORK AND SETTLED IN AT THE Hotel Theresa in Harlem. He arrived in a chauffeur-driven Cadillac but quickly described for reporters how he was barred from various restaurants on his two-day trip from Miami. (“Man it was really a letdown drag/For all those miles I had to eat out of a bag.”) The Theresa, a Harlem landmark, was far more welcoming. Joe Louis used to stay there, as did dozens of other black celebrities when they were visiting Manhattan. Fidel Castro stayed there. Nearly every demonstration held in Harlem began outside the Hotel Theresa.

  For the first few days in March, Clay held court at the hotel and went everywhere with Malcolm X—for walks around Harlem, around Times Square, and to the United Nations for a tour and a press conference. One reporter wrote that the boxer and the political leader had caused the greatest commotion at the
UN since Nikita Khrushchev came to bang his shoe on the desk. Malcolm, who was eager to win Clay over to whatever new coalitions he was forming, even brought him out to Long Island with the idea of persuading him to buy a house near his own in Queens. But Clay could not straddle his loyalties for long. The rift between Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X was severe; the Nation leadership was not likely to permit Clay to enjoy both membership and a friendship with their enemy. Even while he continued in public to vow loyalty to Muhammad, Malcolm had already said that he would try to form a new, independent group—a group that the Nation would immediately view as a threat.

  On March 6, Elijah Muhammad gave a radio address in which he declared that the name Cassius Clay lacked a “divine meaning” and must be replaced with a Muslim name. “ ‘Muhammad Ali’ is what I will give to him, as long as he believes in Allah and follows me.” In the past, the fighter had always admired the history and the euphony of his own name. “Makes you think of the Colosseum and those Roman gladiators. Cassius Marcellus Clay. Say it to yourself. It’s a beautiful name.” But now he had been instructed otherwise: “Muhammad” meant one worthy of praise and “Ali” was the name of a cousin of the prophet. Most members of the Nation used X as a last name; Elijah Muhammad gave “completed” Islamic holy names mainly as a great honor to longtime leading Muslims who had been with the movement for decades. Elijah needed Clay not only as a cash cow and as a recruitment vehicle, but as a weapon in the war with Malcolm X.