King of the World

by David Remnick

  Malcolm was listening to the speech on his car radio and was outraged. “That’s a political move!” he said. “He did it to prevent him from coming with me.”

  Of course, Malcolm was right about that. Emissaries from Chicago arrived at the Hotel Theresa to make their appeals to the new champion, to Muhammad Ali. They appealed to Ali’s loyalty and faith, telling him to remember who was the real “Messenger” and who was merely a pretender. They even promised Ali a wife, one of Elijah Muhammad’s granddaughters if he wanted.

  A few days later, Alex Haley came to the hotel on assignment for Playboy magazine. He was already very close to Malcolm; once or twice a week, Malcolm would visit Haley at his apartment to be interviewed extensively for the book that would become his autobiography. Haley discovered very quickly that Ali had made his choice.

  “You don’t just buck Mr. Muhammad and get away with it,” Ali said. “I don’t want to talk about him no more.”

  It is hard to exaggerate the sharpness with which Ali cut off Malcolm X. In May, Ali left for a month-long tour of Egypt, Nigeria, and Ghana with his close friend the photographer Howard Bingham and two friends from the Nation of Islam, Osman Karreim (formerly Archie Robinson) and Herbert Muhammad (the third of Elijah’s six sons and Ali’s future manager). In the years to come, the emotion of the trip to Africa—the demonstrations of affection, the chants of “Ali! Ali!” in the remotest villages—would all be repeated many times and in many countries. But this trip was the first of its kind, and Ali was thrilled. It thrilled him to be among Africans, “my true people,” as he put it; it thrilled him to meet such world leaders as Kwame Nkrumah; and it thrilled him to be recognized in places that would never have known, or cared about, Joe Louis, much less Rocky Marciano. This was, in short, his first taste of what it would be like to be Muhammad Ali, international symbol, a fighter bigger than the heavyweight championship, the most famous person in the world. This was the start of it, the start of Ali’s transfiguration.

  At the same time, the reporters, who were almost as thrilled by Ali as he was by himself, were also learning that he was a complicated man, a kind and gentle soul capable nevertheless of flashes of dismissive cruelty. Malcolm X, who had now taken the Sunni name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, was also traveling in Africa after a trip to Mecca. He was wearing a goatee and the gauzy white robes of the pilgrim and carrying a walking stick. On his trip, Malcolm had encountered many light-skinned Muslims, and decided that all the talk of “blue-eyed devils” amounted to “generalizations [that] have caused injuries to some whites who did not deserve them.” Malcolm’s trip was life-altering, so much so that when a reporter asked him if it was now true that he no longer hated white people, Malcolm said, “True sir! My trip to Mecca has opened my eyes.” Just as Martin Luther King was expanding his critique of American society to include the war in Vietnam and economic injustice, Malcolm was becoming more moderate, more universalist, in his moral outlook. The two vectors of black leadership were converging, and it was Malcolm’s trip to the Middle East and Africa that helped make it happen. At the Hotel Ambassador in Accra, just as he was about to leave for the airport, Malcolm crossed paths with Ali.

  “Brother Muhammad!” Malcolm called out. “Brother Muhammad!”

  Ali looked over at Malcolm, but did not greet him as a friend.

  “You left the Honorable Elijah Muhammad,” Ali said stiffly. “That was the wrong thing to do, Brother Malcolm.”

  Malcolm did not want to make matters worse by approaching him, and Ali looked away and moved on.

  It was a terrible moment for Malcolm. Despite the appearance of strength and endurance, Malcolm had lived with his losses all his life. “I’ve lost a lot,” he said after the chance meeting. “Almost too much.” As a child, he had watched his father, a Garveyite preacher named Earl Little, frightened for his life by white racists; he remembered his father’s mysterious death on the trolley tracks and his mother going mad as a result; he remembered, after declaring his intention to become a lawyer, being told by his teacher, “You’ve got to be realistic about being a nigger”; and now, thrust out of the Nation of Islam, his life threatened by the Fruit of Islam, he had been rejected in the harshest terms by Muhammad Ali, his great protégé and friend.

  Shortly before leaving Africa, Malcolm sent Ali a wire that still assumed the tone of their former relationship. “Because a billion of our people in Africa, Arabia, and Asia love you blindly,” Malcolm wrote to Ali, “you must now be forever aware of your tremendous responsibilities to them.” In the telegram, which soon appeared in The New York Times, Malcolm warned Ali not to let his enemies exploit his reputation; Malcolm kept his language vague, but it was clear that the exploiters he had in mind were in the Nation of Islam.

  Ali was in no mood to take advice. He joked with reporters that he had come to Africa to find four wives: one to shine his shoes, one to feed him grapes, one to rub olive oil on his muscles, and one named “Peaches.” He was not prepared to accept the righteous moralizing of a discredited teacher.

  “Man, did you get a look at Malcolm?” he asked Herbert Muhammad. “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. Nobody listens to Malcolm anymore.”

  Most of the country, especially white America, could not have cared less about the differences between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad and where a twenty-two-year-old fighter from Louisville came down between them. The split seemed utterly marginal next to the truly epic battle going on between civil rights demonstrators and their opponents on the streets and in Congress and the courts. Only a very few people (outside of the FBI, to be sure) took the time to sort through these differences. But some black nationalists who admired Ali as both a fighter and an independent soul now wondered about his maturity and his choice. The poet and black nationalist LeRoi Jones, who later changed his name to Imamu Amiri Baraka, said that while Ali was now “my man,” his choice of Elijah Muhammad over Malcolm X “means that he is a ‘homeboy,’ embracing this folksy vector straight out of the hard spiritualism of poor Negro aspiration, i.e., he is right now just angry rather than intellectually (sociopolitically) motivated.”

  Sonia Sanchez, a well-known poet and an activist in CORE, thought Baraka was inflexible and unforgiving, especially considering Ali’s position and his age. “Ali had no time for analysis,” she said. “He had to make a split-second decision between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad and there was no gray area, no in-between. He was surrounded by powerful people from the Nation who could convince him that Malcolm may have been close to him but the real leader was Elijah Muhammad. Also don’t forget that the split was not helped by the way outside forces, including the FBI, infiltrated the Nation and other black groups with the idea of weakening them. The establishment saw that now even middle-class people were moving to a more radical position—Malcolm’s position—and wanted to undermine it. Ali was a great man, but he was not a thinker, an analyst. You couldn’t expect him to make better flash decisions than anyone else.”

  Robert Lipsyte of the Times was disappointed in Ali not so much for splitting with Malcolm as for his all too easy acceptance of the way a small core of Nation of Islam members were now attacking dissidents. Lipsyte knew a Muslim named Leon 4X Ameer, who had acted as a kind of makeshift press secretary for Ali. Ameer had also been a bodyguard and an organizer for Malcolm X before his suspension from the Nation. Ameer’s relationship to Malcolm now made him suspect among the Muslims. One day, in the lobby of the Sherry Biltmore Hotel in Boston, the captain of the Nation’s Boston mosque and three other Black Muslims attacked Ameer, beating him and clubbing him to his knees. Ameer was lucky to be rescued by a security guard. That night, however, another group of Muslims from the Boston mosque battered their way into Ameer’s room and beat him nearly to death. He was found the next morning in the bathtub with his face looking like hamburger; his eardrums were ruptured and several of
his ribs were broken.

  Lipsyte had planned to collaborate with Ameer on a magazine article about the Muslims. When Ali came to New York to sign a contract for radio rights to a rematch with Sonny Liston, Lipsyte asked the new champion about his old friend’s beating.

  “Ah-meer? A little fellow?” Ali said mockingly. “I think I remember a little fellow who hung around camp, a little fellow who liked to go downstairs and get me papers. Now I hear he’s telling lies, saying he was my press secretary.”

  Lipsyte persisted, and Ali exploded.

  “Any fool Negro got the nerve to buck us, you want to make him a star. Jim Brown said something about the Muslims and they made him a movie star. Ameer was caught with a young girl. He had a wife and nine children. That man stole eight hundred dollars, he was a karate man, and he come down on three officials and he got what he deserved.”

  Should Ameer fear for his life? Lipsyte asked.

  “They think everyone’s out to kill them because they know they deserve to be killed for what they did.”

  Malcolm X, for his part, showed no inclination to end his opposition to the “pseudo-Islamic” sect of Elijah Muhammad. Through his jailhouse discovery of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm had remade himself; he had gone from street hustler to national figure. But he was now reworking himself almost as radically as he had in the mid-fifties. He spoke out on the potential utility of a civil rights bill. He shook hands with Martin Luther King in a corridor of the U.S. Senate. He began to link the struggle of American blacks with those of Africans and other “brothers of the Third World,” and, in that spirit, tried to start two new groups, Muslim Mosque Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity.

  Elijah Muhammad was surely paying attention. On November 30, 1964, an FBI informant inside Washington’s Mosque No. 4 told the bureau that a general announcement had gone out to the Fruit of Islam: Malcolm should be attacked on sight. A week later, Louis X (soon to become Louis Farrakhan) wrote in Muhammad Speaks that Malcolm would not escape vengeance. He invited Malcolm to picture his own head rolling along the sidewalk. And in January, yet another article in Muhammad Speaks predicted that 1965 would be “a year in which the most outspoken opponents of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad will slink into ignoble silence.”

  PART FOUR

  Las Vegas, 1965. With Joe Louis.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Save Me, Joe Louis …”

  BOXING IN AMERICA WAS BORN OF SLAVERY. LIKE THE ROMAN emperors who gathered at the Colosseum to watch their warring chattel, Southern plantation owners amused themselves by putting together their strongest slaves and letting them fight it out for sport and gambling. The slaves wore iron collars and often fought nearly to the point of death. Frederick Douglass objected to boxing and wrestling not merely because of the cruelty involved, but also because it muffled the spirit of insurrection.

  Even Ali, who would earn millions of dollars in the ring, who became famous and adored because of his skill at beating other men, even he expressed ambivalence about the spectacle of two black men fighting. “They stand around and say, ‘Good fight, boy; you’re a good boy; good goin’,’ ”Ali said in 1970. “They don’t look at fighters to have brains. They don’t look at fighters to be businessmen, or human, or intelligent. Fighters are just brutes that come to entertain the rich white people. Beat up on each other and break each other’s noses, and bleed, and show off like two little monkeys for the crowd, killing each other for the crowd. And half the crowd is white. We’re just like two slaves in that ring. The masters get two of us big old black slaves and let us fight it out while they bet: ‘My slave can whup your slave.’ That’s what I see when I see two black people fighting.”

  The first acknowledged American champion was a Virginia-born slave named Tom Molineaux. Many Virginia gentlemen acquired their enthusiasm for boxing on their visits to England, where the sport was extremely popular. After Molineaux beat all the other fighters in Virginia, he came to New York as a freeman and went on to defeat all comers, American and foreign, who boxed on the Hudson River piers. He was then sent to England to challenge the great Tom Cribb, a white man, and the putative champion of the British Empire. They met on Capthall Common, Sussex, in 1810. Round after round, Molineaux destroyed Cribb, but Cribb’s supporters would not tolerate a loss to a black man. They propped their man up—literally propped him up—and caused long delays in the contest, the better to give Cribb time to recover from his beating. Some in the crowd even attacked Molineaux, punching him, breaking some of his fingers. Finally, Cribb revived himself sufficiently to win in the fortieth round.

  The stink of slavery, of rich brutes exploiting the strong and the desperate, did not fade with the Emancipation Proclamation. John L. Sullivan, the first champion of the modern era, established the “color line” in boxing by refusing to fight black challengers. “I will not fight a Negro,” Sullivan declared, “I never have and I never shall.” Sullivan’s successor, Jim Jeffries, also said he would retire “when there are no white men left to fight.” And so he did. But Jeffries was lured out of retirement to face Jack Johnson, who had taken the title from a white fighter, Tommy Burns.

  Jeffries admitted that he was returning to the ring less for a belt than to redeem the white race. “I am going into this fight for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro,” he said. Naturally, he had the full-throated support of the press, including the New York Herald’s occasional boxing correspondent Jack London. London thought of himself as a great radical, a friend of the worker, and yet his racism could not have been plainer. “Jeff must emerge from his alfalfa farm and remove that smile from Johnson’s face,” he wrote. “Jeff, it’s up to you.” The editors of the popular magazine Collier’s declared that Jeffries would surely win because of his long history of valor; the white man, after all, “has thirty centuries of traditions behind him—all the supreme efforts, the inventions and the conquests, and whether he knows it or not, Bunker Hill and Thermopylae and Hastings and Agincourt.” Jeffries simply could not lose. Someone named Dorothy Forrester wrote a song in praise of Jeffries called “Jim-a-da-Jeff” and instructing Jeffries thus:

  Commence right away to get into condish,

  An’ you punch-a da bag-a day and night,

  An’-a din pretty soon, when you meet-a da coon,

  You knock-a him clear-a out-a sight.

  Who give-a Jack Jonce one-a little-a tap?

  Who make-a him take-a one big-a long nap?

  Who wipe-a da Africa off-a da map?

  It’s a Jim-a-da-Jeff.

  When Johnson finally climbed into the ring to fight Jeffries in Reno, Nevada, on July 4, 1910, the crowd began its chant of “Kill the nigger!” A band struck up “All Coons Look Alike to Me.” If this displeased Johnson, he did not show it in the ring. Johnson destroyed Jeffries, humiliated him both fistically and verbally, taunting him and his cornermen throughout the fight. “Hardly a blow had been struck when I knew that I was Jeff’s master,” Johnson wrote in his autobiography.

  When Johnson’s triumph was announced around the country, there were riots in Illinois, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and the District of Columbia. In Houston, a white man slashed the throat of a black man named Charles Williams for cheering Johnson too enthusiastically. In Washington, D.C., a group of blacks stabbed two white men to death. In the town of Uvalda, Georgia, a gang of white men opened fire on a group of blacks celebrating the Johnson victory; three black men were killed and five wounded. In Manhattan, police rescued a black man who was just about to be lynched. Thousands of whites gathered on Eighth Avenue, threatening to beat any black man who showed up. No racial event until the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, would set off such a violent reaction. Terrified, Congress passed a bill banning the interstate distribution of fight films. Various religious and right-wing political groups that had never shown much interest in boxing before now wanted to ban it.

  Johnson, of course, was persecuted
wherever he went with cries of “Lynch him! Kill the nigger!” Even though this was the era of Booker T. Washington and the strategies of accommodation and gradualism, Johnson was defiant. He was probably the most publicly reviled black man of his time, and he tried not to show he cared. He even flaunted the sexual subtext of the hatred directed at him. He had affairs with young white women and prostitutes; his wife, a white woman named Etta Duryea, shot herself in 1912 after a year of marriage. When he invited reporters to watch him train, he wrapped his penis in gauze and displayed its grandeur under tight shorts. Johnson was magnificently defiant, and defiantly magnificent. He owned preposterously expensive cars and sipped vintage wines through a straw. He read widely in English, French, and Spanish (he was especially fond of the novels of Dumas) and played the bass viol. When he opened the Cabaret de Champion in Chicago he equipped the place with silver cuspidors.

  Eventually, the white establishment had its way with Johnson, forcing him into prolonged exile. Johnson was prosecuted under the Mann Act, which was enacted to prevent commercial prostitution and the transport of women across state lines for immoral intent. Johnson avoided jail by wandering through Canada and Europe. Finally, he returned to the United States and served time in Leavenworth; in 1915, he lost his title in Havana to Jess Willard, claiming later that he had taken a dive. He ended his career as promoter of his own legacy and a raconteur in a dime museum. Muhammad Ali was keenly aware of the parallels with his own life. Years later, when talking with James Earl Jones, who played Johnson in The Great White Hope, Ali said his own exile from the ring after refusing the draft was “history all over again.”

  “I grew to love the Jack Johnson image,” he said. “I wanted to be rough, tough, arrogant, the nigger white folks didn’t like.”