by Jonathan Eig
Patience was not his strength. When Cassius started attending the blacks-only Virginia Street Elementary School, Odessa would send him every day with lunch. He would eat it on the way to school, even though he’d already consumed a big breakfast at home. Some children would have worried that if they ate their lunch before school they’d be hungry later but not Cassius. He assumed he would improvise a solution, and he usually did, cajoling friends at lunchtime to share their food. To address the problem, Odessa stopped packing Cassius a meal and instead gave him money to buy a hot lunch in the school cafeteria. Cassius was not to be denied, though. He used his mother’s money to buy his friend Tuddie’s bagged lunch and ate that on the way to school.
By the time he was seven or eight, Cassius was the leader of a pack of boys ever on the lookout for action. Odessa would look through the screen door and see her eldest son standing on the concrete porch, like a politician on a platform, addressing his youthful followers about what he had planned for them. As soon as he was old enough to keep up, Rudy Clay became his brother’s shadow and chief competitor. “We were like twins,” Rudy recalled years later. For fun, Cassius would stand in the seventy-two-inch gap between his house and the neighbor’s and let Rudy throw rocks at him. Rudy threw as hard as he could while his older brother jumped, ducked, and darted. The boys played marbles and jacks and hide-and-seek, with Cassius almost never letting his younger brother win. When they played cowboys and Indians, Cassius was the cowboy — every time.
The boys were teased and picked on, not only because they were loud and called attention to themselves but also because they had unusually big heads. “Honey,” recalled their aunt Mary Turner, “those kids had some large heads, let me tell you. They’d be sitting on the edge of the curb, shooting marbles or playing some kind of street game, when one or two kids would sneak up behind them and bump their heads together, pop! Then the kids would scamper off, with Rudy and Cassius at their heels. They thought that was great fun. But after the boys grew up a little, that kind of thing stopped. Cassius and Rudy could handle most all the boys on the block, because they were very quick and very big. Eventually their bodies grew enough so their heads weren’t too big.”
Before long, it was Cassius and Rudy who were teasing and torturing smaller children. They would borrow bicycles from smaller children and keep them for hours. “They weren’t being mean,” their aunt said, “but they just thought they were the greatest little things around. Cassius thought nobody had a brother as good as Rudy, and Rudy thought the same way about Cassius.”
Friends who grew up with the Clay boys in the West End recalled Cassius as a fast runner and a good but not especially gifted athlete. He couldn’t swim at all. He would agree to play softball or touch football, but he had little passion for those sports.
“That Gee would run around and get me in trouble all the time,” recalled his classmate and neighbor Owen Sitgraves. “We used to hide in the alley behind Kinslow’s flower shop and roll old tires in the street in front of cars and make ’em stop. Once, the tire got stuck under a car, and we ran out the other end of the alley and around some houses and came around to look at it. The lady got out of the car. She said, ‘Boys, I’ll pay y’all two dollars to get that tire out from under my car.’ So we got the jack out of her trunk and we got that tire out for her.” On another occasion, Owen and Cassius found an old shirt in an alley and filled it with dirt, then flung the shirt in an open window of a passing bus. “This guy in a white panama suit — he must’ve been on a date — he got out and chased us all the way from 34th and Virginia to the Cotter Homes, but we were too fast . . . I still feel bad about that. He was really clean.”
Cassius would always love the playfulness and cruelty of pranks. He once cut down his father’s plum tree. He imitated a siren’s sound so well that drivers pulled to the side of the road and craned their necks looking for the police car. He plucked tomatoes from the family’s garden and lobbed them over the fence of a teacher’s house, splattering guests at the teacher’s backyard party. He tied a string to the curtains in his parents’ bedroom, ran the string across the hall to his own room, then waited until his parents were in bed to rustle the curtain. He covered himself in sheets and sprang from dark corners of the house to scare his mother. No amount of scolding or punishment would inhibit him.
“I would make ’em take naps every day,” Odessa recalled, “and one day he said to Rudy, ‘You know what, Rudy? We too big to be in here taking naps.’ And they never did take another one.”
When the boys’ disobedience went too far, Odessa would send them to the bathroom, where Cash would bend Cassius and Rudy over his knee one at a time and spank them. These punishments did nothing to make Cassius more cautious. “Cassius Jr. would always go in first and get his spanking and go right out and do something else!” Odessa paused to laugh as she told the story to Jack Olsen, who interviewed her for a series of stories in Sports Illustrated in 1966. “He was a very unusual child.”
When Cassius’s friends described the fun they had as children, they sometimes failed to mention the myriad ways that racial discrimination and prejudice hung over their lives. In part, that may be because Cassius Clay’s friends and neighbors took discrimination for granted, so deeply was it ingrained in their daily activities. It may also have been because black people in Louisville in the late 1940s and early 1950s believed they were better off than other black Americans, that they were fortunate to live in a city that exhibited “a more polite racism,” as Louisville historian Tom Owen put it.
Although the majority of Kentuckians sympathized with the Confederacy, Kentucky did not secede from the Union during the Civil War. No race riots or lynchings occurred in Louisville between 1865 and 1930. Unlike most of their southern counterparts, black Louisvillians had been granted the right to vote beginning in the 1870s and had never lost it. Louisville’s white civic leaders expressed frequent and seemingly genuine concern for the living conditions of their black neighbors and gave generously of their own money to support black causes. In return, of course, these white civic leaders, like the slave owners from whom some of them were descended, expected blacks to be passive and accept their second-class status without fuss or fury.
Some white community leaders were patronizing, proclaiming that without proper guidance and support, the Negroes of Louisville would return to their barbaric African ways. Many white Louisvillians deemed segregation intrinsic, natural, and inevitable. Others were more progressive and genuine in their desire to help. Robert W. Bingham, owner of the Louisville Courier-Journal, served on local branches of the Urban League and the Commission on Interracial Cooperation. Jewish leaders, including the family of Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, worked with volunteer organizations serving black neighborhoods. Prominent local white attorneys fought against housing discrimination.
Black and white journalists who visited the city in the 1940s and 1950s stated almost unanimously that black people in Louisville were treated better than those in the Deep South and in many northern cities. They usually neglected to mention, because it was taken for granted, that black people still lacked equal access to housing, schools, employment, and healthcare. They didn’t point out, because it was standard treatment, that while black customers were allowed to buy clothes in the city’s big department stores, they couldn’t try on the clothes first. They also failed to say, because it was so obvious, that many of the wealthy white people helping black causes were motivated by the desire to keep the black community from rising in protest.
For young Cassius Clay, it would have been impossible not to notice that there were, in essence, two Louisvilles: one for blacks and one for whites. For blacks, the best schools, best stores, and best hospitals were off limits. So were most country clubs and banks. Black moviegoers were permitted in only a handful of the big downtown movie theaters, and even then only in the balcony.
“Bird,” Cassius would ask his mother when they went downtown, “where do the colored people
work? Bird, what did they do with the colored people?”
The answer was clear, if not necessarily easy to explain to a child. Louisville’s economy was booming in the years after World War II, with thousands of new manufacturing jobs. Tobacco plants, distilleries, and tire factories offered steady employment, although black workers were routinely paid less than white workers and routinely denied promotions. In 1949, the annual median income for black workers in Louisville was $1,251, while the median income for white workers was almost twice that, at $2,202. Black workers got the dirtier and more dangerous jobs, not only the lower-paying ones. Often, black men worked in the service of white men as waiters, caddies, and shoeshine boys, where docility was not just a job requirement but also necessary for survival. For black women, prospects were even worse. A handful worked as secretaries, hairdressers, or schoolteachers, but 45 percent of all black women who worked in Louisville did the same thing as Odessa Clay — they walked or rode buses to well-to-do neighborhoods, where they spent their days cooking and cleaning for white families, carving their identities from the stone slab of white supremacy. The scraps of leftover food they were permitted to take home helped feed their families, and the money they earned not only paid the household bills but purchased prayer books for their churches.
According to his mother’s recollections, Cassius quickly made a merciless judgment: that the world was for white people. He recognized it long before he could have understood it as he watched his mother return home, exhausted after caring for white families, then summoning energy to care for her own.
Sometimes, when he was a child and still learning how society made distinctions about race and how much those distinctions mattered, Cassius Jr. would ask his mother whether she was black or white. She was, after all, much fairer than her husband. But Odessa wasn’t light enough to pass for white, nor did she try. The shade of her skin and the genetic influence of her white ancestors mattered little in her day-to-day life. As far as the laws and customs of Kentucky and the United States of America were concerned, the Clays were black — or “colored,” to use the term more commonly applied at the time — and that racial designation determined where they could eat, where they could shop, where they could work, where they could send their children to school, where they could live, how they would be treated if they broke the law or were accused of doing so, whom they married, how they would be cared for if they got sick, and where they would be buried when they died. Cassius knew that he was permitted to play in Chickasaw Park, Ballard Park, and Baxter Square but not in Iroquois Park, Shawnee Park, Cherokee Park, Triangle Park, Victory Park, or Boone Square.
Signs of inequality were everywhere. The homicide rate for black people in Louisville was about fifty-six per thousand in the mid-1950s, compared to three per thousand for white people. The death rate from natural causes was 50 percent higher for blacks than whites. But if those signs didn’t register for a young, energetic boy growing up in the West End, a more glaring one did. It was called Fontaine Ferry Park, the city’s most popular amusement park. It was within walking distance of the Clay house on Grand Avenue, and only whites were allowed. On summer weekends, thousands of Louisville residents would arrive by car, ferry, or trolley. To the black children who lived in nearby neighborhoods, it was more than tantalizing to have it out of reach; it was torturous. The black neighbors of Fontaine Ferry Park could hear the rattle of the rollercoaster cars and the frightened screams of the riders. They could smell the overcooked grease and fried dough and smoking beef. They could watch the parade of sunburned families in station wagons leaving each night. They could hardly miss the message as to whose fun mattered and whose did not.
“We’d stand by the fence,” Rudy Clay said, “but we couldn’t go in.”
As a little boy, Cassius Clay Jr. lay in bed crying, asking why colored people had to suffer so. He asked why everyone at his church was black but all the portraits of Jesus were white, including the portraits painted by his father.
Young Cassius Clay also learned about discrimination from his grandfather Herman Heaton Clay, the man who had gone to prison for murder at the turn of the century. Herman boasted that he had been a talented baseball player in his youth — so talented that he might have played professionally if big-league baseball hadn’t been off limits to black men at the time. Herman Heaton Clay, Cash Clay, and Cassius Clay Jr. all understood that they had to live with the effects of slavery, that the country had been built by slave labor, that their work and even their identities had been stolen from them, and that slavery had left behind a caste system that relegated black and white Americans to dramatically different lives, at least for the foreseeable future.
Herman died in 1954, when his grandson was twelve. The same year, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that the U.S. Constitution prohibited segregation in public schools. Reaction in the South was swift and brutally negative. Some states began maneuvering to deny funding to integrated schools. In Mississippi, white business leaders and politicians organized the White Citizens Council to resist integration and defend white supremacy. Leaders of the Ku Klux Klan urged supporters to resist the “mongrelization” of the white race that integration would bring. The summer after Brown, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till traveled from his home in Chicago to spend time with relatives in the small Delta town of Money, Mississippi, population fifty-five. More than five hundred black people had been lynched in Mississippi since officials began keeping count in 1882. The state’s governor had recently declared black people unfit to vote. Till’s mother, anxious about sending her son to the South in the summer of 1955, warned him that it was important to behave in the manner that white Mississippians expected of young black men. He was to answer them with “yassuh” and “nawsuh” and to humble himself if necessary to avoid confrontation.
But, like Cassius Clay Jr., who was only six months younger, Emmett Till could be feisty. He ignored his mother’s warning. One day in Money, Emmett was standing outside a grocery store, showing friends a picture of his white girlfriend from Chicago. One of the kids dared Emmett to go into the store and talk to the white cashier. Emmett accepted the challenge. On his way out of the store, he reportedly told the cashier, “Bye, baby.” A few days later, the cashier’s husband and another man broke into the house of Till’s uncle and dragged Emmett out of his bed. He was pistol-whipped and ordered to beg forgiveness. When Emmett refused to beg, he was shot in the head. His killers used barbed wire to tie a heavy cotton-gin fan around the boy’s neck and then threw his body into the Tallahatchie River. An all-white jury needed only sixty-seven minutes to acquit the accused men. “If we hadn’t stopped to drink pop,” one juror said, “it wouldn’t have taken that long.”
Till’s mother insisted on an open casket so the world would see her young son’s mutilated face, and Jet magazine published photos from the funeral that became seared in the consciousness of many black Americans. Till became a martyr for civil rights and inspiration to countless activists. Soon after the trial of Till’s killers, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus, setting off waves of protest.
Cash Clay showed his sons photos of Emmett Till’s disfigured face. The message was clear: This is what the white man will do. This is what can happen to an innocent black person, an innocent child, whose only crime is the color of his skin. America, according to Cash Clay, wasn’t fair and never would be. His own career was proof. He had the talent to be a great artist, didn’t he? Yet he was almost forty years old and painting store signs for meager pay, with almost no chance of earning his way out of the cramped, four-room cottage where his family lived. Only money would give the black man a shot at equality and respect, Cash told his boys.
Cassius Clay Jr. absorbed his father’s words. At age thirteen, he didn’t talk about changing the world or improving the plight of his people. He didn’t talk about getting an education and striving to do something meaningful with his life. He talked, as his father did, about m
aking money.
“Why can’t I be rich?” the son asked his father once.
“Look there,” his father said, touching the boy’s walnut-colored hand. “That’s why you can’t be rich.”
But every son comes to believe he can be more than his father, that he is not beholden to his position in the line of his ancestors, not tethered to that soul-crushing concatenation formed in a past beyond his control, and Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. was no exception. At an early age, he talked about owning a hundred-thousand-dollar house on a hill with fancy cars in the garage, with a chauffeur to drive him around, with a chef to prepare his meals. He vowed to buy one house for his parents and another for his brother. He would keep a quarter of a million dollars in the bank for emergencies.
By the summer of 1955, the summer of Emmett Till, he had an idea of how he might make that money.
3
The Bicycle
Late one afternoon in October 1954, twelve-year-old Cassius pedaled his bike through downtown Louisville, his brother perched on the handlebars, a friend riding alongside, when a sudden rain forced the boys to seek shelter. They scrambled into the Columbia Auditorium, at 324 South 4th Street.
The Louisville Defender, the city’s black newspaper, was sponsoring a Home Service Exposition at the auditorium. It was a hall of wonders, packed with displays of the latest innovations in housewares. Visitors registered to win prizes, including a Magic Chef Range, a Hoover Steam Iron, and an RCA Victor Record Player. In the 1950s, as the economy boomed and new technology made household jobs like ironing and vacuuming a little less onerous, black families strove to acquire the same wondrous devices they saw white families demonstrating on television and in magazine advertisements. Cassius wasn’t interested in the latest kitchen gadgets, but the exposition offered refuge from the storm, and the boys happily gobbled up the free popcorn and candy.