by Jonathan Eig
Beginning in 1958, Clay would make three trips to Chicago in three years. More than any other city, Chicago provided him a pathway not only to adulthood and big-city life but also to new complexities defined by race and its consequences. Chicago was not the Promised Land, not for Clay nor for new arrivals from the South who had come to the city on Lake Michigan expecting something better than they’d left behind. Wages and living conditions for black families were far from equal to those of white families. Blacks were still not welcome in many jobs, unions, clubs, and neighborhoods. In the North, as sociologist Gunnar Myrdal wrote in 1944, “almost everybody is against discrimination in general but, at the same time, almost everybody practices discrimination in his own personal affairs.” Nonetheless, Chicago offered Clay his first sexual experience and his first national media exposure. Chicago showed him that his confidence in the boxing ring was justified, that he really could compete against the best fighters in the country, which in turn made him more confident than ever. The city, while still deeply segregated, offered a greater sense of freedom than Louisville ever had. Not only was Clay away from his parents; he was in the North, in a city where many southern blacks had discovered that they could more openly express their opinions, where they could stroll the sidewalks without stepping aside for white men, and where they could sit beside a white woman at a lunch counter without fear of a violent reaction, where a young man like Cassius Clay could behave mischievously with only a moderate fear of reprisal.
It was also in Chicago that Cassius Clay discovered a man who would change his life perhaps more than any other.
Elijah Muhammad referred to himself as the Prophet of the Nation of Islam, a religious group dedicated to black separatism and empowerment. The Nation of Islam made its home on Chicago’s South Side, where most of the city’s black residents lived. On street corners and in mosques, followers of Elijah Muhammad preached a message of black strength that was beginning to resonate with young black men in the 1950s as outrage grew over segregation and violent attacks like the one on Emmett Till. If Europeans and white Americans worshipped a white Christ and if Buddhists in China worshipped a Buddha who looked Chinese, Elijah Muhammad asked, why didn’t Negroes worship a Negro god? And if Europeans and Chinese had names rooted in their ancestries and cultures, why were Negro men and women in America still referred to by names they’d been assigned by slave owners in much the same way ranchers branded their cattle? These were conditions imposed by white men, without the consent of those affected, conditions that relegated black men and women to a seemingly permanent position of inferiority, conditions that would change only when black men demanded they change.
To the Nation of Islam, it wasn’t enough that courts were ordering the integration of schools, trains, buses, and beaches. Integration would never suffice so long as Americans of African ancestry were treated as second-class citizens, more likely than their white neighbors to be incarcerated, unemployed, underemployed, homeless, or hungry; more likely to die young; more likely to be shot by police; more likely to be lynched.
In Africa, black people in the 1950s were finally breaking free of colonialism. Were black Americans going to be the last surviving symbols of racial inferiority and submission? Not if Elijah Muhammad was to be believed. If Muhammad’s prophecies came to pass, a new nation of freed black Americans would soon be established, occupying as much as one-fifth of the territory currently belonging to the United States. To thousands of black Americans — especially those who felt most disenfranchised, including prison inmates and the unemployed, who made up the core of the Nation of Islam’s following — Elijah Muhammad’s message proved alluring. Muhammad rejected the pacifism of civil rights leaders such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and rejected the efforts of the NAACP to bring gradual change through the American judicial system.
Before he changed his name, Elijah Muhammad was Elijah Poole, a sharecropper’s son, born in 1897 in rural Georgia. In 1923, Poole, like so many others, migrated north, settling in a poor section of downtown Detroit, where economic conditions were not much better than those he’d left behind in Georgia. Poole drank heavily and relied on government relief to get by, but he eventually fell under the teachings of a mysterious preacher named W. D. Fard, a light-skinned black man who went door to door in Detroit selling garments he said were similar to those worn by the black people of the Middle East. Fard claimed to be from Mecca though in fact he had never been there. He referred to himself by an assortment of exotic names, including Mr. Farrad Mohammad, Mr. F. Mohammad Ali, Professor Ford, and Mr. Wali Farrad. Regardless of which name he used, Fard found customers eager to hear more about the places he claimed to have been, about the places where black people had roots; where they were proud members of the majority; where they prayed to a god called Allah, not Jesus; where they had pride in the color of their skin and the history of their lineage.
Fard began holding meetings throughout the community, referring to himself as a prophet and offering suggestions to his audiences about how they could improve their health by avoiding certain foods. As his popularity grew, Fard became increasingly critical of the Christian Bible and the “blue-eyed devils” comprising the white race. Fard promised his followers a way out of their misery: by returning to their ancient Islamic heritage and embracing a philosophy of cleanliness, independence, and hard work, he said, black people would rise up. They would form their own, independent nation. A “Mother Plane” hovering in space, controlled telepathically by black pilots, would destroy the earth, and only believers in his message would survive. This cataclysmic event would most likely take place in 1966, according to Fard.
This philosophy, though unusual, was not entirely new. Booker T. Washington and countless other black leaders had long ago preached the importance of morality and hard work. In the 1920s, Noble Drew Ali (born Timothy Drew in North Carolina) had founded the Moorish Science Temple of America, which taught that all people of color were originally Moorish, or Muslim. And Marcus Garvey had stoked the imaginations of countless men and women by preaching Negro pride and urging his people to leave America and return to Africa.
Fard called his new religious group the Nation of Islam. Within a few years, he had established a Temple of Islam and a University of Islam, both in Detroit. He built a base of about eight thousand followers. Elijah Muhammad became one of the group’s first officers. In 1934, Fard appointed Muhammad the chief Minister of Islam and gave him power to run the organization. Soon after Elijah Muhammad’s appointment, Fard disappeared and was never heard from again. Elijah Muhammad would go on almost singlehandedly to perpetuate Fard’s teaching, to deify his mentor, and to vastly expand the Nation of Islam’s reach. In an ironic way, Elijah Muhammad’s views included strands that were both genuinely American and fundamentally conservative, even if they did include spaceships. He urged black people to quit waiting for white America to help them. The only way forward, Muhammad said, was for black people to separate themselves — by starting their own businesses, buying from those black-owned business, and, eventually, forming their own nation.
By 1955, the Nation of Islam was enough of a force to attract the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which referred to the organization as the Muslim Cult of Islam, or MCI, calling it “an especially anti-American and violent cult.” In a document intended to serve as a guide to field agents, the bureau concluded:
1. The MCI is a fanatic Negro organization purporting to be motivated by the religious principles of Islam, but actually dedicated to the propagation of hatred against the white race. The services conducted throughout the temples are bereft of any semblance of religious exercises.
2. Organizationally, the MCI is a collection of autonomous temples bound by a tremulous personal relationship between the heads of the temples and the headquarters of the Cult in Chicago, Illinois.
3. The MCI, although an extremely anti-American organization, is not at the present time either large enough or powerful enough to inflict any
serious damage to the country; however, its members are capable of committing individual acts of violence.
4. The aims and purposes of the MCI are directed at the overthrow of our constitutional government, inasmuch as the Cult members regard it as an instrument of the white race; therefore, it is obvious that this group, as long as it retains the ideas now motivating it, will remain an investigative problem to the FBI.
The Nation of Islam’s growth was not all the work of Elijah Muhammad. It was also a product of rising discontent among black Americans. “Without the failings of Western society,” wrote Louis E. Lomax, one of the first authors to document the history of the Nation, “the Black Muslims could not have come into being.” And without the racism he experienced growing up, without the angry voice of his father reverberating through his family’s small home, without the image of Elijah Muhammad as a wise and powerful and sober alternative to his father, and without the shocking death of Emmett Till, young Cassius Clay might not have been so captivated by the message of the Black Muslims, as they were known.
Cassius Clay would fall under the spell of two great influences in his life: The first was boxing, which was violent at its core but offered the promise of fame, riches, and glory. The second was the philosophy of Elijah Muhammad, who said a black man should take pride in his color, and that black men would soon rule the world, that they would use violence if necessary to come to power, and that there was nothing white America could do about it.
After his trip to Chicago for the Golden Gloves in 1959, Cassius returned home with a recording. Some journalists have said it was a recording of Elijah Muhammad’s speeches, but it was more than likely a recording of a song: “A White Man’s Heaven Is a Black Man’s Hell,” written and performed by Minister Louis X, formerly known as Louis Eugene Walcott and later known as Minister Louis Farrakhan. The recording was more than ten minutes long, split over two sides of a 45-rpm record. Over a subdued calypso beat, Minister Louis X delivered something like a sermon, speaking more than singing:
Why are we called Negroes?
Why are we deaf, dumb, and blind?
The song went on with a list of questions: Why was everyone else making progress while black people were left behind? Why were black people treated so poorly? Why were they stripped of their names, their languages, their religion?
“White Man’s Heaven” served as an introduction to the Nation of Islam for many black Americans. It could be heard on jukeboxes in black-owned cafes and restaurants and purchased in black-owned record stores. For centuries, the white man had imposed his religion on Africans, often in the name of liberation. Now, the song urged the children of slavery to rethink their relationship with the Christian church and reframe their identities. Its lyrics were a reflection of the philosophy of Elijah Muhammad, who taught young men like Louis X that they possessed characteristics beyond the ones imposed by the white men who had enslaved their ancestors; that they had a history and a religion of their own; that they could break free of the systems and rituals that rendered them first as slaves and then as second-class citizens.
Clay listened to the recording repeatedly, as his aunt once told a reporter, until everyone else in the house was sick of it and until Clay himself was completely “brainwashed, hypnotized,” his life irrevocably altered.
After beating Tony Madigan for the national Golden Gloves light-heavyweight championship in March 1959, Clay became something close to a fulltime amateur boxer. In April, he won the National Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) championship with a unanimous victory over Johnny Powell.
In May, he suffered the biggest loss of his amateur career — a split decision to left-handed fighter Amos Johnson — a defeat that kept him out of the Pan-American Games finals. Although Clay took a pounding from Johnson, Joe Martin continued to be impressed by his young fighter’s ability to stay on his feet and keep calm when hurt.
“Cassius really knew how to fight when he got in trouble,” Martin told a reporter. “He never panicked or forgot what I’d taught him. When he’d get hit, he wouldn’t get mad and wade in, the way some boys do. He’d take a good punch and then he’d go back to boxing, box his way out of it . . . Only once did I ever see him knocked out, knocked cold, and that was in the gymnasium, working out with an amateur named Willy Moran. Moran was a good hitter . . . Anyway, he really flattened Cassius that day. Cassius had been talking to me about wanting a scooter, and when he regained consciousness he said to me, ‘Mr. Martin, which way was the scooter going that hit me?’ The scooter was on his mind. That was the only time I ever saw him knocked cold. He was about sixteen then, and it didn’t faze him. He was back working out with Moran again the next day.”
In 1959, though everyone knew that the skull was a container for the brain, little thought was paid to the damage done by the bashing of one’s cranium; quite the contrary, the ability to take a punch was considered a totem of manliness and, for a young fighter like Clay, an indication of a bright future.
During the spring of 1959, Clay was boxing almost constantly, with an average of about three fights a month. Most of the contests were on weekends, but he nevertheless must have missed many days of school. No longer did friends see Cassius running alongside the bus on the way to Central High. Now Cassius and Rudy ran almost exclusively at Chickasaw Park and on a nearby track. The brothers remained almost inseparable. They shared a bedroom, meals, and a training regimen. Rudy boxed in tournaments almost as often as his older brother. While Rudy fared well, it was clear to the brothers as well as to their coaches that Cassius was the more promising fighter. It was a matter of talent, not effort or strength. Cassius had the gift, and his brother didn’t. “My mind was not as quick as his,” Rudy said. “Boxing is a thinking man’s game.”
Being the younger brother of Cassius Clay was not easy. Cassius was the finer athlete and the more popular, more entertaining, more charismatic of the two. Rudy Clay seemed to accept his status in much the way a straight man accepts that his comedy partner gets the laughs. Rudy knew his limitations and enjoyed having an all-access pass to the carnival that was his brother’s life. Rudy was his brother’s most trusted companion. Cassius never wore a watch because he had Rudy there to tell him the time. And Cassius made his brother a promise: whatever came along — money, women, travel, glory — they would share every bit of it, forever, together.
By 1960, Cassius was six-foot-one and weighed about 180 pounds. In March, he returned to Chicago to fight again in the Golden Gloves tournament. This time he competed as a heavyweight, not a light-heavyweight, in order to avoid a possible showdown with Rudy, who had also entered the competition. After winning in Chicago, Cassius traveled to New York to fight the Golden Gloves champion of the east, Gary Jawish, who outweighed Clay by about forty pounds. Clay started by measuring Jawish with jabs, then began throwing quick hooks. He kept them coming so swiftly and with such forward momentum that Jawish lost the ability to hit back. Soon he lost the ability to stand up straight, and by the third round the referee decided that Jawish was in danger of serious injury, declaring Clay the winner by a technical knockout.
Throughout the first half of 1960, Clay fought on a schedule that might have suited a hungry young professional. In April, he once again won the National AAU light-heavyweight title and took home a trophy as the tournament’s outstanding boxer. “WATCH CLAY in the future,” wrote the boxing promoter and journalist Hank Kaplan after the AAU tournament. “Best amateur prospect in the country. Not a hard hitter, but is fast, throws fast combinations.”
The AAU championship assured Clay of a chance to compete in the upcoming Olympic trials. But instead of resting, he returned to Louisville, where he continued to fight and win.
“Let’s forget the Olympics,” he told Joe Martin. “I’m ready to turn pro.”
6
“I’m Just Young and Don’t Give a Damn”
Years later, historians would say that 1959 marked the end of a decade of American innocence. It was an age when image trumped
substance, an era remembered for pink Cadillacs, drive-in movies, drive-in restaurants, slick-haired rock ’n’ rollers, daylight baseball, and fraternity-house panty raids, all of it flashing in bright colors as if it were a Hollywood-made tribute to youth.
For Clay, in his last year of high school, the rumors of distant wars meant nothing. Neither did the actions of four black college freshmen at the Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina, who asked politely for coffee at a Woolworth’s lunch counter and sat in silent protest when they were refused service, their actions setting off a wave of “sit-ins” in seven other southern states. Soon after, in April 1960, a group of young, militant black men formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). They would go on to participate in Freedom Rides, aimed at desegregating busing, and countless other civil rights protests. The self-discipline and courage of these young rebels might have struck a chord with Cassius Clay. But, for the time being, he was not engaged with politics. He was young. He was handsome. He was talented. His attention was focused on boxing, girls, cars, money, and mirrors.
When a reporter suggested he was conceited, Clay seemed hurt.
“No,” he said, “I’m just young and don’t give a damn about anything.”
One day during his senior year of high school, Cassius Clay attended a school talent show. When the show ended, he spotted a former classmate named Areatha Swint and stopped her to say hello. Areatha had dropped out of school the year prior after becoming pregnant and having a baby boy. She had left the baby home with her mother so she could attend the talent show and see some of her old friends at Central High. When the show was over, Clay offered to walk her home.