Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight

by Howard Bingham

  It wasn’t yet time to reveal the news, but Ebony was as good a place as any to provide a hint. Cassius Clay was trained not to let his guard down, but for years he had been harboring a secret, and he was itching to let it out.

  In 1897, a man named Elijah Poole was born in Georgia, the son of a Baptist minister. Poole dropped out of school in grade eight and led a fairly mundane life as a door-to-door salesman until he moved to Detroit in 1930. It was the beginning of the Depression, and blacks were suffering its devastating effects. One day, Poole encountered a mysterious man named W. D. Fard preaching his gospel on a ghetto street corner to a group of unemployed black men.

  He told them he “came from the East” and recited a number of parables from the Bible. After gaining a large following, he finally revealed himself to be a Muslim from Mecca who had come to spiritually cleanse the “so-called Negroes” who were trapped in the “wilderness of North America.”

  Poole was soon among his most devoted followers, and Fard bestowed upon him the Muslim name Elijah Muhammad. In 1933, the mysterious Fard suddenly disappeared. But before he vanished he designated his pupil as a successor. Elijah Muhammad declared Fard to be “the person of Allah on earth” who had visited the lost-found American Negro and revealed himself to be the Messenger of Allah. He christened his movement the Nation of Islam, although his strange theology had little in common with traditional Islamic doctrine.

  Each religion has its unique creation story, but few are quite as unusual as the one espoused by Elijah Muhammad, which he claimed was passed down from Fard. The Nation of Islam teaches that the black race was descended from the original tribe of Shabazz. Sixty-six hundred years ago, this tribe ruled the world, until an evil scientist named Yacub cooked up an experiment. Yacub, who was exiled to the island of Patmos with 59,999 followers because he preached dissension, interbred the lightest-skinned segment of the black race for hundreds of years. This resulted in a new race of blond, blue-eyed “white devils”—a people without morals or compassion. The new race set blacks against another and created so much strife that they were exiled to the caves of Europe. Two thousand years after their exile, God sent Moses to civilize the devil race. Before long, the whites took over the world, enslaving the entirety of “the darker world.”

  But it was prophesied that black people would give birth to someone whose power and wisdom would be infinite. W. D. Fard was that chosen one, and he taught that the white devil’s civilization was destined to be destroyed.

  The reign of the white oppressors would come to an end when a one-and-a-half-mile-wide spaceship—the Mother of Planes—appeared in the sky eight days before Allah’s chosen day of retribution, which was alternately known as the Judgment, Armageddon, the fall of America, and the second Hell. The ship would drop pamphlets written in Arabic telling righteous people where to go to survive. Then 1,500 planes would emerge from the spaceship and drop deadly explosives, destroying the white race and restoring power to the original descendants of Shabazz.

  Taking up Fard’s mantle, Elijah Muhammad traveled through America’s Northern ghettos preaching his doctrine, which demanded complete separation of the races. Since the white race was a race of devils, blacks should avoid them at all costs or they would be tricked by the whites’ evil ways. “Integration means self-destruction,” he proclaimed. “The black people throughout the earth are seeking independence for their own, not integration into white society…. We want our people in America whose parents or grandparents were descendants from slaves to be allowed to establish a separate state or territory of their own—either on this continent or elsewhere. We believe that our former slave-masters are obligated to provide such land.”

  The fledgling movement had to compete for the allegiance of disenchanted young blacks with a number of other nationalist organizations. The most popular of these was the Harlem-based Universal Negro Improvement Association, founded by Marcus Garvey in 1916. The UNIA was a back-to-Africa movement that stressed respect for blackness and economic help while decrying “the tragedy of white injustice.” Muhammad took many of the most popular doctrines of the Garveyites and incorporated them into his own Nation of Islam.

  By the beginning of World War II, the Nation could boast little success in recruiting converts and counted only a few hundred followers throughout the country. But the rhetoric being preached by Muhammad had already attracted the attention of law enforcement officials, who had infiltrated the group as early as 1941, the year Elijah Muhammad prophesied that a great conflict would erupt involving the United States. The Messenger predicted that the Japanese would cross the Pacific Ocean in the Mother Plane and “the white devils will be destroyed by dark mankind.” After Pearl Harbor, he repeatedly vowed he would not fight the white man’s war and repeatedly noted the segregation and discrimination rampant in the U.S. Armed Forces at the time. The army’s policies gave him plenty of ammunition for his attacks. Barracks, medical centers, and training centers were all designated by race. The American Red Cross even separated blood plasma designated for the troops by skin color. His message seemed to resonate in the ghettoes where many young blacks were unimpressed by government propaganda about the fight for freedom overseas. The movement’s ranks were beginning to grow.

  Alarmed by Muhammad’s increasingly belligerent tone and concerned about the effect his criticism might have on black enlistment, the government decided to act. On May 8, 1942, the FBI burst into Muhammad’s Chicago home and arrested him for failing to register for the draft. The government agents were frank about their motives, the Messenger later recalled. “President Roosevelt doesn’t want you out there in public with that kind of teaching while America is prosecuting a war. That’s all we’re putting you in jail for, to keep you out of the public.”

  Over the next four months, the government would raid each of the Nation’s temples and arrest thirty-eight more of Muhammad’s followers. On top of the draft evasion count, the Messenger was charged with sedition and subversion. He was convicted with dubious legal evidence to back up the charge and languished in a federal prison cell until August 1946, a full year after the war came to an end. If Muhammad was bitter toward white America before, his prison experience only served to intensify his antagonism. His biographer Claude Clegg crystallized his feelings. “The persecution and imprisonment of the Muslims seemed to confirm to Muhammad the white man’s innate adverseness to truth and fairness,” Clegg wrote. “In his view, he and his followers had done nothing to deserve incarceration except teach the knowledge of self and others to the so-called Negroes. No’lost-found’ had joined the German or Japanese armed forces, turned American top-secret documents over to Hitler or Hirohito or cached weapons for a fifth column offensive. They had simply practiced their religion of peace and asked for freedom, justice, and equality.”

  After Muhammad’s release from prison, his movement struggled to regain the momentum it had begun to build up before the war. It was slow going, each convert a hard-won victory. The movement seemed destined to remain marginal—until salvation arrived in the form of a letter.

  Seven months before he was released from federal prison, a former hustler and petty thief named Malcolm Little was convicted in Boston of armed robbery and incarcerated for six years.

  Little’s parents were organizers for Marcus Garve’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and traveled the country preaching a message of racial pride. Despite these black nationalist roots, however, Little was unmoved by his parents’ beliefs and his memories of childhood weren’t fond ones.

  “I actually believe that as anti-white as my father was, he was subconsciously so afflicted with the white man’s brainwashing of Negroes that he inclined to favor the light ones, and I was his lightest child,” he recalled in his autobiography, while noting that his mother treated him more harshly because his light complexion stirred memories of her own mixed-race ancestry. His parents’back-to-Africa sentiments failed to stir him as a young child. “My image of Africa, at that time, was
of naked savages, cannibals, monkeys and tigers and steaming jungles.”

  Little’s life fell apart when he was six. His father was run over by a streetcar and his mother was forced onto welfare. She managed to hold the family together for seven years, but after a nervous breakdown she was finally committed to a mental hospital. The institutionalization of his mother meant that at the age of thirteen, Malcolm was removed from his brothers and sisters and sent to reform school. Within two years, he was involved in Boston’s criminal underworld. Nicknamed “Big Red,” he gained a reputation as a hustler, pushing dope, playing the numbers, and peddling bootleg whiskey. Before long, he switched his operation to Harlem—the big time for a black hoodlum—where he continued his ways as “Harlem Red.”

  On January 12,1946, Malcolm was arrested in a Boston jewelry store while trying to reclaim a stolen watch he had left for repair. While in prison, he received frequent visits from his three brothers and one sister, all of whom had converted to what they called “the natural religion for the black man,” the Nation of Islam. They were determined to bring their brother into the fold. At first he resisted their attempts at conversion, but they persisted until one message in particular resonated—the theory that whites are devils in disguise. As he thought back over his life, he couldn’t think of a single white person who hadn’t been cruel to him. He especially remembered the day he informed his high school teacher that he wanted to be a lawyer, only to be told, “That’s no profession for a nigger.”

  Profoundly moved by his new realization, Malcolm succumbed to his family’s urging and devoted his life to Islam. He quit cigarettes and drugs, stopped eating pork, and finally brought himself to pray to Allah. He later described how difficult this process was for him. “Bending my knees to pray—that act—well, that took me a week. Picking a lock to rob someone’s house was the only way my knees had ever been bent before. I had to force myself to bend my knees. And waves of shame and embarrassment would force me back up.”

  Taking advantage of the prison library, he read all he could about the “so-called Negro” people in America and the injustices they had suffered. Then, in 1949, with three years to go before he was eligible for parole, Malcolm sat down and initiated his first contact with the “Messenger of Allah” in the form of a short letter. Apologizing for his poor grammar and spelling, Malcolm introduced himself and explained he was writing at the urgence of his brothers and sisters.

  A week later, Muhammad wrote back welcoming Malcolm into the “true knowledge.” He enclosed a five-dollar bill as he did with all prisoners who wrote to him. The black prisoner, he wrote, symbolized white society’s crime of keeping black men oppressed and deprived and ignorant, and unable to get decent jobs, turning them into criminals.

  The reply had an electric effect on the young Malcolm, and he vowed to dedicate his life to the Messenger and his movement. For the next three years, Malcolm busied himself converting his fellow inmates and devouring the books in the prison library as he prepared himself to take advantage of his imminent freedom. “I still marvel at how swiftly my previous life’s thinking pattern slid away from me, like snow off a roof,” he would recall. Each day he wrote Elijah Muhammad, updating him on the progress of his new protégé.

  When he was released in 1952, Malcolm traveled to Chicago to watch the Messenger address the faithful at a rally. “I was totally unprepared for the Messenger Elijah Muhammad’s physical impact on my emotions,” he wrote years later. After Muhammad addressed the cheering crowd, exhorting the black man to uplift himself and his brothers and sisters, Malcolm was shocked to hear his name mentioned from the podium. In a parable comparing his new disciple to Job, who remained faithful to God even in the face of hardship, Muhammad intoned, “We will see how Malcolm does. I believe that he is going to remain faithful.” In keeping with the Nation’s tradition, he urged his new devotee to shed his “slave name” Little and renamed him Malcolm X.

  For a decade, Malcolm rewarded his mentor’s faith in him, taking advantage of the skills he had learned in his criminal days. “As a street hustler, I was always the most articulate in the ghetto,” he would write. Within a year of his release, Malcolm had been named assistant minister of the Detroit Temple, where his flare for fiery rhetoric and his ability to recruit disaffected youth was responsible for tripling membership in only a few months.

  Next he was assigned to organize temples in Philadelphia and Boston, and he so impressed Muhammad with his success that within two years he was named minister of New York’s Temple number 7, the largest Nation of Islam temple in the country. As he moved rapidly up the ladder of the Nation, Malcolm’s relationship with Elijah Muhammad grew stronger, becoming almost like that of a father and son. Everywhere he went, he praised the Messenger in the highest of terms, comparing himself to the popular ventriloquist’s dummy, Charlie McCarthy. “When you hear Charlie McCarthy speak,” he would say, “you listen and marvel at what he says. What you forget is that Charlie is nothing but a dummy—a hunk of wood sitting on Edgar Bergen’s lap. This is the way it is with the Messenger and me. It is my mouth working, but the voice is his.”

  For those ten years, Malcolm’s devotion to Muhammad was absolute. His charismatic personality and flare for promotion brought thousands of new followers into the movement. Each day he would stand on a Harlem street corner and, within minutes, would be surrounded by throngs of young blacks attracted by his appealing message. In his autobiography, he explains his success. “At the bottom of the social heap is the black man in the big-city ghetto,” he would tell them. “He lives night and day with the rats and cockroaches and drowns himself with alcohol and anaesthetizes himself with dope, to try and forget where and what he is. The Negro has given up all hope. He’s the hardest one for us to reach, because he’s the deepest in the mud. But when you get him, you’ve got the best kind of Muslim. Because he’s the most fearless. He has nothing to lose, even his life, because he didn’t have that in the first place.”

  The movement’s rapid growth and the influence of Malcolm X took place for the most part off the media’s radar screen—until 1959, when Mike Wallace produced a five-part TV series called “The Hate that Hate Produced.” The highly inflammatory series vaulted the Black Muslims into the consciousness of the American public, using sensational terms to imply a threat that didn’t really exist. “Black supremacy,” “gospel of hate,” “hate-mongers in our midst”; the series claimed the movement had at least 250,000 members “preaching hatred for the white man” and implied that the Nation was readying for a race war. Wallace chose to focus attention on Malcolm X as the chief spokesperson of the Muslims rather than the leader Elijah Muhammad. Overnight, the Nation of Islam became a national phenomenon; recruitment flourished, and the ranks of the movement swelled close to the exaggerated figure the series had portrayed.

  Although this was the first time most Americans learned of the Nation’s existence, it was already very familiar to one man—FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Long before Hoover took over the FBI, he had worked as an official in the Justice Department’s General Intelligence Division. Among his assignments, he directed counterintelligence operations against the black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey. His intense racism—he alternately referred to Garvey as a “nigger” or a “jigaboo”—led to a near obsession with black militancy. During his early years at the Bureau of Investigation—the forerunner of the FBI—he refused to involve the Bureau in preventing the increasing number of lynchings rampant in the South, saying it had “no authority to protect citizens of African descent in the enjoyment of civil rights generally,” according to one department memo. During the 1960s and the increasing militancy of the civil rights movement, Hoover would combine his other obsession, anti-communism, to persecute Martin Luther King Jr.—who he was convinced worked for Moscow—as “public enemy number one.” But before King came to national prominence, Hoover targeted the Nation of Islam and its leaders Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X for special scrutiny

  As ea
rly as 1952, the FBI began tapping Muhammad’s phones. The same year, Hoover unsuccessfully attempted to convince the government to place the Nation of Islam on the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations. In 1959, the Justice Department refused his request to prosecute the Nation for subversive activities and concluded that the group was not a threat to national security.

  Hoover insisted that all surveillance reports on the activities of Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad be forwarded to him personally. For two decades, the FBI unsuccessfully attempted to locate W. D. Fard in an effort to prove him a hoax and discredit the movement.

  After years of surveillance, the FBI could find no concrete evidence of a threat to national security. Despite their hostility towards the “white devils,” members of the Nation were generally law-abiding. In 1960, agents questioned Malcolm X after he gave a particularly inflammatory speech about the spaceship that will “descend on the United States, bomb it, and destroy all the devils.” An FBI account of his interrogation calls him “uncooperative” but quotes Malcolm as saying “Muslims are peaceful and they do not have guns and ammunition and they do not even carry knives.”

  In spite of Hoover’s continuing obsession with the movement, it is clear the U.S. government didn’t see a particular threat in the Nation of Islam as long as it could be successfully isolated and discredited. Malcolm X, notwithstanding his success in recruiting new members from the disenfranchised youth of the ghettoes, had no widespread national following or influence among the mainstream of black Americans and no significant forum to reach a larger audience.

  That forum was about to present itself in the unlikeliest of places.

  In the canon of Muhammad Ali, much of the biographical information available has to be approached with caution because it has been filtered through the self-serving lens of the Nation of Islam. Even his 1975 autobiography, The Greatest, was ghostwritten by Richard Durham, a former editor of the Nation’s newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, and is notoriously unreliable in places.