Among the murkiest, and most important, chapters of the early life of Cassius Clay is the question of how he first became a member of the Nation—as pivotal a moment in his life and career as the theft of his red-and-white Schwinn back in 1954.
Ali mythology traces his conversion to Miami in 1961, where he met a follower of Elijah Muhammad named “Captain Sam” while he was training for a fight. He told Thomas Hauser he had heard about Elijah Muhammad as far back as 1959 and that he once saw a copy of Muhammad Speaks before he went to Rome. But his first formal encounter, he insisted, was that day in Miami, “the first time I felt truly spiritual in my life.”
Abdul Rahman, formerly known as Captain Sam Saxon, also recalled the alleged encounter. “I met Ali—I think it was in March of 1961—when I was selling Muhammad Speaks newspapers on the street. Ali saw me, said, ‘Hello, brother,’ and started talking. And I said, ‘Hey you’re into the teaching.’ He told me, ‘Well, I ain’t been in the temple, but I know what you’re talking about.’ And then he introduced himself. He said, ‘I’m Cassius Clay. I’m gonna be the next heavyweight champion of the world.’ He was interested in himself and he was interested in Islam, and we talked about both at the same time. He was familiar in passing with some of our teachings.”
There was a good reason Clay was familiar with the Nation’s teachings. He had in fact been a member for at least three years prior to that day in Miami.
While Cassius Clay was making a name for himself as an amateur boxer in Louisville in the years prior to winning the Olympic gold medal, he had ample opportunity to travel and expand his horizons. Every few weeks, he would travel around the East Coast of the United States competing in boxing tournaments, usually driven by Christine Martin, the wife of his amateur coach. In October 1958, during his junior year in high school, the sixteen-year-old Clay was in Atlanta for a tournament when he stumbled upon a Nation of Islam recruiter outside a mosque, according to FBI agent Robert Nichols, who had the temple under surveillance. Ali later confirmed this encounter. “I was fished off a street corner,” he recalls.
Venturing inside, he heard a message of black pride that hit home. Apart from the rantings of his father at the dinner table, he had never encountered anything like this—black people who weren’t afraid to speak out against white injustice. Coming from segregated Louisville, the words were a wake-up call. Explaining the appeal years later, he said it was easy to shed the “spooks and ghosts” of his Baptist upbringing, calling traditional religion merely a white man’s trick to enslave the black man on earth with a promise of “pie in the sky when you die by and by.”
Returning home, he was still mesmerized by the experience. When, the following week, his high school English teacher assigned his class to write an essay about any topic about which they felt strongly, Cassius knew what he would write about—the Nation of Islam. He had no idea what kind of an uproar his choice of essay topic would cause.
When he turned in the essay a few days later, his teacher, a black woman, was livid. She marched right into principal Atwood Wilson’s office and demanded disciplinary action be taken. The Principal turned the matter over to the school’s guidance counselor Betty Johnston.
“You have to understand,” recalls Johnston forty years later, “that most educators were usually middle of the road. When Cassius turned in a paper about the Black Muslims, his teacher was quite alarmed. She wanted to fail him. At the time, most blacks in Louisville were disturbed by the Black Muslim movement. I was quite an activist and I felt they had a place in the overall scheme of things, but most people didn’t agree with me.”
Nevertheless, Johnston admits she was also concerned over his choice of essay topic.
“I didn’t want him to become a Black Muslim because I didn’t want him to become angry. They were preaching some very negative things and he was such a gentle boy. I went to school with his parents and knew the family quite well. It was obvious from the paper that he was well-versed in the doctrine of the Muslims and that he admired them. The Principal and I talked to the teacher and defused the situation. We weren’t going to let him fail. People had a feeling he was going to do something important. That’s when Mr. Wilson had a meeting and made it clear Cassius was not going to fail in his school.”
Previously, this meeting has been cast by Ali chroniclers as an attempt by the principal to graduate Clay despite his poor marks (see Chapter One), rather than in defense of his right to free speech.
Clay learned a lesson that week. For the time being, it was safer to keep his admiration for the Nation of Islam to himself. He didn’t stop visiting the Nation’s mosques; indeed, whenever he travelled to a city with a black population that was large enough and militant enough to support one, he would quietly attend the service. But, as he digested the message and as his thinking matured, they were not visits he talked about.
When he returned to the States from Rome in 1960, Clay stayed for a week in New York, where—between sightseeing—he found time to go to Harlem and watch the by-then infamous Malcolm X deliver a sermon. The new Olympic champion was captivated by the charismatic minister but was too shy to introduce himself. It would take another two years before he had the courage to approach the man who would become his mentor.
In his autobiography, Malcolm X recalled the first time the two met: “I had met Cassius Clay in Detroit in 1962. He and his brother Rudolph came into the student’s luncheonette next door to the Detroit Mosque where Elijah Muhammad was about to speak at a big rally. Every Muslim was impressed by the bearing and the obvious genuineness of the handsome pair of prize-winning brothers. Cassius came up an pumped my hand, introducing himself as he later presented himself to the world, ‘I’m Cassius Clay’ He acted as if I was supposed to know who he was. So I acted as though I did. Up to that moment, though, I had never even heard of him.”
From the moment of their first meeting, Malcolm and Clay formed a special bond. “I liked him,” Malcolm wrote. “Some contagious quality about him made him one of the very few people I ever invited into my home. Our children were crazy about him.” For the next two years, Clay would arrange his itinerary so he could come see Malcolm speak as often as possible. After the sermon, the two would spend hours discussing the Koran. Malcolm carefully nurtured his new protégé in the ways of the Nation.
Ali later described Malcolm’s appeal. “He was very intelligent, with a good sense of humor, a wise man. When he talked, he held me spellbound for hours.”
But Malcolm’s influence over Clay extended beyond the spiritual realm. Early on, he sensed the young fighter’s potential and he was quick to cultivate it. He appointed one of his officials, Archie Robinson, to act as an administrator and road manager, going over contracts and helping to run Clay’s training camp.
The prominent African-American historian Jeffrey Sammons explains why Malcolm X would devote so much effort to a boxer, despite the Nation of Islam’s long standing aversion to sports. “Malcolm considered prizefights exploitive affairs, in which whites gleefully permitted blacks to act like animals,” he writes. “But, reasoning that mechanisms of social control worked both ways, he knew that power flowed in many directions. He sensed that the time was right to exploit the obvious link between sport and society.”
As Clay inched closer to a heavyweight title fight and came increasingly under the scrutiny of the nation’s sportswriters, his association with the Muslims proved harder to keep a secret. The first hint came in September 1963, when the Philadelphia Daily News reported that Clay attended a Nation of Islam rally in Philadelphia at which Elijah Muhammad presided. “Clay stood out in the crowd of some five thousand that heard Elijah Muhammad unleash a three-hour tirade against the white race and popularly accepted leaders,” it announced. In the article, Clay denied being a Muslim but said he thought Muhammad was “great.”
The timing could have been better. Only three weeks before Clay announced his admiration for the avowed black separatist who preached racial segregation, Martin Lut
her King Jr. had given his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in front of 250,000 followers in Washington, D.C. The positive reaction nationwide signaled a widespread acceptance in white America of the civil rights movement and its calls for integration.
Fortunately for Clay, the Daily News item was largely ignored or dismissed as a publicity stunt. His association continued to be a closely guarded secret until five months later when his hometown newspaper the Louisville Courier-Journal caught him in a candid moment. “Sure I talked to the Muslims and I’m going back again,” he confided. “I like the Muslims. I’m not going to get killed trying to force myself on people who don’t want me. I like my life. Integration is wrong. The white people don’t want integration. I don’t believe in forcing it, and the Muslims don’t believe in it. So what’s wrong with the Muslims?”
Ali’s cousin Coretta Bather recalls the impact of that interview in Louisville. “By that time,” she says, “the black community was completely caught up in the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King’s brother even lived in Louisville and Dr. King was like a messiah to folks here. You can imagine that Ali’s words weren’t very well received. You could even say people were in shock.”
None more so than his own father, Cassius Sr. In November, the world heavyweight champion Sonny Liston had agreed to a February 25 title bout against Clay in Miami Beach. On February 7, Miami Herald sportswriter Pat Putnam cornered Old Cash after a few drinks and asked him if the rumors were true about his son’s conversion to the Nation of Islam. In a long tirade, Clay confirmed the story and complained that the Muslims had brainwashed his son to hate white people and were stealing his money. When he objected, claimed Clay Sr., the Muslims threatened to drown him.
“After my story came out,” recalls Putnam, “I started getting death threats from the Muslims, really nasty stuff. I went and told Ali about it and he was pretty pissed off. The threats immediately stopped.”
The resulting story in the Herald would send Shockwaves throughout the sports world and the country.
The prevailing myth has always been that Ali kept his conversion a secret for fear it would jeopardize his title bout. This is a myth that was carefully cultivated after the fact by the Nation of Islam because the truth is somewhat more embarrassing.
In the highly regulated Nation of Islam, one of the strongest prohibitions set down in the strict code of behavior was attendance at sporting events. In his book Message to the Blackman in America, Elijah Muhammad wrote, “Poor so-called Negroes are the worst victims in this world of sport and play because they are trying to learn the white man’s games of civilization. Sport and play (gambling) take away the remembrance of Allah and the doing of good, says the Holy Koran. Think over what I am teaching, my people, and judge according to justice and righteousness.”
When Cassius Clay first started attending meetings of the Nation in 1958, he was still an unknown and never came to the attention of the Chicago headquarters. As he started to achieve national media attention, some members of the movement recognized the potential publicity value of his membership. One of Clay’s earliest Muslim teachers was Jeremiah Shabazz, who recalled the reaction of the leadership when he first told them about Clay’s involvement. “When I telephoned our national secretary to tell him, ‘We got this fighter coming to our meetings,’ was roundly condemned for being involved with a boxer. The Messenger told me I’d been sent to the South to make converts, not fool around with fighters,” recalled Shabazz.
On subsequent occasions, when Clay’s interest in the movement was pointed out to him, the Messenger was steadfast. Sports, he maintained, “cause delinquency, murder, theft, and other forms of wicked and immoral crimes.”
As Clay came under the tutelage of Malcolm X, headquarters also admonished Malcolm for his involvement in the sports domain. After the Liston title fight was announced, Malcolm traveled to Miami to spend time with Clay at his training camp, a fact noted in the New York Herald Tribune. The paper observed that despite Malcolm’s presence, Clay had still not formally announced support for the Muslims and refused to discuss the subject publicly.
The reports of Malcolm’s presence at the Miami fight camp sparked alarm in Chicago, where Elijah Muhammad and other Nation officials warned him to disassociate himself from the boxer. “They felt that Cassius hadn’t a prayer of a chance to win. They felt the Nation would be embarrassed through my linking the Muslim image with him,” Malcolm X wrote in his autobiography.
Indeed, nobody gave Clay much of a chance of beating the heavily favored Liston, whose powerful punch was considered unstoppable. Arthur Daley of the New York Times summed up the attitude of the boxing elite in his column a few days before the fight: “Cassius is a precocious master of Ballyhoo who lulls himself to sleep at night not by counting sheep but by counting money. He’ll be seeing stars when Sonny Liston hits him on Tuesday.”
Besides Clay himself, only one man gave the challenger any hope of winning the title. But Malcolm X had other things on his mind besides boxing. Two weeks after Clay signed to fight Liston, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. The Nation of Islam had always been fierce in its condemnation of President Kennedy and his professed concern for Negroes. But Elijah Muhammad was acutely aware of the impact his death had on the country, and he understood it was not the right time to further alienate the white establishment at a time of national mourning. He immediately issued a directive to all his lieutenants to remain silent about Kennedy’s death until further notice.
For more than a decade, the loyalty of Malcolm X to the Messenger had been absolute. He would never have dared to question or disobey an order from the man he regarded as the Divine Prophet. But a few months earlier Malcolm had learned some disturbing news. For years, it was whispered in the movement that Elijah Muhammad had fathered a number of illegitimate children by his secretaries. If true, this would have violated the Muslims’strict edict against adultery. Malcolm had always dismissed these rumors as FBI propaganda—until the spring of 1963, when he visited Muhammad at his Detroit home. When he arrived, there were three women with their children standing on the front porch. Each of the children appeared to have a common father. The women needed Muhammad’s signature so the children could attend school. But the Messenger refused to sign and wouldn’t allow the women in the house. The truth finally dawned on Malcolm. The man he most admired—the man he had followed faithfully for fifteen years—was an immoral hypocrite. That night he told his wife, “The foundation of my life seems to be coming apart.”
From that moment, Malcolm’s entire moral system was undermined to the point where he questioned the basis of his beliefs. “My faith had been shaken in a way that I can never fully describe,” he later wrote. “For I had discovered Muslims had been betrayed by Elijah Muhammad himself.”
He could not yet bring himself to abandon the movement that had become his life, but he began to see things differently. A number of recent positive encounters with white people had convinced him that not all whites were devils—another revelation that shattered his previous way of thinking.
By the time of Kennedy’s assassination, Malcolm was no longer capable of blindly obeying Muhammad’s directives. On December 1, he gave an interview about the slain president, arguing that Kennedy had merely become a victim of the violent status quo his administration had tolerated. “Being an old farm boy,” he said, “chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they’ve always made me glad.” These words reached Chicago quickly, infuriating Muhammad—not so much because of their potential to alienate white America but because his once loyal disciple had publicly disobeyed him.
Since May, the Messenger had known that Malcolm’s loyalty had waned, and he was acutely aware of the threat posed by the movement’s most popular and influential minister. It was time to signal that the real power rested in Chicago, not New York.
The next day, Muhammad summoned Malcolm to national headquarters and told him that in order to disassociate the Muslims from his rem
arks, he would be suspended for ninety days. Malcolm accepted his punishment stoically, knowing that the power struggle between the two charismatic men was coming to a head. “Any Muslim would have known that my ‘Chickens coming home to roost’ statement had been only an excuse to put into action the plan for getting me out,” he would write.
While Malcolm was still under suspension, he and his wife Betty were invited by Clay to attend his Miami training camp. The sudden presence of Malcolm X at Clay’s camp combined with the rumors of the boxer’s conversion to Islam sent the media into an uproar, and Clay’s entourage urged him to distance himself from the infamous figure until after the fight. But Clay insisted he needed Malcolm by his side. He told the media that he had given the trip to Malcolm and his wife as a sixth anniversary present. The truth was that, despite his outward bravado—“Sonny Liston is great but he’ll fall in eight”—he was scared stiff of his formidable opponent. Malcolm, however, recognized the enormous potential of linking the heavyweight champion of the world to his cause, and he was determined to strengthen Clay’s resolve. He reminded the challenger that Allah had already willed that he would win the fight. “This fight is the truth,” he said forcefully. “It’s the Cross and the Crescent fighting in the prize ring—for the first time. It’s a modern Crusades. … Do you think Allah has brought about all this intending for you to leave the ring as anything but the champion?”
While most of the assembled media, promoters, and VIPs stayed at the exclusive Fontainbleu Hotel, Malcolm X checked in to the down-scale Hampton House Motel, where Clay was staying. There may have been a political component in the choice of accommodation, but one way or another it was somewhat limited: most of the better hotels in Miami Beach, including the Fontainbleu, didn’t allow Blacks. Florida was still a Jim Crow state.
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