No one gave Clay a chance. By February 25, the day of the fight, Liston was an eight-to-one favorite. Maybe that’s why Clay avoided his opponent for most of the fight, dancing around the ring, using his superior speed. By the third round, he had landed enough shots to slice open the skin above Liston’s right eye. However, by the fourth, Liston had nearly punched Clay into submission. Fighting on, Clay made his opponent chase him around the ring again, wearing him out; by the sixth, Clay had taken the lead. Then the unthinkable happened. As the seventh round started, Liston refused to continue. He spit out his mouth guard and just sat in his corner, giving up. Cassius Clay was now the heavyweight champion of the world.
The shock of Clay’s victory would quickly be overshadowed. Two days later, when a reporter asked him if he was a “card-carrying member of the Black Muslims,” Clay, as expected, spoke his mind. “I believe in Allah and peace,” he declared. “I don’t try to move into white neighborhoods. I don’t want to marry a white woman. . . . I’m not Christian anymore.”
The next day, while he and Malcolm X ate breakfast at the Hampton House, a black motel in segregated Miami, he elaborated to a group of white sportswriters: Yes, it was true, he was a member of the Nation of Islam, and as the heavyweight champion of the world, that meant he was rejecting white American society and its God. What’s more, he was rejecting the entire concept of integration, the prize that the civil rights movement had been fighting and dying for, just a month after President Johnson had met with Martin Luther King Jr. and Roy Wilkins at the White House to reaffirm his personal commitment to pass the stagnant civil rights bill—“without a word or a comma changed,” Johnson told them. (King and the others feared the president had called the meeting to tell them he was watering down the bill.)
Now, at this pivotal moment in race relations in the United States, the newly crowned boxing world champ was rejecting leaders of both races and embracing a religious group on the fringes of American society, an organization that many considered a hate group—The Hate That Hate Produced—and feared was bent on overthrowing the government. What’s more, Clay had forsaken his Christian name; from now on, as the world would soon learn, he would be known as Muhammad Ali. In just two years, the world of boxing—a sport still at the heart of American life—had gone from the gentlemanly Patterson to the thuggish brute Liston to Ali, the disciple of a black separatist sect. “[He] is the finest Negro athlete I have ever known, the man who will mean more to his people than any athlete before him,” Malcolm X told reporters. To many whites, the prediction sounded like a threat.
If it was all just a bit too much for many Americans, maybe it was because there were so many other cultural touchstones challenging the status quo. The same month, February 1964, that introduced the Beatles and Clay/Ali to the nation, American institutions and traditions were seemingly under attack in movie theaters, on the bestsellers list, and on Broadway. A new movie had recently opened, one that took a humorous take, an extraordinarily dark humorous take, not only on the American military and the Cold War, but on the very notion of nuclear war—the prospect of which had been horrifyingly real during the Cuban Missile Crisis just fifteen months earlier.
Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb reduced Cold War anxieties and America’s containment policy toward Soviet Communism to pure theater of the absurd. The film challenged—and openly ridiculed—Americans’ notion of themselves. They were the nation that had won World War II, defeating Hitler and his Fascist cronies, and now were in the process of stopping the worldwide spread of Communism. In 1964 American soldiers were holding the line in Berlin, and a decade after having stopped totalitarianism at the border of North Korea, were now in the process of doing the same in Vietnam. Just as President Kennedy had promised to the world, America was paying any price, bearing any burden, and opposing any foe. Americans were the good guys. Weren’t they? In 1964, that last rhetorical question was as new to millions of Americans as the music of the Beatles or the bravado of Ali.
The film’s cowriter, Terry Southern, had also made headlines with his best-selling novel Candy, a modern retelling of Voltaire’s Candide. The novel’s young, all-American heroine isn’t asking what she can do for her country. Instead, she has sex for sex’s sake, like millions of American women utilizing the birth control pill, which had become available just a few years before. Candy was another humorous take—a satire really—on a largely verboten topic: sex.
Candy was published by Grove Press, the same New York City publishing house that had issued the first uncensored American version of D. H. Lawrence’s 1929 novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in 1959, provoking a lawsuit that eventually ended the US Post Office’s ban of the book. Grove was run by a literary-minded provocateur from Chicago named Barney Rosset, who would wage a seemingly one-man war on censorship in the United States, publishing Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs’s dystopian dreamscape of a novel, in 1962. The Naked Lunch saga would end in another victorious court case for the publisher and for freedom of expression.
The year before Lunch, Rosset had published Henry Miller’s banned 1934 novel, Tropic of Cancer, which was considered obscene by US authorities for its unabashed depiction of sex, and no doubt for its rejection of American values. Miller, like the protagonist in Cancer (also named Henry Miller), left his native New York broke and utterly disgusted with the American way of life. Living in Paris, Miller leads the life of an art-(and sex-)obsessed bohemian. (“What really got me,” Rosset confessed decades later, “was the anti-American feeling that Miller had. He was not happy living in this country and he was extremely endowed with the ability to say why.”) The book was a talisman and inspiration for disaffected postwar writers like the Beats and Norman Mailer, who viewed it as a serious work of literature. Then in June 1964, after sixty court cases in twenty-one states, the US Supreme Court agreed, ruling that the book had “redeeming social value.”
Walls were being broken down in American society, and quickly. On Broadway James Baldwin’s play, Blues for Mr. Charlie, loosely based on the killing of Emmitt Till—a fourteen-year-old black boy who was kidnapped, mutilated, and murdered in Mississippi in 1955 by two white men for allegedly flirting with a white female shopkeeper—also opened in February 1964. The horrific case—Till’s mother insisted on an open coffin so the country and the world could see what the murderers had done to her son—was a transformative moment in the civil rights movement. The shocking death inspired poems by Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes, an essay by novelist William Faulkner, and a 1962 song from Bob Dylan. But now here on Broadway—the Great White Way—was a painful drama picking at the scab, so soon after the shocking deaths of the four little girls in Birmingham (to whom the play was dedicated, along with Medgar Evers).
But the far more controversial play of the season was The Deputy, which opened around the same time. Written by German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, the drama questioned Pope Pius XXII’s silence during the Holocaust, portraying the aristocratic pontiff as indifferent to Nazi war crimes. Conservative Catholics were outraged. Leading the charge was New York’s powerful Cardinal Francis Spellman, who had become a one-man crusading army against the blasphemies and moral degradations of Hollywood dating back to Elia Kazan’s 1956 film, Baby Doll, and against Roberto Rossellini’s Il Miraclo (The Miracle), in which a peasant woman is impregnated by an itinerant wanderer that she believes is a saint. Spellman, who was at one time powerful enough to earn the moniker “the American Pope,” saw The Deputy as “an outrageous desecration of the honor of a great and good man.” Here was another form of popular entertainment—the Broadway play—fronting an attack on another venerable institution: the Roman Catholic Church.
Although Catholics were a minority religion in America—only four years earlier, John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism had been seen as a massive obstacle to his chances at winning the White House—Spellman had been a dominant force in New York City for d
ecades. He wielded immense influence among Gotham’s ruling elite. He was a close political ally of both Mayor Wagner, who appointed the cardinal’s cronies to his administration, and Moses, who was instrumental in helping the cardinal acquire the Manhattan real estate to create Fordham University’s Manhattan campus near Lincoln Center (even though the move forced the eviction of hundreds of working-class families). Without Spellman, there wouldn’t have been any Vatican Pavilion or La Pietà in Flushing Meadow.
Spellman hadn’t seen The Deputy (nor would he), and although the publicity-seeking cardinal tore into the play, the protest never achieved critical mass: Only 150 people picketed the Brooks Atkinson Theater when it opened. Even Boston’s Cardinal Richard Cushing, a close personal friend of the Kennedy clan, disagreed publically with his fellow Prince of the Church, declaring that maybe Spellman should see the play before damning it. Powerless to stop its Broadway run, or the drama’s publication in book form that same year (by Rosset’s Grove Press), Spellman, like his good friend Moses, was beginning to seem like a man from another age.
They weren’t alone. Others manned the barricades against these seemingly endless assaults on the culture. One eloquent critic, English journalist and historian Paul Johnson, knew exactly whom to blame for these sorrowful turns of events: the Beatles. Just weeks after the band’s triumphant introduction to America, Johnson tried to warn his fellow countrymen—and the English-speaking world—of “The Menace of Beatlism.”
Johnson thought the Beatles—their music, their modish suits, their disrespect for authority, and everything they stood for—were an assault on Western culture and the existing social order. Like other forms of “pop culture,” which to his mind included jazz virtuosos like Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington, “the growing public approval of anti-culture is itself . . . a reflection of the new cult of youth.” The young, screaming teenagers in the throes of Beatlemania formed “a collective portrait of a generation enslaved by a commercial machine.” He declared Beatlism as another “mass-produced mental opiate.”
Ironically, Johnson, the conservative anti-Communist, sounded like a Marxist zealot lamenting the undue influence of religion among the proletariat. However, one certainty that Johnson had the foresight to realize was that the stagnant postwar ancien régime of England—and America—was under attack. And the Beatles, along with their likeminded cultural avatars like Ali were leading the charge.
16.
Revolutions are never peaceful, never loving, never nonviolent. Nor are they compromising. Revolutions are destructive and bloody.
—Malcolm X, December 1, 1963
Malcolm X was evolving. By early 1964 his political ideas, his spiritual foundation, even his racial philosophy—everything that had turned a small-time hustler named Malcolm Little into one of the most dynamic and charismatic leaders in American history—seemed to be up for grabs. Although his metamorphosis had actually been a gradual process, like so much else in American life, in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, his transition reached critical mass. Malcolm was morphing into something new.
On December 1, 1963, less than two weeks after the events of Dallas, the dynamic orator was scheduled to speak at New York’s Manhattan Center, filling in for Elijah Muhammad, the spiritual leader of the Nation of Islam. Muhammad issued direct orders to his National Minister just a few days earlier: Under no circumstances was Malcolm to discuss the assassination or even mention Kennedy by name. The Nation had always been apolitical, but more importantly, Muhammad was well aware of Kennedy’s popularity among African Americans. He did not want a backlash against his sect, or more antagonism from white reporters in the mainstream press who would be attending Malcolm’s talk, which was dramatically titled “God’s Judgment of White America.” The stakes for all involved were much too high.
Malcolm, with his strong independent streak, was already chafing under the strict edicts of the Nation. But even he must have understood Muhammad’s reasoning: Malcolm had regularly criticized the Kennedy administration for its gradualist approach to civil rights. The president’s historic primetime speech on race back in June had done little to change the fiery minister’s mind. In fact, just two days before the assassination, Malcolm had ridiculed Kennedy and his policies during a talk at Columbia University. “Any time a man can become president and after three years in office do as little for Negroes as [Kennedy] has done despite the fact that Negroes went for him 80 percent,” he told the audience. “I’ll have to say he’s the foxiest of the foxy.”
Despite his orders, Malcolm took little time before veering from his script at the Manhattan Center. The killing of the president wasn’t just random violence, he said, it was a violent act in a violent country that exported violence. Then, comparing Kennedy’s death to the US-backed November 2 assassination of South Vietnam president Ngo Dinh Diem, he said the events in Dallas were nothing more than “the chickens coming home to roost.” Inspired by the enthusiastic reaction of the crowd, mostly Nation faithful, he pushed the rhetorical envelope further. “Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they’ve always made me glad,” he remarked. The audience roared with laughter and applause.
The fallout was immediate. Malcolm was suspended from all Nation activities for ninety days. He was forbidden from speaking at his spiritual and political headquarters, Mosque No. 7 in Harlem, and no Muslim in good standing with the Nation could speak to or be seen with him. Accepting his sentence obediently, Malcolm hoped to reconcile with Muhammad, a man he loved like a father, a man revered by Nation members as no mere mortal but the divine Messenger. Despite their increasing differences—Malcolm had been struggling spiritually since hearing of Muhammad’s infidelities (the Messenger had a penchant for the attractive, young secretaries at the Nation’s Chicago headquarters)—he hoped their fractured relationship could be mended.
During the early months of 1964, however, Malcolm came to the realization that the split was permanent. In fact, it was his close, personal relationship with Muhammad that had endangered Malcolm’s role in the secretive Black Nationalist group. Muhammad’s family members and closest advisors in Chicago were envious of Malcolm, fearing he would be named the Messenger’s successor. In the end, petty jealousies and palace politics had played a critical role in sending Malcolm X into exile.
By March he was moving on, no longer shackled by the Nation’s strict separatist or apolitical stances, which forbade members from participating in the white devil’s political system or joining the civil rights movement. Seeing how the civil rights cause was fueled largely by Southern black Christians, Malcolm began to explore a more secular and practical approach to the liberation of black Americans. He was ready to “cooperate in local civil rights actions in the South and elsewhere,” he told the New York Times, announcing his split with the Nation of Islam. He was now entering a new phase of his life. “It is going to be different now,” he said. “I’m going to join in the fight wherever Negroes ask for my help.” However, he soon realized that this new, inclusive approach was dangerous, too: His former spiritual brethren in the Nation of Islam now viewed him as a traitor. In their eyes he was a heretic, and he knew they would stop at nothing to silence him if his voice grew too loud or his influence too large.
Malcolm founded a new organization, the Muslim Mosque, Inc. and commuted each day from his home in East Elmhurst, Queens, to the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, which served as the group’s headquarters. In the poisonous atmosphere of race relations in New York City in early 1964, controversy immediately ensued. After reaffirming to local media his belief that blacks should arm themselves in self-defense—“by whatever means necessary,” in his famous words—taking full advantage of their Second Amendment rights, New York City Police Commissioner Michael J. Murphy immediately condemned him. “Nobody will be allowed to turn New York City into a battleground,” the commissioner warned, claiming Malcolm X and other local activists wer
e driven by “a lust for power” and “other sinister motives.”
Maybe Murphy feared that the newly liberated Malcolm X would become the truly revolutionary figure that many activists had hoped for, or that Malcolm would rival, perhaps even overshadow, the nonviolent wing of the civil rights movement. Maybe the pressure of the job was getting to the police commissioner. Since the summer of 1963, the daily street protests and sit-ins in New York City had been threatening to boil over into a full-scale race riot. The World’s Fair, which was set to open in just weeks, had become a central focus for local radicals, like the Brooklyn chapter of CORE, who were promising a citywide stall-in to ruin Robert Moses’ opening day.
Throughout March and April, Malcolm stayed in the spotlight, accepting speaking engagements in the Northeast. He visited the Capitol to witness the civil rights debate in the Senate. Historically, the US Senate was where civil rights legislation went to die or get watered down until it was largely meaningless. It was not lost on Malcolm that the person most responsible for gutting those previous laws was then Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, who was now the President of the United States. Malcolm refused to believe that this man, this Texan—who called the Democrats’ 1948 civil rights plank “a farce and a sham”—was sincere when he met with Roy Wilkins, James Farmer, or Martin Luther King Jr. It was a leap of faith that Malcolm was not prepared to make.
But at least one aspect of his Washington, DC, trek would make the whole trip worthwhile. While leaving the Senate gallery, Malcolm and King—whom he had critiqued again just the week before, saying, “Martin Luther King must devise a new approach in the coming year or he will be a man without followers”—came face-to-face for the only time in their abbreviated lives. The meeting was short, just a minute or so, but the resulting iconic photo of the two men, laughing and shaking hands like old friends, would have a lasting historic significance. “I always had a deep affection for Malcolm,” King would later say, “and felt that he had the great ability to put his finger on the existence and root of the problem.” Although Malcolm continued to question the legitimacy of King’s nonviolent approach, he began to speak of his rival as someone who had fought in the same wars, acquired the same scars, even if they continued to differ on tactics.
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