Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  Thus, African Americans were on their own when they developed a unique—for once, that description is an understatement—quasi-Islamic faith in the twentieth century. As a matter of fact, nothing could be more blasphemous to traditional Muslims than Elijah Muhammad’s notion of Allah as a man—black or otherwise, whether created by a single spinning atom or a shooting star. That would be a form of one of the greatest Muslim sins, shirk, which means the association of anything or anyone with Allah. In Islam, a man cannot be God.

  When Ali joined the Nation in 1964, the organization was locked in a bitter rivalry between Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, who had been censured by the Nation for his comments describing the assassination of President John F. Kennedy as a case of “chickens coming home to roost.” In 1965, the charismatic Malcolm—who was moving toward a more racially inclusive view and expressed a desire to work with other, non-Muslim civil rights leaders—left the Nation. Another reason for Malcolm’s split with Elijah Muhammad was the latter’s propensity for violating his own precepts about sexual morality and engaging in affairs with women—several of whom he impregnated—on his staff. Malcolm was assassinated on February 21, 1965, and three members of the Nation were convicted of his murder. But the young Ali, who had once admired Malcolm greatly and would come to admire him again as the years passed, sided with the Nation in the 1960s.*2 This decision did not necessarily do Ali any good with many black Americans. At the time he became a Muslim, many blacks (most of whom, if they were over thirty, still called themselves and wanted to be called Negroes) joined their white contemporaries in rejecting the Nation as a bona fide religion. Overwhelmingly Christian and Baptist in their religious orientation, middle-class black Americans were frequently baffled, embarrassed, and worried that the Black Muslims would incite white hostility at a time when the civil rights movement needed more white support. As Ali notes in his 1975 autobiography, The Greatest (written with Richard Durham), professional backers and friends of both races warned him that he would ruin his career and reputation by acknowledging his conversion to Islam. “When I finally made it known that I was a Muslim,” Ali recalls, “almost every educated friend, associate and prominent person I knew, black as well as white, was horrified. Sugar Ray Robinson warned me that my career would be wrecked if I became a ‘Black Muslim.’ Jackie Gleason urged me to ‘reconsider the step’ he heard I was about to take. ‘Don’t let yourself be used,’ he said. I thanked him for his advice, but I told him the main ones I didn’t want to be used by were the enemies of black people, those who help oppress and subordinate them.”6

  No group was more convinced that Ali was being “used” than the nation’s sportswriters, almost all of whom were white. In 1965, after I graduated from college and became a reporter for The Washington Post, I heard a veteran sports columnist—a man whose writing I admired greatly—call the heavyweight champion “a jock so dumb he believes in voodoo.” That comment was mild compared with what actually appeared in many mainstream publications. Myron Cope, in a 1964 article titled “Muslim Champ” in The Saturday Evening Post, described “Clay” as “fighting a socio-religious battle with the Christian world.” (Most sportswriters and publications refused, for years, to call the fighter Muhammad Ali and continued to use the name Cassius Clay.) Cope claimed that Ali had “completely severed communication with whites” and “still acts the clown for TV cameras but only to sell fight tickets.” Jeff Nilsson, director of the Saturday Evening Post online archives, points out in an analysis of the 1964 coverage that Ali had hardly cut off all communication with whites, given that he agreed to speak extensively for the article with Cope himself (even though he was well aware of the sportswriter’s hostility toward him). The political opinions expressed by Ali in the interview were anything but extreme. Discussing Nation of Islam rhetoric calling whites “devils,” Ali explained, “I’m stressing just the works that the whites generally have been doing. They blow up all these little colored people in church, wash people down the street with water hoses. It’s not the color that makes you a devil, just the deeds that you do….If you be a blue race, and you do the works of the devil, then we can call you a devil. You got white people who dies under demonstrations, died under tractor wheels for colored people. I wouldn’t call them no devil.”7

  Reading these words, which might just as easily have been “by their fruits ye shall know them,” many twenty-first-century Americans—especially the young—will find it hard to understand what so enraged middle-aged, mid-twentieth-century white sportswriters about Ali’s conversion. Ali sounds like exactly what he was—a highly intelligent but poorly educated (by his own account) young black man who was trying out a new way of thinking that differed not only from his upbringing as a black American Baptist but from the shiny, contented image that white America wanted to see in people of color who had achieved worldly success. In 1965, another antagonistic Saturday Evening Post writer, Bill Bridges (in a story that was never published), argued that an upcoming bout between Ali and the former heavyweight boxing champion Floyd Patterson was being considered a battle between the Christian and Muslim religions. “After Patterson was defeated, however,” Nilsson observes tartly, “there was no more talk about the match proving which was the superior faith.”8 But the extreme disrespect manifested by most older sportswriters toward Ali in the 1960s was likely motivated less by real knowledge about or hatred for Islam in any form than by a combination of racism and the envy-distorted psychological relationship that existed (and still does) between those who can only write about the sport they love and those who can actually play the game. The unwritten clause in the contract between most sportswriters and the athletes they cover (and this contract was much more powerful fifty years ago than it is today) was: “You do these splendid things with your body, but I write about them as I see fit, because I’ve got the brains.”*3 An athlete who said, “I’m not who you think I am or want me to be,” was breaking the agreement.

  •

  It is impossible to separate the antagonistic reaction to Ali’s conversion from the rage that greeted his refusal, in 1967, to be drafted. After stating bluntly that he had no quarrel with the Viet Cong because none of them “ever called me nigger,” Ali was immediately stripped of his boxing license in the state of New York. In June 1967, an all-white jury promptly sentenced him to five years in jail for draft evasion. Ali never went to prison, because he posted bond while his case was being appealed. His claim to conscientious-objector status was denied by every lower appeals court, and it took four years for the case to make its way to the Supreme Court. In 1967, although there was a growing antiwar movement on college campuses, the American public at large had not yet turned decisively against the Vietnam War. Although the armed services, in the era of the draft, were much more representative of the general population than is today’s volunteer military, the war in Vietnam (unlike the Second World War) was being fought disproportionately by both poor blacks and poor whites. Deferments were available for college students, so the middle and upper-middle classes had many more opportunities to avoid being drafted. Athletes and entertainers also frequently received deferments. Joining the National Guard and staying at home, as the future president George W. Bush did, was another option widely used by the sons of the upper-middle class and by celebrities who wanted to avoid actual combat in Southeast Asia. Had Ali not become a Muslim and then taken a public antiwar position, he could probably, like so many athletes, have kept his deferment and never been required to serve. Or, for that matter, he could have served his time in the military by engaging in bouts staged for the entertainment of the troops. But that was not for the proud champion of a sport that had always been tainted by racism, when blacks who beat whites, like the storied heavyweight Jack Johnson in 1910, were punished for their success.

  By the time Ali came along, boxing at the highest level had become an all-black sport. As Remnick notes, the history of black boxing in America, like everything to do with race, goes back to slavery, as “pl
antation owners amused themselves by putting together their strongest slaves and letting them fight it out for sport and gambling.”9 Slaves wore iron collars and were required, like their forebears in the ancient world, to fight nearly to the point of death. Ali, who obviously loved boxing in his youth, was nevertheless well aware of this history. “They don’t look at fighters to have brains,” he said in 1970. “They don’t look at fighters to be businessmen, or human, or intelligent. Fighters are just brutes that come to entertain the rich white people. Beat up on each other and break each other’s noses, and bleed, and show off like two little monkeys for the crowd. We’re just like two slaves in that ring. The masters get two of us big old black slaves and let us fight it out while they bet: ‘My slave can whup your slave.’ That’s what I see when I see two black people fighting.”10 And yet Ali did fight other black men, and he fought for and was paid millions. It does not take a psychoanalyst to figure out that Ali’s religious conversion might have been part of an effort to cope with his ambivalence about the sport that had brought him riches and fame but could not be separated from the humiliation of black men in the American past (and, as Ali saw it, in his own life).

  In his autobiography, Ali provides a small sampling of the phone calls he received after his announcement that he would not serve in the Vietnam-era army. Most of the callers were anonymous, but a deputy sheriff who had escorted the boxing champion many times in Miami was an exception. “He had a soft drawl, like a fatherly bigot,” Ali recalls. “ ‘Now Cassius, you just done gone too far now. Somebody’s telling you wrong. Them Jews and Dagos you got around you. Now, some of my boys want to come down and talk to you, for your own good.’ Another caller simply said, ‘You gonna die, nigger, die before the night’s out!’ ”11 Ali chose to base his antiwar position on selective, peace-loving passages from the Quran, which—like the Christian and Jewish Bibles—can offer something to rationalize just about any belief.

  One of the most touching aspects of The Greatest is Ali’s growing wonderment that there were very different phone calls—from people uninterested in sports or in Ali’s achievements as a boxer—congratulating him on his stand. Students called, asking Ali to speak on college campuses, and he experienced the “strange new feeling…without planning or even wanting it, [that] I was an important part of a movement I hardly knew existed.”12

  Ali, known generally for his brashness, was always humble when it came to his own lack of intellectual credentials and educational background. His reflections revealed the pain of an intelligent man who understood that he had never been offered or obtained an education commensurate with his potential. One day, Ali received an overseas phone call—still a rarity in the 1960s—from an old man he had never heard of. The man, a British antiwar activist, asked Ali if he had been quoted accurately in the press and said, “I suppose the world has more than incidental curiosity about what the World Champion thinks. Usually he goes with the tide. You surprised them.” Ali told the man he might soon be coming to England, to fight the European heavyweight champion, Henry Cooper. He then asked his caller which fighter he would bet on. The caller laughed, “Henry’s capable, you know, but I would pick you.” Ali gave what he described as his stock, flip answer to such responses: “You’re not as dumb as you look.” Ali and his caller would frequently exchange cards and notes, but it wasn’t until two years later, as Ali was browsing through a volume of the World Book Encyclopedia, that he learned that his correspondent, Bertrand Russell, was a famous philosopher and mathematician who had gone to jail in England for his antiwar writings during the First World War. Ali immediately typed a letter of apology to Russell for his offhand remark, “You’re not as dumb as you look,” and Russell replied that he had enjoyed the joke. Ali hoped to visit Russell in England, but his passport was confiscated after his conviction for draft evasion. By the time it was returned, four years later, after the Supreme Court overturned the conviction, Russell had died in 1970, at the age of ninety-seven. “I thought of him whenever I visited England,” Ali said, “and for years I kept a picture of his warm face and wide eyes. ʻNot as dumb as he looks.’ ”13

  Because Ali’s boxing license was revoked in every state after his conviction for draft evasion, he did not fight from March 1967 until October 1970, in what would have been the prime of any athlete’s career—his late twenties. Ali’s ultimate legal fate, and the slow change in public attitudes toward his decision to convert and oppose the war, also offer striking examples of the possibilities of toleration in a society weighed down by racial injustice but lifted up by the separation of church and state and a strong tradition—however frequently it has been honored in the breach instead of in reality—of respect for freedom of conscience. Both the better and the worse angels of the American nature were at work in the life of this extraordinary man.

  The Department of Justice, under Presidents Johnson and Richard Nixon, had opposed Ali’s claim of conscientious-objector status. When the case reached the Supreme Court in the spring of 1971, Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall recused himself because he had been Johnson’s solicitor general. (Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court justice, was appointed to the high court by Johnson in 1967.) The court in 1971 was closely divided, a hybrid of aging New Deal liberals and appointees from the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. Nixon had already begun to reshape the court by appointing Warren Burger to succeed Earl Warren as chief justice. In addition to Marshall and the recently appointed Burger, the court included Justices Hugo L. Black, William O. Douglas, John Marshall Harlan II, William Brennan, Jr., Potter Stewart, Byron White, and Harry Blackmun. The key justice in this decision was Harlan, appointed by Eisenhower in 1955. (He was the grandson and namesake of the nineteenth-century Supreme Court justice who was called “the great dissenter” and is best known for his stellar, lone dissent in the 1893 case Plessy v. Ferguson. This notorious case established the “separate but equal” doctrine of segregation, which lasted until 1954, when the high court declared segregated schools inherently unequal in Brown v. Board of Education.) With Marshall having recused himself, the decision in Ali’s case might well have gone against the plaintiff. However, Harlan, an old-fashioned moderate Republican and a judicial conservative, became convinced over time of the sincerity of Ali’s personal, religiously based antiwar views (even though Islam is obviously not a pacifist religion). He set about persuading the other justices, including his friend Burger, to reconsider the constitutional questions that had been overwhelmed, four years earlier, by racial and pro-war passions. In the end, the vote to strike down the lower-court rulings denying Ali conscientious-objector status was eight to zero. The decision, constructed on narrow grounds, says not that Ali qualified as a conscientious objector but that the Department of Justice had failed to prove its case. The Justice Department and the lower courts had erred, the Supreme Court stated, in asserting, with no proof, that Ali’s views were based entirely on his racial and political beliefs and not on his religious views. The court’s decision rendered the issue of military service essentially moot for Ali, who, at twenty-eight and as a father, was not likely to be drafted in ordinary circumstances.

  After his victory in the nation’s highest court, Ali returned to the boxing ring. He suffered the first defeat of his professional career at the hands of Joe Frazier in 1971. On October 30, 1974, Ali regained the world heavyweight championship by defeating George Foreman (after beating Frazier in a rematch). His last meeting with Frazier in the Philippines, dubbed, “The Thrilla in Manila,” in 1975, was one of the most brutal fights in boxing history. The fight finally ended when Frazier’s trainer, over the boxer’s protests, refused to let him answer the bell for the fifteenth round. Both men had taken relentless punishment, and Ali was declared the winner on a technical knockout.

  In the late 1970s, observers noticed that Ali was beginning to stutter and that his hands sometimes trembled. He retired from boxing in 1981 and was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 1984, at age fo
rty-two.

  •

  In his life after boxing, Ali has, improbably, been transformed from the black nemesis hated by many whites into a revered figure—revered for the moral stand he took against the war and not for his boxing titles. “Who could have predicted in the late 1960’s,” asked Budd Shulberg in 1998, “when Muhammad Ali was reviled by the sporting press and most of white America as a black racist, a mouthy troublemaker, that he would be the obvious choice to light the torch at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, as a symbol of international understanding, peace, and love?”14 Though he remained an observant Muslim, Ali’s religious views shifted in his thirties, away from the Nation to mainstream Sunni Islam. It seems likely, had Malcolm X lived and continued on his path of interracial and interreligious cooperation, that he and Ali would have been reconciled. In his last interview with Remnick, in the late 1990s, Ali said, “I’ll tell you how I’d like to be remembered: as a black man who won the heavyweight title and who was humorous and who treated everyone right. As a man who never looked down on those who looked up to him and who helped as many of his people as he could—financial and also in their fight for freedom, justice, and equality. As a man who wouldn’t embarrass them. As a man who tried to unite his people through the faith of Islam that he found when he listened to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. And if all that’s asking too much, then I guess I’d settle for being remembered as a great boxing champion who became a preacher and a champion of his people. And I wouldn’t even mind if folks forgot how pretty I was.”15

  As long as he was physically able, Ali participated in the kind of civic events that would have been unimaginable venues for him in the charged political climate of the sixties. In 1988, the two hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the Constitution, Ali was selected by the California Bicentennial Foundation to ride in the Tournament of Roses Parade as a symbol of the enduring and ever-evolving meaning of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Two years later, he traveled to Iraq a few months before the first Gulf War in a successful attempt to persuade Saddam Hussein to release fifteen American hostages being held as “human shields” in the event of a Western attack. At the time, many Europeans and Americans—from former government officials to ordinary citizens with trapped relatives—were visiting Iraq in attempts to get their citizens or loved ones released. The correspondent of The New York Times, in one of the snottier articles about this understandable human phenomenon, took a special slap at Ali. “Surely the strangest hostage-release campaign of recent days has been the ‘good-will tour’ of Muhammad Ali, the former heavyweight boxing champion,” wrote the correspondent, Philip Shenon. “Mr. Ali, who became a hero in the Muslim world after he converted to Islam in the 1960s and changed his name from Cassius Clay, suffers from the impaired muscular control of Parkinson’s syndrome, and he has attended meeting after meeting in Baghdad despite his frequent inability to speak clearly.”16 Shenon, with a talent for turning the word “hero” into a slur, was not a medical expert, since he seemed unable to recognize the difference between impaired muscular control—which affects speech as well as other physical actions—and an inability to think.*4 And he could not resist slipping the name Cassius Clay into the story. What many found more improbable than Ali’s trip to Iraq was his being awarded, in 2005, the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, by President George W. Bush. But Bush’s motivation could not have been more obvious: he wanted to honor a Muslim American in an effort to discourage domestic bigotry in the post-9/11 era, and who better than a man who was now, in an unpredictable turn of history, a heroic figure to many? Unable to speak, Ali attended the White House dinner, though he could only accept with gestures. But his remarks to Remnick had been those of a man at peace with being both a Muslim and an American—not the words of a man who would refuse an invitation to the White House. Moreover, his 1990 trip to Iraq, in view of his status as the most famous American Muslim in the world, also made perfect sense in terms of his relationship to both his faith and his country. Why wouldn’t “The Greatest” use his publicity value to shine a light on the plight of American hostages held by a Middle Eastern Muslim dictator? The mature Muhammad Ali certainly wasn’t as dumb as he had looked, as a young man, to a great many white Americans.