Blood Brothers

Copyright © 2016 by Randy Roberts and John Matthew Smith

Published by Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, contact Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10107.

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[email protected]
.

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

LCCN: 2015043982

ISBN: 978-0-465-09863-7 (e-book)

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Marjie, Alison, and Kelly, the loves of my life.

—
RWR

For my loving wife, Rebecca.

—
JMS

CONTENTS

PREFACE
   
A Dream Deferred

PROLOGUE
   
Behind the Veil

ONE
   
The Mother Ship in Miami

TWO
   
God's Angry Man

THREE
   
“Who Made Me Is
Me
”

FOUR
   
In Cold Blood

FIVE
   
The Winter of Boxing

SIX
   
Apollo

SEVEN
   
Hide Your Cat

EIGHT
   
The Great Pretender

NINE
   
Back to the Grave

TEN
   
Trouble in Miami

ELEVEN
   
The Crusade

TWELVE
   
Free to Be Me

THIRTEEN
   
The Shakeup

FOURTEEN
   
An American Nightmare

FIFTEEN
   
King of the World

SIXTEEN
   
The Muslim Champ

SEVENTEEN
   
Worthy of Death

EPILOGUE
   
Once the Hate Is Gone

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Notes

Index

PREFACE: A DREAM DEFERRED

            
Malcolm X and Ali were like very close brothers. It was almost as if they were in love with each other.

—
FERDIE PACHECO, MUHAMMAD ALI'S PHYSICIAN

“W
hat happens to a dream deferred?” Langston Hughes asked in one of his most moving and insightful poems. “Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? . . . Or does it explode?”
¹

We ask the same questions about the lives of two extraordinarily gifted men, both born in a segregated land and raised amidst pain and discrimination to face a violent world. What happens to a dream deferred? Does it snake toward hopelessness, despair, drunkenness, addiction, and poverty? Or does it explode in rage? A dream deferred, Malcolm X knew, could become an American nightmare.

Our story begins with two questions: Who was Cassius Clay? And how did he become Muhammad Ali? As much as has been written about him, he remains enigmatic, a silent sphinx. He has meant different things to different people at different times. It has become increasingly difficult to know the Muhammad Ali of the 1960s. Since the end of the Vietnam War, liberal writers have manufactured an image of him as a hero of social causes, a unifying force of goodwill. He is no longer seen as controversial, threatening, or anti-American. His legacy has become distorted and trivialized.
²

In a tragic irony, Parkinson's disease has robbed him of his verbal gifts. Once known as the Louisville Lip, Ali no longer boasts, rhymes, or raps. His silence has been filled by corporate sponsors, movie producers, and writers who have created a new voice for him, a voice that neither preaches racial separation nor acknowledges his past with Malcolm X. A minister in the Nation of Islam (NOI), Malcolm espoused racially charged rhetoric about “devilish white men,” “brainwashed Christian Negroes,” and “bloody revolution.” Many feared that he might organize the opening battle of an impending race war. Muhammad Ali called this man his brother, leading critics to vilify him as a disgrace to boxing.

At first, Cassius Clay, as he was known until 1964, hid his relationship with Malcolm. A master of deception, he proved infuriatingly elusive for journalists. “Figuring out who or what is the
real
Cassius Clay is a parlor game that has become unrewarding even for experts,” commented Jack Olsen, a white writer who gained unprecedented access to the fighter.

Clay's personality is like a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces were cut by a drunken carpenter, a jumbled collection of moods and attitudes that do not seem to interlock. Sometimes, he sounds like a religious fanatic, his voice singsong and chanting, and all at once he will turn into a calm, reasoning, if confused, student of the scriptures. He is a loudmouth windbag and at the same time a remarkably sincere and dedicated athlete. He can be a kindly benefactor of the neighborhood children and a vicious bully in the ring, a prissy Puritan totally intolerant of drinkers and smokers, and a teller of dirty jokes.
³

In 1966, when Olsen began writing
Black Is Best
, a lengthy profile of the boxer, piecing together the jigsaw puzzle of Muhammad Ali seemed impossible. Yet what Olsen and other writers have failed to recognize is that the
real
Muhammad Ali can only be seen when his many masks are uncovered. From 1960 to 1965, the half decade that framed his relationship with Malcolm X, he appeared convincingly as four different personalities, packaged and expressed at different times for different audiences.

He first emerged on the world stage as Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. of the 1960 Rome Olympics—wide-eyed, talkative, enthusiastic, and likable, a defender of the glacial progress being made in American race relations. In Rome, Cassius proudly told a Soviet reporter who asked him about the American color line, “We've got qualified people working on that problem, and I'm not worried about the outcome. To me, the U.S.A. is still the best country in the world, counting yours.” As Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., he was the quiet southern “Negro,” downplaying racial conflict, and avoiding controversy.
⁴

After turning professional toward the end of 1960, he became the Louisville Lip—boasting loudly, spouting poetry, belittling opponents, and advertising himself. As the Louisville Lip, he became the booming athletic equivalent of Little Richard and Elvis Presley, echoing the raucous notes of rock ‘n' roll and the television antics of professional wrestler Gorgeous George.

As the civil rights movement escalated from 1962 to early 1964, he evolved into Cassius X—the loyal follower of Elijah Muhammad, the Supreme Minister of the Nation of Islam. As Cassius X, a name he adopted only for a brief time, he imitated Malcolm, appearing angry and outraged by racial injustice. Behind the walls of the Nation's mosques, he stood up as an outspoken defender of the Black Muslim philosophy, one that promoted racial pride, self-determination, and complete separation of the races. As an acolyte of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, he defiantly opposed Martin Luther King's approach to the civil rights movement and the ideals of racial integration.

Finally, after winning the heavyweight title in February 1964, he became Muhammad Ali—renamed by Elijah, pried apart from Malcolm, and the new front man for the Nation of Islam. As in his other personas, he inhabited the role of Muhammad Ali, often wearing the somber, stone-faced mask of Elijah's paramilitary followers. As Muhammad Ali, he instantly became the most politically controversial athlete in the country's history.

Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., the Louisville Lip, Cassius X, and Muhammad Ali—the boxer played all these roles, wearing the different masks as the occasion dictated. He
was
all of these characters, and sometimes more than one at the same moment. “I don't have to be what
you want me to be,” he once announced. “I'm free to be who I want.” Yet some of the men closest to him had trouble understanding exactly who he was free to be. “They say there's fifteen sides to Clay,” his ring physician Ferdie Pacheco said. “To me he's just a thoroughly confused person. Sure, he has sides, but they don't mesh.”
⁵

Only by examining Cassius Clay's early years in Louisville and his relationship with Malcolm X can one hope to discover Muhammad Ali. Central to his life, relationships, and career was deception. Disguise and dissemblance, of course, have been integral to African American culture since the first moments of contact between blacks and whites. From the stories of B'rer Rabbit's trickery and indirection to such novels as Richard Wright's
Native Son
and Ralph Ellison's
Invisible Man
, the ability of black Americans to wear disguises and assume multiple identities has been crucial in navigating the boundaries and pathways of the color line in America.

But beyond African American culture, the volatile circumstances of young Cassius Clay's home life created an atmosphere conducive to disguise. That he entered a profession that rewarded violence and deception, a trade that trafficked in feints, fakes, and pain, indicates how ingrained those qualities were in his life. If Olsen, Pacheco, and others could not figure out “the riddle of Cassius Clay,” that attested to how well he had learned to hide himself.
⁶

L
IKE
M
UHAMMAD
A
LI
, Malcolm X was also a man of many masks. The seventh son of an itinerant Baptist preacher, Malcolm Little inherited his father's rage against white supremacy. As a young man in the 1940s, he came of age as Detroit Red, a street hustler strutting in a zoot suit, peddling drugs and prostitutes. In the smoky pool halls and jazz clubs of Boston and New York, he developed the swagger of a trickster, cultivating the cool pose of the “hip cats” he admired.
⁷

Behind the mask of Detroit Red, he buried the pain of his past. In prison for larceny, his fellow convicts called him Satan. Voraciously reading history, sociology, and theology, he transformed himself into a puritanical follower of Elijah Muhammad, the self-proclaimed Messenger of Allah. From his cell, he absorbed and memorized Muhammad's writings and speeches, accepting his message of separatism and strict morality. By the mid-1950s, the former convict had become the
Messenger's protégé—Malcolm X—an outspoken minister saving lost souls in bars, nightclubs, and back alleys.
⁸

As Malcolm X, he was a model of redemption, preaching a doctrine of abstinence from drugs, alcohol, and crime. The “angriest black man in America” divided the country with his sharp tongue and brutal honesty, openly condemning whites for terrorizing black Americans. Ultimately, the internal politics of the Nation of Islam and his own crisis of faith led him on a journey toward the universalism of Sunni Islam. In Africa and the Middle East, he was known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, but he would forever be remembered in America as Malcolm X.
⁹

Malcolm may have changed his name, but at his core he remained the same dedicated freedom fighter. Fiercely uncompromising, he carried himself with imperial restraint, striking a cool posture that could intimidate the most self-assured white man. For Malcolm, coolness meant speaking his mind, refusing to submit to white authority. Being cool meant being completely free.

In many ways, Malcolm X and Cassius Clay seemed the product of the same DNA. Both thrived on center stage surrounded by an audience. Standing beneath the spotlight—at Malcolm's pulpit or in Clay's ring—they responded to the thundering sound of applause and the deafening chorus of boos. Neither man could resist a platform, an interview, or a debate. Both enjoyed sparring with words and manipulating other men's fears with sensational language. They were both fighters.

Before Cassius X became Muhammad Ali, Malcolm saw something in the young boxer that no one else did. “Not many people know the quality of the mind he's got in there,” he told writer George Plimpton in 1964. Like Malcolm, he was absolutely self-assured, proud, and defiant. He carried himself with boundless confidence, boldly professing his own greatness the way that Malcolm fearlessly denounced white America. Studying Clay's interactions with reporters, the way he spellbound audiences with his performances, Malcolm realized that he could become something more than an athlete. As the heavyweight champion of the world, Clay possessed the kind of far-reaching cultural power that could unify black people. Recognizing Clay's global fame, Malcolm exploited him, envisioning a new movement that fused together Clay's world and his into one built around celebrity and politics.

A
MYTH HAS ENSHROUDED
the encounters between Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. The stories are told and retold, fashioned in ways that obscure the reality. An anecdote here, a quote there, and before you know it a fabricated “truth” has emerged. Drawing on a few unsubstantiated observations by writer Alex Haley and a couple of self-serving comments by Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, historians and biographers have manufactured a convenient morality play involving two men who came together, formed a deep relationship, and then suddenly and dramatically broke apart. End of story. It was almost as if the two larger-than-life figures were planets, swinging close to each other in their orbits and then moving apart on separate paths.

But it was never that simple. Although their respective biographers have neglected to show that Ali and Malcolm were much more important to one another than previously acknowledged, we have uncovered and interpreted previously unexamined documents that reveal the personal and political dynamics between them. The complex friendship between Malcolm and Ali is interred in a labyrinthine jungle of sources—the private papers of Malcolm X, Alex Haley, and others; FBI files and surveillance reports; State Department records; archived news footage and television programs; long-unexamined interview transcripts; new interviews with people who knew Ali and Malcolm intimately; the daily press; and a variety of other published and unpublished materials.

Investigating their relationship, we have reconstructed the lives and movements of Ali and Malcolm, focusing especially on the period from the time they met in June 1962 through February 1965. Plotting their daily activities provided a key to deciphering redacted FBI files, revealing the events and conversations recorded in the Bureau's records in a new light. Using these unique sources, we tracked their movements and, in the process, discovered how historians and biographers have misread the complicated relationship between them.

In the generally accepted narrative, writers maintain that Ali severed his friendship with Malcolm the moment Elijah renamed him. These authors have relied on a quote that Ali allegedly gave Alex Haley during an interview in Harlem, one that Haley excluded from the published account in
Playboy
. In fact, nowhere in the
Playboy
interview is there any mention of Malcolm or why Ali turned his back on him in allegiance to Elijah Muhammad. In the epilogue of
The Autobiography of
Malcolm X
, however, published seven months after Malcolm's death, Haley recounted his memory of the interview with Ali. According to Haley, Ali said, “You just don't buck Mr. Muhammad and get away with it. I don't want to talk about [Malcolm] no more.” It is likely that during his research for the epilogue, Haley read a nearly identical quote Ali gave
Ebony
in September 1964, when he said, “You just don't buck Mr. Muhammad and get away with it.”
¹⁰