Blood Brothers (2 page)

Using Haley's quote, several accomplished biographers and historians have mistakenly suggested that Ali made this statement to Haley during the week after Elijah Muhammad renamed him on March 6, 1964. But Ali was not in Harlem at that time, and more importantly, Haley conducted the interview
after
the boxer returned from Africa on June 24, 1964. Accepting his chronology of events, writers have simplified the complex feelings Ali had for Malcolm. Yet in Haley's unpublished notes from the
Playboy
interview, he scribbled on an index card a comment from Ali that revealed the champ's hidden feelings, contradicting the epilogue in
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
. Haley's index card indicated that Ali told him that although he followed Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm was “still my brother, [and] my friend.”
¹¹

According to Haley, shortly after the interview, he mentioned his meeting with Ali to Malcolm. Curious, Malcolm asked what the champ had said about him. Haley wrote that he pulled out the index card with Ali's comments about Malcolm and handed it to the minister. After leading readers to believe that Ali had only cross words for Malcolm, Haley wrote in the
Autobiography
, “Malcolm X stared at the card, then out of the window, and he got up and walked around.” It was “one of the few times I ever heard his voice betray his hurt.” Sadly, Malcolm said, “I felt like a
blood big brother
to him.” Taking a deep breath, he added, “I'm not against him now. He's a fine young man. Smart. He's just let himself be used, led astray.”
¹²

Under great financial stress to make
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
a publishing success, it appears that Haley manipulated Malcolm's broken relationship with Ali in order to present a more sensational historical account. Throughout the epilogue, Haley selected and excluded events that fit into
his
agenda. In some cases, he tampered with the facts. But the truth was more complex than Haley let on. Only by carefully following the day-by-day activities of Ali and Malcolm can one
see how intertwined their lives became and how their brotherhood unraveled, leading inexorably to Malcolm's assassination at the Audubon Ballroom.
¹³

W
E HAVE TRIED
to rescue a story that has fallen into the hands of hagiographers.
Blood Brothers
explores the importance of two of the most important black men of the 1960s. By following their lives, we have discovered that Cassius Clay had begun attending meetings organized by the Nation of Islam well before any reporter caught wind of it. Even before he became a professional boxer, Clay became infatuated with the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm.

What follows is the story of how Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali and the central role Malcolm X played in his life. It is a tale of friendship and brotherhood, love and deep affection. It is also a story of deceit, betrayal, and violence—inside and outside the ring—during a troubled time.

When Malcolm's life was in danger, when Elijah Muhammad threatened to cast him outside the Nation of Islam, Clay became the central figure in his world. For the first time,
Blood Brothers
reveals that the instant Malcolm realized he might be murdered, he tethered his future—his very survival—to the life of a boxer who most people figured would never win the heavyweight championship. Malcolm had no doubt that someone inside the Nation wanted him dead. He also knew that none of Elijah's disciples would risk Clay's life. As long as they were together, Malcolm figured, he was safe. Cassius was the perfect shield. However, only ten days after they celebrated the boxer's championship victory over Sonny Liston, Cassius stopped taking Malcolm's phone calls. Submitting to Elijah, the champ accepted a new name and the Supreme Minister's edict that all Muslims cease contact with Malcolm. Once Muhammad Ali sided with Elijah, Malcolm knew that he could no longer hide behind him. At that moment, he recognized that losing Ali's cover might cost him his life.

Ali understood the violent world Malcolm inhabited. Boxing reflected a violent society. “Violence and hate,” explained former heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson, were “part of the prizefighter's world, Clay's world and mine.” Boxing promoters paid prizefighters “to get in
the ring and act out other people's hates.” Only in that ring of hate could a black man assault a white man with impunity.
¹⁴

Like many young black men born into segregation and contained by white supremacy and the threat of mob violence, Ali channeled his fears and frustrations into the ring. In boxing gyms, he released his anger, sweating out his bile against a system of racial oppression, pummeling men who stood between him and his dreams. Ali fought not only because boxing offered him a way to make a name for himself but also because the gym offered a sanctuary from the dangers lurking outside. The gym became the one place where he could unleash his frustrations on speed bags, heavy bags, and sparring partners. At a time when black men yearned for power, he confronted the dangers of a violent world by retaliating with violence himself.

“What white America demands in her black champions,” Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver insisted, “is a brilliant, powerful body, and a dull bestial mind—a tiger in the ring and a pussycat outside the ring.” Black boxers' lives, Cleaver maintained, were “sharply circumscribed by the ropes around the ring.” But Ali completely rejected the worn-out role. By redefining the political boundaries of sports, he ushered in the beginning of a new era: the revolt of the black athlete.
¹⁵

The seeds of the revolt were planted in the cities that transformed Cassius Clay into Muhammad Ali. Between 1960 and 1965, he traveled widely, fighting in Rome and London, New York and Los Angeles. When he left Louisville as a teenager, he entered a new world, one that exposed him to the possibilities of freedom beyond the American South. Yet the world beyond Louisville also taught him that no matter how famous he became, some white people would hate him just because he was black or because he was a Muslim.

In gyms and mosques across the country, he matured into a man influenced by the discontent in black America. In Chicago and Detroit, Miami and New York, he heard frustrated black men denounce the crimes of white men. Listening to Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X led him to change more than his name. When he won the heavyweight championship in February 1964, he broke free from the political constraints of the sports world, declaring that he would define himself on his own terms. When he boldly proclaimed, “I'm free to be who I want,”
he became a source of inspiration for others who would later challenge the sports establishment. In 1969, about a year after sociologist Harry Edwards organized black athletes in an Olympic boycott movement, he observed that Ali had been the central hero in the political “revolution in sports.” Ali, he proclaimed, was “the warrior saint in the revolt of the black athlete in America.”
¹⁶

That revolt began the moment young Cassius Clay had his first talk with Malcolm. Once Clay met Malcolm—once the personal narrative became a political one—the ring and the playing field were no longer sacred spaces. The relationship between Cassius Clay and Malcolm X signaled a new direction in American culture, one shaped by the forces of sports and entertainment, race and politics. When Clay befriended Malcolm and adopted his ideology, he became the most visible, politically conscious athlete in America. More than anyone else, Malcolm molded Cassius Clay into Muhammad Ali. Under Malcolm's tutelage, he embraced the world stage, emerging as an international symbol of black pride and black independence. Without Malcolm, Muhammad Ali would have never become the “king of the world.”

PROLOGUE: BEHIND THE VEIL

            
Through a veil I could perceive the forbidden city, the Louisville where white folks lived. . . . On my side of the veil everything was black: the homes, the people, the churches, the schools, the Negro park with Negro park police. . . . I knew that there were two Louisvilles and, in America, two Americas. I knew, also, which of the two Americas was mine. . . . I was a Negro. An act of God had circumscribed my life.

—
BLYDEN JACKSON
,
THE WAITING YEARS

H
e never lifted the veil, not when he was Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. or after he became Muhammad Ali. Some things he would talk about incessantly—his greatness, his beauty, and his rendezvous with destiny. Other matters he would discuss in more serious moods—the history of the black man in America, Black Muslim theology, and, after he became an orthodox Muslim, universal peace. Yet he seldom whispered a word about the discord in his own family. “There was a lot of trouble, bad trouble, between his father and his mother,” recalled one of the boxer's early advisers, “but Cassius would bite his tongue before he mentioned it.”
¹

I
T WAS A
dime-a-dozen domestic battery, out in “the colored district” of Louisville's West End. On the hot night of August 8, 1957, Officer Kalbfleisch took the call. When he arrived at 3302 Grand Avenue, an
older man took off running, darting between houses and into the night. Two young boys huddled close to their crying mother, whispering to her in a comforting manner. One of the youths was bleeding from a knife wound. Years later Kalbfleisch couldn't remember if the boy had been cut on his ass or on his thigh, but “it was in the meat” and bleeding pretty good. When asked about the gash, the teenager said that he had cut it on a milk bottle.
²

It was an unlikely story. The father had bolted when he saw the police car. The mother, the policeman later told a reporter, was causing trouble—“you know how women are.” Kalbfleisch got the picture: The father got drunk. Began to beat his wife. Her son tried to protect her and got cut for his efforts. It was not the first time that Mrs. Odessa Clay had called the police. Nor was it the last.

The injured son, only fifteen years old, identified himself. “My name is Cassius Clay,” he said. “I'm a boxer under Joe Martin.”

The name Cassius Clay meant nothing to Kalbfleisch, but he knew Joe Martin. A patrolman who in his spare time trained young boxers at Columbia Gym, Martin produced a local television program called
Tomorrow's Champions
. Not many of the kids who fought each other on the weekly telecasts ever won titles, but the mere fact that they were seen on TV granted them a certain local celebrity. And Cassius was one of them, a kid from the tough side of town whose transitory fame still proved no defense against a drunk, angry father.

Kalbfleisch could have filed a formal report at police headquarters, but he let it slide. “I said to myself, ‘Well, there ain't gonna be no prosecution anyway.' So I said to the mother, ‘Now look, take him to your doctor or take him to the hospital, and if you want to, go up and take out a malicious cutting warrant.'” But the officer knew that the incident would end there. Mr. Clay would return soon enough, and life would go on as before.

All that remains of the episode is a few lines in the duty record book: “August 8, 1957—10:32 p.m., Mrs. Clay, cutting INV. [investigation] 330[2] Grand. NA [no arrest].”

C
ASSIUS
M
ARCELLUS
C
LAY
J
R
. grew up living in fear—fear of his father's raised fist, the smell of alcohol on his breath, and his rising, angry voice bursting through the front door. He also feared what would
happen if he did not heed his father's warnings about the dangers lurking outside their home. Repeatedly, the man exhorted his boys: Don't leave our neighborhood. Don't go into white people's stores. Don't contradict a white man. Don't look at white women. Don't disobey policemen. And most importantly, don't get arrested. “Our parents taught us to be safe,” said Bob Coleman, a childhood friend of Cassius Clay. “And they knew that if I got arrested by a policeman, there was nothing they could do to help me. It would be like I was lost to them. I would be on my own. That scared them as much as me.”
³

Cassius Clay Sr. told parables that taught young Cassius and his brother Rudy about the world. All the stories had the same general theme: black men die after seemingly harmless encounters with white men. The murders, Clay Sr. insisted, were “legal lynchings.” They happened all the time, he said. “When I was a boy, seemed like every darned day you'd read in the paper about something like that: a lynching, a burning of a Negro, every day. Now wouldn't that turn you against the white man? Nine or ten or twelve or fifteen cases like that a week?”
⁴

The past haunted Clay Sr., and it lived on in the stories he told his sons. Living in a world of intolerable racism and violence, Clay Sr.'s frustration manifested in outward rage and loathing for the white man. As James Baldwin wrote in 1962, “The Negro's past [was one] of rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation; fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone; doubt that he was worthy of life, since everyone around him denied it; sorrow for his women, for his kinfolk, for his children, who needed his protection, and whom he could not protect.” In the words of Baldwin, this “hatred for white men [ran] so deep that it often turned against him and his own, and made all love, all trust, all joy impossible.”
⁵

Clay Sr. threw his entire body into the stories he told, twisting, snorting, huffing, and punctuating key points with a loud “Ummmmhmmmma” or an inopportune laugh. A natural storyteller, he moved gracefully from humor to tragedy, carrying the listener along with him.

He was an exasperated artist who earned a living as a sign painter. A wiry, dark-skinned man, opinionated and outspoken, he was not much of a fighter, except when he was drunk. Then he was apt to turn on his family. But he was also a teller of tall tales, most of which centered on his fantasy life. Given his mood of the moment, he might claim to be
a Mexican, a Hindu, or an Arab. During his Mexican phase he wore a serape and took siestas. During his Arab period he called his second son Rudolph Valentino, after the actor who portrayed the Hollywood sheikh. A friend recalled that during Clay Sr.'s time as an Arab, he observed certain rituals. “At noon he used to get down off his painting ladder and in his little box he had a carpet and he'd put the carpet down and bow to the east and then bow to the west.”
⁶

All his life Clay Sr. struggled. A friend of the family said he “enjoyed life,” by which he meant he took his pleasures where he found them and didn't worry excessively about propriety and consequences. But a streak of anger, a sense of opportunities denied, ran like a river through his life. Had he been white, he thought, he would have been famous and wealthy. His murals on walls and churches in the West End of Louisville attested to his talents, and he could sing any song in his thin baritone. Yes, sir, he said, he could have been a great artist or recording star. Like the other greats, all he needed was a little more training. “Nat King Cole was nothing when he started out,” he said. “And Dean Martin was nothing. Frank Sinatra was sickening. Frank Sinatra was
sickening
!”
⁷

C
ASSIUS
C
LAY
J
R
. was a mama's boy, handsome, sweet, and well liked. He feared his father, avoided violence, and abhorred alcohol. But in fundamental ways he
was
his father's son, and he would become more so as the years passed. His father's stories made all too much sense of the violent world inside and outside his home.

Two events were enough to confirm all of his father's gruesome tales of horror. The first happened within a four- or five-minute drive of Clay's home on Grand Avenue. In 1954 Andrew Wade IV, an African American electrician, and his wife, Charlotte, arranged for a white couple to purchase a house for them in an all-white suburban neighborhood. Their new neighbors immediately and angrily reacted, insisting that the Wades sell their house and move. When the Wades refused, they received ominous threats followed by a cross burning on their lawn. Later someone fired a rifle through a window in their house. Still, the Wades stayed put. Finally, on the night of June 27, 1954, while the Wades were gone for the evening, someone dynamited the house.
⁸

There was no justice in the case. The person who ignited the bomb was never identified. And the Wades were forced to move into the segregated West End. It was another example of what Clay Sr. told his son: the white man doesn't want you around. He explained that in America, the black man could never get ahead. Cassius asked why. If he worked hard, why couldn't he become a rich man? Why couldn't he share in the American Dream? His father pointed to the skin on Cassius's arm: “Look there, that's why you can't be rich.”
⁹

The second event—and for Cassius the more emotionally searing—occurred the following summer. Emmett Till's mother had packed him off to visit family members in Money, Mississippi, and not long after his arrival in the small town, he and his cousin and several local boys went to Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market to buy some candy. While in the store, Till whistled while speaking to Carolyn Bryant. It may have been a wolf whistle, as some recalled, or perhaps due to his problem pronouncing “b”-words, he whistled before asking for bubble gum. Regardless, Bryant later told her husband that Till had made a pass at her. Enraged, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J. W. Milam went after Till. They pulled him from his uncle's home, pistol-whipped him, beat him, and finally shot him in the head. Then they attached a heavy cotton-gin fan to his neck with barbed wire and dumped him into the Tallahatchie River.

In a sensational five-day trial, held in a packed courthouse and attended by nationally prominent reporters, Bryant and Milam were tried for kidnapping and murder. After listening to all the evidence, the all-white jury deliberated for sixty-seven minutes before voting to acquit the two men. “If we hadn't stopped to drink a pop,” commented a juror, “it wouldn't have taken that long.”
¹⁰

The trial, along with Till's shocking open-casket funeral in Chicago, energized the civil rights movement and stood as a stark confirmation of what black males had long been taught. Justice was not color-blind. That lesson was not lost on young Cassius Clay. Twenty years after the event, he recalled looking at the pictures of Till's mutilated face in the pages of
Jet
magazine, horrified by the sight of “his eyes bulging out of their sockets and his mouth twisted and broken.” He would never forget those images or the grizzly stories his father told him about the crime.
¹¹

M
ISSISSIPPI JUSTICE WAS
not confined to the South. Malcolm Little felt trapped by the same realities that pained Blyden Jackson, frustrated Clay Sr., frightened Cassius Jr., and killed Emmett Till. Writers often asked Malcolm when he first experienced racial inequality, as if he were a test subject whose anger could easily be reduced to some isolated incident. In March 1964, shortly after Clay won the heavyweight championship, a Swedish television reporter inquired about the psychological scars that Malcolm carried from his youth. When did segregation first hurt him? Irritated, he quipped, “When I was born. I was born in a segregated hospital of a segregated mother and father.”
¹²

Intrigued by his provocative answer, the writer pressed further. “The first was when we were living in Lansing, Michigan, in an integrated neighborhood.” One evening, when Malcolm was only six years old, he “woke up and found the house on fire. The good Christians of the neighborhood had come out and set the house afire. The second was when my father was found under a streetcar where he had been thrown by the good Christians—that's my second.” Grinning derisively he paused, looking directly into the television camera. “You want my third and fourth and fifth and sixth and seventh?”
¹³

He never knew for sure how his father ended up under the streetcar—the coroner ruled Earl Little Sr.'s death accidental—but growing up fatherless, all but certain that white supremacists had killed his dad, Malcolm was embittered from an early age. He often told white journalists, “Your father isn't here to pay his debts. My father isn't here to collect. But I'm here to collect, and you're here to pay.”
¹⁴

Burdened by their fathers' broken dreams and shattered lives, Malcolm Little and Cassius Clay transformed the deep pain and anger that they felt into an unshakeable pride. Tormented by the past, they resisted the brutality of America, relentlessly pursuing redemption. One man was scarred by his father's absence, the other by his father's presence. They shared the kind of anguish and love that only a brother could understand.