Blood Brothers (31 page)

Before the fight, Muhammad had made no public announcement supporting Cassius. He had believed what most boxing experts believed: Liston would not only defeat Clay, he would pummel him. No one from
Muhammad Speaks
was sent to Miami to cover the fight. The last thing Elijah wanted was for the Nation to be disgraced by a follower laid out on his back. When Malcolm first asked Muhammad for permission to attend the fight in Miami, the Messenger answered, “Yes, [but] if you do go, it will be as a private person. You will not in any way be representing us, because it's impossible for Cassius Clay to win.”
²⁵

The day after Clay won, Muhammad confessed something that no one had heard from him before. The deaf, dumb, and blind “wanted [Cassius] to get his face torn up, but Allah and myself said, ‘No!'” Then he delivered a message meant for Malcolm: “Clay had confidence in Allah and in me as his
only
messenger.” His faith in Allah and his inspiration from Muhammad—not Malcolm—“assured his victory and left him unscarred.”
²⁶

A
ROUND EIGHT O
'
CLOCK
the next morning, Malcolm met Cassius for breakfast at the Hampton House, where they read Muhammad's announcement in the papers. Cassius had become a pawn in a power struggle between Malcolm and Elijah, and the Supreme Minister had just made a bold move. Now it was Malcolm's turn. He realized that he had to do something to lure Cassius; he had to offer him something that Muhammad could not.
²⁷

Time, Malcolm realized, was running out. Elijah would not wait much longer before he made another move. At that moment, Robert Lipsyte observed, Malcolm “understood that he had not really, totally” reached Clay. When he finished reading Muhammad's statement, he folded the paper and tossed it onto the counter, knowing that he had to keep one eye on Cassius and the other on Elijah.
²⁸

Seeing Cassius talk with Malcolm made reporters ask the new champion if Muhammad's statement about his membership in the Nation was accurate. “That is true, and I am proud of it,” he answered. “But what's all the commotion about?” The commotion was all about the country's fears—fears of a religion most Americans knew little about; fears that the Muslims were a black menace lurking in the shadows; fears that Elijah Muhammad intended to lead a violent uprising; and fears that Cassius Clay was the bogeyman in the closet.
²⁹

Sportswriters wanted to know why he had joined the Black Muslims. “You call it Black Muslims, I don't,” he asserted. “This is a name that has been given to us by the press. Yet people brand us a hate group. They say we want to take over the country. They say we're Communists.” None of it was true. The Muslims, he said, didn't carry knives or guns. They were peaceful people who avoided confrontation. He joined the Nation because the Muslims offered a sanctuary, a utopia free from racial violence. “I want peace and I do not find peace in an integrated world,” he explained. “I don't want to be blown up. I don't want to be washed down sewers. I just want to be with my own kind.”
³⁰

A childhood friend later explained to Jack Olsen that when Cassius talked “about race—when he says, ‘I don't want to be bombed. I don't want to be set on fire. I don't want to be lynched or have no dogs chase me'—he's expressing a general fright more than a real racial attitude.” Cassius “finds it safer to be with Negroes, his own kind. It allays his fear of all those things his father used to tell him the whites'd do to him. He keeps this tight little Negro group around him, and he's scared to death to venture away from it.”
³¹

Clay maintained that it was only “natural” for blacks to live among blacks and for whites to live among whites. Sounding like Malcolm's assistant minister, he said, “We believe that forced and token integration is but a temporary and not an everlasting solution to the Negro problem. It is merely a pacifier. We don't think one people should force its culture upon another.” Malcolm grinned as he listened to his pupil deliver one of his favorite lines: “A rooster crows only when it sees the light. Put him in the dark and he'll never crow. I have seen the light and I'm crowing.”
³²

As he listened to Clay's answers, he heard his voice grow stronger, bolder, and more defiant. There was no other athlete in America who
so audaciously challenged the politics of the sports world. “Clay is the finest Negro athlete I have ever known,” Malcolm asserted, “the man who will mean more to his people than any athlete before him. He is more than Jackie Robinson was, because Robinson is the white man's hero. But Cassius is the black man's hero. Do you know why? Because the white press wanted him to lose. They wanted him to lose because he is a Muslim. You notice nobody cares about the religion of other athletes. But their prejudice against Clay blinded them to his ability.”
³³

White men were not the only ones blinded by Cassius. In their private moments together, between the minister's lectures and lessons, during their conversations and laughter, Malcolm came to believe in their friendship, their brotherhood, their bond. He rarely trusted any man, and few ever visited his home for family dinners the way that Cassius did. Malcolm fell for Clay's boyish wonder, his innocence and charm. Never did he imagine that Clay would hurt him. He trusted his own eyes, seeing only what he wanted to see: a magnetic young black man full of conviction and sincerity.

But Malcolm failed to apply the key lesson from his relationship with Elijah Muhammad: things were not always what they seemed. Later that day, Malcolm and Cassius made plans to see each other again soon. They shook hands, Malcolm congratulated him once more, and then he departed for the airport.

As he waited for his flight to New York, Malcolm probably thought about Clay and how their friendship had evolved. He'd never felt closer to him than he had during the days between his suspension and Clay's title celebration. They had known each other for only a little more than a year and a half, but in the past month their relationship had matured swiftly, as swiftly, almost, as it would crumble.

After Malcolm left, Rudy and Sam Saxon returned from Chicago. They arrived with a message for Cassius. During the Saviours' Day Convention, Saxon told Captain Joseph all about Malcolm's maneuvering in Miami. Joseph shook his head in disgust, convinced that the suspended minister was trying to manipulate Clay. Elijah, he told Saxon, had already determined that Malcolm would never return to the Nation. Malcolm was an outcast, a marked man with one foot in the grave. Send word to Cassius, Joseph instructed: he better not get too close to Malcolm.
³⁴

Chapter Thirteen

THE SHAKEUP

            
Boxing is sport, not politics. But Cassius Clay, without any political experience, would immerse sport in politics.

—
A. S. “DOC” YOUNG,
LOS ANGELES SENTINEL

C
assius Clay arrived in New York on a mission. “I'm gonna shake up this town,” he announced.

On March 1, around three p.m., after riding more than 1,200 miles in his bus Big Red, he and his six-man entourage checked into the Hotel Theresa. Clay stepped off the bus in no mood to celebrate. Crossing the Mason-Dixon line convinced him, once again, that he would rather live in New York than Louisville or Miami. “I'm heavyweight champion of the world, yet, for a day and a half I had to eat bologna out of a bag . . . simply because I'm black,” he complained. At every southern stop white men could not have cared less that he was the heavyweight champion. No black man, they reminded him, was welcome in a white restaurant. And yet, he could not understand why his “own people,” he said, “so-called Negroes,” still asked him, “‘Why are you a Muslim?'”
¹

Clay felt more at home on the streets of Harlem, where black fans gave him a hero's welcome. “I could be living all exclusive, downtown, in some skyscraper,” he said, but he preferred being around his own people at the Theresa. His face broke into a wide smile when a crowd of black kids rushed toward him, shouting his name. For more than an hour, he signed autographs in the lobby. At a hotel with mostly black clientele, he figured that he would not find any trouble, except for the women who showed up at his suite at all hours of the night, posing as Muslims.
²

In Harlem, Malcolm's home turf, the minister smiled like he was in the catbird seat. During the first week of March 1964, Malcolm clung to the new heavyweight champion as if his life depended on him. His designs for Cassius X seemed within his grasp, but the boxer had plans for slipping away.
Associated Press

At the corner of Seventh Avenue and 125th Street, the Hotel Theresa sat at the nexus of black culture. A white terracotta building situated near Harlem's most popular nightclubs and the Apollo Theater, the Theresa was known for catering to black celebrities. Writers, actors, bandleaders, and athletes found everything that they needed inside the hotel: multiroom suites, business offices, a barbershop, beauty parlor, bar, and restaurant. Reporters looking for a scoop came to the Theresa knowing that something newsworthy was always happening. All they had to do was tip a doorman and they were bound to learn something that they could write about. Every night, it seemed, somebody
important—a diplomat or a national leader—stayed at the Theresa. Castro, Lumumba, Nasser, Nkrumah, and Khrushchev, a who's who of American critics, had all visited the “Waldorf of Harlem.”
³

Outside the thirteen-story hotel, soapbox speakers railed against the white man while paperboys sold copies of the
Amsterdam News
. Across the street, radicals held court at Lewis Michaux's African National Memorial Bookstore. Surrounded by stacks of books, pamphlets, and magazines, Michaux, a slight septuagenarian known among Nationalists as “the Professor,” educated visitors about history and politics, telling old stories about his days in the United Negro Improvement Association. Malcolm became one of his most prized pupils, listening intently as the former window washer preached about Pan-Africanism and American hypocrisy. One time, as he often did, Malcolm pulled out a pocket-size notebook and a red pen, jotting down something Michaux had said about “America's chickens coming home to roost.”
⁴

After his banishment from Mosque No. 7, Malcolm moved into an office at the Theresa, even though the most famous “Negro” hotel in the country was no longer the popular destination it once was. In fact, it was never really the glamorous getaway writers made it out to be. “With its dimly lit hallways, drab colorless bedrooms, dingy ancient furnishing, and limited room service, the Theresa,”
Ebony
magazine noted in 1946, “is anything but a first-rate hotel.” In the succeeding years, the hotel's owners neglected necessary repairs, and the building began deteriorating along with the neighborhood around it. By the time Malcolm settled into Suite 128, the hotel's white brick was smeared with soot, its luster long gone.
⁵

Malcolm's mezzanine office had served at one time or another as a brokerage firm and a cosmetics company, and traces of both were still present. When visitors reached his office door they could still read an old hand-painted sign:
EVE NELSON COSMETICS
. Inside the large conference room, sparsely furnished with two cluttered desks and a few folding chairs, Malcolm designed his future plans, pinning news clippings to a bulletin board and writing ideas on a wall-sized chalkboard. It was an unimpressive workspace, but Malcolm recognized that its proximity to his former mosque—the home that he had known for the last decade—made it an ideal place to set up his new headquarters.
⁶

When Cassius checked into the hotel, he visited with Malcolm for “a secret conference,” only they did not meet in his mentor's office. Instead, Malcolm came to him, knocking on Clay's suite door. Even before Cassius became champion, from the moment Malcolm set foot in Miami, their relationship fundamentally changed. Cassius, the title contender, altered Malcolm's thinking. In a moment of weakness, he exploited his friendship with Clay, manipulating him and withholding the truth about his future in the Nation. In a desperate attempt to prove his value to Elijah, he offered to deliver Clay to Chicago after the title fight, treating Cassius like some prize that could be bartered or traded. But Elijah did not have to buy Clay's loyalty. He already owned it.
⁷

Reporters assumed that Clay was Malcolm's most devoted follower. One New York writer claimed that “an insider” told him that Clay was “solidly in Malcolm's corner and would” prove influential in helping “his friend to establish a cult of his own.” Other writers speculated that if Cassius teamed with Malcolm, then Elijah would lose many of his followers to their rival Muslim movement.
⁸

By all appearances, Cassius and Malcolm had never been tighter. After Cassius arrived, later that afternoon, they toured Times Square, parading the streets and shaking hands with strangers as if they were running for office on the same ticket. When a reporter from the
Amsterdam News
spoke to Malcolm, he gave no indication of trying to persuade Clay to leave the Nation. He was still waiting for just the right moment to tell him the truth about Elijah. Cassius, he told the writer, “dances like Sugar Ray, punches like Joe Louis, and
thinks
like Elijah Muhammad.” In time, Malcolm would wish that Cassius thought more like him.
⁹

L
ATER THAT EVENING
, after watching a film of Clay's championship match at a theater, Cassius and Malcolm were surrounded by a crowd of nearly five hundred on Broadway at Times Square. While Clay signed more autographs, photographers snapped pictures of Malcolm standing beside him with a satisfied smile on his face. Seeing them together, reporters concluded, no one could doubt that they were planning a bold political initiative. Clay felt he had jumped beyond the world of sports. “I'm shaking up Times Square now,” he declared. “In a few days, I'll
shake up the United Nations. I'm going to meet all the delegates.” After speaking with writers and fans for about twenty-five minutes, Clay and Malcolm squeezed through the crowd, making their way toward a limousine, and disappeared.
¹⁰

The next day, March 2, Malcolm arranged for them to visit the offices of the
Amsterdam News
, where Clay said that he would no longer acknowledge the name of “a Kentucky slave master.” Now, he said, “I will be known as Cassius X.” When a reporter at the
News
asked him about Elijah and Malcolm, he feigned ignorance of any rift between them. “Elijah Muhammad is the sweetest man in the world,” he said. “Malcolm X? I fell in love with him after watching him on television with those educators—leaving them with their mouths wide open.”
¹¹

Malcolm was not the only friend Cassius visited in New York. The following evening, he met Sam Cooke at a Columbia recording studio on Seventh Avenue, where they cut a snappy rendition of “Hey, Hey, the Gang's All Here.” Since the previous summer, when he'd covered Ben King's hit song “Stand By Me,” Cassius had become more comfortable in the studio, though he still sounded a bit tentative when he sang. On his album,
The Greatest
, he did not really sing—he mostly recited poems—but his unbridled confidence and Sam's encouragement convinced him that he could become a singer. Realizing Cassius's range was limited, Sam arranged for him to perform a simple, fun tune that accentuated his soulfulness.
¹²

Later Sam and Cassius appeared on BBC's
Grandstand.
Host Harry Carpenter had met Clay in England before the Cooper fight and now detected that Cassius was “a changed man.” The champ admitted that he had changed, and that he no longer needed “to talk like I used to.” Yet he struggled with his identity. He was unsure how he would express his new freedom now that he was champion and the world knew that he was a Muslim. Only a few months earlier, he'd told the Louisville Sponsoring Group that he no longer wanted to be a showman. He was not interested in being a clown on television. He'd said that he wanted people to take him more seriously. But now his representatives at the William Morris Agency were in the middle of negotiating “a deal involving millions of dollars” where he would perform on television, on tour, and on more records. It was an enticing offer that made him reconsider his position. Ultimately, the negotiations broke down when booking
agents and record executives learned more about his relationship with the Black Muslims. “Malcolm X,” one New York columnist learned, “has cost him a fortune in endorsements, TV shots, and disc sales.”
¹³

If he was not careful, Elijah warned, Malcolm might cost him much more. Captain Joseph called Elijah on March 4 and told him that Malcolm had informed a local radio station that his suspension was over and that he had been reinstated with his full responsibilities. Stunned, Elijah replied, “Well, I'll stop him.” Muhammad then mailed Malcolm a letter informing him that his suspension remained indefinite. Furthermore, Elijah told Captain Joseph, Cassius should not visit the UN with Malcolm during his suspension. In the meantime, Muhammad continued to calculate his next move.
¹⁴

The next afternoon, March 5, around one p.m., Cassius, Rudy, Archie, and Malcolm arrived at the United Nations, where they met with delegates from Africa and Asia. As the group entered the delegates' lounge, African dignitaries greeted Cassius and Malcolm with invitations to visit their countries. “We're proud of you. Come whenever you can,” a Liberian ambassador said. “Thank you, sir,” Cassius replied. “I have longed to go back home to Liberia.” Cassius floated in a room of important men, all paying homage to him. Esteemed political figures from around the world knew his name; they knew that he was champion—the first Muslim champion of the world—and they treated him with respect. He recognized that he was becoming a global figure, “champion of the
whole
world,” he emphasized. “The people are really shook up and they look at me as if I was a messenger or prophet or something.”
¹⁵