Blood Brothers (45 page)

The following day, Elijah held a press conference from his living room. He spoke impassively, denying any knowledge about Malcolm's murder. According to his grandson, Elijah was sitting in his office when he heard the news on the radio. “Oh my God!” he exclaimed. Speechless, he sat quietly for about thirty minutes until he said that he wanted to go home. When reporters asked him if he had ever heard of the suspect, “Thomas Hagan,” he answered, “he is a stranger to us.”
⁵⁶

In the days leading up to the annual Saviours' Day Convention, officers escorted Ali everywhere he went. The police figured that if Malcolm's avengers could not get their hands on Elijah, they most certainly would try to kill Ali. On Tuesday, February 23, the morning after a firebomb exploded at Mosque No. 7, completely gutting the Harlem temple, reporters hounded Ali. Anticipating open warfare, writers asked him if he feared death. “I'm with God. If I'm gonna die for truth, I'm ready to die. I ain't afraid. I ain't afraid of nothing.”
⁵⁷

Facing death threats, he remained defiant, professing his faith in the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. Publicly, he maintained a loyal front, but his mother sensed that her son wavered about being in the Nation. “I heard he wants to quit [the Muslims],” Odessa said. “I hope he does.” In her heart, though, she doubted that her son would actually leave Elijah. Ali never seriously considered breaking with him. He was in too deep. And now, as a spokesman of the Nation, he could show no remorse for the deceased. “Malcolm X was my friend and he was the friend of everybody as long as he was a member of Islam,” he said. “Now I don't want to talk about him no more.”
⁵⁸

On Friday, February 26, Muhammad preached for more than two hours at the Coliseum. Outside the old stadium on Wabash Avenue, the police set up a tight perimeter comparable to that for a presidential visit. Two days earlier, they had received a phone call from a man who claimed that he had planted a bomb inside the stadium. Undeterred,
Muhammad stepped to the podium. Surrounded by a phalanx of “grimfaced” troopers standing shoulder to shoulder, the Fruit created a bulwark around the Messenger.
⁵⁹

“Malcolm was a hypocrite who got what he was preaching,” he declared, his voice cracking between coughing spells. “If he had not been a hypocrite, we could have given him a glorious burial,” but Malcolm “went around the country trying to slander me.”

Standing on the dais next to Louis X, Ali endorsed Elijah, clapping enthusiastically and repeatedly shouting, “Amen!' and “Yes, sir!” Muhammad's frail voice hardly carried in the cavernous arena, but the crowd followed Ali's cues, showering him with praise: “Sweet words! That's right! That's right!” If Malcolm had not turned his back “on me,” Elijah preached, “we would have stood over his body and prayed with tears of grief in our eyes.” But no one on the stage, not Louis, not Ali, not Elijah, not even Malcolm's own brothers, Philbert and Wilfred, shed a tear. “It's wrong,” Muhammad reminded his followers, “to even stand beside the grave of a hypocrite.”

S
ATURDAY
, F
EBRUARY
27, felt like the coldest day of winter. Just before sunrise, mourners began lining up outside Faith Temple Church of God in Christ on Amsterdam Avenue. Braving the bitter chill, grievers quietly huddled together, their hands jammed into their pockets and coat collars pulled up to their ears. As the sun climbed the morning sky, the temperature rose to fourteen degrees. Emerging from the subway, people extended the line, four abreast, down the block and around the corner onto 147th Street. Police barricades could hardly contain the overflowing crowd, estimated at 2,500. Earlier in the week, more than twenty thousand people had viewed Malcolm in his copper casket at the Unity Funeral Chapel on Eighth Avenue. Now, around nine thirty a.m., cameramen from WNBC began filming the funeral procession, capturing images of old women weeping and people hanging out of tenement windows watching the action below. Police squads patrolled the sidewalks while officers stationed on rooftops searched for signs of trouble.
⁶⁰

Inside the church, an old renovated movie house, Malcolm's glass-covered coffin lay beneath two murals of Jesus. Despite the Christian setting, Sheikh Ahmed Hassoun made sure that Malcolm received a proper Muslim funeral. At nine forty-five, Betty arrived, dressed in
black, her face hidden behind a veil. Bomb threats—“We'll cremate Malcolm with firebombs”—frightened the pregnant widow out of bringing her four daughters to the service. Escorted by Malcolm's security team and a group of policemen, she walked steadily toward the casket, tears streaming down her face, her upper lip quivering. When she reached the casket, she leaned toward Malcolm, who was wrapped in a white burial sheet, and kissed the glass that separated them. Surrounded by friends, family, newsmen, and photographers, Betty sat in a second-row pew, “looking terribly beautiful and alone.” Some of the most notable figures in black America joined her, including Bayard Rustin, Andrew Young, John Lewis, and Dick Gregory.
⁶¹

During his former friend's funeral, Muhammad Ali spent the day in Chicago performing a boxing exhibition at the Nation's Unity Bazaar. Bounding around the ring in a white T-shirt, the champ looked overweight and sluggish, not yet fully recovered from his hernia surgery. The Muslims had expected a large crowd, but less than ten percent of the Coliseum's 7,500 seats were filled. Ali did not seem too worried that the police and the FBI were watching him. It was no secret that there were men who had loved Malcolm more than he did, vengeful men who were willing to kill the champ. “Shoot Clay too,” one of them said. “Why not? Why shouldn't we shoot him? Right in the ring in front of all his people.”
⁶²

If the death threats scared Ali, he showed no fear. Instead, he clowned for five rounds, playfully contorting his face while he taunted his brother and tossed a few jabs. When Rahman hit him in the fifth, he pretended that he was hurt and took a dive, provoking laughter from the crowd. On a day of mourning, columnist Jimmy Breslin could not understand how Ali could act so flippant, entertaining the same men who reveled in Malcolm's death. The champ had surrounded himself with “the dull-minded, dangerous fanatics who will kill for this cult, just as they ran into the Audubon auditorium in broad daylight and killed Malcolm X last Sunday.” Watching the scene unfold, Breslin wondered if Ali ever really loved Malcolm at all.
⁶³

In New York, Malcolm's friend, playwright and actor Ossie Davis, delivered a powerful eulogy. Looking out at the black faces in the packed church, Davis was reminded that Harlem truly loved Malcolm. The actor wanted the world to know that Malcolm was not a “fanatic, a racist,”
or a violent demagogue. Those who cast Malcolm as evil never really knew him, he said. To Malcolm's critics, he asked, “Did you ever talk to Brother Malcolm? Did you ever touch him, or have him smile at you? Did you ever really listen to him?”
⁶⁴

Those who really knew Malcolm understood why the congregation honored him. Malcolm spoke for the powerless, the downtrodden, the voiceless black man. He was an authentic symbol of black pride, strength, and redemption, and he spoke the truth without cowering from whites. A champion of self-determination, he probed America's deepest wound, the gulf between the country's democratic ideals and its inequalities. Ultimately, he died in the struggle for Black Power; he died so that other blacks could live without fear, so that they could realize their dreams of freedom. Malcolm, Davis declared, was one of Harlem's “brightest hopes,” he was “our manhood, our living black manhood! This was his meaning to his people. And in honoring him, we honor the best in ourselves.”
⁶⁵

When Davis finished speaking, the pallbearers loaded Malcolm's casket into a silver-blue hearse. For twenty miles, a police escort led the fifty-car procession out of the city, through Yonkers and Westchester, to the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, a hamlet in the town of Greenburgh. Around eleven thirty-five, the convoy passed through the cemetery gates. In the Pinewood section of the graveyard, two hundred mourners gathered around plot 150, which was marked with a bronze plaque that read, “
EL-HAJJ MALIK EL-SHABAZZ
.”
⁶⁶

After reciting the final Muslim prayers, a group of cemetery workers lowered the casket into the bottom of the cold, muddy grave. When the white workers grabbed shovels, a few of the brothers interjected. The undertaker told them that their caravan was already leaving. If they stayed behind, they would have no way to get home. “We'll walk,” one of the mourners replied. When the brothers started tossing handfuls of dirt into the grave, the white men backed away, surrendering their shovels. The brothers picked up the tools, scooped the dirt, and filled the grave while the last mourners watched in silence. “No white man,” one of them said, “is going to bury Malcolm.”
⁶⁷

Epilogue

ONCE THE HATE IS GONE

            
Cassius Clay will be the first heavyweight champion in history to train in a bullet-proof ring.

—
DAVID GORDON,
BOSTON GLOBE
, FEBRUARY
23, 1965

A
poisonous mood pervaded Muhammad Ali's camp as he prepared for his rematch against Sonny Liston. “The atmosphere surrounding the fight was ugly,” Jerry Izenberg recalled. “Malcolm was dead, and there were rumors Ali was going to be killed, maybe in the ring, in retaliation.” At one point, a week or so before the fight, while Ali was getting a rubdown after a workout, a reporter asked him if he had heard the stories about Malcolm's people coming after him. He lifted his head angrily, a cruel note in his voice. “What people? Malcolm ain't got no people.”
¹

In the days leading up to the fight, the rumors intensified. Supposedly, carloads of heavily armed men—Malcolm's men—had left New York headed for Ali's camp. There were other tales too. One story held that the Nation of Islam had threatened to kill Liston unless he took a dive. Other scuttlebutt suggested that the Nation would discard the champ if he lost, but Ali refused to believe a word of it. “lies, all lies,” he shouted during a news conference. “The hell with Malcolm's boys!” he erupted, pounding a table with his fist. “Who are they?”
²

Paranoia swept through the St. Dominic's Arena in Lewiston, Maine. On May 25, 1965, security guards scrutinized every black man who walked through the turnstiles. Officers searched purses, briefcases, and coat pockets. Hours before the contest they combed the old hockey
stadium, searching for “poison gas bombs.” The match was originally scheduled to take place in Boston, but a few weeks before the fight Massachusetts authorities refused to sanction it, claiming that the promoter had ties to organized crime. The fight moved to Lewiston, an impoverished textile town and unlikely site for a heavyweight title match, leaving the Muslims increasingly suspicious that Ali was being set up. Unconvinced that the police had thoroughly searched St. Dominic's, Clarence X inspected the air vents in Ali's dressing room, “afraid poison gas would be shot into it.”
³

All the talk about a murder in the ring contributed to the pathetic turnout. Officially, the ring announcer declared the evening's attendance to be 4,280, but
Sports Illustrated
's Tex Maule reported that there could not have been more than 1,200 fans present. And even fewer of them actually saw how the fight ended.
⁴

It all happened in the blink of an eye. After the opening bell rang, Ali stormed toward Liston, hitting him with a hard right cross. For about a minute they danced as Ali moved clockwise, his head high and his gloves low. He moved cautiously, looking for an opening. Plodding toward Ali, Liston tried to cut off the ring, pawing at the champ. Liston tossed a few amateurish jabs, lunged forward, and lost his balance. At that moment, Ali leaned back, dodging Liston's punch. Quickly, he planted his left foot, and snapped a short, chopping right flush on Liston's chin. Sonny collapsed as if a sniper had shot him. But only his reputation died that night.
⁵

A chorus of boos rained from the stunned fans. “Fake! Fake!” the crowd shouted. Few ringside observers could believe that Ali's single whipping punch had knocked Liston down. Sportswriters labeled the final blow “the phantom punch,” implying that Ali never actually hit Liston, or at least, he had not hit him hard enough to end the fight.
⁶

Upon review of the fight film, and with the benefit of slow-motion technology, writers determined that Ali “perfectly delivered” a hard, blurring right. He threw the final punch at precisely the right instant—the moment Liston lost his balance and fell toward him, exposing his chin. Sonny never saw it coming. Sprawled across the canvas, Ali loomed over him, his right hand cocked, muscles flexed, shouting, “Get up and fight, sucker!” Neil Leifer, a young photographer from
Sports Illustrated
,
snapped an iconic picture of Ali towering above Liston, taunting the fallen fighter. That photograph would become the most recognizable and enduring image of him during the sixties, capturing Ali's essence: his strength and beauty, his arrogance and boldness, everything that made Americans love and hate him.
⁷

“T
HE ATHLETE OF
the decade,” Jimmy Cannon opined in 1970, “has to be Cassius Clay, who is now Muhammad Ali. He is all that the sixties were. It is as though he were created to represent them.” In many ways, Ali personified the cultural changes of his times. During the decade he became the most important athlete in America, a controversial figure who transcended sports, shaping cultural debates about race, war, and religion. More than any other athlete, his life fused the political upheavals of the age. His entire boxing career was defined by the social and political movements of the decade.
⁸

This became more evident in early 1966. The United States military had lowered its threshold for intelligence exam scores, leaving him eligible for service. On February 17, after the Louisville draft board denied his request for deferment on numerous procedural grounds, Ali received dozens of phone calls from reporters. Confused, he could not understand why the government suddenly wanted to send him to Vietnam. The Muslim brothers hanging around his Miami house tormented him with frightful predictions that Uncle Sam would soon tighten the noose around his neck. One of them said, “Some cracker sergeant is gonna drop a grenade down your pants and blow your balls off.” Flustered by the television crews gathering in his lawn and the calls, Ali became agitated. When a reporter asked him for what seemed like the hundredth time what he thought about the Vietcong, he finally snapped. “Man, I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong!”
⁹

Ali's memorable line splashed across the front pages of the nation's newspapers. His defensive outburst made many Americans despise him even more than they already did. Critics excoriated him as an unpatriotic coward, calling for boycotts of his matches. Amidst an escalating antiwar movement, establishment writers portrayed him as a spoiled brat, no better than the draft dodgers on college campuses. “Squealing over the possibility that the military may call him up,” Red Smith
charged, “Cassius makes himself as sorry a spectacle as those unwashed punks who picket and demonstrate against the war.”
¹⁰

While Ali's draft status threatened his boxing career, his personal life unraveled. When his contract with the Louisville Sponsoring Group expired that year, Herbert Muhammad became his exclusive business manager, gaining greater control over his life. Herbert strongly disapproved of Ali's wife because Sonji frequently questioned the directives Muslim authorities gave her husband. Her disobedience, Herbert claimed, made her an unfit wife.

About a month before his military reclassification, Ali divorced Sonji, claiming that she had not adhered to the tenets of the Nation of Islam as she promised. Sonji contended that Herbert had pressured him into the divorce. Facing alimony payments, Ali had filed an appeal on the grounds of financial hardship. Now, after his draft status had changed, he protested that his previous purses were tied up in litigation, and therefore he could not afford to pay alimony unless he continued boxing.
¹¹

On the same day that the Selective Service announced his appeal, a New York judge sentenced Talmadge Hayer and two other men to life for Malcolm's murder. Hayer confessed his involvement in the assassination but insisted that the other defendants, Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson, were innocent. “I just want the truth to be known that Butler and Johnson didn't have anything to do with this crime,” he said, “because I was there, I know what happened, I know the people that did take part in it.” During the trial, Hayer never disclosed who ordered the hit on Malcolm. More than a decade later, though, he filed affidavits naming four other alleged accomplices. New York authorities, however, refused to reopen the case.
¹²

Muhammad Ali never talked about the murder trial. He had other problems on his mind. On March 22, 1967, a few weeks after he received military orders for induction, he anxiously sat in his hotel bed, unable to sleep, his eyes downcast, contemplating his uncertain future. Around two a.m., Sugar Ray Robinson knocked at the door. Robinson worried that the draft pressure was taking its toll on him. He reminded Ali that he needed sleep if he was going to defeat Zora Folley later that evening.
¹³

“What's wrong champ?” he asked.

“The army,” Ali answered with trepidation. “They're gonna want me soon. But I can't go.”

“But you have to go,” Robinson argued, without mentioning that he had been accused of desertion during World War II. “What's this can't?”

“Elijah Muhammad told me that I can't go.” The Nation's separatist principles would never allow him to serve alongside whites.

“You won't see a gun,” Robinson maintained. Ali would just have to fight some exhibitions like he and Joe Louis had. “It'll be a snap. If you don't, they'll send you to jail, pick up your license.” Ali risked everything if he refused to serve—his title, his career, his income—everything.

“Well, Elijah Muhammad told me,” he said, conceding his future to the Messenger's wishes.

“Forget the old man,” Robinson urged. “Is Elijah going to go to jail, and all those other Muslims?”

“But I'm afraid, Ray,” he admitted with tears in his eyes. “I'm really afraid.”

“Afraid of what? Of the Muslims if you don't do what they told you?”

Ali would not answer. Robinson pressed, but the champ remained silent. When Robinson recalled the story for a writer, he said, “If you ask me, he wasn't afraid of jail. He was scared of being killed by the Muslims.”

M
UHAMMAD
A
LI WOULD
not give boxing exhibitions for the army, nor would he fight the Vietcong. “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?” he asked a reporter from
Sports Illustrated
. “If I thought going to war would bring freedom and equality to twenty-two million of my people, they wouldn't have to draft me. I'd join tomorrow. But I either have to obey the laws of the land or the laws of Allah. I have nothing to lose by standing up and following my beliefs. We've been in jail for four hundred years.”
¹⁴

On April 20, 1967, Ali refused induction at the US Armed Forces Examining and Entrance Station in Houston. He proclaimed that he was a conscientious objector, opposing all wars undeclared by Allah. Immediately after he refused induction—before he had been charged
with a crime—the New York State Athletic Commission suspended his boxing license and withdrew his heavyweight title for conduct “detrimental to the best interests of boxing.” Athletic commissions across the country followed New York's lead, forbidding his presence in the ring. On June 20, a federal court convicted him of draft evasion, sentencing him to the maximum five-year imprisonment and ten-thousand-dollar fine. For the next three and a half years, during his appeal and the prime of his boxing career, he was banished from the ring. Although he never went to prison, his fans believed that the government and the boxing authorities that banned him from the ring had already shackled him.
¹⁵

Without boxing, Ali fell on hard times. In early 1969, during a paid television interview on
ABC's Wide World of Sports
, he complained to Howard Cosell that he was nearly broke and that he would return to boxing if the price was right. Infuriated, Elijah Muhammad immediately suspended him for failing to follow his teachings of prudence. In the pages of
Muhammad Speaks
, the Messenger announced that Ali was barred from all NOI meetings and speaking with its members. The Nation would no longer recognize him as a Muslim. Giving him back his slave name, Elijah declared, “We will call him Cassius Clay.”
¹⁶

In Elijah's view, Ali had made a grave mistake, placing “his hopes and trust in the enemy of Allah for survival.” When the twenty-seven-year-old boxer suggested that he would sacrifice his religious principles for “the white man's money,” Elijah decided to make an example out of him for those “who are weak in the faith.”
¹⁷

Ali's experience in the Nation now mirrored Malcolm's. Like Malcolm, he outwardly worshipped Elijah. When Elijah suspended him, Ali was crushed. He hoped that the Messenger would eventually forgive him and welcome him back into the movement. Yet without boxing, Ali had lost his value. Without the ring, without that world stage, he was just another acolyte. In his weakest moment, when he could not raise money or generate good publicity for the Nation, Elijah disowned him, casting him outside the Nation as he had done to Malcolm before him.