Blood Brothers (8 page)

Whenever possible Malcolm visited Chicago. A mutual friend recalled, “I sat in Elijah Muhammad's home one Saturday morning while he was lecturing a group of ministers. The doorbell rang, and a servant came in and announced that Malcolm had come. Elijah's eyes lit up as if the prodigal son was home. He leaped from his seat and when Malcolm appeared they embraced and kissed.” Muhammad had no doubt that Malcolm would take a bullet for him. Malcolm had said as much: “I would give my life so that he may live. He has done so much for me.”
³²

Yet Muhammad was not the only one closely following Malcolm's growing influence within the Nation. In late 1958, a black FBI informant assessed the New York minister's rising power: “Brother
MALCOLM
ranks about third in influence”—behind Muhammad and his son-in-law, Supreme Captain of the Fruit, Raymond Sharrieff. “Outside of the Messenger's immediate family he is the most trusted follower. He is an excellent speaker, forceful and convincing. He is an expert organizer and untiring worker. . . .
MALCOLM
has a strong hatred for ‘blue eyed devils,' but this hatred is not likely to erupt in violence as he is much too clever and intelligent for that. . . . He is fearless and cannot be intimidated by words or threats or personal harm. He has most of the answers at his fingertips,” and, the informant warned, “he should be carefully dealt with.”
³³

M
ORE THAN ANY
other event, the documentary
The Hate That Hate Produced
brought Malcolm into the country's national consciousness. In New York, journalist Louis Lomax and news anchor Mike Wallace sensed that the rising popularity of the Black Muslims in Harlem and the surrounding controversy over their beliefs would spark great interest. In the summer of 1959, Lomax gained Muhammad's cooperation through Malcolm. In a sensationalized narrative, Wallace told viewers that they were watching “a story of black racism.” The documentary portrayed the Muslims as adversaries of the civil rights movement. The growing “black supremacist group,” it declared, taught their “anti-white” and “anti-American” doctrine in more than fifty cities and claimed more than 250,000 members, an exaggerated figure that only enhanced viewers' fears about the Nation.
³⁴

In the documentary, Muhammad's heir apparent, the younger, more charismatic minister Malcolm X, overshadowed the Nation's leader. Almost overnight, Malcolm appeared on news broadcasts across the country. The national media's reaction to the documentary convinced Muhammad that the press deliberately distorted his teachings in an effort to undermine him.
³⁵

Widespread attacks on the Nation convinced Muhammad that Malcolm should respond directly to critics, despite accusations from some Nation officials who blamed the New York minister for seeking too much publicity. Yet Muhammad insisted that Malcolm should become more visible. If Malcolm became famous, he explained, “it will make
me
better known.”
³⁶

Over the next year, Malcolm began traveling more, giving interviews on television and radio. He visited college campuses, delivered lectures, and engaged in public debates. His life became “a blur of planes and trains, speeches and sermons.” His frequent appearances on television shaped a public perception that Malcolm
was
the Muslims, creating envy inside the Nation's headquarters. Muhammad warned him, “You will grow to be hated when you become well known. Because usually people get jealous of public figures.”
³⁷

Given his recent heart attack and chronic bronchial asthma, Muhammad could never have taken on the demands of traveling as Malcolm did. The frail sexagenarian's deteriorating health led him to move to the drier climate of Phoenix, Arizona. Separated from the national
headquarters, he empowered Raymond Sharrieff, John Ali, and his sons, Herbert and Elijah Jr., to run the daily operations in Chicago.

Muhammad's physical decline and heightened sense of mortality led him to tighten his grip on the world around him. He carefully monitored his ministers, requiring them to record their weekly sermons and send tapes to Chicago, ensuring that they did not deviate from his message. He especially depended on Sharrieff and his network of temple informants to report any conflicts or subversive activity within the Nation.
³⁸

The more hostile attention the Muslims received from outsiders, the more paranoid Muhammad became. “He has tremendous faith in himself and Allah,” a minster told journalist William Worthy. “He trusts his subordinates to a degree, but essentially he thinks that no one is his friend. He alone is going to run the Nation of Islam and he is so strong right now that a split in the organization would be impossible at this time.”
³⁹

I
N THE SPRING
and winter of 1960, thousands of college students in dozens of cities settled on a new tactic for forcing change to the civil rights landscape: the sit-in. This nonviolent direct action movement was aimed at desegregating southern lunch counters. Yet the sit-in was of little use in the North, where black people could eat at any coffee shop or lunch counter. There, the blurred color line of
de facto
segregation, hardened by history and custom, created separate and unequal neighborhoods, poor public schools, dilapidated housing projects, and persistent unemployment. Trapped in a cycle of poverty, blacks lived as second-class citizens, fatigued by empty promises of a better life. “The mood of the Negro, particularly in New York City,” Louis Lomax asserted, “is very, very bitter. He is losing faith. The Negro on the streets of Harlem is tired of platitudes from white liberals.”
⁴⁰

On a mild Saturday afternoon in May 1960, about three months before Cassius Clay departed New York for the Rome Olympics, an estimated ten thousand Harlemites, standing shoulder to shoulder, attended an outdoor “freedom rally” at the intersection of West 125th Street and Seventh Avenue. The large assembly of people, most of whom were not Muslims, attested to Malcolm's growing popularity as a political figure. Responding to the urban unrest, he offered a broad message of solidarity.

“As black people we must unite,” he insisted. He exhorted the masses to follow “fearless black leaders who will stand up and help the so-called American Negro get complete and
immediate
freedom.” While civil rights activists challenged segregation in the South, a temper of defiance swept through northern cities like an epidemic. Radicals tried to cure the disease by pressing for full citizenship, equal rights, and racial justice. Well before “Black Power” became a rallying cry, the belief in self-determination and racial pride blossomed as northern black activists fought for better jobs, quality education, and open housing.
⁴¹

No one articulated black rage against American hypocrisy and the failures of democracy more strongly than Malcolm did. Despite his calls for unity, he could hardly resist criticizing civil rights leaders who advocated integration. Although he did not call anyone out by name, he made it clear that black people wanted “leaders who are not afraid to demand freedom, justice, and equality. . . . We do not want any more Uncle Toms.”
⁴²

Many admired Malcolm for his fearlessness. He was willing to debate anyone, anytime, anywhere. Malcolm debated the way Clay fought, swinging from the opening bell, hitting his opponent with hard cuts and fierce jabs. Unrestrained by the “conventional niceties of debate,” he played by his own rules, on his terms. He cultivated a combative style, bobbing and weaving, pivoting the conversation in the direction that he wanted. Malcolm was not interested in simply scoring points and landing a few punches. Decisions were not his goal. He swung for the knockout. Alex Haley recalled, “He would turn a radio or television program to his advantage in a way he credited to the boxing ring's great Sugar Ray Robinson, who would dramatize a round's last thirty seconds. Similarly, Malcolm would eye the big studio clock, and at the instant it showed thirty seconds to go, he'd pounce in and close the show with his own verbal barrage.”
⁴³

Photographers popularized a fiery image of him lecturing at the podium, fist clenched, face masked with a snarl. Yet Malcolm's behavior on stage belied the provocative image of the angry black man. Dressed in a conservative suit with his tie perfectly knotted, he appeared more like an intellectual than an itinerant preacher. Before responding to a question, Malcolm looked back at the moderator or his opponent,
holding their full attention. Then, after calculating his response, he thoughtfully answered. Joseph Durso interviewed Malcolm, expecting “more of a platform speaker, somebody who was very militant.” But “he was more cerebral than physical. He reasoned. He was almost like a college professor.”
⁴⁴

On multiple occasions Malcolm matched wits with Bayard Rustin, the veteran civil rights activist and close friend and adviser of Martin Luther King. In January 1962, they debated at Manhattan Community Church, a liberal congregation made up mostly of whites. In the past two years, they had become friendly rivals, fully aware of each other's tricks and strategies. Rustin, an advocate of racial cooperation and direct action against segregation, argued that separatism failed to address the problems facing black people. It left them powerless to change the oppressive conditions of the society they inhabited. Without any clear plan, Rustin charged, Malcolm resorted to emotionalism.
⁴⁵

“When a man is hanging on a tree,” Malcolm snapped, “and he cries out, should he cry out unemotionally?”

When a man is sitting on a hot stove and he tells you how it feels to be there, is he supposed to speak without emotion? This is what you tell black people in this country when they begin to cry out against the injustices that they're suffering. As long as they describe these injustices in a way that makes you believe you have another one hundred years to rectify the situation, then you don't call that emotion. But when a man is on a hot stove, he says, “I'm coming up. I'm getting up. Violently or nonviolently doesn't even enter the picture—I'm coming up, do you understand?”
⁴⁶

Pleased by his decisive blow, Malcolm flashed a sardonic smile—the same satisfied grin that eased onto Jack Johnson's face after the black boxer knocked his white opponents to the canvas.

As Malcolm's celebrity grew, he became empowered, speaking more independently about politics. The less time he spent inside Mosque No. 7, the less he spoke about Muslim theology. Privately, Malcolm became convinced that the Nation needed to engage “in more
action
.” As Muhammad read news clippings and transcripts of Malcolm's speeches and
debates, he grew suspicious about his popular minister's motives. In Chicago, Muhammad's lieutenants whispered that Brother Malcolm was “trying to take over the Nation.”
⁴⁷

Muhammad suspected that Malcolm aspired to lead the Muslims into the front lines of protests, though he feared such involvement would only attract greater scrutiny from the government. On February 15, 1962, the Messenger wrote Malcolm, reminding him not to “go too much into details on the political side; nor into the subject of a separate state here for us.” The Nation's patriarch ordered him to speak only about what “you yourself have heard me say.” He insisted that Malcolm avoid discussing political issues, an impossible request as long as Malcolm engaged civil rights activists.
⁴⁸

Less than a month after he received Muhammad's edict, Malcolm debated James Farmer at Cornell University. Speaking first, Farmer, leader of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), shrewdly borrowed the minister's standard speech about the white man's crimes against blacks. He explained that everyone already knew that racism poisoned America. Then he aggressively criticized the Nation's theology and separatist doctrine.

“The time has passed when we can look for pie in the sky, when we can depend upon someone else on high to solve the problem for us,” he said. “What we want Mr. X, the representative of the Black Muslims and Elijah Muhammad, to tell us today, is what his program is, what he proposes to do about killing this disease?” Turning toward his opponent, he attacked Malcolm's flank, demanding an answer: “We know the disease, physician, what is your cure?”
⁴⁹

The question haunted Malcolm. Farmer had set the perfect trap. Malcolm slowly rose from his seat and took the microphone. He rambled for a few minutes, searching for the answer that the black masses were waiting to hear. But he could not give them what they wanted, not as long as Elijah Muhammad was listening.
⁵⁰

Chapter Three

“WHO MADE ME IS
ME
”

            
I'm a boxer, and I really don't want anything to do with the civil rights program right now.

—
CASSIUS CLAY

T
he morning definitely did not show Gorgeous George in his most gorgeous light. Born George Raymond Wagner in 1915, the forty-six-year-old performer showed up at the Las Vegas radio station looking hung over and worn out. His skin had a sickly pallor; his famous platinum blond hair hanging uncharacteristically loose without his “Georgie pins.” The most famous professional wrestler in America was less than one and a half years away from retirement and two and a half away from dying of a terminal liver condition brought on by decades of heavy drinking. But at showtime, George could still muster enough energy to please the crowds.

Clay arrived in Las Vegas on the evening of Wednesday
,
June 21, 1961, and the next morning he met the wrestler at the station. They both had tickets to peddle. George had a grudge match—they were all grudge matches with him—scheduled for June 23 at the Las Vegas Convention Center against Freddie Blassie. Clay was fighting Kolo “Duke” Sabedong, a six-foot-seven Hawaiian of Samoan ancestry, at the Convention Center on Monday the twenty-sixth.
¹

Turning first to Clay, the show's host asked about his chances with the experienced, hard-punching Sabedong. The Hawaiian had a mixed career that included wins over club fighters and losses against better boxers. He had also fought contenders, though he usually did not finish those fights on his feet. When the host asked Clay about his own chances, he was circumspectly confident. “I can't say I was humble, but I wasn't too loud,” Clay later recalled.
²

“Who made me is
me,
” Cassius Clay announced. But his identity was subject to interpretation. He was like a magician, revealing only what he wanted his audience to see and hiding the secrets behind his tricks.
Associated Press

The host then turned to George. In the early years of television, Gorgeous George practically invented the persona of the flamboyant, bombastic villain. After observing that the untalented “freaks, baboons, and foreigners” who passed themselves off as professional wrestlers attracted the largest audiences and purses, he asked himself, “What if a guy had a flair for showmanship
and could also
wrestle—would he go over?”
³

George Wagner reinvented himself as Gorgeous George, a villain of the first order. He dressed effeminately—long, dyed hair; gold-plated, sequined “Georgie pins”; satin outfits; reportedly an ermine jockstrap;
monogrammed towels; and robes that looked like they had been lifted from Liberace's closet—and swished down the aisle to the ring to “Pomp and Circumstance.” Once inside the ropes, his valet sprayed a fine, sweet-smelling mist from an atomizer on the robes, canvas, and, stealthily, on the referee and opponent. The Gorgeous One performed other pre-match rituals with great solemnity and formality, but once the bell sounded he was capable of committing any vile trick or underhanded tactic to win a match. Gorgeous George was, in short, the very negation of the American male athlete; the persona he originated was equal parts drag queen, aristocratic prig, and lowdown cheat. And audiences in arenas across the country and on television could not seem to get enough of him.

The host asked George, what would be the outcome of his upcoming match? “I'll kill him; I'll tear off his arm,” Clay recalled George saying. “If this bum beats me, I'll crawl across the ring and cut off my hair, but it's not gonna happen because I'm the greatest wrestler in the world.” Floating on a sea of self-endorsement, he continued to wax eloquently about how great and beautiful he was. “And all this time,” Cassius remembered, “I was saying to myself, ‘Man, I want to see this fight. It don't matter who wins or loses; I want to be there to see what happens.'”
⁴

Clay closely watched the match, noting the wrestler's grand entrance illuminated by a spotlight and covered by a red velvet gown lined with white satin. George moved imperiously toward the ring, shouting that the spectators who booed him were “ignorant peasants.” It was a sensational act, and afterward Clay vowed, “[Although] I'd never been shy about talking . . . if I talked even more, there was no telling how much money people would pay to see me.” He later told Dundee about George's performance, concluding, “This is a gooooood idea.”

“
Niño con boca grande!
” the Cubans in the 5th Street Gym had called Cassius. But in Las Vegas his mouth, like the Grinch's heart, seemed to grow three sizes bigger. A few days later he told sportswriter George King what to expect in the fight: “Someone's got to go before the 10th—and you can bet it won't be me.” There was no way he would lose, he explained. Losing a fight against a big Hawaiian just was not a possibility.
⁵

Sabedong made his most pointed statements with his fists in the ring. From the first round it was clear that Clay was faster and infinitely superior in boxing ability. But the Duke had a few dirty tricks that
would have shocked even Gorgeous George. When he got a chance he hit Clay low, on the breaks, and after the bell, and he used his head as a third fist. “I threw a couple of low punches just to let him know I was there,” he later said. “The first time I hit him low, his eyes went as big as saucers. I was going to bite his ear. You know when you are in clinches you get the guy's ear between your teeth and give it a little tug, that usually would bring water to their eyes.”
⁶

Sabedong's problem was that he rarely got close enough to Clay to hit low, butt, or bite. Constantly moving, Cassius peppered him with jabs and hooks, landing harder punches occasionally but not often enough to take him out. The fight went the distance, but for Clay it was a learning experience. Professional boxing was not like the amateur version of the sport, where referees passed out penalties for the slightest infractions. In the pro ranks you had to expect the unexpected and protect yourself at all times. Clay departed the Convention Center a wiser boxer. And he left Las Vegas with a new bag of verbal tricks.

B
EFORE
G
ORGEOUS
G
EORGE
departed Las Vegas, he talked briefly with Cassius. Clay had gone to the wrestling match, watched the packed house scream insults at the foppish athlete, and met with him afterward in the dressing room. “Boxing, wrestling—it's all a show,” he told Clay. “A lot of people will pay to see someone shut your mouth. So keep on bragging, keep on sassing, and always be outrageous.”
⁷

Clay got it. He understood that most beat reporters were less interested in the truth than a good tale. Every day or so they needed a story to file, and they spent their lives scrounging for copy—digging for leads, tracking down facts, conspiring for quotes. “Trouble with boxing today,” Cassius told a reporter after the Sabedong match, “is most boxers don't want to talk. Say, ‘Yeh, no, yeh, no.' You writer men ain't got nothing to write about. . . . Look at
Ring Magazine
—it loaded with stuff about John L. Sullivan and all them old-timers. Nothing else to write about.”
⁸

He knew the solution to the sport's woes—it was him. And he expressed it with candid specificity.

Boxing need fighters who talk a lot and
kill
. Fighter today, he bring two or three girls with him to the fight and go into the ring with his hair all
waved silky. In the olden days a fighter go back in the woods and train and drink tea without sugar in it, getting
mean
. Today, temptation is abroad in the land. There's more pretty cars these days, and you can get 'em cheap. Everything's a dollar down, and a liquor store on every corner. Rock 'n' roll show in town every week. But Cassius Clay go to bed at
nine
. I'm eating them lima beans, collard greens, okra and tomatoes, and spinach. Man, them are things that stick to your kidneys. Most guys eat crackers and soda pop and expect to stay in shape. But Cassius Clay, he a determined young man. When he lay down on a guy, that guy supposed to go
down
. So as I see it today, I should be champ when I'm twenty-one. You writ that?
⁹

After his short exchange with Gorgeous George, Cassius became the most vocal and opinionated athlete in America. He sounded off on topics ranging from boxing and diets to music and foreign policy, though rarely did he address racial issues or domestic politics. When he said, “The trouble is boxing's dying because everybody's so quiet,” he meant it, and he made it his personal mission to pump some noise into the sport. He lectured on his personal growth—“I'm mature. I'm growing a mustache. I shaved yesterday for the first time.” He rendered an opinion about his similarity to the leaders of communist nations—“Man, the way I been talking, if I didn't back up my talk I'd have to leave town. I'd have to leave the country. Take a man like Feedel Castro. He say, ‘I gonna do this, I gonna do that.' Next morning, rat-a-tat-tat—six people die. He
do
it. . . . So I talk big and that just makes me fight harder.” And, of course, he mentioned his importance to the Fourth Estate—“I'm the best friend a reporter ever had because I always give good quotes, changing them around so everybody gets a fresh one.”
¹⁰

Some sportswriters thought he was charming and refreshing; others found him conceited and bombastic. When Huston Horn of
Sports Illustrated
met Clay in 1961, he noted that the boxer was “irrepressible, impish, cocksure and sometimes utterly unbearable.” But it mattered little how they felt about him because they all wrote about him.
¹¹

Clay became for the early 1960s what Joe Louis had been for the mid-1930s, a singular, transcendent force in the world of sports. In the Depression, sportswriters had competed to pin a tag on Louis, coining
such monikers as the Dark Destroyer, the Tawny Tiger, the Chocolate Cobra, the Ebony Assassin, the Saffron Sandman, and, of course, the Brown Bomber, among scores of others. Virtually all referred to his skin color and destructive power. Clay's nicknames included the Louisville Larruper, the Mighty Mouth, the Mouth That Roared, the Marvelous Mouth, Claptrap Cash, Cash the Brash, and, most famously, the Louisville Lip. They suggested neither his race nor fighting ability but alluded to the tenor and volume of his verbiage. In an age of celebrity, when fame was conferred on the loudest self-promoters, Cassius Clay was reaching for the moon.
¹²

He even dressed the part. Aware of his audience, fashion was important to him. “If the women come, the men got to follow, ain't that so?” he asked a reporter. So his ring attire was clean and light—white shoes with three coats of polish, white satin trunks, and a white satin robe. To complete the look, he spread a thin coat of Vaseline on his arms and torso “to make me look real musclely.” He appeared almost ethereal as he danced, light-footed, in his corner before the bell and glided toward an opponent. As much as possible he tried to take the pain out of fighting—at least the pain he suffered. “Women don't like the sight of blood . . . so I make sure they don't see none of mine by not getting hit.” For him, boxing was a sport of speed and grace, not shuffling and slugging.
¹³