Since the early twentieth century, real estate developers had promoted Miami as “the Magic City.” Beautiful beaches, luxurious resorts, and exotic entertainment attracted wealthy investors, tourists, and dreamers. But the city’s black citizens were barred from the beaches, restaurants, golf courses, schools, and theaters of Miami’s tropical paradise. In 1959, civil rights activists defied white supremacists, sponsoring dozens of sit-ins at department stores, drugstores, and diners. By August 1960, just before Clay arrived, their persistence and shrewd backroom negotiations with white leaders had led to the complete desegregation of the city’s downtown.20
Yet Clay quickly learned that the city’s culture of racism remained intact. In August 1961, Flip Schulke, a white photographer from Sports Illustrated, visited Miami for a photo shoot with Clay. Schulke was a serious photojournalist who had traveled the world and taken memorable photos that appeared in leading American publications, but he had never photographed a boxer. Shopping at Burdines department store, Clay picked up a short-sleeved shirt while Schulke snapped pictures. When a white store clerk saw the tall, lean black man touching the shirts, he informed him that store policy prohibited blacks from trying on clothing. Schulke fumed. It shocked him that Cassius Clay—an Olympic champion—could not try on a shirt in an American store. But Clay was not surprised. He wasn’t even angry. This was the South. As a southerner he outwardly accepted second-class citizenship as a way of life. “Come on, Flip, don’t worry about it,” he said. “I don’t want to make a big mess here. It’s not a big deal.”21
Clay may have been a boxer, but he was not a fighter. He disliked confrontations and avoided violence outside the ring. He preferred Overtown, where he felt safer among his own people. Throughout the neighborhood blacks greeted him warmly and made him feel important. And soon enough, one man in particular standing at the corner of Northwest Second Avenue and 6th Street, in front of Muhammad’s Temple of Islam, caught Cassius’s attention.
Sam Saxon, a burly, thirty-year-old, light-skinned black man with the arms of a blacksmith, waved a copy of Muhammad Speaks, the Nation of Islam’s newspaper. The two men started talking about the teachings of Elijah Muhammad. As he listened to Clay speak, it was clear to Saxon that he had already heard of the Nation’s leader, though he had never seen or met Elijah before. “Hey, you’re into the teaching,” Saxon said. “Well, I ain’t been to the temple, but I know what you’re talking about,” Clay replied. Then the boxer introduced himself as he always did: “I’m Cassius Clay. I’m gonna be the next heavyweight champion of the world.” Saxon, a boxing fan, recognized the name. “I know you, man,” he said, “I followed you in the Olympics.”22
The fact that Saxon knew his name engendered a level of trust from Clay. A former gambler and poolroom hustler turned missionary, Saxon had become a devout Muslim. When he was not selling copies of Muhammad Speaks or teaching in the temple, he ran concessions at the Miami racetracks and worked as a bathroom attendant, handing towels to white men and shining their shoes. But his primary objective in life, his real love, was fishing for converts.23
Wherever there were large concentrations of “so-called Negroes,” as the Black Muslims called them, those “lost souls” in the Kingdom of Allah, Elijah Muhammad’s ministers cast their lines. On Sundays, young Muslim men, clean-shaven and hair close-cropped, dressed in dark suits, waited outside churches, inviting Christians to hear the truth about God at the local temple. On weeknights, Muhammad’s foot soldiers, armed with Muslim literature, canvassed the streets of the ghetto, “fishing for the dead,” those “deaf, dumb, and blind—brainwashed of all self-respect and knowledge of kind by the white Slavemaster.” In nearly every large American city, Muslim officers trolled in bars, liquor stores, pool halls, barbershops, and diners. Standing on soapboxes and stepladders, Muhammad’s articulate followers preached, captivating the curious.24
In their meetings at Temple No. 29, a vacant storefront converted into a makeshift mosque, Saxon noticed that Clay was curious about the Muslim faith. In Miami, most blacks viewed the Muslims with skepticism, rarely entering the temple. When Clay first started attending meetings there were only about thirty members. In his first visit, he heard a preacher named Brother John deliver a sermon on the history of the black man. Cassius learned that white slave owners stripped the black man of his identity, his heritage, his language, and his true name and replaced it with a slave name, a name that belonged to the white man. According to the Muslims, the word Negro derived not from the Latin niger, meaning “black,” but rather from the Greek nekros, meaning “corpse.” Thus, the man who called himself a “Negro” remained spiritually dead, buried in the grave.25