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 *cat 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