On Saturday, Muhammad Ali will celebrate his 67th birthday; two days later,
the United States will observe its annual holiday commemorating the birth of
Martin Luther King Jr; and one day after that, Barack Obama will raise his
right hand at a ceremony in Washington DC to take the presidential oath of
office. This curious alignment of dates has not gone unnoticed on the other
side of the pond and has caused many to reflect upon the inextricable
connection between the victory of Obama and the trailblazing achievements of
the black pioneers who went before him.
Ali, for his part, is determined to take up his invitation to be at the
inauguration ceremony. The former world heavyweight champion keeps his
public appearances to a minimum these days, a consequence of his long battle
with Parkinson’s disease. But it is understood that he will be present
to witness Obama’s elevation to the White House, just as he was in
Denver, Colorado, in August when Obama became the first black to accept the
Democratic nomination. The man who wowed the world with poetry and punches, it
seems, still has an eye for the theatre of history.
Ali’s presence in Washington would be fitting, in part because no sportsman,
in any era, has made a greater contribution to black advancement, even if
there is a fog of historically misleading sentimentality. When Ali pitched
up in Denver, more than a few commentators felt moved to laud his
contribution to the civil rights movement, seemingly unaware that the former
champion was not merely one of the most outspoken critics of King in the
1960s, but openly contemptuous of the idea that blacks and whites could ever
live in harmony.
That, of course, remains the central irony of Ali’s life. In an era when hope
battled fear in the hearts and minds of Americans of every colour, Ali chose
to fight on the side of fear. It was not just that he bought into a
segregationist ideology that preached that whites were blue-eyed devils or
that he was openly scornful of peaceful protest at a time when the entire
nation had been energised by the dignity and power of the Montgomery bus
boycott and the student sit-ins; more influential still was the potency of
his persona in radicalising a new generation of politically self-conscious
African Americans, handing the Nation of Islam an influence wholly out of
proportion with its tiny membership and threatening the fragile consensus
erected by King.
Many have argued that Ali was manipulated by his religious handlers into
endorsing a crudely racist philosophy that was out of kilter with his
consensual nature, but this is the opposite of the truth. Ali was
radicalised, not by men in dark suits carrying guns, but by the tragedy of
Emmet Till, a 14-year-old from Chicago who was lynched by white men for
wolf-whistling at a white shop assistant while visiting an uncle in
Mississippi in 1954. The two men charged with his murder were acquitted by
an all-white jury in 67 minutes. “If we hadn’t stopped to drink pop, it
wouldn’t have taken that long,” one juror said.
Ali was the same age as Till and the episode set in motion a chain reaction
that would culminate in him asking a teacher if he could write an assignment
on the Black Muslims, a request that was rejected. But Ali was undeterred,
visiting mosques in the late 1950s as he sought an ideology that could
channel his growing anger at a system of regional apartheid that continued
deep into the 1960s.
It is, perhaps, the greatest irony of the era that so many black Americans
came to endorse segregation (albeit on more equal terms) of the kind that
had crushed the promise of Reconstruction.
Even as Ali was building up to his challenge with Sonny Liston for his first
shot at the heavyweight title in 1964, the Civil Rights Bill was bogged down
in Congress after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. But it was at this
moment, more than any other, that Ali helped to alter the course of history.
His increasingly militant pronouncements had not merely sent a deep tremor
through white American consciousness; they had also opened the eyes of King
to the possibility of a big political gamble. As he negotiated in
Washington, King painted an apocalyptic vision of what might happen to the
United States if significant reforms were suppressed and yet more black
Americans were pushed into the arms of the Nation.
In a landmark column for the Chicago Defender, Jackie Robinson, the first
black man in the modern era to play in baseball’s major leagues, provided
what became the most insightful analysis of the period. “I don’t think
Negroes en masse will embrace Black Muslimism any more than they have
Communism,” he wrote. “Young and old, Negroes by the tens of thousands went
into the streets of America and proved their willingness to suffer, to
fight, and even die for their freedom.
“These people want more democracy — not less. They want to be integrated into
the mainstream of American life, not invited to live in some small cubicle
of this land in splendid isolation. If Negroes ever turn to the Black Muslim
movement, in any numbers, it will not be because of Cassius Clay or even
Malcolm X. It will be because white America has refused to recognise the
responsible leadership of the Negro people and to grant us the same rights
that any other citizen enjoys.”
President Johnson took the point, strengthening the Civil Rights Bill against
opposition from within his own party. The 1964 act went farther than anyone
would have deemed possible a few months earlier, banning employment
discrimination and ending segregation. Thirteen months later the Voting
Rights Act was signed into law, obliterating the disenfranchisement of
blacks across the South. Taken together, these were the crowning
achievements of the Civil Rights era, bringing the curtain down on the
iniquity of Jim Crow segregation.
Ali would later repent of his support for a racist political and religious
movement, eventually converting to a moderate form of orthodox Islam in the
wake of his retirement from the ring after a string of destructive bouts in
the late 1970s. But it was as he descended into Parkinson’s that his
historical legacy was allowed to morph into the cuddly, consensual
reinterpretation that has proved so marketable.
The tragedy is that the sanitisation of Ali, like that of other aspects of the
civil rights movement, has served to obscure that, despite its many
successes, the basic objective of that struggle has yet to be achieved. The
2000 census was unequivocal, recording the enduring nature of social and
economic inequality. Blacks earn less than 75 per cent as much as whites,
are twice as likely to be in poverty and, by the end of eighth grade
(equivalent to third form in England), their score on standardised tests is
equivalent to white pupils still in fourth grade.
As Obama heads to Washington, it would be timely indeed for the US to grapple
not only with its complex past, but also to rediscover its righteous anger
at the schism that continues to disfigure the nation. Ali, for all his
mistakes and wrong turns, symbolises that complexity and anger. That is why
it would be fitting for the former world champion to be in the capital as
America sets out on a new, progressive era.
