Sportswriters wanted to know why he had joined the Black Muslims. “You call it Black Muslims, I don’t,” he asserted. “This is a name that has been given to us by the press. Yet people brand us a hate group. They say we want to take over the country. They say we’re Communists.” None of it was true. The Muslims, he said, didn’t carry knives or guns. They were peaceful people who avoided confrontation. He joined the Nation because the Muslims offered a sanctuary, a utopia free from racial violence. “I want peace and I do not find peace in an integrated world,” he explained. “I don’t want to be blown up. I don’t want to be washed down sewers. I just want to be with my own kind.”30
A childhood friend later explained to Jack Olsen that when Cassius talked “about race—when he says, ‘I don’t want to be bombed. I don’t want to be set on fire. I don’t want to be lynched or have no dogs chase me’—he’s expressing a general fright more than a real racial attitude.” Cassius “finds it safer to be with Negroes, his own kind. It allays his fear of all those things his father used to tell him the whites’d do to him. He keeps this tight little Negro group around him, and he’s scared to death to venture away from it.”31
Clay maintained that it was only “natural” for blacks to live among blacks and for whites to live among whites. Sounding like Malcolm’s assistant minister, he said, “We believe that forced and token integration is but a temporary and not an everlasting solution to the Negro problem. It is merely a pacifier. We don’t think one people should force its culture upon another.” Malcolm grinned as he listened to his pupil deliver one of his favorite lines: “A rooster crows only when it sees the light. Put him in the dark and he’ll never crow. I have seen the light and I’m crowing.”32
As he listened to Clay’s answers, he heard his voice grow stronger, bolder, and more defiant. There was no other athlete in America who so audaciously challenged the politics of the sports world. “Clay is the finest Negro athlete I have ever known,” Malcolm asserted, “the man who will mean more to his people than any athlete before him. He is more than Jackie Robinson was, because Robinson is the white man’s hero. But Cassius is the black man’s hero. Do you know why? Because the white press wanted him to lose. They wanted him to lose because he is a Muslim. You notice nobody cares about the religion of other athletes. But their prejudice against Clay blinded them to his ability.”33
White men were not the only ones blinded by Cassius. In their private moments together, between the minister’s lectures and lessons, during their conversations and laughter, Malcolm came to believe in their friendship, their brotherhood, their bond. He rarely trusted any man, and few ever visited his home for family dinners the way that Cassius did. Malcolm fell for Clay’s boyish wonder, his innocence and charm. Never did he imagine that Clay would hurt him. He trusted his own eyes, seeing only what he wanted to see: a magnetic young black man full of conviction and sincerity.
But Malcolm failed to apply the key lesson from his relationship with Elijah Muhammad: things were not always what they seemed. Later that day, Malcolm and Cassius made plans to see each other again soon. They shook hands, Malcolm congratulated him once more, and then he departed for the airport.
As he waited for his flight to New York, Malcolm probably thought about Clay and how their friendship had evolved. He’d never felt closer to him than he had during the days between his suspension and Clay’s title celebration. They had known each other for only a little more than a year and a half, but in the past month their relationship had matured swiftly, as swiftly, almost, as it would crumble.
After Malcolm left, Rudy and Sam Saxon returned from Chicago. They arrived with a message for Cassius. During the Saviours’ Day Convention, Saxon told Captain Joseph all about Malcolm’s maneuvering in Miami. Joseph shook his head in disgust, convinced that the suspended minister was trying to manipulate Clay. Elijah, he told Saxon, had already determined that Malcolm would never return to the Nation. Malcolm was an outcast, a marked man with one foot in the grave. Send word to Cassius, Joseph instructed: he better not get too close to Malcolm.34
Chapter Thirteen
THE SHAKEUP
Boxing is sport, not politics. But Cassius Clay, without any political experience, would immerse sport in politics.
—A. S. “DOC” YOUNG, LOS ANGELES SENTINEL
Cassius Clay arrived in New York on a mission. “I’m gonna shake up this town,” he announced.