Brother John’s sermon helped Cassius make sense of his family’s history and his own identity as a black man. He later recalled, “I could reach out and touch what Brother John was saying. It wasn’t like church teaching, where I had to have faith that what the preacher was preaching was right. And I said to myself, ‘Cassius Marcellus Clay. He was a Kentucky white man who owned my great-granddaddy and named my great-granddaddy after him. And then my granddaddy got named, and then my daddy, and now it’s me.’”26
For the first time in his life, Clay’s name didn’t sound so magical. At that moment, when Cassius began questioning the origins of his name, Sam Saxon knew that he had hooked a big fish.
DEPENDING ON THE day of the week and the whim of the moment, Cassius claimed to have first learned about the Nation of Islam in Atlanta, Chicago, or New York in 1958, 1959, or 1960. Over the years, whenever reporters asked him about his conversion to Islam, his answers were inconsistent. In his stories, Clay created an origin myth based on his scattered memories and affection for tall tales. There were hardly any witnesses who could testify about his accounts, creating a sense of mystery about his activities with the Nation. In all of his anecdotes about meeting the Muslims, one thing remained constant: whenever he left Louisville and found freedom from supervision, he gravitated toward the temples. No one understood this better than Clay’s own mother. “The big mistake was when [the Louisville Sponsoring Group] sent him to train at Miami all by himself,” she said. “That’s when the Muslims got him. That’s how Sam Saxon got him and talked that Muslim stuff to him every day.”27
Odessa was unaware that her son had started listening to the Muslims long before he ever met Sam Saxon. As a teenager, when Cassius traveled for amateur boxing tournaments, he came across Muslim preachers proselytizing for the teachings of Elijah Muhammad. In October 1958, Clay and his brother Rudy traveled to Atlanta for a vacation. At the time, the FBI had assigned Special Agent Robert R. Nichols to investigate the activities at Muhammad’s Temple No. 15 in Atlanta. Nichols set up wiretaps on the temple’s phones and hired college students to record the minister’s speeches.28
Nichols learned that Clay had talked with the Muslims outside the Atlanta temple on Piedmont Avenue. At the time, the information seemed unimportant. After all, Cassius was just a sixteen-year-old kid from Louisville. Yet that day in Atlanta marked the beginning of his indoctrination. That was the moment, he said, “I was fished off a street corner.”29
When he traveled to Chicago for the Golden Gloves tournament in March 1959, he once again ran into the Muslims outside their temple. Near the Nation’s headquarters, the Muslims gave Clay a record that they said would explain everything he needed to know. When he returned to Louisville, he played the record repeatedly. Performing “A White Man’s Heaven Is a Black Man’s Hell,” Louis Eugene Wolcott, a charming and talented calypso singer, crooned over piano and guitar. Wolcott, who was then known as Louis X and would later become recognized as Louis Farrakhan, became so popular singing the song at the Nation’s rallies that it became the anthem of the Muslim movement.30
Clay played the record over and over, memorizing the lyrics and absorbing the message. In Miami, Sam Saxon and the other members of the mosque echoed the song’s central theme, reminding him that there was no heaven or hell after death. While the black man lived in hell, they said, white Christians enjoyed heaven on earth. For a young man who dreamed of riches, Cadillacs, and mansions, the lyrics made him question his Baptist upbringing. As early as 1961, he began talking about what he had learned from the Muslims, though he was careful to ensure that not even the sharpest reporter could recognize that he was sharing what the Muslims had taught him.
When Clay started telling Sports Illustrated’s Huston Horn what he thought about heaven and hell, the writer had no idea that the boxer’s interpretation of the afterlife came directly from the Black Muslims. “Like last Sunday,” he said, “some cats I know said, ‘Cassius, Cassius, come on now and let’s go to church; otherwise you won’t get to Heaven.’ ‘Hold on a minute,’ I said to them, ‘and let me tell you something else. When I’ve got me a $100,000 house, another quarter million stuck in the bank and the world title latched onto my name, then I’ll be in heaven. Walking around making $25 a week, with four children crying at home ’cause they’re hungry, that’s my idea of Hell.”31