MALCOLM’S GHOST HAUNTED Ali. In early November 1974, three years after the Supreme Court overturned his draft evasion conviction on a technicality, he returned to Louisville for a celebration. He had just regained the heavyweight title from George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire. More than seven thousand fans greeted him outside the Belvedere, a riverfront plaza of parks, trees, and fountains overlooking the Ohio River.20
At the reception inside the Galt House, Ali enjoyed the singularity of being champion again. Sitting with white reporters from the Louisville Courier-Journal, he boasted about his comeback. Suddenly, his mood changed when two stone-faced men from the Fruit told Ali that it was time for him to go. “No, leave us alone,” he snapped. “These are my people . . . these are my Louisville men. They can stay as long as they want. Don’t bother us again.”21
After his security team disappeared, Ali told the writers that the guards were just doing their job, but he did not appreciate being told with whom he could talk. “They always got somebody watching,” he said.
“Who are ‘they’?” reporter Dave Kindred asked.
“I would have gotten out of this a long time ago,” Ali whispered. “But you saw what they did to Malcolm X. I ain’t gonna end up like Malcolm X.”
Kindred sensed that Ali feared what would happen if he left the Nation. Controlled by Elijah Muhammad for more than a decade, he lived in a straitjacket, trapped by the Nation’s officials. He could not eat, sleep, or breathe without worrying about the wrath of the Black Muslim leaders. “I can’t leave the Muslims,” Ali said, his voice foreboding. “They’d shoot me, too.”
About four months later the Messenger died, signaling a turning point in Ali’s life. Wallace Muhammad took the helm of the Nation, renouncing his father’s divine claims, tempering the Nation’s racial rhetoric, and embracing orthodox Islam. In 1976, the sect’s new imam renamed Mosque No. 7 in honor of Malcolm X, acknowledging that Malcolm had told the truth about his father’s paternity scandals. “What we should see in Malcolm,” he declared, “is a turn for the Nation of Islam from fear and isolation to openness, courage.”22
Freed from Elijah Muhammad’s influence, Ali embraced a more universal attitude about race and Islam. “I don’t hate whites,” he announced after Elijah’s death. “That was history, but it’s coming to an end. We’re in a new phase, a resurrection.” Deep down he believed “that the devil is in the mind and heart, not the skin. We Muslims hate injustice and evil, but we don’t have time to hate people.”23
“I IMAGINE ONE of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly,” James Baldwin suggested, “is because they sense, once their hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with the pain.” When Malcolm died, Ali hid the pain behind a mask of contempt, heartlessly asserting that the fallen minister “got what he deserved.” Ali lived to regret those words. For years, he suffered under the burden of guilt, knowing that he had hurt Malcolm, his friend, his brother. But time softened him. Gradually, he became more humane, and more forgiving.24
“I wish I’d been able to tell Malcolm I was sorry, that he was right about so many things,” Ali said more than forty years after Malcolm died. “Malcolm X was a great thinker and even greater friend,” he reflected. “I might never have become a Muslim if it hadn’t been for Malcolm. If I could go back and do it over again, I would never have turned my back on him.”25