Clay’s statement was completely disingenuous. He didn’t really have any plans to fight for the NAACP. What concerned him more than civil rights was status—his status in the world of boxing and his material worth. In some ways, his attitude about social mobility and materialism reflected the temper of his generation, one that came of age in the “affluent society.” National advertising campaigns encouraged the millions of young people of his generation to buy rock ’n’ roll records, radios, blue jeans, shirts, shoes, soft drinks, cereal, comic books, magazines, movie tickets, and gasoline for cruising in chrome-covered cars. Clay belonged to a youth culture that celebrated pleasure and instant gratification, a distinct demographic that was told that their opinions about everything, from consumer products to social issues, mattered.2
In an age of growing prosperity, black teenagers who identified with this youth movement believed that freedom and living “the good life” should be one and the same. Seeing themselves as first-class consumers, many black youths became increasingly alienated when confronted with the reality of their second-class citizenship. When they entered a diner or a department store and were turned away because of the color of their skin—as Clay was in Louisville and Miami—they were told that the good life was not for them. The tension between full participation in the consumer culture and racial exclusion from society cut deep into the dreams of black youths.3
Yet Clay never expressed the same dissatisfaction that tens of thousands of black activists did when they demonstrated against racism during the sit-ins. When he was growing up in Louisville, there were certain places that he could not go because he was black: restaurants, libraries, public swimming pools, and some downtown movie theaters. The one time he joined a picket in Louisville, a woman dumped hot water on him and he never returned to the marching lines again.4
But by March 1963, he was a celebrity and, by his calculation, rich. If for any reason he could not eat somewhere, he could always return to the hotel where he was staying and order anything he wanted from room service, or he could ask his private chef to make him a meal at his home in Miami. Wealth helped him escape discrimination, a luxury most blacks could not afford.
Cassius now had more money than most youths ever dreamed of having. He took home $13,500 from selling out Madison Square Garden and earned another $10,000 from the closed-circuit-theater ticket sales. By the end of the year, he’d made $81,000, not too far from the president’s $100,000 salary. Donating money to the NAACP, therefore, would have certainly benefited him during tax season, a fact that was not lost on him. He frequently complained that the more money he made, the more he paid Uncle Sam.5
When he declared that he would raise money for the NAACP, he never said anything about giving civil rights lectures or joining any marches in the South. Rather, his financial offer reflected his own strategy of dealing with racism. His success as a boxer earned him economic independence, the kind that Elijah Muhammad promoted. Money, Muhammad preached, gave black men freedom from whites.
Most reporters who covered boxing never suspected that Clay had embraced Muhammad’s philosophy. Since he rarely talked about race or the civil rights movement, writers assumed that he gave the subject little thought. All they ever heard from him were bombastic proclamations of his own greatness. But in his declarations of preeminence, Alex Poinsett, a black writer for Ebony, heard something more. “For when Cassius Clay declares, ‘I am the greatest,’ he is not just thinking about boxing,” he wrote. “Lingering behind those words is the bitter sarcasm of Dick Gregory, the shrill defiance of Miles Davis, [and] the utter contempt of Malcolm X.”6
Poinsett was circling in on the truth, though he had no idea just how much Clay echoed Malcolm or why he had started to sound like him. Hidden behind Clay’s clowning, behind the “publicity gimmicks and boyish buffoonery, behind the brashness, Cassius Marcellus Clay is a blast furnace of race pride. His is a race pride that would never mask itself with skin lighteners and processed hair,” the way Detroit Red once degraded himself, burning his scalp with a homemade congolene in a quest for straight hair.7
Clay possessed “a pride scorched with memories of a million little burns like the paper cup he drank root beer from at a New Orleans stand while his white companion [Sports Illustrated’s Huston Horn] sipped from a glass.” He may not have talked publicly about discrimination, but he projected a more militant, defiant posture, rejecting any notion of racial inferiority. When he boldly shouted, “I am the greatest,” he defined his self-worth on his own terms, expressing an emerging attitude of Black Power.8