Increasingly, journalists simplified the struggle as a rivalry between two political movements: the nonviolent integrationists and violent Black Nationalists. In the aftermath of Birmingham, journalists wrote that the black freedom struggle had reached a crossroads. According to most writers, the struggle could either embrace the moderate leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the NAACP or turn toward the “extremism” of Malcolm and the Nation of Islam.25
In mid-May, after the Ku Klux Klan bombed Birmingham’s A. G. Gaston Motel, King’s organizing headquarters, rumors spread that Malcolm might visit the battered southern city, but he never did. Elijah Muhammad would not allow it. Instead of traveling to the South, Malcolm criticized Jackie Robinson and Floyd Patterson for going to Birmingham. He claimed that Robinson and Patterson were being used by white liberals to pacify angry blacks.26
For a boxer who admitted to being scared in the ring, nothing frightened Patterson more than going to Birmingham. When Robinson invited him to speak, he prepared for the worst: jail, beatings, even death. He had told Jackie that he could only afford to stay behind bars for three days, but when a television reporter asked him what he would do if the police turned on the hoses or unleashed the dogs, he answered, “I’m not used to standing by like the people in the South, who are much stronger than I am when it comes to this type of thing. I can’t stand around and let an animal bite. So,” he declared, “I will have to do something.”27
Not every boxer shared Patterson’s views. Heavyweight champion Sonny Liston scorned Martin Luther King’s nonviolent ideas and the strategies of the NAACP. Several years before, he had called the Freedom Riders “stupid,” explaining, “That ain’t no way to do things. You have to fight for what you get. It’s like boxing. No use being in there if you just catch punches, because you’re not going to get the decision. . . . Now, if some sucker comes and blows up my house, then someone else’s house is going to be blowed up. And the next time this sucker ain’t going to be in no hurry to go blow up houses.” It was all a matter of fighting back, trading punch for punch. He was not going to participate in any nonviolent protests. When a white reporter asked why he was not going to Birmingham, Liston answered, “I ain’t got no dog-proof ass.”28
But Patterson was committed to a cause that Liston refused to join. When he and Robinson arrived in Birmingham on May 13, they learned that white vigilantes threatened their lives. Protected by a police escort, they toured the ravaged city, visited with ministers and citizens, and spoke at rallies. The next night, they accompanied King to the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church. After Patterson spoke briefly about his admiration for the grassroots activists, Wyatt Tee Walker, the executive director of SCLC, introduced Robinson, a man who needed no introduction.
As the graying baseball legend rose from the pew and walked pigeon-toed toward the podium, leaning on his cane, the congregation cheered even louder than they had for King. They never forgot all the abuse—the beanballs, the vile epithets, and the death threats—that he had endured to prove that blacks belonged in the national pastime. His presence at the church demonstrated that he did not believe that his fight against segregation had ended when he hung up his baseball cleats. When Robinson spoke, the congregation drew strength from a “race man,” a proud, fearless black man who had stared down Jim Crow without blinking.29
Malcolm remained unimpressed with Robinson’s politics, calling him a traitor for working with white politicians. Over the next year, they sparred through the press. Robinson claimed that he respected Malcolm’s intellect, but he insisted that the Nation of Islam’s Black Nationalist philosophy “set back the cause of the Negro.”30
Later in the year, Robinson indicted Malcolm for failing to risk his life fighting injustice the way that other activists did in the South. “Whom do you think you are kidding, Malcolm, when you say that Negro leaders ought to be ‘thankful’ that you were not personally present in Birmingham or Mississippi after racial atrocities had been committed there? The inference seems to be that you would have played some dramatic, avenging role.”31
Robinson did not believe Malcolm would have ever retaliated against white supremacists because he had never done so before. “I think you would have done exactly what you did after your own Muslim brothers were shot and killed in Los Angeles. You left it to the law to take its course.”32