In a sensational five-day trial, held in a packed courthouse and attended by nationally prominent reporters, Bryant and Milam were tried for kidnapping and murder. After listening to all the evidence, the all-white jury deliberated for sixty-seven minutes before voting to acquit the two men. “If we hadn’t stopped to drink a pop,” commented a juror, “it wouldn’t have taken that long.”10
The trial, along with Till’s shocking open-casket funeral in Chicago, energized the civil rights movement and stood as a stark confirmation of what black males had long been taught. Justice was not color-blind. That lesson was not lost on young Cassius Clay. Twenty years after the event, he recalled looking at the pictures of Till’s mutilated face in the pages of Jet magazine, horrified by the sight of “his eyes bulging out of their sockets and his mouth twisted and broken.” He would never forget those images or the grizzly stories his father told him about the crime.11
MISSISSIPPI JUSTICE WAS not confined to the South. Malcolm Little felt trapped by the same realities that pained Blyden Jackson, frustrated Clay Sr., frightened Cassius Jr., and killed Emmett Till. Writers often asked Malcolm when he first experienced racial inequality, as if he were a test subject whose anger could easily be reduced to some isolated incident. In March 1964, shortly after Clay won the heavyweight championship, a Swedish television reporter inquired about the psychological scars that Malcolm carried from his youth. When did segregation first hurt him? Irritated, he quipped, “When I was born. I was born in a segregated hospital of a segregated mother and father.”12
Intrigued by his provocative answer, the writer pressed further. “The first was when we were living in Lansing, Michigan, in an integrated neighborhood.” One evening, when Malcolm was only six years old, he “woke up and found the house on fire. The good Christians of the neighborhood had come out and set the house afire. The second was when my father was found under a streetcar where he had been thrown by the good Christians—that’s my second.” Grinning derisively he paused, looking directly into the television camera. “You want my third and fourth and fifth and sixth and seventh?”13
He never knew for sure how his father ended up under the streetcar—the coroner ruled Earl Little Sr.’s death accidental—but growing up fatherless, all but certain that white supremacists had killed his dad, Malcolm was embittered from an early age. He often told white journalists, “Your father isn’t here to pay his debts. My father isn’t here to collect. But I’m here to collect, and you’re here to pay.”14
Burdened by their fathers’ broken dreams and shattered lives, Malcolm Little and Cassius Clay transformed the deep pain and anger that they felt into an unshakeable pride. Tormented by the past, they resisted the brutality of America, relentlessly pursuing redemption. One man was scarred by his father’s absence, the other by his father’s presence. They shared the kind of anguish and love that only a brother could understand.
Chapter One
THE MOTHER SHIP IN MIAMI
As a kid in Louisville, the city seemed so big to me. New York seemed so big. Chicago seemed big. And London, England, seemed far away. Africa was far away. I was Cassius Clay then. I was a Negro. I ate pork. I had no confidence. I thought white people were superior. I was a Christian Baptist named Cassius Clay.
—MUHAMMAD ALI
Clay is a product of our times. The minute he got back from Rome, the saga started.
—MILTON GROSS, NEW YORK POST
Three hundred and four mostly flat, cornfield miles after it departed Chicago’s Union Station, the South Wind passenger train rolled into Louisville’s Union Station. There, on December 17, 1960, a young man stepped aboard, toting a worn suitcase and a pocketful of dreams.
Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. was eighteen, tall and slender, with a handsome unmarked face. His body was deceptively lithe, like a dancer’s, but he was a professional prizefighter. His electric smile could light up an arena, though he was haunted by fears real and imagined. He had won a gold medal in the Rome Olympics, charmed the press corps and fellow athletes in the Eternal City, and signed a lucrative promotional contract with a collection of white Kentucky movers and shakers known as the Louisville Sponsoring Group (LSG). It was that group, most of whom were millionaires, that had paid for his train ticket.
After the brief stop in Louisville the South Wind chugged over the rolling hills of Kentucky, through a narrow, river-veined section of Tennessee, and then across the border into Alabama. Looking out the window as evening turned into night, Cassius saw mile after mile of the cotton South as the train made its way through the heart of the old Confederacy, stopping to pick up more passengers in Decatur, Birmingham, Montgomery, and Dothan.
There had never been a heavyweight boxer like Cassius Clay. He had the fresh, unmarked face of a teenage matinee idol and a smile to match. In a division often dominated by ponderous sluggers, his jitterbug style ushered in a new age for the sport. Getty Images