February 28, 1964: Clay Says He Has Adopted Islam Religion and Regards It as Way to Peace
By The Associated Press
Miami Beach, Feb. 27 (AP)--The new heavyweight champion, Cassius Clay, said today he had adopted the Islam religion. He called Islam the best way to bring about lasting peace.

"They call it the Black Muslims," the 22-year-old Clay said. "This is a press word. It is not a legitimate name. But Islam is a religion and there are 750 million people all over the world who believe in it, and I am one of them."

He said he had made an extended study of the religion over a period of months and had become convinced it was "the truth and the light."

"A rooster crows only when it sees the light," he said. "Put him in the dark and he'll never crow. I have seen the light and I'm crowing."

Clay Is Relaxing

Clay, who stopped Sonny Liston in their 15-round title fight here Tuesday night, was relaxing at his temporary quarters when he was told that the leader of the black supremacy sect, Elijah Muhammad, had told a meeting in Chicago that the new ring champion was a disciple.

"That is true, and I am proud of it," Clay said. "But what is all the commotion about? Nobody asks other people about their religion. But now I am the champion, I am the king, so it seems the world is all shook up about what I believe.

"You call it Black Muslims, I don't. The real name is Islam. That means peace. Yet people brand us a hate group. They say we want to take over the country. They say we're Communists.

"That is not true. Followers of Allah are the sweetest people in the world. They don't carry knives. They don't tote weapons. They pray five times a day.

"The women wear dresses that come all the way to the floor and they don't commit adultery. The men don't marry white women.

"All they want to do is live in peace with the world. They don't hate anybody. They don't want to stir up any kind of trouble. All the meetings are held in secret, without any fuss or hate- mongering."

Religion Is Credited

Clay said that his religion, which had brought him "inner peace," was responsible for his sensational upset victory over Liston, an 8-to-1 favorite.

"God was with me--I couldn't have done it without God," he added.

The new champion said he was disturbed to find that the Islam group had drawn the fire of integrationist forces among the Negro people.

"We believe that forced and token integration is but a temporary and not an everlasting solution to the Negro problem," he added. "It is merely a pacifier. We don't think one people should force its culture upon another.

"I get telephone calls every day. They want me to carry signs. They want me to picket. They tell me it would be a wonderful thing if I married a white woman because this would be good for brotherhood.

"I don't want to be blown up. I don't want to be washed down sewers. I just want to be happy with my own kind."

Clay said it was only natural that people of the same culture and heritage should live together.

"Animals in the jungle flock together," he said. Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Chinese and Japanese all live better if they are together.

"I don't like hot Mexican food and I would be unhappy if somebody made me eat it. At the same time, you may not like what I like--turnip greens and hominy grits, or country music. If you don't like it you shouldn't have to accept it."

Attitude Is Resented

The boyish-faced fighter, descendant of a runaway Kentucky slave, said he resented the fact that some people attached "dire motives" to his Islam connections.

"I am a good boy. I never have done anything wrong," he insisted. "I have never been in jail. I have never been in court.

"I don't join any integration marches. I don't pay any attention to all those white women who wink at me. I don't carry signs.

"I don't impose myself on people who don't want me. If I go in somebody's house where I'm not welcome, I am uncomfortable. So I stay away.

"I like white people. I like my own people. They can live together without infringing on each other. You can't condemn a man for wanting peace. If you do, you condemn peace itself."

March 5, 1964: Clay, on 2-Hour Tour of U.N., Tells of Plans to Visit Mecca
By STEVE CADY
assius Clay told African and Asian delegates to the United Nations yesterday that he "couldn't wait" to visit to their countries.

"I'm champion of the whole world," he said during a two-hour tour of the U.N., "and I want to meet the people I am champion of."

He said he would begin the trip as soon as arrangements were completed, probably in about a month, and that he might include some exhibition bouts on the agenda.

Clay, who had disclosed his membership in the Black Muslims after taking the world heavyweight boxing title from Sonny Liston last month, said he had been deluged by invitations from Moslem countries. He said one of the places he wanted to visit was Mecca.

Army Status Not Known

In a tape recording with the Asian correspondent, the 22-year-old boxer from Louisville, Ky., declared that he had beaten Liston "because I had faith in Allah."

Asked to comment on a report that he had flunked his predraft Army psychological tests, Clay replied with a chuckle, "Do they think I'm crazy?" He said he had not heard from the Army and did not know what his draft situation was.

According to a story published yesterday by The Louisville Courier-Journal, Clay failed by a slight margin to pass the psychological tests, which he had taken Jan. 24 in Coral Gables, Fla. The Defense Department said only that the tests were being forwarded to Washington for "processing."

Clay, who had visited the U.N. in 1960 after winning the Olympic light-heavyweight title, made yesterday's tour at the invitation of two members of the U.N. press corps--Mal Goode of the American Broadcasting Company and Charles Howard of the Howard News Syndicate.

Because the U.N. would not allow a formal news conference to be held, Clay answered questions in an impromptu session in Howard's office.

More subdued than usual, the champion did almost as much listening as talking. One of his lighter comments came when he told why he had decided to "live forever" in New York.

"I'm so popular I need a big town so all the people who want to watch me can do it," he said. "New York's the only place big enough for me."

Clay will remain at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem for another week or so before returning to Louisville. In the meantime, he plans to look for a home in the metropolitan area here.

Among those accompanying the champion were his brother, Rudolph; Archie Robinson, his personal secretary, and Malcolm X, the New York spokesman for the Black Muslims.

Clay said he objected to the term "Black Muslims" as applied to American Negro devotees of Islam. He said the word "black" had been bestowed by whites as the most offensive word they could find.

"Angel food cake is white, devil food cake is black," Cassius declared.

Decision Laid to Clay

Asked if he had influenced the champion's decision to move to New York, Malcolm X said, "He's got a mind of his own."

Asked if he thought Cassius would do any formal preaching, he said, "You don't preach our philosophy, you live it."

Throughout the 1 P.M.-to-3 P.M. tour, which included a late "lunch" of orange juice and coffee at the delegates' north lounge, Malcolm X did most of the talking on racial issues.

Among the delegates and officials with whom Clay shook hands were Sori Coulibaly, Mme. Jeanne Rousseau and Aw Mammadou, all from Mali, and Christie W. Doe of Liberia. Coulibaly is chairman of the U.N. special committee on colonialism.

Guests at the luncheon party included Sheikh Wadda of Gambia and Matutu Julien of the Congo, who described themselves as friends of Malcolm X.

I have had many nice moments in my life. But the feelings I had while standing on Mount Arafat (just outside Makka, Saudi Arabia) on the day of the Hajj (the Muslim pilgrimage), was the most unique. I felt exalted by the indescribable spiritual atmosphere there as over one and a half million pilgrims invoked God to forgive them for their sins and bestow on them His choicest blessings.
It was an exhilarating experience to see people belonging to different colours, races and nationalities, kings, heads of state and ordinary men from very poor countries all clad in two simple white sheets praying to God without any sense of either pride or inferiority.It was a practical manifestation of the concept of equality in Islam.

(Speaking to the daily "Al-Madinah" Jeddah, 15 July, 1989).

The First Celebrity Muslim

Muhammad Ali's conversion to Islam was the most important moment in Islam's development in America
Ali's amazing impact on developing Islam in America

By Deborah Caldwell

http://www.beliefnet.com/frameset.asp?pageLoc=/story/96/story_9678_1.html&boardID=31239

When Muhammad Ali converted to Islam in a flamboyant, defiant moment nearly 38 years ago, not many people were happy about it. His own father, Cassius Clay Sr., declared that Ali had been "conned." Perhaps a majority of Americans weren't even sure what a Muslim was. Ali’s trainer, Angelo Dundee, said he thought it was “a piece of cloth.”

And that was the nicest thing said about Ali’s new faith. Most people were simply appalled. For Americans in the 1960s, any kind of Islam was suspect to mainstream America. And Ali had converted to the Nation of Islam, the black nationalist movement founded by Elijah Muhammad and embraced by Malcolm X. So he was not only a convert to a foreign-seeming religion--he'd also chosen what was at the time the most politically charged and scariest branch of Islam in America. Meanwhile, he essentially betrayed his friend, Malcolm X, by siding with Elijah Muhammad instead of Malcolm, who had been silenced by the Nation of Islam leader.

Of course, all these years later the world is different. There are now between 2 million and 6 million American Muslims, and the vast majority of those who are American-born Muslims--between 500,000 and 1.5 million--are African-American converts, making blacks a critical component of Islam in America. Ali is today a traditional Sunni Muslim, having left the Nation of Islam in 1975. So while he initially made Americans aware of Islam, his greater contribution may be that he later gave mainstream Islam a big boost.

Today, trembling with Parkinson’s disease but still feisty, he is a beloved American symbol. And perhaps, when Americans look back on the last decades of the 20th century, they will recognize that Ali had a significant impact on the development of Islam in America.

As the first bona fide American celebrity to embrace the faith, Ali was a hero to millions of Muslims, here and around the world. Many African-American Muslims were inspired to convert to Islam because of Ali.

Now, post-Sept. 11, he remains the most visible American Muslim celebrity. Shortly after the terrorist attacks, he went to Ground Zero to proclaim: “I've been a Muslim for 20 years. ... People recognize me for being a boxer and a man of truth. I wouldn't be here representing Islam if it were terrorist. ... Islam is peace.” A new movie, Ali, is number three at the box office. And two weeks ago, a group of Hollywood companies announced that Ali will star in public service announcements seeking to reassure Muslims that the United States is not engaged in a war with Islam. The ads will be shown in America and translated for broadcast in the Middle East and other Muslim countries.

“He’s the pivotal person in terms of mainstreaming Islam in a non-political way,” says Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid, who leads the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood in Harlem, one of the nation’s most prominent primarily African-American mosques.

“Here he is so many years later, no longer physically able, but really he’s become this symbol of America,” says Abdur-Rashid, one of many Americans for whom Ali’s conversion was an inspiration.

When Abdur-Rashid converted to Islam in 1971 at age 20, he revered Ali as a great athlete and as an African-American leader. Only later did he discover how much Ali was already revered in other countries for his Muslim faith. While it's well-known that Ali is popular in the developing world, Westerners often underestimate how important his religion is to his appeal.

“When Ali would have a fight, it was headline news throughout the Muslim world,” he recalls. “I used to have a few copies of clippings from al-Ahram newspaper in Egypt. He was a tremendously popular person. Because we in the United States tend not to be connected to other parts of the world, I think that wasn’t understood about Ali.”

In the mid-1960s, in the early years of Ali’s conversion, Abdur-Rashid was a teenage boy, still an acolyte and Sunday School teacher at a Lutheran Church in Harlem. He remembers reading newspaper stories about Ali--most of them negative, he says--and listening to grown-ups in the neighborhood talk about this young black boxer.

“Back in those days you could turn on the television and see Ali fight, and it wouldn’t cost you anything. There was no pay-per-view. Ali’s fights were always televised on Wide World of Sports on Saturdays with Howard Cosell,” Abdur-Rashid remembers. “Early in 1967, I happened to be home one particular Saturday and I was looking through a newspaper. I noticed Muhammad Ali was having a fight. I turned it on out of curiosity and I was flabbergasted by what I saw. This is the guy the newspapers were saying really can’t fight? And I realized: they’re lying. My next thought was that people who write in the newspaper actually tell lies. If they’re lying about that, what else are they lying about? It was like a window opening in my mind that never closed. From that moment on, I was a rabid Ali fan.”

Abdur-Rashid says the new Ali movie ends at the moment of his 1974 win over George Foreman, with Ali’s arms raised in victory. Perhaps it cuts away too soon, Abdur-Rashid says, because he remembers the ending with additional details: “When he sat down to talk to the press, he pulled out a copy of a Muhammad Speaks newspaper and he said, ‘This victory is proof of the truth of what I stand for religiously.’

“He always kept that projection out there,” Abdur-Rashid says, laughing.

The next year, Elijah Muhammad died. His son, W.D. Muhammad, led his followers into traditional Islam, with Ali among them.

“When Ali, particularly, became an authentic Muslim and began to travel all over the world, all that did was magnify greatly his popularity among Muslims,” Abdur-Rashid says.

Today no one disputes that Ali is an American icon, an elder statesman, someone who is revered and beloved. But how important do Muslims believe he is to the development of their faith in this country?

“Extremely important,” says Abdur-Rashid. “A lot of Americans turn on their TV sets these days and see this about 'Islam,' and that about 'Muslims'--and they don’t have a human face to relate what they see and hear about Islam. But over the past 35 years, Muhammad Ali was that human face the average person in America came to know and associate with being a Muslim.”

The Changeling
"Defiance against having to be the good Negro, the good Christian waiting to be rewarded by the righteous white provider"

By David Remnick
http://www.beliefnet.com/frameset.asp?pageLoc=/story/96/story_9673_1.html&boardID=31239


Just about the only people to react to the news of [Cassius] Clay’s conversion with a shrug were the men in his corner. “What’s in a name?” [trainer Angelo] Dundee said by way of Shakespeare. “To me he’s still the same individual, same guy. Actually, I didn’t know what Muslim was, really, because I thought it was a piece of cloth.”

Probably no other trainer would have been so foolish as to alienate his new champion—there was too much money to be had. But Dundee really didn’t care what religion his fighter belonged to as long as he showed up at the gym. “I learned that much when I was a kid,” Dundee said years later. “One thing you don’t mess with in a fighter is his religion. And his love life. You don’t mess with that either. How to throw a left—you’re better off sticking with that stuff.”

But outside that small circle of handlers, Clay’s conversion was a shock, not least to his family. His father, though never exactly a devout Christian, made clear his wrath in person and in the press. Clay senior told reporters that his son had been “conned” by the avaricious Muslims. “I’m not changing no name,” he said. “If he wants to do it, fine. But not me. In fact, I’m gonna make good use of the name Cassius Clay. I’m gonna make money out of my own name. I’ll capitalize on it.”

The relationship between father and son deteriorated to such a degree that the next time Clay went home to Louisville, he stayed in a hotel downtown. “He came out to visit us,” his mother, Odessa, said, “but he stayed only 25 minutes and kept a cab waiting outside in the driveway. He’s been told to stay away from his father because of the religious thing, and I imagine they’ve told him to stay away from me, too. Muslims don’t like me because I’m too fair-complected.”

The leading columnists reacted with almost as much outrage as Cassius Clay, Sr.

“The fight racket, since its rotten beginnings, has been the redlight district of sports. But this is the first time it has been turned into an instrument of hate,” Jimmy Cannon wrote. “It has maimed the bodies of numerous men and ruined their minds but now, as one of Elijah Muhammad’s missionaries, Clay is using it as a weapon of wickedness in an attack on the spirit. I pity Clay and abhor what he represents. In the years of hunger during the Depression, the Communists used famous people the way the Black Muslims are exploiting Clay. This is a sect that deforms the beautiful purpose of religion.”

Cannon’s point of racial orientation would always be Joe Louis. Clay’s association with the Nation of Islam, Cannon declared, was a “more pernicious hate symbol than Schmeling and Nazism.”

[Robert] Lipsyte’s coverage in The New York Times was of a different order, partly because the paper’s news columns did not allow for much opinion, but also because he was of a different generation and possessed of a far different set of experiences, not least his close friendship with Dick Gregory. “It’s true that I wasn’t freaked out about the conversion the way Cannon or [Red] Smith were,” he said. “But you have to remember how scary Malcolm X was to some people, and not just white people. The New York Times, for one, never really knew how many people he could put on the street for a revolution.

Malcolm X appreciated the depth and restraint of Lipsyte’s coverage and told him so. Back at the newsroom on West 43rd Street, Lipsyte recounted the compliment to one of his editors.

“Well, that’s great,” the editor said. “Maybe we should put huge ads on the side of all our trucks saying, ‘Malcolm X Likes Bob Lipsyte!’”

The World Boxing Association suspended the new champion for “conduct detrimental to the best interests of boxing.” However, the suspension had no real force to it after the key state commissions in New York, California, and Pennsylvania made it clear they would ignore it. Members of the Louisville Sponsoring Group reacted first with visceral shock. They realized, quite rightly, that Clay’s conversion would cost him, and them, hundreds of thousands of dollars. What was more, they realized rather quickly that Clay would not likely renew his contract with them once it expired in 1966. “We guessed the Muslims would want to control things on their own,” said Gordon Davidson. “And it was a pretty good guess.”

Just about the only white politician to speak out in support of the new heavyweight champion was Richard Russell, senator from Georgia and a segregationist. Russell thought it was splendid that the Nation of Islam’s goal of separating the races coincided with his own. (In fact, in 1961, Elijah Muhammad had initiated contact with the Ku Klux Klan leadership, the idea being that both groups favored the separation of black and white.)

The most complicated reactions came from black commentators and political actors. Black-run newspapers were deeply involved in and supportive of the civil rights movement, and most were suspicious of the Nation of Islam. It was February 1964, and the country had already witnessed a decade of civil rights landmarks: the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955-56, the Little Rock schools crisis in 1957-58, the student sit-ins in Nashville in 1960, the Freedom Rides of 1961, James Meredith’s integration of Ole Miss in 1962, the Birmingham struggle and the Sixteenth Street Church bombings in 1963, the march on Washington.

Many middle-class blacks, especially, privately admired certain aspects of the Nation—the way it rehabilitated men coming out of jails, the way it represented a certain upright morality in the home and safety on the street—but worried that such a vehement rhetoric of confrontation and religious style so alien to mainstream America would jeopardize the movement.

In Clay’s hometown newspaper, the black-run Louisville Defender, Frank Stanley wrote, rather delicately, “Our difference is not with Clay’s choice of a religious group, although we have our reservations about the motives of this particular sect. We are dismayed at the Louisville youth’s disassociation from the desegregation movement.”

[Martin Luther] King himself, who was now at the zenith of his power and appeal in the movement, indulged no such delicacies. “When Cassius Clay joined the Black Muslims and started calling himself Cassius X he became a champion of racial segregation and that is what we are fighting against,” he said. “I think perhaps Cassius should spend more time proving his boxing skill and do less talking.”

Eventually King called Clay to congratulate him on his boxing triumphs—a phone call that was overheard by the FBI. According to the bureau’s wiretap log of King’s conversations, Clay assured King that he was “keeping up with MLK, that MLK is his brother, and [Clay is] with him 100 [percent] but can’t take any chances.” Clay told King to “take care of himself” and “watch out for them whities.”

A month after the fight, Jackie Robinson wrote a piece for The Chicago Defender, the most prominent of all black-run papers, in which he insisted on the magnitude of the new champion’s victory in the ring and a cool acceptance of his conversion to the Nation of Islam. While Robinson’s putative admirers among the white columnists brayed with anger and confusion about this self-assertive new champion, Robinson himself, who did not require their fatherly acceptance, saw some virtue in this young man’s decision, even if he did not share it.

“I don’t think Negroes en masse will embrace Black Muslimism any more than they have embraced Communism,” Robinson wrote. “Young and old, Negroes by the tens of thousands went into the streets in America and proved their willingness to suffer, fight, and even die for freedom. These people want more democracy—not less. They want to be integrated into the mainstream of American life, not invited to live in some small cubicle of this land in splendid isolation. If Negroes ever turn to the Black Muslim movement, in any numbers, it will not be because of Cassius or even Malcolm X. It will be because white America has refused to recognize the responsible leadership of the Negro people and to grant to us the same rights that any other citizen enjoys in this land.”

In the late sixties, when he was making his stand against the draft and went into exile, many voices, radical and not, celebrated Ali as a figure of defiance and courage. Eldridge Cleaver described him as a “genuine revolutionary” and the “first ‘free’ black champion ever to confront white America.” Athletes like Lew Alcindor would be radicalized to the point of converstion. Even Red Smith would come around. But at the time, in 1964, very few people, black or white, openly celebrated Clay’s transformation.

“I remember in the early sixties how we felt at home about Ali,” said the writer Jill Nelson, who grew up in Harlem and on the Upper West Side. “We weren’t about to join the Nation, but we loved Ali for the supreme act of defiance. It was the defiance against having to be the good Negro, the good Christian waiting to be rewarded by the righteous white provider. We loved Ali because he was so beautiful and powerful and because he talked a lot of lip. But he also epitomized a lot of black people’s emotions at the time, our anger, our sense of entitlement, the need to be better just to get to the median, the sense of standing up against the furies.”

Read MORE about Muhammad Ali:

Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr. was born January 17, 1942, in Louisville, Kentucky. The son of Cassius Marcellus Sr., a sign and mural painter, and Odessa Grady, a housewife, Cassius may have been born "junior," but the eldest son of the Clay family was destined for true greatness.

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