THE passing of Muhammad Ali – radical black activist, anti-war campaigner, Muslim believer in Sufi mysticism, poet and original rapper – has been followed inevitably by millions of honeyed words from media commentators, politicians and assorted hangers-on, all seeking to praise the sometime world champion boxer now he is safely in his grave.

But I am old enough to remember a different establishment reaction to Ali. There was a time, in the 1960s and 1970s, when he was vilified, denounced and hounded out of his well-deserved sporting titles by a spiteful, blatantly racist, vicious media and political machine. A period when Ali was arrested, stripped of his boxing titles then tried and convicted on spurious draft dodging charges, in a blatant attempt both to silence his opposition to America’s genocidal war in Vietnam and humiliate him because he was an “uppity” black.

Ali’s radical views, militant black separatism and (synonymous with his politics) conversion to Islam outraged the American establishment because it cut across the fictional narrative of the Civil Rights movement of the Kennedy era that a “reformed” white society had “granted” the Negro his and her place in the great American Dream machine. In fact, blacks like Ali who contested this white political condescension were either assassinated – like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. Or systematically hounded from their careers – like Ali himself, or Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who were stripped of their medals at the 1968 Olympic Games for daring to give the Black Power salute during the playing of the American national anthem. The vendetta against Ali – a black man who dared to reject his assured status as a “house servant” in the US entertainment industry – lasted decades. When Ali renounced his “white” name of Cassius Clay in 1964, shortly after defeating Sonny Liston for the world heavyweight title in 1964, the US media deliberately decided to ignore his wishes. You can be a white movie star and change your name from Marion Morrison to John Wayne. But a black man discarding a name bequeathed from Western culture long after his African forebears had been kidnapped into slavery? That’s another matter.

In 1967 Ali defended his heavyweight title against Ernie Terrell, another black boxer. Terrell was terribly outclassed and a dancing, confident Ali was soon taunting the media from the ring with “What’s my name?” This only provoked the US mainstream media to paroxysms of anti-Ali bile. The New York Times called him “a mean and malicious man”. Jimmy Cannon, reputedly one of America’s eminent boxing writers, quipped: “Cassius Clay had a good time beating up another Negro”. Cannon was later inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2002.

Ali came into this world in racist, segregationist America on 17 January, 1942 in Louisville, Kentucky. To understand the America of this period you have to put aside the dominant myth of modern US history, namely that the Southern slave-owning Confederacy lost the Civil War. In fact, Lee’s surrender at Appomattox in 1865 marked only an interregnum in the struggle. With Lincoln assassinated, the Northern and Southern halves of the dominant Democratic Party re-united around a programme of counter-revolution against black rights.

In 1874, the Democrats won control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the Civil War. Emboldened, the following year, Democrats in Mississippi launched an armed coup against the Republican state legislature and governor (both elected by black votes). Hundreds of blacks were massacred yet the Republican president in Washington, General Ulysses S Grant refused to intervene, fearing another civil war. Matters came to a head when the 1876 presidential election ended in deadlock because of disputed Electoral College ballots in the Southern states. A deal was brokered, letting the (now financially corrupt) Republicans have the White House in return for the reactionary Democrats having the Senate. White southern racists controlled the Senate for the next century, making the US into an apartheid state and turning a blind eye to the routine, extra-judicial lynching of any black man who got out of line.

TO reject this evil system intellectually took courage. But to oppose it in practice, risking life and reputation, like Muhammad Ali did, required bravery of a different order. Few were so inclined. In fact, during the early 20th Century, much of the organised political resistance to segregation in the Deep South came from the tiny US Communist Party, which explains why many of the cadres who organised Martin Luther King’s great Civil Rights marches in the 1960s had CP backgrounds – history the US likes to ignore.

This confluence of black resistance and left-wing politics was the seedbed of an idea that would influence many black Americans: the notion of an independent, black nation in North America. Between the world wars, US Communists propagated the idea of an independent Afro-American state in the so-called Black Belt – though later they repudiated the concept. The 1930s also saw black separatism appear in a different form, with the founding of the radical Nation of Islam movement, to which Ali would later adhere (before converting to orthodox Sunnism in 1975).

Black separatism in America has always proved a divisive, complex and equivocal political doctrine. Ultimately, most Afro-Americans have rejected it in favour of some wider vision of social and economic reform (as did Ali). Rather, the importance of the separatist idea lies in the way it poses the ultimate political dilemma in the struggle of black Americans. Are they seeking an “equal” place in conventional society, with all its imperfections, exploitation and corruption? Or can genuine equality – social, economic and cultural – only be achieved by such a radical reshaping of existing society (of which “separatism” is but one variant) that it brings down the whole rotten capitalist edifice, thereby liberating everyone? (We face the same dilemma here in Scotland.)

For Ali, ultimately it was the latter vision that prevailed. His path led first to the black separatism of the Nation of Islam, as it did for Malcolm X. But both men later embraced a more liberal (and authentic) vision of historic Islam as they moved further to the political left and realised that a systemic social revolution was called for. Ali’s first public tensions with the Nation of Islam movement emerged when he came out in support of the mass anti-Vietnam War demonstrations of the late 1960s – demonstrations that brought whites and blacks together in a common cause.

The US media of late has been lamenting an outbreak of “political correctness” among students in liberal arts universities. So-called examples of this “assault” on free speech and intellectual curiosity are student demands to put warning labels on courses or books that might cause offence.

Don’t be misled. What is happening here is that black and Latino students from very poor backgrounds are rejecting courses designed to train them to enter a very white, middle class professions.

Confused and confusing as some of these student demand might be, they are signs that a new generation of black students in the elite US universities are questioning their cultural assimilation.

The great Muhammad Ali would understand where they are coming from and cheer them on. His soul goes marching on.


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