Muhammad Speaks and Muhammad Ali Intersections of the Nation of Islam and Sport in the 1960S Maureen Smith

10 Muhammad Speaks and Muhammad Ali Intersections of the Nation of Islam and sport in the 1960s Maureen Smith America, more than any other country, offers our people opportunities to engage in sports and play, which cause delinquency, murder, theft, and other forms of wicked and immoral crimes. This is due to this country’s display of filthy temptations in this world of sport and play.1 Introduction With the advent of its first issue, Muhammad Speaks established itself as the voice of the Nation of Islam’s Messenger, Elijah Muhammad. Dedicated to ‘Freedom, Justice, and Equality for the Black Man’, the first issue was printed in October 1961 and the newspaper’s circulation increased at a rate comparable to the discontent of African Americans in the USA during the freedom struggle of the civil rights movement.2 Advocating freedom and separation from whites, the newspaper served a critical role in promoting racial pride, as well as ministering the beliefs and teachings of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. Some of these teachings explored issues surrounding a range of athletic pursuits, and initially the Nation rejected the ‘evils’ of professional sport and games. Yet, through the pages of Muhammad Speaks it is possible to identify a shift in the Nation of Islam’s position on sport, as the organisation’s leadership came to recognise the political utility that an association with a prominent Muslim athlete, such as Muhammad Ali, could offer their movement. Once Ali’s use to the Nation of Islam was exhausted, the leaders once again resumed their opposition to professional sport. The Nation of Islam, according to Wallace D. Muhammad, was both a religion and a social movement.3 It was a Black ‘nation’ within the USA which ‘believed that African-Americans must free themselves physically and psychologically’.4 The organisation ‘commenced’ in the 1930s when the Moorish Science Temple broke into a number of separate ‘warring factions’ and echoed sentiments familiar to those who had followed Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. The Nation of Islam was a new Black Islamic movement, which established its own temples, created its own bureaucracy, assigned its own officials, started its own 178 Maureen Smith schools and even trained its own paramilitary, the Fruit of Islam. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad had been selected by Master Farad Muhammad (also known as W.D. Fard) to lead the Nation and return the people to the ‘old time religion of African Americans’.5 Elijah Muhammad claimed that African Americans were ‘royals of the Original People from the holy city of Mecca’ and that the white man was the devil.6 He taught that God was a Black man and that ancient Black civilisation was the original site of divine culture.7 Muhammad empowered African Americans through Islam and set forth guidelines and economic and moral codes of behaviour to follow. He ordered that ‘Muslims pray five times a day, eat once a day, and abstain from pork, alcohol, tobacco, narcotics, gambling, sports, long vacations from work, and sleeping more than is necessary for health’.8 In the mainstream American press, the religion was not recognised as a ‘legitimate’ religion and was regarded variously as a cult or a Black supremacist organisation. The Muslim teachings were detailed in several Nation of Islam publica- tions, including Muhammad’s book, Message to the Blackman in America.9 As part of this message, Muhammad addressed the role of sport in Black culture in the USA. Despite his admonishment of Black athletes and their decision to pursue a professional career in sport, the leader and his newspaper changed their position after one of their disciples rose to the top of his field. When Cassius Clay wrested the Heavyweight Championship of the World title from Sonny Liston, Clay had already been attending meetings of the Nation of Islam. Within days of his victory, Clay announced his conversion to the Muslim religion and his subsequent name change from Cassius Clay, his slave name, to Muhammad Ali, a name bestowed upon him by the religion’s leader, Elijah Muhammad.10 Ali’s subsequent career is chronicled in the pages of Muhammad Speaks, as Muhammad and the Nation of Islam’s stance on sport and professional athletes changed radically. Whilst organised sport has provided both an avenue for the acculturation of a number of minority groups within American society as well as a means of retaining an independent cultural identity,11 the Nation of Islam was reluctant to incorporate sport into its philosophy, for, in the 1960s, organised, professional sport represented yet another arena in which African Americans were subjected to segregation and disenfranchisement. Yet with the success of Muhammad Ali, the Nation of Islam, whilst not rejecting their previous position, quietly overlooked the ‘evil’ aspects of Ali’s profes- sion and embraced professional sport as an avenue through which their message could be communicated to a wider audience. This chapter explores the meaning of sport within the Nation of Islam and the role of Muhammad Ali in promoting sport and the Islamic religion during the 1960s. Despite the Nation of Islam’s eagerness to embrace Ali and the promotional poten- tial his success inspired, tensions arose as a result of their philosophy of sport, compounded by conflicts between Ali’s religious and athletic identi- ties. This chapter examines these pressures and provides insight into the Muhammad Speaks and Muhammad Ali 179 various ways that sport and, in this context, the athletic achievements of Muhammad Ali were used to symbolise Black Islamic identity and retain the religious and political integrity of the Nation of Islam. Beyond this, Ali presented an opportunity to further the cause of the Nation, promising a healthy increase in recruits as well as a larger market for its message, as promulgated in Muhammad Speaks. As such, Ali’s sporting achievements served important political purposes for the movement, contributing both to their on-going domestic struggle for civil rights as well as to the establish- ment of links with Islamic communities abroad. When Ali no longer served an explicit political purpose, or had perhaps simply become too popular within mainstream white America, he was denounced by the Nation, as was organised sport once again. Within a matter of five years, the political, religious and sporting landscape was drastically altered. The country experienced a shift in philosophies and race relations, and the Nation of Islam reached a zenith in their popularity with the help of a ‘loudmouthed’ fighter. The Nation of Islam and their philosophy of sport The first reference to sport in Muhammad Speaks appeared in the December 1961 issue, with an advertisement for Joe Louis Milk and a picture of boxer Archie Moore at a Baltimore luncheon. Published monthly until July 1962, and then semi-monthly from August 1962, each issue contained at least one article or picture of professional male athletes in America, always in the last pages of the publication. From the beginning of 1963, Muhammad Speaks was published weekly. The reportage of sport in the newspaper was generally non-controversial and focussed on providing ‘facts’, such as ‘Baseball’s Top NL Negroes’,12 or a profile of heavyweight champion Sonny Liston.13 By early 1962, the paper started publishing articles with a more critical edge, which focussed on African-American participation in professional sport, beginning with a three-part series on the absence of Black quarterbacks in the National Football League14 and an article entitled ‘Recreation vs. wreck- reation: expert defines role of physical culture in big city ghetto’.15 In the 15 October 1962 issue, Elijah Muhammad contributed a column that warned against the evils of sport and play, which formed the basis of an essay that was later published in his book, Message to the Blackman in America. Despite mentioning Muhammad Ali in the book a number of times and praising him for his religious conversion, Muhammad dedicated a chapter to what he perceived to be the destructive role of sport in America, focussing specifically on how it affected the Black man.16 In his column, Muhammad proclaimed the evils of sport and linked the practice of Christianity to the growing popularity of sport and the damage the games caused: Hundreds of millions of dollars change hands for the benefit of a few to the hurt of millions, and suffering from the lack of good education, with 180 Maureen Smith their last few pennies they help the already helped to try winning with these gambling ‘scientists’ who have prepared a game of chance that the poor suckers have only one chance out of nine hundred to win. Therefore, the world of sports is causing tremendous evils.17 Beyond gambling, Muhammad attributed to Christianity: the destruction of homes and families, the disgrace, the shame, the filling up of jails … with the victims of sports and play, the loss of friendship, the loss of beautiful wives and husbands, the loss of sons and daughters to these penal institutions.18 He also believed that ‘the poor so-called Negroes are the worst victims in this world of sport and play because they are trying to learn the white man’s games of civilization’.19 He stated that ‘sport and play (games of chance) take away the remembrance of Allah (God) and the doing of good’,20 and concluded his column with an invitation for new members. His public disdain for sport would be revisited, yet was often overlooked in the following years when Cassius Clay announced his conversion to Islam, his name change and his membership in the Nation of Islam.

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