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- ELIJAH MUHAMMAD:
- Cassius Clay.
- He was box office.
Anywhere he went, he could create a crowd.
- I was truly infatuated with this man.
- You're standing in front of my candelabra.
- From the first moment, I was in love.
- Whatever you do, pay to get in.
- The civil rights movement is just about to explode.
- Young Black folks are hungry for something different.
- White America wants Cassius Clay to be the good guy.
- He didn't know what Islam was.
- MARK: Hearing Elijah Muhammad really gave everything
that was going on in his life at the time a purpose.
- THOMAS: The Nation of Islam were thought of
as an ominous, shadowy group.
- MALCOLM X: White people who are guilty of white supremacy
try and hide their own guilt
by accusing the, uh, Honorable Elijah Muhammad
of teaching Black supremacy.
- ATTALLAH: While he was like a younger brother for my father,
he was a bigger brother for me.
And it was stopped right in the middle.
- When the Honorable Elijah Muhammad cuts a man off,
well, then, he's automatically cut off
with all of his followers.
- CLAUDE: He would not follow a student of the teacher.
He would follow the teacher himself.
- I am the greatest! - All right, Cass.
- He is someone who says, I want freedom.
And I have to do that
by tying myself back to my identity.
- Whatever you call me,
you're not gonna call me out of my name.
- And from now on, my name is Cassius X.
- I'm free to be what I wanna be and think what I wanna think.
- ♪
- [crowd shouting]
- A lot of these things get lost in history,
but the Golden Gloves,
certainly then, was the stepping stone,
usually to the Olympics.
And the Olympics, if you succeeded, to a pro career.
- [crowd shouting]
- ROBERT: And Clay was kind of on the cusp of
whether he was really gonna be able to do this thing.
So the Golden Gloves were kind of
his graduation, in a sense,
from being a-- you know, a kid boxer,
suddenly, he was on a national stage.
- ♪
- ROBERT: I think Chicago and the Golden Gloves
was also one of the first times
that he was really out in the world.
- THOMAS: He meets somebody who's selling copies
of the Nation of Islam newspaper, "Muhammad Speaks",
on the street, and that's the beginning of his introduction
to the Nation of Islam.
- JAMES: The world is beginning to hear about
this group of Black men who don't drink alcohol,
don't use drugs, open businesses,
take care of their family.
That was not the narrative that white media was giving
to the world and to African American.
- MARK: For him to hear these messages,
how white supremacy functions, right?
And to double back on this idea that you, Black man,
don't really know who you are?
It's an incredibly powerful message.
- Well, Keith, everything looks set, forthright,
for a wonderful Olympic Games here in Rome.
- It certainly does, Sid.
- The next big thing is the Olympic Games.
- [crowd cheering]
- JIM: Sitting there, summer, no school,
sampling the Olympics on television,
and along came Cassius Marcellus Clay.
- ♪
- I had no preparation for watching what I saw.
Shuffled his feet, emoted demonstrably.
From the first moment, I was in love.
- ROBERT: He got a lot of attention
because he was kind of, uh, the mayor of Olympic Village.
- JERRY: He got the medal.
And he's sitting on these steps in the Olympic Village,
and he's holding a medal up.
And the athletes are walking by.
Now, I'm convinced half of them
can't understand one world of English.
I'm Cassius Clay!
I'm pretty!
I'm gonna be the heayvweight champion of the world,
and you're gonna come pay to see me fight,
and you're gonna blah, blah, blah...
And they don't know what the hell he's saying.
But I notice one thing which made me pay attention to him.
All the female athletes walked 10 feet past him, turned around,
and took a second look.
And I said, "There's some reason to watch out for this guy!"
- [indistinct chatter]
- His exuberance caught international press attention.
- Tell me how you came to get such a Roman name as that.
- Well, as I understand, I'm Cassius Marcellus Clay VI.
And my great-great grandfather was a Kentucky slave,
and he was named after some great Kentuckian.
- I think the young Cassius Clay
would have never thought twice about
whether or not his name was a family name, right?
Was a slave name.
"Clay" was the name of his father,
it was of his parents, of his grandparents.
- Since I've reached a little fame in boxing,
most people want to know where I'm from and, uh,
where did I get that name.
But really, I haven't really checked on it.
So I see that I'm gonna have to go look--
- REPORTER: You'll have to look it up.
- See what it's all about,
now that I'm getting a little interviewed.
- That naming was the thing that connected them to family,
to community, right? To a larger history.
- ♪
- THOMAS: Cassius Clay comes out of the Olympics
with a gold medal,
and white residents of Louisville get together
to back him financially.
- GREG: Here you have 11 white guys that represented
the establishment of the city
that felt like they wanted to protect Cassius
from the underworld of the boxing industry
and make sure, in their words, that he would "emerge rich"
from this once all this was done.
- I'm Will Faversham, vice president of Brown-Forman,
and one of the founders of the group of Cassius Clay.
I'm also his manager.
- Now, you can look at this and you can say,
okay, these people took an interest in this young man
and wanted to make sure that he wasn't exploited financially.
We wanna see that people do right by him.
- I'm W. Lyons Brown, the chairman of the board of
Brown-Forman Distillers Corporation.
I'm also a farmer and in the oil business.
- Or you can say that this is just a variation of,
well, we like horses,
and we buy them and run them in the Kentucky Derby.
And now we've got a fighter
and we're grooming him to see what he can win.
- Of course, they wanted to make some money as well.
It was a 50-50 deal-- it was unheard of at the time--
where Cassius would be receiving a salary,
all of his expenses paid,
so he didn't have to worry about that,
nor did he have to worry about getting pulled into
what was then a largely mob-controlled boxing industry.
- ROBERT: When he came back to Louisville,
he kind of briefly forgot where he was.
Maybe he thought he was still, you know,
a gold medal champion in Rome.
He couldn't go out to dinner with these members
of the Louisville sponsoring group, these white guys.
These are segregated restaurants.
They wouldn't even serve him as an Olympic champion.
He was an international hero,
and that still wasn't good enough for this place?
- W. LYONS BROWN: My mother's family, they were the Clays,
the same name as Cassius.
When the American Negro came here as slaves, they went into--
they took the names of the families.
Our families freed, way back there--
we freed the slaves in our families.
But I'm not sure that Cassius's probably great grandparents
and some of my relatives, uh, they were probably the owners
of Cassius's great grandparents.
- CLAUDE: He would've been raised in an atmosphere
fraught with, underneath the surface
and not so underneath the surface, terror.
He would've grown up, uh,
being told what he could and could not aspire to be,
and it wouldn't have been a long list of things
that would have been, uh, expected of him as far as
the possibilities of life.
He would have been contemporaries
of people like Emmett Till,
who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955.
He would have been contemporaries of
young Black people who were the first
to integrate the high school in Little Rock, Arkansas.
He would have been warned, I imagine, by parents,
people in church congregation, neighbors, uh,
about the dos and don'ts of Southern race relations,
the sort of racial etiquette that people had to live by
in order to survive.
- ♪
- Cassius Clay needed a trainer.
And the sponsoring group asked around,
and they were told, well,
there's a pretty good trainer in Miami
named Angelo Dundee.
They made a deal.
Angelo opted for a weekly salary
instead of a percentage of Cassius's purses.
That was a decision he regretted later on.
Clay trained at the 5th Street Gym in Miami,
which was where Angelo Dundee worked with all his fighters.
That was Angelo's home.
- 5th Street Gym, it looks like a gym.
The windows are so dirty, you can't see the street.
The stairs to the second floor creak.
You get up there,
there's a million fighters,
because they had all the fighters in South Florida.
He gets in there, and every day,
he is learning a little bit about boxing.
- THOMAS: Angelo Dundee was the perfect trainer
for Cassius Clay.
He let Cassius be Cassius.
The great trainers understand
that each fighter has different gifts.
And with Cass, it was to emphasize
extraordinary speed and reflexes.
Angelo would say, you know,
that was really great when you threw your hook this way
and you did it just like this.
That registers with Cassius.
He says, okay, that's how I'm gonna keep throwing
my left hook.
He had a wonderful block of marble to sculpt,
but he knew how to sculpt it.
- ROBERT: One of the great advantages
of having a great trainer like Angelo Dundee
was that opponents would be selected
very, very carefully.
He was groomed through his early fight.
He fought a lot of, you know, big, tough-looking guys,
but they were--what were they?
They were lumberjacks, and truck drivers, and deputy sheriffs.
Tomato cans, as they're often called.
And he, you know, broke every one of those tomato cans
on the way up.
And they were also picked for particularly things
they could or couldn't do that would teach him another lesson.
Cassius Clay was never just kind of thrown into a fight
with somebody who could hurt him.
So it was--it was brilliant strategy.
- They say that I am the greatest that they've ever seen.
Most people predict me, uh,
as the type of fighters Joe Louis was and a lot of 'em.
And "The Ring" magazine, "Sports Illustrated",
and a lot of the other nationwide magazines,
class me over Floyd Patterson.
- MALE COMMENTATOR: The site of the most lucrative fight
in the history of boxing.
27-year-old Floyd Patterson
defends the heavyweight championship of the world
against Sonny Liston.
- Sonny Liston was considered to be
the closest thing to Godzilla you had in fighting.
This was a devastating puncher
with a--a hostile aura about him.
He was scary.
People went into the ring to fight Sonny Liston
and they were scared.
This man is a bad man.
He is really trying to hurt me.
And he has the tools to do it.
- MALE COMMENTATOR: Sonny Liston moves out
to face the big chance of a turbulent life.
- People respected Floyd Patterson.
People kind of liked Floyd Patterson.
Floyd Patterson was clearly a literate man
who had won an Olympic gold medal.
- MALE COMMENTATOR: Liston's heavy jabs bother Patterson.
- [crowd shouting]
- MALE COMMENATOR: A left to a grazing right
and a solid left to the cheekbone
dropped the champion.
- DAMION: Sonny Liston demolished him,
knocked him out in the first round.
That was the first time that a heavyweight champion
had ever been knocked out in the first round.
This made Sonny Liston the most feared man in boxing.
- MARK: Miami was an incredibly segregated city.
And there was a Black part of Miami, right?
And this is important to remember.
And this is where, you know, Cassius Clay,
obviously one of the few places he can live in, hotels, right?
Because of segregation.
Early 1960s Black radio,
you would have been listening to rhythm and blues music.
Some of the early sounds of Motown.
You would have been listening to some blues artists.
Um, you know, a kind of heavy beat music,
not quite soul music yet.
- [radio static, tuning]
- MARK: And then suddenly you're listening to Elijah Muhammad--
- MALE ANNOUNCER: Now we have the honor and privilege
of presenting to you [unintelligible],
the Honorable Elijah Muhammad,
broadcasting to us from Chicago, Illinois.
- --which almost sounds like the voice of God in that moment.
And the young Black folks are hungry for something different.
- ELIJAH MUHAMMAD:
- If you're a young Cassius Clay,
who has an incredible amount of self-confidence,
who's ambitious,
who sees himself as someone
who's going to make a difference in the future,
hearing Elijah Muhammad really gave everything
that was going on in his life at the time a purpose.
- ELIJAH MUHAMMAD:
- Cassius Clay, a young African American,
growing up at the time that the civil rights movement
is just about to explode in America.
The white community set up laws
that restricted the African American community
from exercising their constitutional rights.
He's growing up in segregation in America at its worst time.
- There are a number of organizations
that were struggling, really,
to address the crisis over civil rights.
Much of the leadership would have been
coming out of the churches.
There was the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People.
There was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
to which Dr. King, Martin Luther King,
uh, civil rights icon and leader, was a part of.
There's the Urban League, which, as its name suggests,
was involved in improving conditions
of African Americans in cities.
And the Nation of Islam.
- My father was a preacher.
And I used to sit and look at him preach in faith.
- The early Nation of Islam teachings
really worked along several lines.
First there were daily living tips--
advice, if you will.
Don't eat pork.
Uh, you dress a certain way.
You present yourself a certain way.
That there was no such thing as Heaven and Hell,
which runs counter to the teachings of orthodox Islam.
That white people were devils
and Elijah Muhammad was God's messenger on earth.
- The Nation of Islam is very flesh-and-blood materialist
in their understanding of what evil is,
what good is, and so forth,
as opposed to other religious belief systems
in which there is a spiritual, unseen element.
It's a thoroughly American phenomena.
- The Nation of Islam preached separatism.
- Elijah Muhammad made it very clear,
we tried to live with you, you don't wanna live with us.
- It was totally at odds with
the prevailing integrationist sentiment
of Martin Luther King, Jr.
and other leaders of the civil rights movement.
- ELIJAH MUHAMMAD:
- So if you don't wanna live with [unintelligible],
here's the option:
give us all that we need,
give us a certain amount of land in America,
and let us build a nation of our own,
so we don't have to depend on you
and you don't have to have a contradiction with us.
White America wasn't about to do either of those things,
so the Nation had to go about building a nation
through buying land, building farms,
opening businesses, opening restaurants,
different kinds of local mom-and-pop business
in the Black community, so that the Black community
was indeed controlled by Black people.
- ELIJAH MUHAMMAD:
- [audience cheers and applause]
- CLAUDE: You know, if you're Elijah Muhammad,
and your argument is that the whole thing is rigged, right?
The whole thing is rigged in favor of white people--
you're not gonna get rights,
stop asking them for the right to vote,
stop asking for civil rights and so forth,
because it's not in the cards for you.
The system is not capable of producing that for you
and it's not designed to do that, okay?
If that's your argument and you're standing in 1959 or 1960,
it's hard to argue against that position.
- [applause]
- Their critique was a powerful critique for a lot of folks.
But I think if you're 18, 19,
20-year-old Cassius Marcellus Clay,
and you're hearing the Nation of Islam's critique,
their critique itself was the sharpest part of the sword.
- ♪
- Cassius Clay's true indoctrination
into the Nation of Islam began
when he met a man named Abdul Rahman,
formerly known as Captain Sam,
who was in the Miami Temple of the Nation of Islam.
He was selling papers on the street.
They started talking.
Cassius invited Abdul back to his hotel room
to show him his scrapbooks.
And the relationship went from there.
- JAMES: He didn't know what the hell Islam was.
But now he's being introduced to it in Florida.
It makes him feel good about himself.
And he's learning history.
30% of the Africans that was enslaved in the United States
were Muslims before coming here.
And these people had family names.
They had surnames. They had a history.
They had a culture.
The first thing that was taken away was identity
and the first thing to take away identity
is to take away your name.
They were not allowed by threat on life
to continue using African names.
And to make you submit,
you became the property of the individual who owned you.
And that meant you took on their names.
In the Nation of Islam,
there's already hundreds of thousands
of other Black men and women
who have gone through the process of getting a new name
that would tie them back to their ancient African roots.
- Give the slave master back his name, okay?
An X is better than whatever
the slave master had given you before.
Just take the X.
And ideally eventually you would have an original name.
That would have to come from Elijah Muhammad.
He bestowed original names.
So there are people who could go an entire lifetime with X.
- Captain Sam invites Cassius Clay and his brother to Detroit,
where the Honorable Elijah Muhammad
was making a major speech.
And he's going to be introduced, of course,
by his national spokesperson, Malcolm X.
- You are gathered here this afternoon
to hear the Honorable Elijah Muhammad's message,
which you knew in advance was titled
"Separation or Death."
- Captain Sam took them to a restaurant,
where Malcolm X indeed was preparing his speech
for that evening rally.
And there the two met for the first time.
Malcolm had no idea who the young man was.
But that's where the two met,
and they seemed to have had an impression on one another
in that short and very brief meeting.
- I think quickly they recognized something
in one another, and as time moved on, they stayed in touch.
My father had many people in his life that would come by
and who would be nurtured or guided
or where the camaraderie existed.
- We're not asking you to give us some money to make us rich.
We put up businesses.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad has set up more businesses
than any Black man in America.
- For Cassius Clay to be the student
of the national spokesperson
had to have had enormous impact on him.
- He's not trying to build churches.
He's trying to build, uh, businesses,
'cause businesses make jobs for you
and churches don't make jobs for anybody but preachers.
- ATTALLAH: Cassius Clay--
I mean, he had a million and one questions all the time.
And my father didn't all-- have all those answers,
but he was along the way for those--that journey.
- [audience applause]
- GREG: The Nation, what it represented, I believe,
to white America,
was a group of Black dudes,
you know, plotting against white America.
And obviously white America, white men in particular,
had been calling the shots for a long time.
And they wanted to hold on to that.
So they would look at any kind of threat against that
as something to become concerned about,
and certainly the Nation they perceived as a threat.
- ROBERT: Being aligned with these scary people
drove a lot of basically magazine and newspaper writers
to try to pry out of Cassius, uh,
his affiliation with Malcolm and Nation of Islam, but he didn't--
he just didn't talk about it.
He wouldn't talk about it.
- He didn't hide it in terms of his activity.
He moved around. He went to meetings.
He read, he discovered.
And their people just said, lay low.
- ♪
- THOMAS: Cassius Clay fights Doug Jones in New York
at Madison Square Garden.
In those days, the way you sold a fight to the public,
the way you sold tickets, was through the newspapers.
And what happens? There's a newspaper strike.
Cassius Clay was extraordinary during that time.
He went down to coffeehouses in Greenwich Village
and recited poetry.
He got on radio.
He got on television.
And the bottom line was that fight,
in the middle of a newspaper strike, sold out.
- He was the coming fighter.
He was box office.
- Well, Cassius, they say that the Garden
is gonna be filled for this event.
Uh, why do you think that, uh, you were able to do that?
- Because the main attraction will be Cassius Clay,
The Louisville Lip,
and he has predicted that Doug Jones must fall in six.
- It was an extraordinary marketing performance
by Cassius Clay.
- This will be the 12th straight prediction.
And people would like to--
just to come to see if this guy is really human.
- Cassius Clay was always fun to watch.
He was fun to watch just sitting there.
I mean, he was certainly fun to watch in the ring.
It was a kind of...
Part of that following that watched
because they were waiting for something bad to happen to him.
- Introducing, from Louisville, Kentucky.
He's wearing white trunks.
He weighs 202 1/2 pounds.
Cassius Clay. Clay.
- Doug Jones was a good, tough fighter.
The things that Clay had done that bothered other guys
didn't seem to bother Doug Jones.
- MALE COMMENTATOR: Cassius Clay has [unintelligible].
He's in the white trunks, 6'3.
Watch his speedy left hand. He's got a beauty.
And here you have a standing room crowd only
at Madison Square Garden,
which is credit to this 21-year-older.
- As I'm watching, I'm scoring the fight,
and I'm thinking, "Oh my god, this is--this isn't even fun."
- MALE COMMENTATOR: Jones in black, 188.
[unintelligible], and there it is.
- [crowd cheering, whistling]
- MALE COMMENTATOR: A good, solid run.
- This is scary, come on. Come on, Cassius.
Get your act together.
- MALE COMMENTATOR: Good one too by Clay.
45 seconds left in the round.
Clay, in white,
originally predicted a knockout in six.
But then he decided to cut it down to four.
This is the fourth round.
- My sense is that Cassius liked to make good on his predictions.
But he also understood that boxing is a serious game
and saying something doesn't mean that you can do it.
- [crowd jeering]
- MALE COMMENTATOR: 15 seconds to go.
Fans are probably booing about the prediction.
- [bell rings]
- [crowd cheering]
- MALE COMMENATOR: Well, there's always
the possibility of a draw at Madison Square Garden.
- GREG: He won a close decision.
- 5-4, 1 even, in favor of Clay.
- JERRY: A lot of people at ringside don't even watch.
He never showed a command in a fight.
It was a close fight,
so if you wanna flip one or two rounds,
he just got the fight.
Well, he sure didn't look like a contender
for the heavyweight championship.
- ♪
- JAMES: Malcolm X is at the fight.
He has become a mentor to young Clay.
- CLAUDE: Malcolm X is born Malcolm Little.
He's from, uh, Omaha, Nebraska, born there in 1925.
His father dies at a very early age.
Uh, Malcolm believes he was killed by Klansmen.
His mother is institutionalized for mental health issues,
uh, while he was a youth.
His family is scattered into foster homes,
he and his brothers.
He gets in trouble with the law.
He serves about a seven-year term in prison.
And it's there that one of his brothers introduces him
to the Nation of Islam and its theology.
When he comes out, uh, in the early 1950s,
he's a dedicated true believer in Elijah Muhammad's message.
- ELIJAH MUHAMMAD:
- ♪
- So much of the focus was on this charismatic, you know,
6'6, red hair spokesperson, you know, Malcolm X.
- The Black people in this country
have been the victims of violence
at the hands of the white man for 400 years.
And following the ignorant Negro preachers,
we have thought that it was godlike to turn the other cheek
to the brute that was brutalizing us.
- And in the time when folks thought that
Martin Luther King was too radical,
in many of their minds, right,
Malcolm X was even worse.
- Today the Honorable Elijah Muhammad
is showing Black people in this country
that just as the white man and every other person on this earth
has God-given rights, natural rights, civil rights,
any kind of rights that you can think of
when it comes to defending himself,
Black people should have--
we should have the right to defend ourselves also.
- My father was not one to directly recruit anyone.
He would speak to those who were already interested.
He adored Cassius Clay at the time.
They were in touch all the time.
The conversations, you know, to the house in Queens
and me being able to speak to him on the phone.
And my father, being 17 years older than him,
was ahead of the curve in terms of seeing what,
um, was around the bend.
By that time, my father was already a global citizen.
My father's interest in the African American well-being
did not start with the Nation of Islam.
He was born into it.
It's already in motion.
It's not hatched because you enter one entity or another.
- ♪
- [clock ticking]
- MALE NARRATOR: Several police agencies
were watching the Muslims closely.
The US Justice Department also had them under surveillance.
- CLAUDE: So everyone's investigating
the Nation of Islam.
The FBI has the biggest file.
One part of this censure of the Nation of Islam
is that occasionally they raid a mosque,
uh, just to, you know, show who's boss.
So this happened in the LA mosque.
And one person, Ronald Stokes, was killed.
- In Los Angeles, California last year,
the police shot Ronald Stokes through the heart.
- There were those Muslims who demanded...
as they would, you know,
they'd point to Old Testament biblical justice,
eye for an eye.
They kill one of us, we kill one of them.
- JAMES: Malcolm wanted to take it to the streets.
The Messenger told them, no, that's not the way we do this.
We are a spiritual people.
This is a spiritual community.
We will take it Allah,
and the power of Allah will deal with these, uh, devils
for what they have done to Brother Stokes.
- CLAUDE: It's a fissure within the Nation of Islam.
Elijah Muhammad says, wait.
The devil's going to get his comeuppance.
We have to wait for Allah to work this out
in his own good time. We can't be premature.
And then there are others,
and Malcolm X I think leaned in this direction,
that said, all this talk about Black manhood
and take care of yourself and taking care of the community
and protecting yourself--
they came into our--our sanctuary
and killed one of our brothers.
And we don't really want to hear anything about patience.
Elijah Muhammad never talked about revolution
or decolonization or armed struggle.
That was not his Nation of Islam.
That was Malcolm X.
- JAMES: At this point, Cassius Clay
has become a civil rights spokesperson, in a way.
I mean, he's talking about being a champion.
He's talking about knocking out whomever he wants,
when he wants.
He's talking about how proud he is of himself.
He's talking about how beautiful he is.
- And the big ugly bear I call Mr. Liston.
He's too ugly to be the world's heavyweight champion.
Women don't like ugly men.
They should be good-looking like me.
- And the press is going after him for those statements.
And so now he is having to defend himself as a Black man.
- It's still rare to see African Americans on television.
Uh, sports, particularly boxing, had an outsize influence
on the way that people saw--saw Black folks.
- MARK: There's no question that Cassius Clay
is a star in 1963.
He was a prototypical 21, 22-year-old
who had just come into celebrity and just come into money.
And he carried himself that way.
Incredibly handsome.
He had his pick and choice of women at that point in time.
- Miss Dee Dee Sharp, we understand you have become
an admirer of Cassius Clay, the heavyweight challenger.
- DEE DEE: I met him.
I said, "Hi, how are you? Nice to meet you."
And he said, "You don't know who I am?"
I said, "No, I don't."
"Well, I am the greatest."
I'm like, "Okay. That's...
Yeah, that's nice."
- Who are you gonna be pulling for?
- Well, Cassius.
- Well, it's kind of hard to say that
with him sitting right here. Is that the way you feel?
- She--she knows I'm the greatest
like she's the greatest.
You can't name a woman in rock-and-roll
that sing like her.
- And he said, "Well, now, give me your address."
'Cause he--he talked crazy,
but he was an intelligent person.
I said, "Okay, fine, all right."
And that's when we went out on our first date.
My grandfather, he was a minister.
He was a pastor.
My favorite gospel song--
♪ Yes ♪
♪ Jesus loves me ♪
♪ For the Bible ♪
♪ Tells me so ♪
We were taught strict rules and regulations.
He did not play.
My mom didn't play.
You--you stepped out of line, you got knocked out.
My mother was so strict,
she wouldn't even let me and Marcellus go on a date
until my brother came with us.
He came in here in this limousine with a chauffeur
and he rang the doorbell.
- [doorbell ringing]
- DEE DEE: And everybody was crowding around the car
because they knew who he was.
They knew him as Cassius Clay.
But I...I still didn't...
[snickering]
I was infatuated, I think.
I don't know whether it was love at first sight for him.
But I was truly infatuated with this man.
- ♪
- Cassius was offered a lot of money to fight in England
against Henry Cooper.
Let's go take it.
It should be an easy fight.
Cooper really was not expected
to be competitive with Cassius Clay.
Cassius predicted a fifth-round knockout.
- Oh, Henry Cooper's nothing but a tramp, he's a bum.
I'm the world's greatest. He must fall in five rounds.
But if he talk about me, I'll cut it to three.
- [crowd cheering and applause]
- JIM: Oh, I--I saw the Henry Cooper fight.
And I learned a little bit from that about what a trainer does.
- MALE COMMENTATOR: So here we go.
The fight of the year.
Clay from the right-hand corner against Cooper of Britain.
And Clay has said, "I'll beat him in five."
We'll see.
- Everything went as he had planned it.
He was beating Cooper with ease.
Cooper was cut.
- [bell rings]
- MALE COMMENTATOR: So the bell ends the second.
So Cooper is cut underneath his left eye
It's worse than a slight cut,
so a couple of left jabs on his left eye.
- Henry Cooper was a valiant fighter.
He had a good left hook.
But he cut so easily, you know.
If you rubbed a terrycloth towel across his face, he might cut.
- MALE COMMENTATOR: Got his left eye patched up now.
[unintelligible] with that left hand.
And now he's cut over the left eye.
Henry Cooper is cut over the left eye.
And it looks to me like a very bad cut indeed.
- Cassius was really fooling around, extending the fight,
so he could make good on his fifth-round knockout prediction.
- MALE COMMENTATOR: Sitting down at the ringside
is one of Clay's 11 managers, Will Faversham.
And he told Cassius Clay in the interval,
"Cut out the funny business and get down to work."
And Cooper's eye already bleeding again
in the fourth round.
- And then, of course, at the end of the fourth round--
- [crowd shouting]
- MALE COMMENTATOR: The bell has sounded.
And he's up in about three, Clay.
That was the end of the fourth round,
and he hit him about two seconds before the end of the round
with a left hook.
He took one cross too many.
And he still doesn't know where he is!
He's still half out, Clay.
They're working furiously on him in the corner.
Angelo Dundee, his trainer,
he really is giving him a talking to.
- Cooper hit him with this hellacious left hook,
knocked him down, hurt him.
He was stunned.
If there had been another minute left in the round,
Cooper might have been able to finish him off.
- MALE COMMENTATOR: Clay knocked down two seconds
from the end of the fourth round.
And he got up just after the bell.
And he doesn't know where he is. He's looking at his corner.
- When a fighter has been caught with a huge punch,
one minute is not sufficient time to shake off the cobwebs.
Old-school trainers like Angelo Dundee, they know that.
And now, uh, "Ref? Torn glove."
- MALE COMMENTATOR: And something extraordinary
has happened because referee Tommy Little has gone over
to the timekeeper to ask something.
- If you look at the full video of that fight,
the period between rounds,
which has been done many times by many people,
the delay was only a matter of six seconds.
And that really didn't give extra time to recover.
- MALE COMMENTATOR: Out they come for round five.
And now round five is the round in which
Clay thought he would beat Cooper.
But now the crowd at Wembley
have been willing to pay for a Cooper win.
Clay on the floor at the end of the fourth.
And now fighting to preserve
his professional rank here against Henry Cooper
And now Cooper was seconds away from stopping Clay
And I think Tommy Little will have to stop this
because Cooper's eye is really--
well, it's absolutely a terrible state
And Tommy Little is looking at it.
- [crowd jeering]
- MALE COMMENTATOR: And he's had to stop the fight.
- THOMAS: He'd just beat Henry Cooper
the way he was supposed to,
opened up the cut, the fight was stopped.
- [bell rings]
- [crowd jeering]
- ♪
- THOMAS: Cassius Clay's goal
is to become the heavyweight champion of the world.
But nobody thought he'd be able to do it if he got in the ring
with somebody like Sonny Liston.
- ♪
- MALE REPORTER: We've come to Las Vegas to see if Patterson
can do any better than he did last time against Liston.
With Patterson, you get the impression
he's carrying the whole of the United States on his shoulders.
- Patterson exercised the rematch clause.
- I met the president of the United States.
And he had said to me,
uh, "You want to try to keep the title
because you represent something good."
- MALE REPORTER: In Las Vegas, an eclipse of the sun is due.
But almost no one anticipates an eclipse of Sonny.
- [crowd cheering]
- Floyd Patterson got knocked out in the first round again.
Clay was at the fight.
And he jumped into the ring
and took the spotlight from Liston.
He violated all of the--
the protocols of decorum.
And he made Liston mad.
- ♪
- November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy,
um, the first and only Catholic president
until Joe Biden,
um, is assassinated in Dallas.
For many Black folks, you know,
it's seen as the death of promise, right?
He was the first white politician,
really since Abraham Lincoln, um,
to really publicly embrace the cause of Black folks.
- MALE REPORTER: And now, the casket.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th president of the United States,
leaving the White House for the last time.
- CLAUDE: The split between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad,
you could say it was a long time coming,
but it needed a spark.
That spark was the JFK assassination.
Elijah Muhammad says to his ministers,
don't say anything about
President Kennedy's assassination.
We don't need the heat, you know?
If you go and say something off color,
you know, to the press,
even though right before his death
we said all the awful things,
the worst things we could think about, about him--
he's white devil number one,
he was responsible for, uh, the civil rights movement
not making progress.
Despite all of what we said,
in this moment of national mourning, don't say anything.
- JAMES: Malcolm had a meeting.
People kept badgering him about
what he thought of the death of the president.
And I thought he gave an off-of-the-cuff statement
that would have been meaningless--
had it been anything else
except the president of the United States,
it might have been meaningless.
- Malcolm say he thought it was a case of
"the chickens coming home to roost."
That is, just as Kennedy, according to Malcolm,
had done nothing while Negroes were being killed in the South,
just as he's exporting violence to Southeast Asia,
that same violence and tolerance of violence
just came back and killed-- took the president's life.
- Um, Malcolm was disobedient.
Um, that was a very...
That was a statement that was like
throwing gasoline on the fire.
- MAN: --Elijah Muhammad.
Minister Malcolm did not speak for the Muslims
when he made comments on the death of the president,
John F. Kennedy.
He was speaking for himself and not the Muslims in general.
And Minister Malcolm has been suspended from public speaking
for the time being.
- Malcolm X was silenced.
And he suspected that he would not
be brought back into the Nation of Islam
and given his prime position
because he was seen as a threat to Elijah Muhammad.
- ♪
- In the normal progression of events,
there would be no way that Cassius Clay
would fight for the heavyweight championship of the world.
He had not paid his dues.
Nobody wants to fight Liston. He can beat anybody.
But boxing needed the box office.
- [reporters shouting questions]
- ROBERT: Cassius Clay, he did a lot of things, you know,
stomping around Miami.
He would go up to Liston's camp.
"Oh, the big ugly bear! I want the big ugly bear!"
Anywhere he went, he could create a crowd.
- DAMION: Liston got really upset
when Clay showed up at his house
late into the evening
and sat on his front lawn and berated him,
called him names, and challenged him to a fight.
Liston decided that he was going to make his title defense
against Cassius Clay,
and that he was gonna teach him a lesson.
- Don't you have any respect for him at all?
As a fighter?
- As a fighter?
I think he should be locked up for impersonating a fighter.
- He whoops me--
you tell it to your camera, your TV man, your radio man,
and you right there in the whole world,
if Sonny Liston whoops me, I'll kiss his feet in the ring!
Hell, out of the ring, on my knee!
Tell him he is the greatest,
and catch the next jet out of the country.
- [shouting, laughter]
- The drama
was about just how badly
this monster was gonna destroy
this bubbling, beautiful, innocent kid.
- JIM: My father died when I was five years old.
My Nashville-born, Memphis-raised mother
had an anti-racist consciousness
that was certainly the position from which she was raising me
and my older brother.
When I read in the newspaper that Clay would challenge Liston
for the heavyweight championship on Miami Beach,
my mother told me, she said,
"That's going to be an extremely expensive ticket.
That's going to be something that you and I can't afford."
I began saving car washing and lawn mowing money.
Here's a very young, Black, Southern man,
who is using a slave name
to taunt the white establishment.
You couldn't have fabricated a more perfect hero
for the 11-year-old Jim Lampley.
- ♪
- THOMAS: White America wants Cassius Clay to be the good guy.
He's this charming, entertaining, brash young man.
- [audience laughter]
- Uh, move that way a little bit.
You're standing in front of my candelabra.
- [audience laughter, applause]
- He's loads of fun.
He's gonna come in and once again, we'll, you know,
have a guy, if he were to become heavyweight champion,
but he's not gonna become heavyweight champion,
because there's no way he can beat Liston.
But if he were able to, you know, once again,
we'd have a heavyweight champion who's fun,
we can enjoy, and get along with.
- Ladies and gentlemen, for those of you out there
who won't be able to see the Clay/Liston fight,
here is the eighth round exactly as it will happen.
Clay comes out to meet Liston.
And Liston starts to retreat.
If Liston goes back any farther,
he'll end up in a ringside seat.
Clay swings with a left, Clay swings with a right.
Look at young Cassius carry the fight!
- DAMION: I think his appearances
on a number of these shows,
in some ways, it kind of took some of the spotlight
off of his unique boxing skills.
- ♪
- DEE DEE: I was in San Francisco performing.
I was doing a show with, um,
Stevie Wonder, The Ronettes.
I was in my dressing room.
He said, "Well, y'all, wait a minute, wait a minute."
And just had this box, and he just popped out the ring.
I'm like, "What are you saying?"
And he said, "Will you marry me?"
I'm like, I said yes.
I said yes.
The fact that he wanted to marry me, it was shocking.
- ♪
- In the last couple of months prior to the fight,
I loudly trumpeted to everyone in my neighborhood
that I was going to the fight, and that I was going to be there
when Cassius Clay was going to upset the world,
and, um, prove that he was the greatest,
and become the youngest
heavyweight champion of all time.
- ♪
- My neighbors took great pride and delight
in, uh, ridiculing me and abusing me.
Liston was the real thing.
Liston was a legitimate destroyer.
Liston was not a talking pretty boy
like this show-off from Louisville.
- ATTALLAH: I had a conversation with Cassius.
And he asked me had I ever been to Miami.
And I said, "Nope."
So it was my parents' anniversary.
So we thought, as a family, that this would be a cool time.
And so since my parents,
while we had traveled quite a bit,
they had never had a honeymoon per se.
So we called it a "familymoon."
- JAMES: He came to Miami as a guest of Cassius Clay,
um, who was his friend and his student and his brother.
And Malcolm was suspended from the Nation and he was silent.
And he was going through a lot of crisis.
And so Clay invited him to bring Betty and the kids
and come down there and have a little vacation, relax,
get this off of your mind.
- Malcolm was very much of part of Cassius Clay's life.
- ROBERT: And so there were probably
a couple of opportunities where they were seen together.
- Somebody sees Malcolm X, and recognizes him,
and writes a story.
Is Clay a Black Muslim?
Ticket sales [whistles] right into the toilet.
- For the first time, the idea that Cassius Clay
might be a member of the Nation of Islam
pervades the mainstream press in a significant way.
And the promotion is starting to get worried about this.
- And everywhere you go,
the rumors are persisting more and more
that this fight's gonna be a financial flop.
Now, we're only a few hours away.
Uh, you go along with this?
- Well, I don't know what you mean by a financial flop, Bob.
We may not make a nut,
but it'd probably be the biggest indoor, uh, gate
in the history of boxing.
- You wanna have a good guy and a bad guy.
You know, Liston is the bad guy.
Cassius is supposed to be the good guy.
Then all of a sudden now, maybe, just maybe,
he's a member of the Nation of Islam,
or he's certainly hanging out with these guys.
- Is there any one thing that you can point to
that you've come to realize in the last, uh, five or six days
that might have caused this?
- The Muslim thing might've slowed it down.
- DEE DEE: My grandfather,
who had never been on a plane in his life,
flew down to Florida.
He said, "But I wanna stop you from marrying him.
He is going to become a Muslim."
It just didn't register.
- ROBERT: One of the promoters of the fight,
he sees Malcolm at training.
Calls him aside.
He says, "Mr. X, I'll help you if you help me.
"This fight is going in the toilet.
"And the longer you're there at training,
"the deeper it's gonna be flushed.
"Do me a favor, I'm begging you.
"Go home now,
"and I'll put you in any seat in the arena you wanna be in
the night of the fight."
Malcolm was savvy enough. He knew enough to do it.
And Malcolm went home.
- I do recall my father coming home
a little sooner than planned,
because of course him going to Miami,
we knew he was going to see my big brother.
And, um, the reason, you know, people think
that my father was disappointed,
he understood exactly why his presence
was a bit, um, tender.
My father was dedicated to Cassius Clay
winning the fight with Sonny Liston.
- [indistinct chatter]
- Well, I'd read all the stuff
about what had happened at the weigh-in.
- When the doors bang open at the weigh-in,
and here he comes with an African walking stick--
bang, bang, bang, where's the ugly bear?
Liston doesn't know what to say.
- He went mad.
- Joe Louis was flat-footed, and Sonny Liston is flat-footed.
[unintelligible]
- Very hard to take it seriously.
But the older reporters who wanted to believe that,
he was so scared.
He was freaking out.
The doctor somehow cooperated and said
his blood pressure went through the roof.
And the general question was, was he even fit enough
to fight that night?
- The fight is $2500 for each contract on the platform.
- [indistinct chatter]
- JIM: I got a pretty good ticket.
The vast majority of white Miami--all of Miami--
wanted Clay to lose.
- In my opinion, the fights are always won with fists
and not with mouth talk.
I pick Liston to win by the fifth round.
- JIM: A lot of white people thought
this kid was looking down at them.
They hated the idea
of a Black man saying,
I am the king of the world. I'm gonna upset the world.
I'm gonna do whatever I want to do.
I'm the greatest of all time, etc.
Athletes didn't brag like that back then.
- ♪
- JAMES: Malcolm, after leaving, came back
to be there for the fight,
because he felt that the spiritual power
was on his brother's side.
- ATTALLAH: My father would make sure that
he trained him differently
than Angelo Dundee or Coach would--
how to focus on prayer and intent.
- JAMES: The prayer rug is simply
a clean place to make prayer.
You take Wudu before prayer.
You wash your hands up to your wrists.
You wash your face, you wash your ears, you wash your hair.
That I'm coming before God,
and I would like to come before God in my purity,
at least my physical purity.
- It is really just focusing in, like, today's mindfulness,
in owning the moment--
not just proclaiming the moment, but owning the moment.
And so there is a breathing, there is a centering,
there is a focus,
there's a--a direction towards the intention.
You're not winning just to win.
You have to remove the ego in the process.
- ♪
- [crowd shouting, whistling]
- ♪
- Uh, when he first entered the arena, he was booed.
- [crowd jeering]
- And--and there was no massive booing for, uh,
the former mob enforcer.
Somehow he was okay.
- [crowd cheering]
- MALE COMMENTATOR: There we see
the spotlight on the world champion, Sonny Liston,
and his entourage leading him down from dressing room to ring.
- The instructions I got before I left New York--
rent a car at the airport,
drive back and forth between the arena
where the event is being held and the nearest hospital
so that you will waste no, uh, deadline time
following Cassius Clay into intensive care.
- MALE COMMENTATOR: There he comes.
Up the ring he bounces in, calm, cool, collected.
- MALE REPORTER: The challenger,
the challenger, Cassius Marcellus Clay.
22 years of age, unbeaten. 19th straight,
going for all the marbles in the boxing business.
- There really is nothing in sports
like a heavyweight championship fight.
Just kind of full of electricity and bloodlust.
Two men half naked, coming out in front of you,
trying to hurt each other.
- I want a clean bout, men. In the event of a knockdown,
the man that is down must take an eight count.
- ATTALLAH: I did not understand boxing.
I understood him, right?
So you're rooting for someone that you love to win,
whatever "win" meant.
I didn't know competition at that point in my life,
but I knew that this was his aim,
and he certainly did not have a problem orating his aim.
- Good luck. Shake hands.
- [bell rings]
- [crowd shouting]
- And in the first round, uh, he--he made Sonny look clumsy.
- [crowd shouting]
- Your first round in the ring with Cassius Clay
was an introduction to something new.
- And he's looking pretty good.
He's got the left hand working, pop, pop.
- MALE COMMENTATOR: Awkwardly fast.
Good long left lead.
It might be the champion a bit off balance.
- There's never been a heavyweight who combined
that height, that range, those long arms,
the hand speed, the foot speed, with that level of confidence.
There's no precedent for this.
He's the first of his kind.
- MALE REPORTER: The challenger is jabbing all over, body--
and a right hand!
The best punch of the fight so far!
- [crowd shouting]
- ROBERT: And it hit me--
Clay was bigger than Liston.
- MALE COMMENTATOR: We're down to the closing seconds
of this first round,
and the long left lead is making the difference so far
by Mr. Clay.
- [bell rings]
[bell rings]
- [crowd shouting]
- Things that shocked everybody around me didn't shock me.
- MALE COMMENTATOR: Ladies and gentlemen,
we're looking in with our overhead camera
into the corner of Cassius Clay, who is still doing the talking.
I'm saying to myself,
"Well, Sonny's trying to figure him out.
That's why Sonny's not doing anything."
- From the radiocast, it was just a matter of time
until Sonny Liston knocked him out.
Yeah, he might be having a little trouble
figuring out his style.
But we all know Cassius is gonna get tired,
the body blows will hurt him,
and that he's gonna get knocked out.
- [bell rings]
- JOE: I hope that Clay don't get too much confidence.
Soon he's gonna get knocked out.
- MALE COMMENTATOR: But this youngster...
has his own style and it's confusing for
the champion to fathom this early in the fight,
at least up to now. Completely outclassed, Joe,
with the speed, his awkward style,
his boxing, his natural ability.
- JIM: And then in the second round,
he wasn't quite as commanding. But in the third round...
The way I remember it, in the third round,
he landed that right hand and cut Liston on his cheek.
- MALE COMMENTATOR: Another jarring right hand that time.
Another one!
Sonny wobbled! Sonny wobbled!
Cassius has him hurt!
- DEE DEE: I had never really seen him go at it
the way he did.
It was...
My mouth was, like...
He beat the hell out of that man!
[laughs]
He--he beat that man like he stole something.
- MALE COMMENTATOR: Sonny has a big mouse below his left eye.
He has a cut below the eye.
And he's getting hit with all the punches in the book.
- So now he has a tactical advantage in the fight.
- [bell rings]
- [crowd shouting]
- Liston thought he was gonna knock him out early.
Once he saw that his power
didn't intimidate Clay,
he--he got a bit scared.
- Yeah, I still have notebooks with blood on it.
Uh, Liston's blood.
- MALE COMMENTATOR: We're going into Sonny's corner.
Joe, I don't know whether you can see it.
Look closely, look hard.
They're working on the cut below the left eye.
It's very difficult to get a shot.
- I'm saying, well, it's not a serious cut, but he is cut.
I wonder what he's thinking about, being cut.
The first thing I notice is the cut has turned black.
To stop the cut, they used a drug called Monsel.
It's a liquid.
You put it on a cut, the cut will turn black.
Well, Monsel is banned for one reason--
it's dangerous in the eyes.
- [bell rings]
- What happens if it gets on Sonny's gloves?
- [crowd shouting]
- It's in the middle of the round when, all of a sudden,
"I can't see! I can't see! I can't see!"
Clay can't see.
- ROBERT: I think he freaked a little bit.
He thought he was going blind.
- [bell rings]
- MALE COMMENTATOR: Now we have four fast rounds.
- [crowd shouting]
- MALE COMMENTATOR: At this point, we're going over
to look into Cassius Clay's corner.
Let's go back to, uh, Joe Louis.
Joe, look at that shot right in there.
What do you think is going through this youngster's mind?
He's 12 minutes into the fight.
- JOE: Well, he's talking a lot now.
I don't know if he's arguing with his trainer, you know...
- MALE COMMENTATOR: Dundee that he was arguing with, Joe.
Angelo now is toweling him off a little bit
while he gets him ready.
- JERRY: There is no quarreling with the fact
he could not see.
- JOE: I think that there's something wrong with Clay.
- [bell rings] - JOE: Something with Clay.
There's something wrong with Clay.
- MALE COMMENTATOR: His eyes. His eyes are bothering him.
Ladies and gentlemen,
we don't know exactly what happened.
They're yelling from Cassius Clay's corner.
Something got in his right eye.
Uh, however, he's blinking badly.
Sonny's got a tad of R&R!
- JIM: I didn't take a transistor radio.
I wasn't listening to any commentary of any kind.
So I was totally lost at sea trying to figure out
what was going on.
- [crowd shouting]
- MALE COMMENTATOR: Still having some problems with his--
with his eyes.
He's blinking and bouncing away continually.
- You had the sense that, well, this--this fight is even.
- [crowd shouting]
- I suppose it could go either way.
- [crowd shouting]
- MALE COMMENTATOR: As Sonny's still moving in,
Cassius still bouncing out to the way, blocking him.
- [bell rings]
- Then it became clear he had recovered from that.
- MALE COMMENTATOR: We note that Sonny's flat-footed stance
most of the time, easy target.
- Of course, his eyes cleared.
- MALE COMMENTATOR: Easy!
- [crowd shouting]
- MALE COMMENTATOR: Seconds remaining in the sixth.
- [crowd shouting]
- [bell rings]
- [crowd cheering]
- MALE COMMENTATOR: The crowd now cheering the challenger.
Let's get over to our champion, Joe Louis. Joe?
- JOE: Well, I think that the corner
has to get worried a little bit now.
- MALE COMMENTATOR: Now they're working, as we note,
with our camera shots in there, below the left eye.
They've already worked below the right eye.
There you see them.
Joe Paolino trying to keep that cut closed.
And do you feel as though Sonny being busted up a little bit,
cut up a little bit around the face--
will this make a difference in Liston's thinking?
- JOE: Well, it has to make a difference because Liston,
I think he don't see too well out both of his eyes.
- [bell rings]
- MALE COMMENTATOR: The ref is stopping it.
That might be all, ladies and gentlemen!
Get up there, Joe!
Get up there! Get up in the ring!
- He's out. He's out.
He's not coming out of his corner.
- He said, "That's it! That's enough!"
What he really meant was, I'm not going out there.
And he spit out the mouthpiece.
- [cheering, whistling]
- It was, you know, almost otherworldly.
- ROBERT: Sonny Liston has quit.
Cassius Clay is the new
heavyweight champion of the world.
He started capering and running around the ring, you know?
"Eat your words!
I told you I'm king of the world!"
It was just a magical moment.
- [cheers and applause]
- He points and he said, "I fooled you, I fooled you,
I fooled you, I fooled you."
And it's just bedlam.
- JIM: It was electric. It was exhilarating.
I was shouting in the car all the way back to southwest Miami.
- MALE COMMENTATOR: Hold it, he's yelling behind us.
Cassius, come here, come here!
Come here, come here!
- Hey, I'm the greatest thing that ever lived!
I don't have--
- I got up on the roof of the house and began shouting,
"I've upset the world! I'm the greatest of all time!"
- Now, I just turned 22 years old.
I must be the greatest!
- And my mother eventually came outdoors
and started yelling at me, "Get down here!"
You know, "Get off of the roof.
You're going to get us both arrested."
Um, you know, "You know how our neighbors feel about this."
- I told the world! I talk to God every day.
And God [unintelligible].
- Cassius, wait a minute. Wait a minute, Cassius.
- JIM: That was as thrilling as any moment in my life,
because Cassius Clay was Cassius Clay.
He was my hero.
- I am the greatest!
- MALE COMMENTATOR: All right, Cass, thank you.
Thank you, Cassius Clay, the heavyweight champion.
- The scene turns blank for me,
because I have I don't know how many minutes to write my story.
So, uh, I have my little Olivetti typewriter
in front of me on a bench.
Uh, and, um, I start typing.
I just remember the first word, "Incredibly."
"Incredibly, the posturing, braggart kid
was telling the truth all along."
- [cheers and applause]
- After the fight,
I told him that I was going back to the hotel.
He said, "I'll be there in a few.
Wait up for me."
And he never came.
- ROBERT: He goes back to the Black hotel with Malcolm.
They eat vanilla ice cream.
They're having-- they're celebrating.
Nobody's drinking.
- DEE DEE: My mother told me
that I had to give back the ring.
And I said, "Mom, I can't do that."
She said, "No, you gonna do it.
And you're gonna do it now."
When I finally saw him early in the morning,
it all came to a head.
I said, "I have to give it back to you."
He said, "Well, what about--"
I said, "No, nothing. I can't."
He asked me why and I made up some kind of an excuse.
But I didn't wanna say that it--
it was because you were becoming a Muslim.
I didn't wanna say that.
I felt it would hurt too bad, and that--that wasn't me.
I'm not like that.
- [indistinct chatter]
- The story really developed the next morning,
which was the routine press conferences after a big fight.
- [unintelligible]
- I'm ready. - Just keep quiet and relax.
- That's right.
- One of the young reporters said,
so, could you finally tell us,
are you a card-carrying Muslim?
Cassius kind of jerked up.
And--and then he kind of lashed back.
And he said, why are you making such a big deal out of this?
I'm a clean-cut boy.
I don't fornicate, I don't drink, I don't smoke,
I don't run around.
Uh, I'm with this really nice group of people.
- I don't have to be what you want me to be.
I'm free to be what I want to be and think what I wanna think.
- Red birds should stay with red birds.
And bluebirds should stay with bluebirds.
And people should not go to places where they're not wanted.
- And all hell breaks loose.
Ah, it didn't bother me a bit.
I knew what my lead was gonna be the next morning.
"The lost-found Nation of Islam..."
They had a guy who's considered the baddest,
most celebrated man in the world,
the heavyweight champion of the world.
Not only that, but he knocked out Goliath
and he didn't need five smooth stones to do it.
- I don't believe in forced integration.
Ain't gonna never work, man. You knew it ain't gonna work.
You always knew it wasn't right, but I never did.
Now that I done found out, you seem to be shook up.
- And after the Liston fight, uh,
Cassius Clay is happy to embrace the Nation publicly
in ways he could not before the fight.
And the Nation, this new heavyweight champion
claiming to be a Muslim, is happy to embrace him.
- ♪
- Malcolm X and Cassius Clay
went to New York.
- ROBERT: He gets up and he says, fellas,
I have to tell you something.
I am a member of the lost-found Nation of Islam.
And from now on, my name is Cassius X.
I ain't gonna keep Clay.
Clay is a slave name.
- JAMES: And so Cassius Clay
becomes Cassius X, meaning I don't know
my original African last name.
And so I take X to represent that anonymity.
So he is the symbol of transformation,
someone who says, I want freedom.
I want to have self-determination.
And I have to do that by tying myself back to my identity.
- They went to the United Nations.
And this was an important moment because Clay took the idea
that he was champion of the world seriously.
- [reporters shouting questions]
- MALE REPORTER: Soon after, the new champion
came to New York and was shown around the United Nations
by his friend Malcolm X.
- Malcolm X goes to the UN to deliver the case
of white supremacy's
damaging of Black America to the UN,
to see it as an international human rights crisis
what white America had done to Black people.
- Cassius has been following the religion of Islam,
Muslim religion, for the past four or five years.
- Introducing Clay to African diplomats in the UN
serves a few purposes.
Uh, one is to broaden Clay's horizons.
He had not really been involved in international travel
and that sort of thing,
so it was to impress upon this young Black man
that Malcolm is tutoring
that there's this larger world, a larger world of Black people,
and Africa, and Africa is becoming independent,
and so forth, and you just need to know about this.
- I can look at people from all over the world,
regardless of race, creed, or color,
and talk intelligently with them,
and most of all, recognize that all of my brothers and sisters
are these people I haven't recognized
over my lifetime.
- These weren't just dignitaries walking up.
These are people that were already
a part of our family, our life.
This is all separate from the Nation.
This has nothing to do with the Nation of Islam.
- Being a follower of the Muslim religion
had something to do with your winning the championship?
- Well, I would say so. Uh, our religion is what--
the only thing that I can give any credit
for pulling me through.
- I have heard many people attempt to presume
that my father was trying to recruit, um, Cassius Clay
in order to repair his relationship,
his own relationship, with Elijah Muhammad,
which is absolutely incorrect.
They were preparing to be in alliance
so that they continue studying and working,
and it was stopped right in the middle.
- ♪
- [radio tuning]
- THOMAS: Cassius Clay was in New York with Malcolm X.
Elijah Muhammad announced on the radio
that he had given Cassius the name "Muhammad Ali."
- Cassius Clay is a name no more, is that right?
- Yes, sir! It's Muhammad Ali.
"Muhammad" means "worthy of all praises"
and "Ali" means "most high" in the Asian-African language.
- Part of it was a power play,
that here was Malcolm at the United Nations,
showing this man around.
And I'm gonna take him back.
I'm gonna name him Muhammad Ali.
And he's going to take that name,
and that's going to reassert my primacy in this battle.
- Anybody special gave you the name?
- Yes sir, my leader and teacher,
the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
- That moment, I think, helped cement the rupture.
Malcolm saw the writing on the wall.
He didn't tell--
He didn't try to get Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali to become
sort of personally loyal to him, Malcolm X.
And--and probably could not have.
And Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali,
uh, decided he would not follow
a student of the teacher.
He'd follow the teacher himself.
- MALE INTERVIEWER: There's been great publicity given
to the fact that heavyweight champion Cassius Clay
is one of your followers.
Do you think he's a sincere follower?
- Well, Cassius is following Elijah Muhammad.
And I'm no longer a follower of Elijah Muhammad myself.
- The last time my father spoke with, uh, Cassius Clay,
uh, directly, he was in New York
on his way to see us as a family.
I knew, I anticipated his visit.
And it was cut short.
He was summoned to meet with Elijah Muhammad.
And...we were kind of stood up, if you use that term.
But my father knew...
what that meant.
- THOMAS: There was a special bond between them.
And it speaks to the power of Elijah Muhammad
and the hold that he had over Cassius Clay
that, uh, when Elijah and Malcolm separated,
Muhammad Ali went with Elijah
and completely rejected Malcolm X.
- Would you clear this up for me, please?
Have you and Malcolm X,
the man who helped convert you
to the Black Muslim movement-- have the two of you split?
- When the Honorable Elijah Muhammad cuts a man off,
well, then he's automatically cut off
with all of his followers.
And, uh, a lot of people call it a split.
It's not a split.
He's just one individual who, as we say, went astray.
And, uh, when, say, like, two governments split,
one leader takes half, another leader take half.
Malcolm X is just there.
And this is not a split.
He's not big enough to be called a split.
- ♪
- People would not accept the name Muhammad Ali.
- MALE REPORTER: Cassius, did the bus trip
take anything out of you,
and was it worth the $1800 it cost you?
- Muhammad. My name is Muhammad.
Y'all keep calling me Cassius, but I'm tired of telling you.
You know, you intelligent. My name is Muhammad Ali.
- Every time I referred to him in my stories,
um, as Muhammad Ali,
it would be struck out,
and it would be changed to Cassius Clay
by the "Times", you know, edit desk.
- MALE REPORTER: Champ, Liston hopes you don't have another
hernia operation.
- See, now you'd rather say "Champ" than "Muhammad".
- [laughter]
- And to his credit, you know,
he always doubled down on that fact, right?
And it spoke to the fact
that ultimately for Black people,
whatever you call me,
you're not gonna call me out of my name, right?
My name is Muhammad Ali, right?
And that, I think, had an incredible impact,
particularly on young Black folks, right?
Who, whether it was their own name,
or names they'd come to adopt,
you are going to call me my name, right?
That's the basic show of respect.
- MALE INTERVIWER: Why don't you like
to be called Clay anymore?
- Oh, Clay was not my name.
Once we follow the belief
and hear and understand the teachings
of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad,
then come into knowledge of ourselves,
then we want to be called after names of our people,
which are names to fit us Black people.
And "Clay" was a white man's name.
It was a slave name.
- It hurt me because
he was willfully eliminating
a part of his identity
that--that was important to me.
And I felt like he was robbing something from me.
I wanted to learn so that I could figure out
whether it was possible for me to sustain this love affair
for Cassius Clay under the banner of a new name.
If you're on the right side of race relations,
ultimately it became a badge of honor for you
that you did say "Muhammad Ali" and didn't say "Cassius Clay"
because that was the way he wanted it.
- [drum music]
- ROBERT: In the summer of 1964, Muhammad Ali
actually went to Africa.
- They went to Ghana, Nigeria, Egypt.
And there was a point on that trip
where something remarkable happened.
They were in Ghana.
One day, Muhammad and his traveling party got in a car
and they decided to just drive through the countryside.
And as they drove through the countryside,
there would be drums beating and messages were transmitted.
And people would come out of the countryside
and stand on the road and line the road
just to be there to see Muhammad Ali.
And that had a mesmerizing effect on him.
In that moment, it registered in his brain
that this is something bigger and more powerful
than I conceived of.
This isn't just being
heavyweight champion of the world.
I'm back in my spiritual homeland.
That's really the moment
that Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali.
- ♪
- [traffic]
- ATTALLAH: When I was in New York, living in New York,
and I saw in the news that Muhammad Ali was coming to town
to unveil his artwork at the Waldorf Astoria,
I said to my housemaid,
"I know him."
She said, "You know Muhammad Ali?"
I said, "Yes, he's my big brother."
And I thought to myself,
"Is it dangerous?"
Not, "Would he not accept me?"
But is it dangerous because of the forced division
to go see him?
So I did.
I went downtown and I stood across the street
and watched the crowd come his way.
And somehow or another, he felt me
and turned around and beckoned to me.
And we were together from that point
until he was unable to engage.
In that first 24 hours, after all of the public things
that he was there at the Waldorf Astoria to address,
we talked about everything.
And we continued talking.
He entrusted me the way I know he trusted my dad.
His big question--
One of his first questions when we were away from people was,
did my father know he loved him?
And it was a painful--it was a painful couple of hours.
- ♪