Ali’s contested legacy
BBC History Magazine, December 2001
Asked if ‘Ali’, the soon-to-be released Hollywood epic starring Will Smith, would be ‘controversial’, screenwriter Eric Roth responded, “Are you kidding? It’s about Muhammad Ali. Do you really think all the things he stood for don’t matter anymore? His name is still a lightning rod in American society.” Roth has promised that the film will deal with “the real Ali” – politics, adulteries and all. In the grim half-light that has overcome the US in the aftermath of the events of September 11, one wonders whether studio executives will be tempted to doctor the record. How will they deal with Ali’s defiance of the US government, refusal to serve in the military, and friendship with Malcolm X at the time he made his notorious ‘chickens coming home to roost’ remark in response to another historic American trauma, the assassination of JFK?
The $105 million cinematic retelling of the ever-resonant Ali legend is part of a global celebration of ‘The Greatest’ that has been gathering pace over recent years. At the turn of the millennium, Ali was named sportsperson of the century not only by the BBC in this country but by other media bodies and opinion polls across the world. Ali is revered even in places where boxing ranks below synchronised swimming as a popular pastime. And that’s because Ali was much more than a boxer. Among other things he was one of the boldest voices against racism and for a new black identity in the US and world-wide in the sixties. He risked his career and his freedom to take a stand against the war in Vietnam. His relationships with Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad and Martin Luther King were rich and complex. On top of all that, he was one of the first male sports persons to boast about his good looks and dare to call himself “pretty”.
Yet, working my way through the innumerable books about Ali, I found that the political dimension had too often been played down or misrepresented, and in the innumerable books about the “sixties” (the black freedom struggle and the anti-war movement in particular), Ali’s role rarely merited more than a footnote. That wasn’t how I remembered it. So in ‘Redemption Song’ I tried to re-establish Ali in his times.
Thanks to having my name on a book about Ali, I’ve enjoyed the privilege of talking about the man and his era with diverse groups of people in diverse settings – from radio phone-ins to community meetings to the groves of academe. The experience has reconfirmed for me that the battles Ali fought and the battles fought over Ali remain pertinent and contentious. Despite appearances, there’s no consensus here. It has also reminded me of the manifold uses to which history is now put and the various resources and motivations people bring to its study.
On BBC Radio 5 Live I was asked to compare Muhammad Ali to Austin Powers as “sixties icons”. A moment of dreaded ‘dead air’ ensued before I recovered sufficiently to point out that whereas Muhammad Ali was a real person … In contrast, the phone-in discussions of black-managed radio stations in New York, Washington and San Francisco were sophisticated and stimulating. Callers were well-informed, politically engaged and highly opinionated! They testified to the enduring contest between personal memory and “official” history. They remembered the impact Ali had on their own lives and could compare it with the images and ideas about Ali’s role that they were being presented with today. And they felt that something was being stolen from them.
The callers also testified to the remarkable persistence of black nationalism in the African-American community. I was frequently interrogated (always in the most courteous manner) by supporters of the Nation of Islam or others who had passed through or still adhered to variants of black nationalism. For these people, battles over historical record – ancient and recent – are intimate and sustaining; their dissent from mainstream America’s view of its history remains at the heart of their personal identity. The questions raised by Ali’s relations with Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad are vital to them. In particular, the controversies over who killed Malcolm X, whether Elijah Muhammad or the Nation of Islam was directly or indirectly involved, whether Muhammad Ali knew everything or nothing about these matters are hot topics, freighted with unresolved political and ideological questions, not least questions concerning the status of Louis Farrakhan.
In this narrow but apparently inexhaustible arena of historical debate, conspiracy theories proliferate. What struck me, however, was the assiduous scholarship that so often went into creating or shoring up these theories. Callers were well versed in the literature of the subject and sometimes cited carefully-documented details of an event in the last week of Malcolm’s life or in an FBI communiqué. While it’s easy to dismiss many of these speculations as needlessly baroque, it is nonetheless true that our hopes of eventually untangling anything like the truth from a variety of official sources rest in part at least on their (largely amateur) efforts.
Similar themes have emerged in the community meetings I’ve done in England – in Tottenham and Brixton in London and Chapeltown in Leeds. Most of those attending the meetings were white left-wingers, but at each of them there would be a small caucus of young black males, laden down with well-thumbed paperback books (among them, inevitably, the Autobiography of Malcolm X). They were eager to talk and the dialogue that ensued between them and the “white left” was fascinating. Both “sides” wanted to claim Ali as their own, and both had a serious case to make. In order to make it, they had to engage in arguments over what actually happened in the sixties, what the great mass movements of he times did and did not achieve, and cite facts and texts to support their claims.
In this milieu, there’s no sharper point of contention than the evolution of Malcolm X. Did he remain a black nationalist till his dying day or did he become in his final year some kind of socialist internationalist? My own feeling is that he was still in evolution and that therefore he was something of both at the time he died; we simply don’t know where he would have taken that fusion next. But the significance of the discussion is that contention over Malcolm’s legacy is clearly driving forward, and enriching, the study of his life and work.
The most problematic setting for a discussion of Ali in his times proved to be the academic one. I’ve given lectures about Ali in the context of university-level courses on sport and society, or racism and sport (or more often “ethnicity and sport”). My aim, as in the other settings, was to weave Ali into a broader historical narrative. But here several difficulties emerged. First – and I speak as an outsider with only limited academic experience – it seemed to me that students were somewhat overwhelmed by the need to master a theoretical apparatus. It was expected that I would place Ali within a catalogue of signifiers, a taxonomy of “difference” or other critical paradigms advanced in the course texts. Too often, students were being asked to grapple with complex abstractions when they had scarcely any historical knowledge of the topic under study. In the absence of an acquaintance with the elementary facts about Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, etc. it is simply impossible to make any sense of Ali. Unfortunately, I found that in many cases students’ knowledge of history prior to the early 1990s was drawn largely from Hollywood movies.
The telling exception was the minority of black students – who tended to sit at the front of the class and to engage passionately with the topic. For them, history – or this particular historical narrative – is not merely something you study to get a degree; it is a means of self-understanding in a world shaped by racism. Many of them have already engaged with the history of the sixties through their families and other living sources. Again, I was struck by the lively persistence of black nationalism, in various forms, as an alternative historical discourse. Sadly, it was a discourse that excluded the majority of the other students.
Of course, these frustrations are about much more than curriculum content Students today are subjected to a media-modulated regime of the continuous present, in which the past is plundered for imagery and associations that can be used to sell products or promote special interests. No wonder it’s hard for youth to establish a firm grasp on the general movement of history, to distinguish between the recent and remote past, between representations and realities. In a world where you can be asked to compare Muhammad Ali and Austin Powers, it may be that the study and teaching of history are themselves now conducted against the grain of the dominant culture, and therefore need to be consciously promoted from the margins.
During the general election, I was asked by a number of candidates for the embryonic Socialist Alliance to speak on Ali at public meetings. If nothing else, the upshot proved that if you want to attract a crowd, put a picture of Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X on your leaflets.
One of these meetings was at Hackney Community College – at lunch time – and to my amazement 30 students turned up. All but two or three were black or ethnic minority youth; among them were Kurds, Kosovars, and Africans. Again, the controversies of the sixties posed immediate and personally significant questions to them. Again, black nationalism was postulated as an alternative to a non-racial “left” narrative. The discussion ranged from Patrice Lumumba to the situation currently facing asylum seekers. These young people wanted to talk about politics, but I don’t think so many would have been willing to come forward if the politics had not been located within a realm of popular culture in which they felt at home.
Another meeting was held at a community centre in Notting Hill in London – adjacent to the very streets that Ali walked with Michael X on his seminal 1966 visit to London. Here the audience was overwhelmingly Afro-Caribbean. These people knew the Ali story, and at times when I was reading quotes from Ali, they shouted out their approbation with gusto. One of the other speakers outlined the history of the area, in particular the riots of 1958, and traced both the progress that had been made since then and the huge problems that remained.
The ensuing discussion was an enervating exercise in free-flowing polyphonic historical discourse. An elderly West Indian man described the riots from memory, but reserved his most passionate remarks for a nostalgic invocation of the unlicensed dance clubs that used to dot the area. Here black people would invent new styles and steps. “And you never see them on Come Dancing!” he concluded, and it was clear that this wound still hurt. A white man with a Scottish accent told a story about a strike in the west of Scotland in the 1880s that was led by a black man. A young black man replied by reminding everyone of the terrible history of white working class people colluding with racists – from the dockers marching for Enoch Powell down to current events in Oldham. An African woman talked about her memories of Nkrumah – who features in the Ali story as the first head of state anywhere to embrace the world champ – and how she was inspired by those memories to work today for refugee rights. Several people talked about the Macpherson report – and one young black woman made the point that it was scary to see how quickly that particular piece of history was being rewritten, and how this hard-won breakthrough was being recast by sections of the media as some kind of license for black criminality.
All this sprang from a few words about Muhammad Ali. What propelled the discussion was a sense that history is a necessary resource in daily struggles for survival and for social justice. Of course, some would regard much of the discussion I have recounted above as an abuse of history for tendentious political ends. But my own experience writing and talking about Ali has confirmed for me that historical scholarship is driven forward precisely by these claims and counter-claims. If the territory isn’t contested, it will lie fallow.
I wonder if the makers of ‘Ali’, the movie, know what they’re in for?
