Muhammad Ali (photo: Ira Rosenberg/World Journal Tribune)
On June 9, US television live broadcast a Muslim prayer service. Of course, it was a memorial for world champion athlete and activist Muhammad Ali, who died June 3, aged 74.
And the fact that many Americans will likely have seen a jenazah for the first time in association with a widely admired and beloved figure is a reflection of the intentionality of Ali’s life. He planned, one guest told AP (6/9/17), for it to be “a teaching moment.” Coverage of Muhammad Ali’s death can be a sort of teaching moment for media watchers as well, in the sense that it’s good to remember that the version of a person that corporate media embrace and concretize in the public mind sometimes blurs that person’s political complexity.
So while media talked about Ali’s conversion to Islam, and his refusal to be inducted into the Army—because, as some even quoted, he refused, in his words, to go “10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over”—it’s still hard to convey how these things were heard, including by media, what it meant to say them, in 1967.
Reading today, you might not know that, as sportswriter Dave Zirin reminds us, Ali was deemed so dangerous his phone was bugged by the Johnson and Nixon administrations; that out on bail in 1968, he spoke at 200 college campuses; that peace activist Daniel Berrigan called him “a major boost to an antiwar movement that was very white”; that he would later describe his break with Malcolm X as his biggest mistake.
Outlets like the New York Times didn’t start using his name until years after he changed it, employing dismissive locutions like “Clay, who prefers the name Muhammad Ali.” The Times (6/9/16) looked back with evident embarrassment on that policy after Ali’s death, noting that sportswriter Robert Lipsyte (among others) objected to it at the time: “We did not ask what John Wayne and Rock Hudson’s real names were.” When Lipsyte apologized to Ali for having to call him Clay in print, the boxer replied, “Don’t worry, you’re just a little brother of the white power structure.”
And here’s sports journalist Jerry Izenberg from the New Jersey Star Ledger (6/4/16), recounting the effect of his 1967 defense of Ali’s draft refusal:
Some papers that carried my column regularly dropped it. Bomb threats emptied our office, making the staff stand out in the snow. My car windshield was smashed with a sledgehammer. Among the thousand of pieces of hate mail I received, two required the attention of postal inspectors. One turned out to be nothing but a ticking alarm clock, and the second contained what I hoped was dog feces.
At the time, facing five years in prison, Ali himself addressed the media (New York Times, 4/29/67), saying:
I strongly object to the fact that so many newspapers have given the American public and the world the impression that I have only two alternatives in taking this stand: either I go to jail or go to the Army. There is another alternative and that alternative is justice. If justice prevails, if my constitutional rights are upheld, I will be forced to go neither to the Army nor jail. In the end I am confident that justice will come my way, for the truth must eventually prevail.
