No good in him, no justice, he’s gonna be destroyed! To explain that, Ali would have had to go back to the 1930s and an obscure door-to-door salesman in Detroit.
Having a strong sensitivity to the plight of Black people, his mother engaged her sons in conversations about the struggle for freedom, justice and equality.
She also exposed them to progressive material such as the Crisis magazine, published by the NAACP.
In 1974, in the middle of a Michael Parkinson interview, Muhammad Ali decided to dispense with all the safe conventions of chat show etiquette.
“You say I got white friends,” he declared, “I say they are associates.” When his host dared to suggest that the boxer’s trainer of 14 years standing, Angelo Dundee, might be a friend, Ali insisted, gruffly: “He is an associate.” Within seconds, with Parkinson failing to get a word in edgeways, Ali had provided a detailed account of his reasoning.
Enough of them were intrigued for Fard to get a following and to be able to switch from the Bible to the Koran as the basis for his preaching. “More about myself I will not tell you yet, for the time has not yet come.” It seems that time had still not come when in 1934, Fard mysteriously disappeared.
The FBI took the opportunity to creatively fill in the gaps.
Since its founding in 1930, the Nation of Islam (NOI) has grown into one of the wealthiest and best-known organizations in black America.
Its theology of innate black superiority over whites and the deeply racist, anti-Semitic and anti-gay rhetoric of its leaders have earned the NOI a prominent position in the ranks of organized hate.
“Elijah Muhammad,” he told the TV viewers of 1970s Middle England, “Is the one who preached that the white man of America, number one, is the Devil!
” The whites of America, said Ali, had “lynched us, raped us, castrated us, tarred and feathered us … ” In one explosive, virtuoso performance, Ali had turned “this little TV show” into an exposition of his beliefs, and the beliefs of “two million five hundred” other followers of the radically – to some white minds, dangerously – black separatist religious movement, the Nation of Islam.