>Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 18:14:57 -0400
>From: Art McGee <amcgee@igc.org>
>Reply-To: ireedpub@yahoo.com, uncleish@aol.com
>Subject: [BRC-NEWS] Muhammad Ali and the Sixties
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>http://www.ishmaelreedpub.com/Natambu4.html
>
>Ishmael Reed's Konch Magazine
>
>March 20, 2000
>
>Book Review
>
>------------------------------
>Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali
>and the Spirit of the Sixties
>by Michael Marqusee
>Verso, 1999
>------------------------------
>
>Reviewed by Kofi Natambu
>
>This is an extraordinary book. It is especially astonishing
>because just when I began to despair that any one text could
>possibly do justice to accurately documenting and analyzing
>the often badly misunderstood and largely misrepresented
>complexity of either Muhammad Ali, the African American
>civil rights and black power movements, or that endlessly
>fascinating and elusive historical moment known forever as
>"the sixties," an heretofore obscure author restores my
>faith in the illuminating power of great writing to do much
>more than merely chronicle legendary events. That the author
>would be a white American expatriate who left the U.S. in
>1971 at the age of eighteen to settle in England and become
>an award-winning sports historian is all the more amazing
>and, in this particular case, gratifying.
>
>For what Michael Marqusee has accomplished with this
>elegantly written book is nothing short of providing the
>most lucid, succinct, intellectually honest and even-handed
>account I have ever read of what Ali, and the various black
>political and cultural movements for radical social change
>both in this country and abroad (especially in Africa) of
>that volatile period really meant to its massive legions of
>fans and supporters throughout the world.
>
>But Marqusee doesn't stop there. His highly insightful and
>sharply analytical prose, which always somehow manages to
>remain both graceful and completely devoid of dogma, also
>incorporates an analysis of the significant social and
>cultural impact of such archetypal figures of the '60s era,
>as well as earlier 20th century American history, as Malcolm
>X, Bob Dylan, Elijah Muhammad, Paul Robeson, Jackie
>Robinson, Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. DuBois, Louis Armstrong,
>Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Sam Cooke and Martin Luther King.
>In doing so we learn how and why these seemingly disparate
>figures had such a profound effect on the anti-war movement
>against the American intervention in Vietnam, as well as the
>on-going struggles for human rights and social revolution in
>the United States, the African continent, the Caribbean,
>Latin America and Europe.
>
>Toward that end Marqusee ties in the revolutionary movements
>against colonialism and for political and economic democracy
>in what was formerly known as the Congo (now Zaire), Ghana,
>and South Africa. Thus the reader is also treated to an
>analysis of U.S. complicity (through the CIA and the State
>Department) in the the military overthrow and assassination
>of the first and only democratically elected President in
>the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, in 1960 by none other than the
>vicious military officer and subsequent dictator Joseph
>Mobutu (who bankrolled the famous 'Rumble in the Jungle'
>heavyweight championship fight between Ali and George
>Foreman with state funds in 1974).
>
>In fact it is one of the many engaging aspects of this book
>that it seriously investigates the many links between
>individuals like Ali, Malcolm X, Dr. King and Elijah
>Muhammad within the broader context of such major
>institutional forces as the Nation of Islam, SCLC, SNCC, the
>Organization of African Unity (founded by Ghanaian president
>and Pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah), the FBI, the CIA, and the
>American government. What emerges from this meticulously
>detailed attention to the intricate nuances of history is a
>book that tells us precisely who Muhammad Ali was as both
>boxer and human individual without sacrificing an
>understanding of how massive political, economic and social
>forces of the 1960s and '70s impacted Ali's perceptions of
>himself and the world. At the same time Marqusee allows us
>to see the champion's considerable strengths and weaknesses
>in a way that doesn't dehumanize him through either too much
>misplaced adulation or petty criticism. In fact the truly
>heroic dimensions of Ali's stand against the war in Vietnam
>and his sincere commitment to his chosen religious and
>philosophical beliefs at great personal and professional
>cost is even clearer and more profound after reading this
>text.
>
>As a result the extended and brilliantly written passages on
>the champion's personal and political relationships with
>such icons of the period as Malcolm X, the major mentor and
>confidant of Ali's before the acrimonious split between
>Malcolm and the authoritarian patriarch of the Nation of
>Islam, Elijah Muhammad, in March 1964 (and which helped lead
>to the tragedy of Malcolm's assassination just eleven months
>later) is filled with well-researched and captivating
>accounts of the complex personalities and stances of all
>three men. For example, we learn that Ali, who first began
>secretly attending meetings of the Nation of Islam as early
>as 1962 (some two years after he received a gold medal as
>the American representative in boxing at the Olympic Games,
>and two years before he fought and defeated Sonny Liston in
>February 1964 for the world heavyweight crown), was already
>fascinated with the militant black nationalist oratory of
>Malcolm X (the leading national minister of the NOI) at a
>time when the Nation was still almost completely unknown to
>the general American public.
>
>It was Ali's intense interest in the sect as well as his
>highly confident and independent attitude that supported
>Malcolm's typically prescient insight that a then relatively
>unknown 20-year-old kid named Cassius Marcellus Clay would
>very soon become world heavyweight champion. Thus began
>Malcolm's recruitment of a young man that he insisted from
>the beginning was more than capable of becoming a very
>important force in the organization. That this prophecy was
>not shared by the then sixty-five-year-old founder and
>leader of the NOI, Elijah Muhammad, is a major
>understatement since the old man not only considered boxing
>to be a morally inferior pastime but the idea of the young
>Clay as an important member of his organization struck him
>as pure folly. Of course none of this kept him from fully
>endorsing and embracing Clay as a leading (and now wealthy)
>member once he did become champion or bestowing on him the
>very rare privilege of a new Islamic name, Muhammad Ali, on
>the very night he became champion. This resulted in the
>older man being able to not only wean Ali away from Malcolm
>who, after being suspended by the Nation in December 1963,
>formed his own organization just two weeks after Ali won the
>title on February 25, 1964 but also enabled the elder
>Muhammad to take over the new champion's financial affairs
>through his appointment of his own son Herbert as Ali's
>business manager.
>
>Ali admits years later that his painful split with Malcolm
>at Elijah's bidding was a big mistake on his part and the
>major regret of his life. As Ali put it: "It was a pity and
>a disgrace he died like that [assassination] because what
>Malcolm saw was right, and after he left us, we went his way
>anyway. Color didn't make a man a devil. It's the heart,
>soul and mind that counts."
>
>Marqusee also provides us with a particularly astute and
>dynamic comparative analysis of Ali and another '60s
>cultural hero and icon, singer and songwriter Bob Dylan.
>What is revealed in this luminous comparison is how Ali and
>Dylan, who were only eight months apart in age, both
>symbolized and represented in strikingly similar and
>different ways the alienation, restlessness, rebellion and
>deep thirst and desire for social and cultural change that
>was so characteristic of an entire generation throughout the
>world.
>
>As Marqusee writes: "Ali and Dylan were first generation
>children of the burgeoning electronic audio-visual culture,
>which was still at that time largely unrecognized as
>anything other than an inferior and distant cousin to the
>mature forms of "high culture." Their public achievements
>and the controversies that surrounded them helped compel the
>in telligentsia to take pop culture seriously. By their
>boldness, their ambitions and, paradoxically, their
>playfulness, they made their disciplines--sport and popular
>music--worthy of study..."
>
>The deep appreciation for, and understanding of, popular
>culture that Marqusee consistently demonstrates in this book
>is never smug or condescending. In fact his clarity
>regarding how cultural values, politics, and ideology
>intersect and influence each other is echoed in his riveting
>accounts of the rise, rapid expansion and agonizing decline
>of the black power movement in the 1965-1975 period. This
>section of the book is framed by a dizzying number of major
>historical events, two of the most pivotal being the public
>assassinations of Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
>who both died at the age of thirty nine only three years
>apart in 1965 and 1968. In recounting and critically
>examining these earth-shattering incidents Marqusee very
>deftly weaves the parallel narrative of not only Muhammad
>Ali but the history of the Vietnam war (and the intense
>national anti-war activity and draft resistance against it)
>and such well-known organizations as SNCC, the Black Panther
>Party, SDS, and SCLC. In highly dramatic yet measured prose
>we see in great and fastidious detail how Ali's courageous
>stands play a key role in the tremendous explosion of black
>political and cultural consciousness among young African
>Americans, as well as the millions of whites who were just
>beginning to seriously question and oppose the government's
>war in Vietnam.
>
>We also witness Ali's impact on global affairs as the U.S.
>moves swiftly to prosecute him for his public opposition to
>the war and the draft. In England, France, Germany, Africa,
>South America and throughout the Caribbean island nations
>Ali is universally hailed as a hero moving everyone from the
>philosophers Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre to
>foreign government leaders, political revolutionaries,
>peasants and workingclass people alike to sing his praises
>and openly defend his position.
>
>Meanwhile Marqusee takes us on a philosophical journey of
>his own, musing about the historical implications and
>consequences of Ali's role in terms of the ultimate meaning
>of sports in the United States as well as a scintillating
>critique of what dramatic changes have occured in American
>political economy and culture (and in the national African
>American community) since Ali was banned from boxing and had
>his passport revoked in 1967, was finally legally reinstated
>(by a 5-4 vote in the Supreme Court in June 1971), and
>defeated Joe Frazier in 1973, George Foreman in Zaire in
>1974, and Leon Spinks in 1978 to become world heavyweight
>champion for a record three times. During this critique
>Marqusee demonstrates how and why the conservative white and
>black American establishment began to embrace and coopt the
>former militancy of Ali after 1975. Thus begins the media's
>concerted (and on-going) attempts to distort and manipulate
>the true meaning of his public legacy.
>
>Finally Marqusee takes the reader full circle from his
>opening paragraph where he ponders the sobering yet curious
>fact that where once Ali had been fiercely opposed and
>reviled by the government, sports writers and media
>executives he was now in the 1990s being openly lionized and
>feted by the same powerful public figures and corporate
>institutions that had once denounced him, took his
>championship title away and tried to send him to prison. It
>is also revealed that because of backstage lobbying by NBC
>Sports Ali was chosen to light the famous torch at the 1996
>Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia before a sold-out crowd of
>83,000 people (paying $600 per ticket), and a global TV
>audience estimated at three billion. However in the final
>chapter to this seemingly dense, but never boring or
>ponderous, three-hundred-page masterpiece, Marqusee provides
>an eloquent, powerful and compelling counterstatement and
>critique of this cynical appropriation by American and other
>global capitalists who use the symbolic power and authority
>of Ali's international image to sell the Olympic Games and
>its endless spinoff products.
>
>In a parallel, and very interesting, assessment of the
>contemporary sports scene Marqusee openly criticizes the
>global corporate and media absorption of Michael Jordan who,
>unlike Ali, has always been willingly complicit in the
>highly profitable exploitation of his image:
>
>"Nothing could be further from the ethos of Muhammad Ali
>than the no-risk business acumen of Jordan. When campaigners
>trying to draw attention to the plight of low-paid workers
>in Nike's Southeast Asian sweatshops appealed to Jordan for
>help, they got the brushoff. So did black Democrats in
>Jordan's homestate of North Carolina when they asked him to
>endorse their efforts to defeat the racist, homophobic
>tobacco champion, Jesse Helms...Ali's embrace of an
>alternative nationality, in the form of the Nation of Islam,
>evolved under the pressure of events into a humanist
>internationalism, a sense of responsibility to the poor and
>powerless of all nations. Jordan's subordination of himself
>to "America" made him an emblem of "globalization", a form
>of rule from above by multinational corporations. His
>astonishing achievements on the basketball court, and the
>huge rewards he has reaped from them, are advanced as
>justifications for "the American way," the capitalist way.
>Jordan has become the embodiment of the Social Darwinism of
>the new world order..."
>
>By historical constrast then we learn the real reasons why
>Ali and his mythic yet all too real example continues to be
>of great value today despite the greed-based blandishments
>of advertisers, promotors, athletes, and consumers alike. It
>is a fitting coda to a great book that, like its main
>subject, continually inspires, educates, entertains and
>transforms our understanding of ourselves, our shared
>history and the incredibly complex world that we live in.
>Nothing could be a greater tribute to a true champion of the
>people.
>
>Copyright (c) 2000 Ishmael Reed Publications.
>
>
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