The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Catching the soul train to a new destiny
STUART COSGROVE
IN 1962, Cassius Clay and his teenage brother Rudy drove north to Detroit for a Nation of Islam rally in the Motor City. They did not travel with the full blessing of their parents. Their mother sang in the choir of her gospel church and could not imagine a road that led away from Christianity and their father, more relaxed about religion, had imagined a future where his sons would follow in his footsteps.
He was a sign writer and when not painting murals and scoping out shop signs, he was drinking in the R&B clubs of Louisville, Kentucky. Both parents sensed they were losing control of their sons and that the magnetic power of a rally in the north would prove too powerful.
When they arrived in Detroit, the Clay brothers found a city bristling with excitement, tense with racial difference and on the cusp of reinventing black music. Cassius Clay was a compulsive record collector and already owned several Motown records, even although
the “sound” that would make it famous was still in its infancy. One song in particular had come pounding on to his radar – Mary Wells’s boxing-themed love song You Beat Me to the Punch, written by Smokey Robinson, which reached No1 on the R&B charts later in 1962.
AS Motown looked to the mainstream, Clay was slowly but surely heading in a different direction, embracing Islam, which thrived in the prisons and ghettos but had never occupied centre stage in African American society. Unlike the creed of Dr Martin Luther King it did not believe in non-violence and would not turn its cheek in the face of racial discrimination.
Casually at first, and then with growing devoutness, Clay read the Nation of Islam’s newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, and on Sunday evenings when he had finished training at the 5th Street Gym in Miami, where he was now based, he would lie on his motel bed listening to Miami’s Radio Station WMIE, which carried a syndicated sermon by the Nation’s leader Elijah Muhammad.
The Olympia, on Detroit’s Grand River Avenue, was busy with anticipation. Muslims had come from across America, bussed in from Chicago and New York. The rally had been convened to protest the shooting of two Nation of Islam members by Los Angeles Police officers. Scores of policemen had ransacked the Los Angeles mosque, wounding seven unarmed Muslims, and leaving William Rogers paralysed and Ronald Stokes dead. More than 3,500 supporters of the Nation had come to register their support for the dead men. The Olympia was a beast of a building, robust and reverential, stylish and steadfast. The stadium’s former general manager Lincoln Cavalieri, once said “... if an atom bomb landed in Detroit, I’d want to be in the Olympia.”
Police patrols circled the neighbourhood and a hidden battalion of armed officers were out of sight in a local warehouse, on red alert. Young men in sharp suits lined the sidewalk, cordoning the entrance and bodysearching the faithful. More people were crowded nearby around the entrance to a diner called The Shabazz which carried a Nation of Islam motto on its fascia: ‘Every man is a builder of a temple – his body’.
It was inside The Shabazz luncheonette that the charismatic Malcolm X first forged a friendship with Clay. It was the introduction to a relationship that impacted on both their lives. Initially, their friendship was one of mentor and student.
“Malcolm was very intelligent, with a good sense of humour, a wise man”, Clay once said. “When he talked, he