The awakening of a giant: After for a few short months, Cassius JUNE 1963
Author details how secret adoption of a new name signalled
After some trademark, verbal sparring with his imminent opponent Henry Cooper, Cassius Clay takes a nap in the afternoon at The Piccadilly Hotel in London, while his bodyguard Rudolfus King watches the door. Despite being briefly on the canvas, the boxer, who will soon be world champ, wins as he had predicted: “It ain’t no jive, Henry Cooper will go in five.”
Before there was Cassius Clay. After there was Muhammad Ali. But between?
The young fighter with a big mouth called himself Cassius X and, in a few short months in 1963, he laid the foundations of greatness.
He quietly adopted the name – the X symbolising a crossing out of his slave name – while embracing the tenets of Black Power and the black supremacy teachings of the Nation of Islam while building up to his first world heavyweight title fight.
But, along with the fight for equality, resurgent black music was another passion for the boxer, born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr, and he was as likely to be mixing with the leading lights of soul music, like singer Sam Cooke, as with prominent black activists like Malcolm X, still then part of the Nation of Islam.
Clay, destined to become
The Greatest within a few short rocket-propelled years, was plugged into the growth of soul music as much as the civil rights movement at a time when both were gaining traction and causing alarm among the authorities in the States.
It is a period of flux in American society and music unpicked by author and broadcaster Stuart Cosgrove in his new book, Cassius X, which he considers a prequel to his bestselling soul and social history trilogy – Detroit 67, Memphis 68 and Harlem 69.
“I was keen to do something on the first days of soul as it was evolving as a musical genre,” he said. “And I became conscious of Cassius Clay being a witness to that era, in part because he was going out with Dee Dee Sharp at the time, a soul singer who was a stablemate of Chubby Checker and involved in the dance craze records like Mashed Potato.
“I started looking into that period of his life and became fascinated of the time when he was converting and had taken on the name of Cassius X. With the current currency of Malcolm X thanks to his story being retold on Netflix and the wider focus on the Black Lives Matter movement, there is currently a lot of interest in that era of American culture and politics.
Soul singer Dee Dee Sharp
“People think Cassius woke up one day and he had a new name, but it was a 12-month journey. And by the time he was given the name of Muhammad Ali he was already heavyweight champion of the world.”
Cosgrove believes readers will find plenty of parallels between the current BLM movement and what was happening in 1963. “There are killings from that period by the police that are never given fair justice which, if you heard them described now, you would think were part of the Black
Lives Matter movement,”
Cosgrove said.
“Cassius’s mum actually used the brutal death of Emmett
Till, a young gospel singer in Chicago who was lynched in the Mississippi
Delta while visiting his grandfather’s home after he was accused of being too friendly with a local white woman, as a warning to him.
“She used to tell him there were a lot of people out there who didn’t like young black men who were smart and had a big mouth, so to be careful. Cassius always used to talk of it being a warning to him and that he was at risk wherever he went.” Cassius became friends with Sam Cooke, who had a string of hits like Cupid and A Change Is Gonna Come, while both worked in Florida, the boxer training for fights and the musician recording a live album. “Sam became like a business mentor,” said Cosgrove. “He owned his own record company and was hugely aware of how the industry worked. People like him and Berry Gordy were saying you had to own the copyright, had to control your business and career, and I think Cassius took a lot of that from the early soul musicians, who had witnessed the way black talent had been ripped off in the 1950s. Maybe the biggest influence of soul music on him was that you could shape your own career and control not only it, but the wealth that comes with it.”
As well as his romantic relationship with Dee Dee Sharp and close friendship with Cooke, Cassius was also friends with the likes of Stevie Wonder, Dionne Warwick and Ben E King, whose hit, Stand By Me,