The time Muhammad Ali lost to an ex-nun
MINNEAPOLIS – Muhammad Ali and Sharon Tolbert made for unlikely sparring partners. He was an ex-heavyweight champion. She was an ex-nun. He was among the world’s most famous faces. She was an anonymous college student. He was, in his words, “as big as all history.” And she was a history major.
They met for a brief, blistering debate 50 years ago Tuesday at Canisius College in Buffalo. Ali was on a national college speaking tour to pay the bills after state boxing commissions took away his license following a conviction on violating selective service laws. Tolbert, the only African-American woman in her class, was among the audience who came out to see him on that wintry night.
Ali preached for separation of the races, as he often did in that era. Tolbert rose from her aisle seat, several rows from the stage, to challenge him. Their pointed exchange was reported by the Associated Press and picked up by Sports Illustrated and other national outlets. She got her 15 minutes of fame, as luck would have it, in the same year that Andy Warhol popularized the expression.
The world knows how Ali’s story turned out. This is Tolbert’s story, as well as the stories of some others from that night, including the white college in the black neighborhood where the exchange took place.
Tolbert would go on to earn her doctorate at Stanford and spend her life in higher education. She became Sharon Tolbert-Glover in 1983 when she married Gleason Glover, president of the Minneapolis Urban League, who died in 1994.
LeRoi Johnson was among the African-American students at Canisius who invited Ali; he would go on to manage the music career of his late brother, Rick James. Tony Masiello, a white Canisius basketball player, was in the audience that night; he would go on to be a threetime mayor of Buffalo.
“We expected to see a show, with Ali there, but we never expected to see the sideshow,” Masiello says. “Sharon took it to him. She didn’t back down. I think he was a little startled.”
Tolbert-Glover turned 78 last month. She remembers an unfamiliar edge of anger as she listened to Ali speak.
“I was fiery,” she tells USA TODAY. “And I’m not usually like that.”
The Buffalo Courier-Express ran a 16paragraph story on page 11 of the next morning’s newspaper. The wording in the lead paragraph tells as much about the era as about that night:
“A petite Negro college girl squared off verbally against former heavyweight champion Cassius Clay in a debate that electrified a crowd of 1,000 at Canisius College Wednesday night.”
The story styled Ali as Clay even though he had changed his name four years earlier. Versions by the AP and the college’s student paper, The Griffin, did the same. Each of the narratives described a tense back-and-forth between the boxer and the scholar.
Ali called Islam the only true religion and said separation of the races was the only correct course. African Americans, he said, are fools to believe “this airport is mine, this bus terminal is mine, this college is mine.”
Tolbert-Glover suddenly stood. She spoke without benefit of a microphone. Even so, her voice rang out in the packed auditorium.
“It is my airport,” she said. “It is my bus terminal. It is my America.”
Tolbert-Glover cited her family’s military service, leaving unsaid Ali’s lack of it.
“My father fought for America in World War II,” she said. “His brothers fought for America. These are my people, so this is my America.”
Ali countered — “not quite to the point,” opined Sports Illustrated — that black is the opposite of white. Ali said it is natural law that the races remain apart. “All animals of a kind in nature stay with their own kind,” he said.
“We’re talking about people,” Tolbert-Glover said, “not animals.”
Then she said African Americans could achieve at the same levels as anyone else, given educational opportunity. She would spend much of the rest of her life in pursuit of that goal, including at historically black colleges.
Ali cut off the impromptu debate by saying others should have a chance to talk. He told reporters after his 90-minute lecture that “I didn’t want to argue with the girl. … She’s one of us.” Ali said she was “typical of the Negroes who have been brainwashed by white people.”
The college’s centennial history, published in 1970, scored Ali vs. Tolbert-Glover like a boxing match, awarding a KO to Tolbert-Glover. The history says she “slipped inside every forensic punch” thrown by Ali and “discharged volley after volley of sharp-angled jabs.” It says the ex-champ smiled chivalrously as he left the hall, doing the Ali shuffle.
The fighter
Ali famously said, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong” in 1966, when he was reclassified as eligible for the draft. He refused induction to the U.S. Army in 1967 and was soon convicted of violating selective service laws and sentenced to five years in prison. He remained free while his case was on appeal but he couldn’t box because state commissions, not necessarily notable for their virtue, ruled he wasn’t fit to fight in the prize ring. He couldn’t get matches overseas either because the court took his passport.
“I’m not allowed to work in America,” he said, “and I’m not allowed to leave America.”
Ali would return to the ring in 1970, and the Supreme Court would overturn his conviction in 1971. But before that, with his livelihood in limbo, Ali spoke at roughly 200 colleges.
“Ever heard of Canisius?” Ali asks on a vintage film clip from Like It Is, a public affairs television program centering on the African-American experience that ran on New York’s WABC for more than four decades, beginning in 1968.
“Canisius, Fairleigh Dickinson, C.W. Post. Three colleges at $1,500 a college — pretty good money,” Ali says on the clip, available on YouTube. “So I broke my wife’s piggy bank; she had $135 in it. I broke the piggy bank to get gas money to get me to the college. That $4,500” — roughly $32,500 in today’s dollars — “held me over so I could pay gas bills, light bills, until I could get to the next college. This went on until the whole mess was over.”
In Thomas Houser’s biography-as-oral-history called Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times, Ali says he wrote speeches on note cards that he would study every day and perform in front of a mirror. “I did that for about three months until I was ready,” Ali says in the book, “and the first speeches turned out good. Talking is a whole lot easier than fighting.”
Ali told the standing-room crowd at Canisius that “weapons, bombs, mortar … are the creation of the white race” and that the Black Muslim movement “gives the Negro a true knowledge of himself by separating him from his white masters,” according to the account in The Griffin. That story ran on the back page of the student paper. The banner story on the front page was about student government opposition to the war in Vietnam.
Ali’s opposition to the war made him a pariah at first, but the years of his college tour coincided with changing public opinion. By 1969, the last full year of Ali’s exile, a majority of Americans had turned against the war.
The former nun
Tolbert-Glover graduated from Canisius two months after her encounter with Ali. She earned her first master’s degree at the University at Buffalo and her second at Stanford University, where she’d also get her doctorate in education.
She held administrative and teaching positions at a series of schools over the years, including Edward Waters College in Florida and Paine College in Georgia, both historically black colleges. Later she was vice president of development at St. Catherine University in St. Paul and a senior fellow at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.
Then, in 1999, Tolbert-Glover began work to reopen St. Peter Claver Catholic School in St. Paul at the behest of Rev. Kevin McDonough, then pastor of the parish in the African-American community. Today the school “draws particular strength from its rootedness in Africa,” according to its website.
“Sharon stands in a long line of urban pioneers who wanted education for the community,” says McDonough, who figures about one-third of St. Peter Claver’s students are Catholic and about two-thirds are from other religious traditions. Tolbert-Glover sees reopening that school as the capstone of her career.
“I’d come full circle,” she says. “Some of the nuns who were teaching there I knew from my school in Chicago.”
She’d been taught at Holy Name of Mary School in Chicago by the Oblate Sisters of Providence, a sisterhood established by women of African descent in 1828. While at Mother of Sorrows High School, Tolbert-Glover entered the seminary to join the Servite Sisters. She was 15.
Her Catholic mother felt she was too young to leave home, but her Pentecostal father gave his approval, according to Tolbert-Glover. She took her final vows some years later. Then, according to her account, found that she couldn’t get placed in a parish to work and teach.
“The priests said white people were leaving Chicago to get away from black people,” Tolbert-Glover says, “so why would they accept a black nun?”
She left the convent in the mid-1960s and moved to Buffalo to teach at St. Nicholas School with the Oblate Sisters of Providence. Tolbert-Glover says she then enrolled at Canisius because she had taken courses at Loyola University Chicago during her years as a nun and she believes in Jesuit education.
Canisius opened in 1870 but did not accept women as full-time students until the mid-1960s. Tolbert-Glover appears to be the college’s first African-American female graduate, according to a check of yearbook photos of the era.
The student
Ali had a point when he told the audience at Canisius it would be foolish for African Americans to think this college is theirs. LeRoi Johnson, Class of 1971, says there weren’t many more than a dozen African-American students enrolled at the school in 1968.
“Canisius was in the black community, basically an island in an ocean of blacks,” he says, “but we had almost no black students.”
Johnson was among the founding members of the college’s Afro-American Society. He and others arranged to bring Ali to campus at about the same time they also welcomed comedian and civil rights leader Dick Gregory, Cleveland’s Carl Stokes, the first African American elected mayor of a major U.S. city, and The Main Ingredient, the soul and R&B group.
“We called it Black Week,” Johnson says. “We were bold and we just called them and asked them to come and we got them.”
Johnson would go on to earn his law degree at Georgetown and later managed his brother’s musical career. James Ambrose Johnson Jr., better known as Rick James, died in 2004 and is buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery, across the street from the college.
Johnson says Ali’s call for separation of the races that night should be viewed in the context of the times.
“I believe the world belongs to all of us,” Johnson says. “But at that time blacks were basically forced to live separately and as a result there was a thriving black community with black businesses. You basically had to take care of your own.”
Johnson, who runs a solo law practice in Buffalo, will receive an honorary degree from Canisius at May’s com- mencement. He is an accomplished artist and some of his oil and acrylic paintings, in an African-influenced style he calls “electric primitive,” hang in the first-floor hallway of Old Main, the college’s signature building.
Johnson and others in the fledgling Afro-American Society began working with college administrators in the months after Ali’s visit to recruit more African-American students. Walter Sharrow, 80, emeritus dean of the college of arts and sciences, was among the professors who shaped new courses in African-American studies. He remembers Johnson and Tolbert-Glover as gifted students.
“She was quiet,” Sharrow says, “but when she spoke, she spoke with great insight. People had no choice but to listen carefully.”
Even a former heavyweight champion of the world.
“Yes,” Sharrow says, “as fate would have it.”
‘Something in the past’
Cora Long, 76, figures she and Tolbert-Glover have been friends for 30 years.
“We’re more like sisters,” Tolbert
Glover says.
And yet, until a reporter came calling, Long had never heard about the night Tolbert-Glover tangled with Ali.
“I didn’t really talk about it,” Tolbert-Glover says. “It was something in the past.”
She and Long are sitting in the living room of Tolbert-Glover’s home. She’s moving at the end of March and her hallway is cluttered with diplomas and awards leaning four-deep against the wall. Sophie, her 18-year-old Yorkie, sleeps at her feet.
Long listens to the story about that long-ago night — and she takes Ali’s side.
“He was telling the truth,” Long says. “Who owned those airports, Sharon?”
“Men with money,” Tolbert-Glover says.
“What color were those men?” Long says.
“White men,” Tolbert-Glover says. “But that’s not the point. The point is it’s our country, black and white. It’s our country, all of us.”
The two old friends agree to disagree. They often do, they say, on many fronts.
Tolbert-Glover tells Long she thinks Ali was right about racism but wrong about separation. And she says when she heard him talk about that, something in her snapped.
“I suddenly found that my emotions just overcame me and I had to stand up and say something, and I did,” she says. “I didn’t mean for it to go into such an intense statement, but it did. And I was basically saying to him, ‘No, we need to live together and act together and appreciate and accept each other and that’s what God wanted.’ ”
Guess who ended up thinking Tolbert-Glover was right?
According to Hauser, Ali’s biographer, that would be Muhammad Ali himself.
“In 1968, Ali belonged to the Nation of Islam, which preached what Arthur Ashe called a form of American apartheid,” Hauser says. “It preached white people were devils and separation of the races was the way life should be.”
Ali recanted such views later in life. He co-wrote a 1996 book with Hauser called Healing: A Journal of Tolerance and Understanding.
“When I was young,” Ali says in the book, “I followed a teaching that disrespected other people and said that white people are devils. I was wrong. Color doesn’t make a man a devil. It’s the heart and soul and mind that count.”
Tolbert-Glover lets that last sentence sink in.
“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” she says.