‘Hurricane’ Carter – a nightmare for white America
Boxer wrongly convicted of murder twice became a symbol of US racism in the 1960s, writes Alan Tyers Carter the middleweight was a formidable opponent, slippery and hard-hitting
Bob Dylan is a hard act to follow. His 1975 song Hurricane
immortalised the boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, wrongly convicted twice on the same murder charges after the fatal shooting of three people in a Paterson, New Jersey bar in 1966. He was incarcerated for 19 years.
As Dylan put it … Now all the criminals in their coats and their ties, Are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise, While Rubin sits like Buddha in a 10-foot cell, An innocent man in a living hell,
That’s the story of the Hurricane,
But it won’t be over till they clear his name, And give him back the time he’s done,
Put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been, The champion of the world.
Carter became an international cause
célèbre; his case axiomatic for racism in the police and the United States’ justice system. The judge who eventually issued the 1985 habeas corpus
writ that freed Carter noted the “prosecution had been predicated upon an appeal to racism rather than reason, and concealment rather than disclosure.” In short, he was fitted up.
A new BBC podcast, available today and broadcast on World Service Radio starting on Sunday, tells the story of the Hurricane and a fine job they make of it, too.
Producer Joel Hammer and producer/narrator Steve Crossman are able to do what Dylan did not, which is flesh out the man’s backstory until that hot New Jersey night in June 1966.
They were immeasurably aided in this by the discovery of 40 hours of audio recordings of Carter, as well as interviews with those close to him.
Carter the middleweight was a formidable opponent, slippery and hard-hitting. Ron Lipton, who sparred with him, said: “Rubin would paralyse you with a punch if you didn’t turn your head. It was like your jaw being driven through the back of your skull.” Carter says he himself sparred with heavyweight champion Sonny Liston and that the bigger man would hit him until blood was coming out of his ears, which Carter did not seem to mind all that much. That anecdote captures much of the Carter story: an almost demented bravery and indomitable spirit, and questions over what the truth of anything was.
With the Cuban Missile Crisis looming in the public consciousness in the early Sixties, Carter had knocked out that island’s Florentino “The Ox” Fernandez at Madison Square Garden in just over a minute, yet Carter’s destiny was to not to be an American hero, but instead white America’s nightmare.
Prior to the events in Paterson, Carter had a long and rich history with the police that began with stabbing somebody when he was 11 as part of his horrific and violent childhood, borstal, court martials from the Army, convictions for mugging and such, and the possibly significant and certainly unwise decision to go on record to a reporter about the justification for black people in killing police officers.
He fought for the world title in December 1964 and rocked the experienced champion Joey Giardello in the fourth, but lost to a unanimous decision.
That was the high water mark for Carter the boxer, and it was judgment of another kind that would define the rest of his life. At once a period piece and absolutely of the moment today, this story of a sporting anti-hero, racism and injustice is a terrific listen.