Muhammad Ali Became a Big Brother to Me - and to All African-Americans

By Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Time

13 June 16

 

hen I first met Muhammad Ali, he was performing magic tricks on Hollywood Boulevard. I was a freshman at UCLA walking along the street with two of my school buddies when we saw him strolling with a small entourage, doing sleight-of-hand illusions for fans who came up to him. This was 1966 and Ali, only five years older than me, had already made his mark as the youngest ever heavyweight champion. The next year, he would be stripped of his title after announcing he would not submit to being drafted into the Army because “I ain’t got nothing against them Viet Cong” who “never called me nigger.” Half the world would chant his name in praise; the other half would sharpen pitchforks and light torches.

And here he was, casually walking down the street as if he hadn’t a care in the world, delighting people he didn’t even know with his magic. His magic wasn’t just the simple tricks he performed, but his ability to draw everyone’s attention to him, whether he was in a crowded room or on a busy boulevard. And once he had their attention, he never disappointed them. No matter how many people were around, he was the only one you looked at. He exuded confidence, a sense of purpose and an undeniable joy, as if he knew that he and the world made a pretty good pair.

Being a big fan, I shyly approached him to say hello. If he knew who I was, he didn’t let on. He was friendly and polite and charming—and then he was gone, moving down the street like a lazy breeze, a steady stream. A force of nature: gentle but unstoppable.

The three of us walked away jabbering giddily about how cool it was to have met the champ. But to me that meeting was much more than running into yet another celebrity in L.A. I’d admired Muhammad since I was 13, when he and Rafer Johnson won gold medals in the 1960 Olympics. Rafer dominated in the decathlon and Muhammad triumphed as a light heavyweight boxer. To me, they were the epitome of the skill, power and grace of the black athlete, and they inspired me to push myself harder.

Muhammad’s influence on me in those formative years, from when I was 13 to when I met him on Hollywood Boulevard, wasn’t just related to athletics. He had not only conquered the boxing world through his undeniable dominance in the ring, but he had mastered the art of self-promotion unlike anyone since P.T. Barnum, who once said, “Without promotion, something terrible happens … nothing!” Muhammad cannily ensured that something would happen by playing the court jester. He bragged relentlessly and shamelessly—and in verse! He riled up some white folk so much that they would pay anything to see this uppity young boy put back in his place.

That place, for blacks of the time, was wherever they were told. Sure, athletes and entertainers were invited to sit at the adult table, but for everyone else, the struggle was still in its infancy. Once at the table, opportunities for blacks opened up everywhere. So if you were smart and wanted to maintain a successful career, you kept your dark head down, mouth shut, and occasionally confirmed how grateful and blessed you felt.

Not Muhammad.

He was a fighter, whether in or out of the ring. In the ring, he was as much businessman as athlete. Out of the ring, he was a champion of justice—and a terrible businessman. His conversion to the Nation of Islam in 1964 would eventually lead to his being stripped of his heavyweight title in 1967, when he refused to submit to the draft during the Vietnam War citing religious grounds as well as the fact that “my conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people.” This caused him to be sentenced to prison for five years, fined $10,000 and banned from boxing for three years, his license to box being revoked in all states. (In 1971, his conviction was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in an 8-0 decision.) He didn’t fight for three years during his physical prime, when he could have earned millions of dollars, because he stood up for a principle. While I admired the athlete of action, it was the man of principle who was truly my role model.

The next time Muhammad and I met was at a lavish Los Angeles party mostly attended by college and professional athletes. Members of various UCLA and USC teams were there, as were some of the Dodgers. I saw Muhammad floating like a butterfly through the party, only he wasn’t stinging anyone like a bee—he was flirting with all the women and charming all the men. He was like a magnet moving through a crowd of needles.

Like a typical gawky and insecure freshman, I drifted off on my own to check out the musical instruments the band had abandoned when they took a break. My dad was a jazz musician and brought me up around a lot of other musicians, so I had a passion for music even though I had no discernible talent. I started hitting the drums, working up a nice beat, when suddenly Muhammad Ali was next to me strumming a guitar. Muhammad’s personal photographer, Howard Bingham, immediately swooped in, posed us, and snapped an image of us jamming.

After that evening, Muhammad took on a big brother role in my life. He invited me to attend a meeting in Cleveland to discuss his protesting the draft. Basketball legend Bill Russell was there, along with NFL great Jim Brown and a lot of other Cleveland Browns players. In the early days of the draft, there wasn’t as much opposition to the war. People of color were among the first to protest, because it seemed as if we were the first to be drafted and sent to fight. Those too poor to afford college, which came with a student deferment, had little choice. As the draft extended to include more white, middle-­class boys, opposition to the war grew in popularity. But despite our passion, we few athletes were unable to do anything significant to fight the draft. We left feeling powerless, especially knowing that had Muhammad allowed himself to be drafted, he would have never faced combat and would have still earned his millions. Instead, he would face the punishment for his convictions alone.

That’s when I realized he wasn’t just my big brother, but a big brother to all African Americans. He willingly stood up for us whenever and wherever bigotry or injustice arose, without regard for the personal cost. He was like an American version of the comic-book hero Black Panther.

Despite our mutual affection and respect, Muhammad and I were not always on the same path. While still a college student, I went to hear him speak in Harlem. Afterward, he took me to dinner to meet Louis Farrakhan, a leader within the Nation of Islam. I had been the object of enough recruitment dinners to know where this was going. Even though I had no intention of joining, my regard for Muhammad was so great that I chose to attend. However, my burgeoning involvement with Islam was strictly a spiritual quest, while the Nation of Islam seemed more of a political organization. I wanted to keep my pursuit of social justice separate from my pursuit of religious fulfillment.

Muhammad was not offended by my refusal to join. (In 1975, he left the Nation of Islam to embrace Sunni Islam.) Throughout the years we disagreed on other social and political issues, but none of that ever interfered with our friendship. We supported each other in the books we wrote, the charitable events we hosted and some of the causes we championed.

Most young people today know Muhammad Ali only as the hunched old man whose body shook ceaselessly from Parkinson’s. But I, and millions of other Americans black and white, remember him as the man whose mind and body once shook the world. We have been better off because of it.

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Omar Mateen Committed LGBT Mass Murder. We Must Confront That.

By Tim Teeman, The Daily Beast

13 June 16

 

The media and politicians are in retreat from calling Omar Mateen’s Pulse nightclub massacre an act of anti-LGBT hate. Especially in Pride month, this erasure must not happen.

here was a massacre at a LGBT nightclub in Orlando on Sunday.

But you might not have known that, if you read some of the initial accounts by outlets like The New York Times. The word “gay” wasn’t mentioned in headlines at first—a meaningful early signal of a wider denial that bloomed Sunday in the media, and on the part of commentators, as the story of Omar Mateen’s dreadful massacre continued to unfold.

As it does, a man in Los Angeles has been arrested, allegedly on his way to the city’s Pride parade in West Hollywood, armed with assault rifles and explosive devices. 

Whether LGBTs are coming under sustained, or any kind of co-ordinated attack during Pride month is unknown. There has been no specific threat received in New York, James P. O’Neill of the NYPD told CBS News.

What needs to be repeated over and over again, and interrogated, is that the largest mass shooting in American history was an attack on gay people, LGBT people—politicians and lawmakers must say that, confront that, call it by its terrible, rightful name. 

On social media, there is not just grief but also anger on the part of LGBT people, not just at the terrible loss of life, but of the erasure of LGBT people from a narrative that is centered on them, that has been visited upon LGBTs during Pride month. Those marches—in recent times, customized as “celebration”—will become far more moving and indelibly political, and rightly so.

Only President Obama, in his moving and concise remarks at the White House, recognized this for what LGBTs feel in the marrow of their bones—that this was an attack on them, as well as an act of terror.

On television this morning, there has been no one calling Mateen’s massacre out as a dreadful act of violence against LGBT people. It may be an “act of terror” as we keep hearing—and Mateen radicalized by ISIS, leading to his call to 911, stating his allegiance to ISIS as he carried out his attack. 

But who was targeted exactly—and why? Why the resistance to saying it? If it was an act of terror, it was also a hate crime.

It is left to the moving testimonies of those affected to underscore who was attacked—of Pulse club-goer Shawn Royston, crying in a CBS News phone interview as he wondered why people “hate” so much that they would go to a club to kill people; and to the mother who is tearfully trying to locate her son, who was in the club. He had, she said proudly, set up a Gay-Straight Alliance at his high school.

Pulse was a club where LGBT people went to feel comfortable and have a good time; LGBT clubs exist because gay people need places to congregate because they were not welcome or comfortable elsewhere. They should be a “safe space,” a retreat, breathing space, refuge, dance paradise, fun house—not somewhere to be hurt or murdered.

This was a Latino LGBT night; there is, right now, a complete lack of engagement on the part of the media about any of this, and about the horror visited on the LGBT community. LGBT people have been killed in a place where they should feel safest, and the media—starting with The New York Times, which later added the “gay” qualifier to its headline—is rendering them invisible.

Let’s say it plainly: This was a mass slaying aimed at LGBT people. Their assassin was a man disgusted by the sight of two men kissing, his father told NBC News. This was a homophobic attack.

If politicians and Pope Francis are horrified by the mass shooting, if they condemn it as strongly as they do, they cannot just compartmentalize the fact it was targeted at LGBT people. So far, all their august statements on the attack have not mentioned that it was an attack on an LGBT club and its patrons.

ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos asked a reporter if Pulse was well-known as a “gay club,” as if there might be some mystery to this, some strange affix it had been endowed with. The mainstream media seems to be in fearful, nervous retreat from this.

They are not alone. Don’t expect certain members of the GOP, and others with prejudice and bigotry running in their bloodstream, to restate this was an attack on LGBT people, because how could they when their own platform and policies propagate exactly the kind of anti-gay hatred that seems to have led Mateen to do what he did.

From Donald Trump, via Twitter, this morning: “Horrific incident in FL. Praying for all the victims & their families. When will this stop? When will we get tough, smart & vigilant?”

“We pray for those brutally attacked in Orlando. While we must learn more about the attacker, the victims & families will not be forgotten,” tweeted Paul Ryan.

But of course, no mention of LGBT people, or that this was a gay club. Both Trump and Ryan have a pitifully lacking notion of what was attacked Sunday morning, and why those LGBT people were attacked. 

The Pulse massacre may be the most extreme manifestation of homophobia, but violence is all too familiar to LGBT people, and it’s rooted in the legitimacy that anti-gay legislation gives it.

On CBS News and elsewhere, ISIS’s murderous homophobia is being emphasized as a possible root cause of Omar Mateen’s actions, and how ISIS spread their message via social media—the images of ISIS soldiers throwing gays to their deaths, and the like.

Who knows if Omar Mateen saw those images? Perhaps, perhaps not. What we know from his father is that his disgust came from seeing two men kiss on a street, right here in America. And Mateen’s homophobic disgust, often enacted in law and in despicable words, is shared by the Religious Right and GOP politicians.

Over the next hours and days, as LGBT people and homophobia may continue to be made surreally incidental to their own story, Omar Mateen will also likely be made 'the other'--all will become a marshy soup of 'radicalization,' ISIS operatives,' and briefings by law enforcement sources.

But Omar Mateen’s anti-gay hatred wasn’t beamed in from Syria. It birthed and grew right here.

If both Trump and Ryan, and their colleagues, really want to ensure the “victims & families” will not be forgotten, they would do something to ensure their party stopped attacking LGBT people, they would actively fight for equality. 

Please, no more “thoughts and prayers,” unless they come with a vocal recognition of this as an attack against LGBT people in an LGBT bar. 

Please, no more talk of the Pulse as a “nightclub” without the word “gay” or “LGBT” attached to it.

Please, no more talk on this being an “attack on all of us” unless LGBT people are accorded the same rights as everyone else. 

Please Marco Rubio, no more of your pieties about how dreadful an attack this is when you, like ISIS and the Pulse attacker, share a base desire against LGBT people, who see us as lesser than. You have spoken powerfully about why we do not deserve equality. You believe in discriminating against us. In future, when talking about the massacre, mention us by name, renounce your previous poisonous words against us—or just shut up. Your hypocrisy is sickening.

First, this was an attack on LGBT people, and second, the GOP has done everything in its power to make LGBT people, “the other,” not deserving of the same civil rights as straight Americans.

Certain GOP lawmakers and politicians, responsible for promoting discrimination and discriminatory legislation against LGBT people should be questioned and shamed too in every post-massacre interview—for it is their words and actions which ultimately give official legitimacy to the violent, bloody acts of killers like Omar Mateen.

We already hear the familiar repetition that Mateen was a “lone wolf.” He was in one sense—in that he killed 49 people and injured 53 others (at the time of writing) with a gun; but he is also—and this is far scarier, and a far bigger challenge for politicians and out culture to confront—far from a “lone wolf” in the disgust and prejudice he felt toward LGBT people. 

The entire GOP platform is predicated on ensuring that LGBT people remain lesser in the eyes of the law.

Homophobia is not isolated. Homophobia thrums through our entire culture. Politicians use it to win votes, schoolkids practice it against each other, employers use it against employees. Homophobia is not isolated to the lone wolf, it thrives in the pack, and it thrives in the playbook of craven politicians.

Today, all of those politicians should feel shame, guilt, and complicity. They must be made to realize, and held to account, that their words and deeds cannot be isolated from Omar Mateen’s actions.

Instead of that necessary recognition, LGBT people will be braced instead to somehow be blamed for this. The religious fruitcakes and right-wing family groups and politicians will find a way.

We keep hearing of “best practices,” of ISIS preying on “troubled souls,” in willful denial that Omar Mateen didn’t have to alight on the wilder shores of radical Islamist social media for encouragement for his vile deeds. 

The painful truth, the truth to be confronted and repeated, is that his homophobia was born in America, and fostered in America.

If politicians profess horror at Mateen’s actions, the most effective thing they could do would be to ensure that their children know there is nothing strange about two men kissing; that there is everything fine about loving whomever you choose to love; to strike down every anti-gay law on the statute books; to legislate for total equality; to fight homophobia and raise our young people to be accepting of all; and to never give another “religious freedom” law even two minutes of reading time.

There were so many straight voices commenting on television on Sunday morning, asking their usual agonized questions of what “we can do,” and beseeching we all “come together,” of gun laws, and of what the FBI will do, and the police will do, and how to stop people becoming radicalized.

All of this obscures the more painful, homegrown truth that Omar Mateen’s murderous homophobia seems to have been fed and watered in America.

There are no gay voices thus far on television. There is no one expressing the pain and shock that this should happen in this month of Pride festivals, the time of year dedicated to LGBT people expressing their strength and demand for equality openly.

The politicians and police huddled at microphones are silent on the fact that this was an attack on LGBTs. Nothing. 

In Orlando, the ban on gay men donating blood remains in place—despite earlier reports to the contrary—which is particularly shaming on a day their LGBT friends, loved ones, and peers injured at Pulse urgently need it.

There are no voices yet expressing the pain of the LGBT people and LGBT people of color affected by this.

There is talk of the pain of families, which is immense and awful. How heartening it would be if this definition of “family” was expanded to the LGBT “family” that was attacked Sunday morning, of why clubs like Pulse are so vital for people who may have been rejected by families, or who have found alternative “families” of friends who gather to let loose and connect at venues like Pulse. 

This will, as it always is with tragedies that affect us and the political, be left to LGBT people to state bluntly, to own, to process, to support one another, and to—as we have done throughout history—fight to assert our right to live equally. And to be heard, and to be represented.

Pride may be a “celebration,” as it is now relentlessly marketed as, but this year, after the appalling mass murder in Orlando, let it also be a statement of strength, and resistance. We thought we were past this. We are not. 

The only good that can come out of the Orlando massacre is that it may shine a light on just how harmful and poisonously corrosive homophobia is, and how necessary, indeed urgent, equality and full social acceptance is.

For that, the straight media and straight body politic needs to acknowledge this as an LGBT tragedy, and one made right here in America.

For LGBTs, don’t do as Omar Mateen and his demented ilk would have us do. Don’t hide. Don’t be scared. Don’t retreat. Donate blood. Go to your Pride marches. Kiss your partners, kiss your friends, kiss strangers. Kiss them joyfully, heartily, kiss them in the sunshine, hold them tight in public, in the light. Declare yourselves. With Pride.