The Silencing of A Black Friendship: Muhammad Ali, Sam Cooke, Malcolm X & Jim Brown
It is sometimes said that great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and small minds discuss other people. In the 1960’s a friendship was born between four great minds, and together they discussed the greatest of ideas. But these great minds were worn by black men, and so their combined intellect and ability to change the world for the better was instead seen as a threat to white supremecy. Because of the colour of their skin and the beautiful and boundless possibility of their joining forces, they were silenced: some by the media, others by bullets.
In February of 1964, Cassius Clay dethroned reigning champion Sonny Liston in the fight that earned him his first ever Heavyweight Boxing title. He celebrated the victory in a hotel room with some of the most influential figures of the civil rights movement. This powerful circle of friends included boxer, activist, and philanthropist Cassius Clay, human rights activist Malcolm X, entertainer and activist Sam Cooke, and American footballer and activist Jim Brown.
At the time America was still under Jim Crow laws, which meant public facilities such as schools, restaurants, and restrooms were strictly segregated by race. The dismantling of racial segregation was one of the ideas these four men shared, and this was the very reason why their friendship was, for the most part, silenced. White America wanted them to be entertainers only, would happily attend their events and enjoy their craft in the comfort and safety of ‘whites only’ areas, but they were not ready to hear talk of social justice and racial equality. These were ideas far too different from their own.
Ever since the colonization of America and for much too long after, the black man was portrayed in the media as ape-like, a primitive creature to be feared and a lesser being than the white man. This is the portrayal that fitted into Jim Crow’s America, lending complacency to the white people who benefited from it. In the limited footage we have of Cooke, Ali, Malcolm X and Brown’s relationship, this archaic stereotype is broken down for a moment and replaced with a young male friendship that is fun, tender, and loving. We see this especially in a video of Cooke and Ali during which they perform a snippet of their single “The Gang’s All Here.” Watching this video, it’s impossible to associate Cooke and Ali with the stereotype of the black man that was so prevalent in the media at the time. This exposing of the black man as a tender human being was another threat to white supremecy. And so, like most of black America’s collective history, it was easily silenced.
From the brief snippets of black history that managed to slip through the cracks of the predominantly white telling of it, we learn that February 25th of 1964 was a significant moment for these four friends. Not long after the night of his victory, Clay changed his name to Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown walked away from his NFL career, and both Sam Cooke and Malcolm X were dead.
Sam Cooke’s life ended in a motel room in LA in what was ruled at the time as a “justifiable homicide”. The events that surround his death remain a mystery, and because he was a black man in a white world, his shooting was never fully investigated as it should have been. It was treated, like Ali said, as “just another dead black man.” Some short months later, Malcolm X was assassinated while on stage at an Organisation of Afro-American Unity meeting. While his assassins were loosely identified as two rival black Muslims, questions remain about the extent to which authorities were tracking Malcolm at the time, and the unusual lack of police presence at the meeting.
There is only so much this friendship can be explored without drawing upon one’s own imagination. We don’t know, and never will know, the brilliant conversations that took place between these four men behind closed doors, nor will we know what exactly they were on the cusp of achieving before they were broken down into fractions of the collective cultural force they once were. The media’s silence around this beautiful black friendship and the tragic deaths that happened at pinnacle moments within it, unveils the limitations of the black celebrity. That these men often refused to play for segregated crowds or sit on segregated buses was not celebrated as a civil rights victory, but rather feared as an uninvited threat to white supremecy.
The friendship of Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, and Jim Brown had the ability to transcend the limitations of a segregated America. It was a force too powerful for the time it was born of, and as we are learning through the exploration of history beyond mainstream white teachings, such forces are much too often silenced by the oppressor.
They pooled their competitive resources, mingled their artforms and created a space where the fighter could be the poet, the footballer could be the activist, and so on. These were four minds too great for their own time, so we must try to remember them forever in ours.
