Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, the only history podcast. I'm your host Margaret Kiljoy, and with me today is the one and only Ian Johnson.
Hey, Magpie, I'm great. I'm excited to be here, you know, on Mike for a change.
It's nice.
Yeah. Best known to listeners of this podcast as the person I mentioned at the start of every episode because he's also our audio engineer. Sophie is our producer, Hi Sophie, Hello, friends, and our audio engineer is Ian Hi. Ian Hi. Oh you could say hick, I can say.
I know.
There's been so many times where I wanted to like edit in myself saying Hi back when I'm like, that's maybe too much, it's not.
Now you should, you totally should.
Maybe I'll just start doing it every now and then.
All right, unwoman wrote Earth theme music. This week is a special week. We did an episode a couple of weeks ago about the pastist burglars who exposed Cointel pro which they did by breaking into an FBI office while Muhammad Ali was fighting the Fight of the Century that everyone would be distracted. My friend Ian said, Hey, Magpie,
what about an episode about Mhammad Ali? So that's what we're doing yay, Yeah, I guess you kind of Usually, you know, here's the great reveal to the the guest, but you already knew what it was going to be.
We're going off screens, I know, I.
Know, all right, So this week we're going to talk about the Greatest with a capital G. Muhammad fucking Ali, the man who declared he was the greatest, is a self appointed nickname and fucking proved it. He is the three time heavyweight champion.
Of the world.
He is a gold medal winner. He is a devout Muslim. He was a humanitarian. He was an anti war activist who threw his life and career into the fire rather than do some racist imperialism on behalf of the US government. He was an icon of black pride for his refusal of the sort of humility that is racistly expected of black men. He was an icon of the anti war movement. He was a shit talker. He was a poet. He was sometimes the first rapper. And you're going to be
shocked to learn that. I want to spend as much time on the context that he's coming out of as I do in his biography, because you can listen to his biography a lot of places, but the context that's what's often missing. Really shaking up the format here, and you'll be shocked to know that he's morally complex, as
basically every human is. And I actually, I really like what his moral complexity does for this story and shows like I actually, okay, the this wasn't a like, all of a sudden near the end you learn this person's terrible or something. This was instead like, oh, this person was always engaging in complicated things as like well as he possibly could. Really fucking interesting. I really I knew the like I mean, this is usually the case, right, I know, the sort of cliff notes version of there
as people and then learn more about them. That's the job I do for a living. But I really liked this one, So thanks for thanks for putting this one in front of me. Yeah, what do you where are you coming from? When you were like, you know, let's do Muhammad Ali.
Well, when we were talking about the Fight of the Century and kind of the relationship between Joe Frasier and Muhammad Ali and you know the cultural I guess impacts surrounding that and you know, their differences, I just thought that that dynamic was really interesting, and I was curious to dive a little deeper into that and kind of the cultural significance underpinning all of that.
Yeah, yeah, there's God, there's so much there, Yeah, so much. I got to some of it, but you know, all right, So the context that I want to talk about, I want to talk a bit about black athletes in the US, and boxers in particular, and how they relate to US race relations. And by US race relations, of course, I mean white supremacy that has been the dominant form of race relations in this country since before it was a country.
And I want to talk about the Nation of Islam because for a lot of his career, Muhammad Ali was a member that particular and not well understood religion, which I had. Also, you know, I knew the big picture notes about the Nation of Islam. So I don't know enough or have enough time in an episode that isn't focused on it, to talk anywhere near the whole breadth of how black people have interacted with sports in the US.
Right is an incredibly complicated thing. The short of it, as I understand, there's been historically very few avenues towards fame and financial success available to a lot of black people in this country because of the aforementioned white supremacy, and music and sports top that list things that put people on pedestals, but also also then keep people out of systemic power, and a lot of people have done
really cool shit with that platform regardless. So one of the more recent examples that I think happened in people's living memories, so probably people know this are the strikes of twenty twenty when in August of twenty twenty, even I, who doesn't follow sports, famously knew about these and was excited about them. We were talking off Mike beforehand about the fact that I don't know anything about sports.
I knew enough, you knew enough.
Yeah, I've actually I've written, I've ghost written two romance novels that sports characters are the main characters of them. You know who Shack was? Yeah, I yah know, fuck yah macpie. Yeah. I also know the average height of a quarterback in the NFL because I had to make a character be the average height of a quarterback in the NFL, which is five foot time concept I know was shorter than I expected.
Yeah.
Anyway, So in August of that year, at twenty twenty, cops tried to murder this guy named Jacob Blake and Kenosha allegedly tried to murder. I don't know if I have to legally say allegedly, but cops, you know, shot a guy a bunch of times because they wanted him to be dead. The word that I have for that is a murder. Cops have a different word, Fuck the cops. They keep murdering black people. So the Milwaukee Bucks, which is a basketball team, which I've learned, they went on strike.
They refused to leave their locker rooms. Their opponents or the Orlando Magic didn't accept the forfeiture. Like as far as I understand, they could have won by default, but they didn't because they were cool. Also right, Yes, soon teams across the NBA, the WNBA, baseball, hockey, soccer, tennis, and football all went on strike, with black players and white players and coaches taking the knee, despite Republican lawmakers throwing a fit and threatening to fund cut everyone's funding.
But I want to talk more about boxing. And I think I think we've mentioned Jack Johnson, the Galveston Giant on the show before, but I don't remember when. I don't remember what episode, and I don't think we talked about him in great detail. I'm gonna talk about him, you remember, I don't remember.
I don't know we talked about him much episode either. Yeah.
Jack was born in eighteen seventy eight. He was born to two formally enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, or at least he grew up in Galveston, Texas. He actually grew up personally. He grew up without experiencing much segregation. In his neighborhood. Everyone was poor as fucking stuck together, and his friend group was at least white as black. He had a fairly progressive viewpoint on that white and black people could just get along. He moved to New York
City when he was sixteen. He started boxing at the gym that he got hired as a janitor before right. He was like, I need a job and they'll like be a janitor, and he was like cool, can I box two? And they're like sure, nice, yeah, And he was really fucking good at it. He wounded back in Texas in eighteen ninety eight, he had his debut fight where he knocked a guy out. Prize fighting, however, was illegal in Texas, so he went to jail for fighting, and he went to jail with another boxer, an older
Jewish guy, who trained him literally in the cell. Spectators would come and watch them. Yeah, they were in jail for like twenty eight days or something, and they would box in the cell and then like spectators would show up. And I can't like, maybe it's like some like such an old timey jail that the spectators are people off the street.
I don't know.
Yeah, that's like you're they're watching them train in the jail cells.
Yeah.
Wow, Okay, he's like count of Monte Cristo type shit. That's cool.
But yeah, so he becomes a very good boxer. By nineteen oh three, Johnson won the Black Heavyweight Championship, which was different than the World Heavyweight Championship because of racism. He wanted more. He wanted the World heavyweight championship regardless of race. No black man had never held it because no black man was ever allowed to fight for it because there was a problem. The problem was racism. I
think I already spoiled that one. It's usually the problem when we're Yeah, actually you could just leave.
It at that.
Yeah, it's usually just the problem. Yeah every time.
Yeah, the raigning champion. His name was James J. Jeffries, which for astute observer observers will notice that is too many J initials.
Yeah, just triple J. That's a lot.
Yeah. Yeah, his a litter of parents had raised him a racist, and Jeffries straight up retired rather than fight Jack Johnson, who also has two J initials, which is like an acceptable number of jays.
I think, yeah, two is good. Three are pushing it.
Yeah, I feel like one is ideal. I think that you're doing really well yourself. Good number of jys. So triple J retires and his white Canadian dude named Tommy Burns he winds up with the belt despite having no js anywhere in either of his names, and he had a really cool thing going for him, Tommy Burns, which is that he wasn't a piece of shit racist.
Okay, Yeah, he was a.
German Canadian from a poor as fuck family. Literally five of his siblings died before they became adults.
Oh my god.
Yeah, he was the heavyweight champion. He was five foot seven and one hundred and seventy five pounds. For modern context, modern boxing heavyweight starts at two hundred pounds overall, The size of boxers has increased over the past century, or at least of heavyweights, and he once said quote, I will defend my title against all comers, none barred by this. I mean white, Black, Mexican, Indian, or any other nationality. I propose to be the champion of the world, not
the white or the Canadian or the American. If I am not the best man in the heavyweight division, I don't want the title.
I like that.
Yeah, Yeah, So they fought in nineteen oh eight. After fourteen rounds, Burns conceded. He conceded for two reasons, one because he was physically too fucked up to continue, and two because people were afraid of the race riots that would come if the crowd saw a black man beat
a white man even further. Yeah, so Jack Johnson, the black boxer with the proper number of J initials, became the first black man to hold the title of heavyweight Champion of the World, and he gave a shout out to Tommy Burns for being the first white man to actually give a black man a chance to win the title, and white people flipped out. This is going to be really surprising. No one's going to have seen this coming. White people as a category seem to have a problem
with not being the best at everything. I think that they're afraid that other people treat them the way that they've been treating people.
Yeah. Interesting, Yeah, like, oh.
Is it a problem to be the minority in the US? Why would it be a problem? How do you treat minorities? What? So something had to be done right because this atrocious thing has happened. The white man has been proven to not be inherently the best at everything.
Oh no, what are we going to do?
Fortunately, there was this guy who I used to think was cool but turns out to be a piece of shit. You ever heard of the writer Jack London.
Yes, I've heard the name. I'm not super.
Fucking Call of the Wild.
Yeah, oh yes, Yes.
He was a huge celebrity at his time, in a way that novelists don't really pull off today because there's like movies, so people don't have to read books as much, right, They've like choices, And I always thought Jacklinin was probably cool. I never really read his books, but I was like passively aware of the fact that he was a socialist, he was into animal rights. He was a big old
racist piece of shit. More than a product of his time racist And there's like, I mean, are we look at look look at this man's face.
Oh yeahs yeah, oh yeah, yeah yeah.
That man says slurs. That's true.
And there's like, as a matter of fact, yes, yeah.
I read so many fucking papers of people trying to defend him and his racism. Oh no, because he like also occasionally said vaguely okay things about race. I was looking for like a redemption arc, like oh he must have changed, Like no, he just he just was inconsistent. But you know what if something is like by meaning cereal and it's like fifty percent deer shit, you know I'm not like, oh I like the fifty percent. That's not deer shit. Like no, I just throw away the
fucking bull. So he wrote essays Jack London, our guy. He wrote essays about the yellow peril of Asian people moving into the US. He didn't coin the phrase yellow peril that predates him. He coined a different phrase, the Great White Hope.
Ah okay.
He started writing in papers the Twitter of the era that what we needed was the great White hope to beat Jack Johnson. He said, quote Jim Jeffries must now emerge from his alfalfa farm and remove that golden smile from Jack Johnson's face. Jeff, it's up to you. The white man must be rescued.
Oh god god, yeah, I mean, I don't want to disrespect our listeners by actually vomiting into the microphone. But just just imagine, yeah.
Just the fragility of it all. It's like a first of all white people that you had enough help. You don't need to say it, you don't need you don't need help. It's that's just ridiculous. Oh my god. Yeah, so just keep going.
So the piece of shit racist Jim Jeffries was like, yeah, I'll do it. I'll wipe that smirk off of his face, you know. And this was the first Fight of the Century. It actually happens in the same century as the Second Fight of the Century. Jack was not subtle about his motives. In case anyone thinks I'm like reading a little bit too much into it, he said, quote, I am going into this fight for the sole purpose of proving that
a white man is better than a negro. As compared to Jack, who was like not like like, he wasn't like I'm doing this for the black man, which would have been entirely chill if he had been. He just was like, let the best man win. Like that's his literal quote is.
Let thet Yeah. Yeah.
Bookies gave the odds of ten to seven in favor of Jeffries, the racist white guy. I can't keep their names apart because their name's not the same to me, because that's the way my brain works, and their names start with the same letter. So they gave ten to seven odds in favor of Jeffreys, which makes no fucking sense. The guy hadn't fought in years. He like, yeah, they favored the outer shape white guy over the black man in his prime.
So Jack, he's the world champion at this time, Jack Johnson, Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they're like, yeah, the other guy who hasn't fought in like three years is definitely gonna beat the world champion.
Okay, sure, look at the color of his skin.
How could he not win?
Yeah, he's like, how could he lose?
Yeah, he can't go wrong. Just been on the white guy. God. So Jack beat the shit out of Gym and eventually Jim sided threw in the towel in the fourteenth round. So not only was Jack and Jack was not only the first person to ever knocked down Jim in a fight, but Jack did it twice that night.
Oh no, he's and.
The boxing promoter John Sullivan, who I think he's the promoter. I didn't like follow this side quest, but I think he's the guy who basically made boxing all like a thing of national attention. Right. John Sullivan put it plainly, the fight of the century is over and a black man is the undisputed champion of the world. So white people rioted all over the country.
Oh of course, okay, yeah, of.
Course they did. They can't not. Apparently, Jack Johnson now the heavyweight champion of the world. He just wants people to fucking get along and he wants to be treated right. He used his prize money to open a desegregated nightclub run by his white wife. He got arrested for having
a white wife. Basically, he was arrested for quote transporting her because she was probably also a sex worker, but she was like legitimately his wife, and so in this way, anti sex work laws were used to further racism and misogyny. But did you know that we carefully we don't carefully screen our ads against misogyny and those things do we because they're randomly generated. Did you know that the other
thing he did with his money is buy stuff? Just like you, the listener can also use your prize money from the prize of work to buy stuff from ads. How do I do?
Yes?
I thanks, here's ce Meds and we're back. We're talking about Jack Johnson, the heavyweight champion of the world in the you know, nineteen oughts and nineteen tens for a little while. Jack Johnson himself was criticized at the time because he also didn't want to fight black people and give them a chance at the title, because history is complicated and doesn't give us easy heroes all the time.
But the next black boxer he fought was Jim Johnson, who had recently fought Joe Jeannette a bunch of times.
Because all these j names, it's kind of crazy.
Yeah, I don't know whether it was like a rule that you couldn't compete if you didn't have a JJ name. I'm not entirely sure, but yeah, so boxing has a racist past, and these racialized conflicts are going to play heavily into Muhammad Ali's life, and there's going to be another Fight of the Century with oddly similar presentation of
racial dynamics that we'll talk about. There's another class. There's a couple of other classic moments in black sports as relate to larger race politics that I don't have time to go into, but some of them are when black athletes beat the Nazi master race in Berlin in nineteen thirty six, only to have to come back in segregated units to Germany to fight and beat the Nazis, one
racist country helping fight another even more racist country. Then you have nineteen sixty eight, when two black runners, Tommy Smith and John Carlos, won the Golden bronze and the two hundred meter in the Olympics. They raised their fist in the Black Power salute during the national anthem, standing on the podium without shoes to represent black poverty. The silver medallist was a white Australian named Peter Norman. He wore a badge in solidarity with the other two and yeah,
I don't know. All three faced a ton of backlash for the action, and where all three of them were ostracized by their nation's sports communities. They had been inspired, of course, by the courageous career at risking actions of a black athlete from before them, Muhammad Ali from the years for them. Actually, I'll talk about the other big piece of context, the Nation of Islam. Are you familiar with the Nation of.
Islam Again, I think, like more cliff notes version. I know, and I may be wrong about this, but I believe they were a slightly more like militant wing of Islam. And I know they attract a lot of people in African American community. I know a lot of people converted to Nation of Islam. So that's like kind of the extent of what I.
Know, not without like I would say, for lack of a better word, controversy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, then the next line in Margaret's script literally says, the Nation of Islam is one of the most controversial organizations I can think of.
Like, I know a lot of people would like hire them for security for things and stuff like that. Like that's next the gist of my knowledge.
Yeah, so yeah, say they're controversial, Margaret.
I would I would say that they're one of the most controversial organizations I can think of. Oh good, and they have there's like some interesting good mixed in with them. But I'll let what I'm aware of them speak for itself. Nation of Islam is a black religious organization that considers itself part of Islam, but that favor isn't returned by the rest of the Muslim world. Oh okay, yeah, they are theologically distinct. There's this really sketchy guy named Wallace
Fard Muhammad. It's possible, depending on who you ask, he might have been a god among men, the Savior. It's also possible that he was a con man. It's possible but unlikely that he was white. It's possible but unlikely that he was black. He was a door to door salesman who in nineteen thirty started a religion among black people in Detroit. He started off mostly talking about the Bible to his new followers because the Bible resonated with people,
but soon he started talking about Islam. In the four years he ran the organization, he built it from the ground up to about eight thousand.
Members in four years.
Yeah, okay, yeah, no, It's an impressive thing that he did, and it is a really interesting mix of really cool and really shitty. I mean whatever, of course, I'm well, I will have my biases in this, but I'm you know, will do my best. The basic ideas behind it were self improvement and community improvement for black people. It didn't start off as a black nationalist organization, but instead an a political, cultural, economic, and religious one. They believed in
black economic self determination. That people should start businesses and take care of the community. That people should eat healthy, They should avoid drugs and alcohol. They should eat mostly vegetarian, eat mostly organic. They should avoid foods associated with the Black South, like collared greens and cornbread. That men should wear suit and ties. Women must dress modestly and not
in pants. Covering your head was optional, but encouraged. No sex before marriage, compulsory monogamous heterosexuality, and so Wallace far Muhammed didn't really like being a figurehead of it all. He appointed others and then receded into the background, and so Wallace, no one knows who the fuck he was. He claims a lot of stuff, the FBI claims a lot of other stuff. To the nation of Islam, he is a literal god, a prophet equal to her, greater than Muhammed, which is a big part of why the
rest of Islam doesn't like or doesn't make sense. Yeah to the FBI, who spent decades researching his background or just as likely, maybe more likely, fabricating shit to tear down his movement. The FBI claimed a lot of shit about him. They claimed he was a white Spanish European, a native Hawaiian, a Turkish born agent of the Nazi Party who was swindling people by charging them to convert
to Islam. I don't have any reason to trust anything the FBI says, or anything that Wallace Vard Muhammad says. The current scholarly take seems to be that the most reliable thing is that he's most likely he's from Afghanistan,
which doesn't mean that is white. Is bullshit, And the same take has him in prison in San Quentin and California in the nineteen twenties, where it's possible that, if this is the case, that he learned about black nationalist Islam from a career criminal and con man named Lucius Lehmann, who was a black nationalist a Muslim in prison in
California in the nineteen tens and twenties. Okay, The other suggested inspiration besides Lucius is a group called the Morris Science Temple of America, which is founded in nineteen thirteen, Wallace had some run ins with the law, most likely before the group started, Like he was probably this guy who was in jail whose name was Ford, I believe at that time, but he certainly had run ins with
law afterwards. In nineteen thirty two, one of the of Islam people, and I actually don't think it's fair to put this on Nation of Islam, to be clear. In nineteen thirty two, one of the Nation of Islam people in Detroit sacrificed another guy his tenant ritualistically to Allah on an altarstone I think in his basement.
Yikes.
Yeah, this was like, this is how the Nation of Islam like. It's kind of like the first Satanic panic in a lot of ways that I've ever well, I guess witch hunts. Okay, there's always been Satanic panics.
Was that kind of the thing that like vaulted them into a little more notoriety like this, this ritualistic sacrifice.
I am. I'm aware of it as the It is the first time I started. It is the first time I have been able to note that they started getting national attention. And yeah, they got a lot of negative attention about a voodoo cult in Detroit, and I there's a scholarly paper that talks about how I mean, that's just racism, right, Like they weren't practicing voodoo, was just like, oh, black people, scary religion.
Right.
It didn't help that five years later, another Nation of Islam man would be arrested for planning to boil his wife and daughter alive. So Wallace dips out of Detroit for a while after the sacrifice. I read it basically as the police were like, hey, get out of here, all right, and so like kind of set up more in Chicago. In nineteen thirty four, the police raided their University of Islam and arrested Fard and after that after I don't think he stayed in jail. He just disappears.
He handed over control the organization to a successor and was never heard from again. Obviously there are conspiracies about this. Personally, I just assumed that being a living god got too hot and he wanted to take his money and go, But I don't know. He handed over control the organization to a black man named Elijah Mohammad, who led the nation from nineteen thirty four to nineteen seventy five until his death, and he's heavily involved in the rest of
the story. He's the guy who gives Muhammad Ali his name. What do they believe? They consider themselves to be a branch of Islam, but their beliefs are considered heretical to mainstream Islamic faiths, or would be if they're in the context of being Islam. You know, both Sunni and Sheiite Islam rely on five pillars. They phrase these two pillars differently,
or sorry, the two organization. The two religions phrase the five pillars differently, but basically, these five pillars are the Muslim creed, that is, declaring that there is no God but God and that Mohammad was a messenger of God. Prayer, charity to the poor, fasting during the month of Ramadan, and the pilgrimage to Mecca for those who are able. Those are the five pillars. The nation of Islam doesn't share these five pillars. They believe some other stuff. I
think this is worth covering. I almost took this chunk out because it sounds ridiculous. But the thing that all religions sound ridiculous if you just like lay out what they believe, you know, right, and so I overall I think my current theory is that we should judge religions based not on their beliefs, but based on one how its institutions behave and two how it's practitioners behave.
Mm hmm. Yeah. How that's like practiced in the world in everyday life.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like you know, you can take any major religion and you can see the institutions of it behaving in a certain way and the practitioners behaving a different way, you know, and like, yeah, that's completely unrelated to whether or not people think that you can like talk to snakes or drink wine that is blood, or you know whatever like belief system. Right, So, and I think that their beliefs the reason I ended up keeping
this in. I think their beliefs are really worth understanding in the context of nineteen sixties race relations and specifically the actions of Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, and some of the other folks. The Nation of Islam says that there have been a bunch of mortal gods. They are all black men named Allah. The last of these mortal gods was their founder, the mysterious fard guy Elijah Muhammad, the
guy who takes over. He's just the divine messenger. The first of these gods made a group called the tribe of Shabbaz, from whom all people of colored are descended, and this is ruled over by twenty four scientists. White people were made by one of these scientists who went rogue,
named Yakup, about six six hundred years ago. White people were created through selective breeding, basically eugenics, on the Greek island of Patmos, and it took six hundred years, so Yacup didn't survive to see the end of this experiment, but he lived for one hundred and fifty years and God in motion. And because of the way that white people were created the violence of the eugenics, white people
came out evil, lacking empathy and inner divinity. Moses tried to tame these new barbaric people for a while, but then gave up and blew up three hundred of them with dynamite. So then Jesus showed up and tried once again to teach and civilize the white people, but it didn't stick either.
My mind is a little blown. I don't know. Some of that is I don't know. Some of that doesn't sound too far fett.
I know, I know that's like, that's that's what's so interesting about Nation of Islam, And like you're like, will I get where it's coming from, you know, right, yeah, So this is where the term white devil comes from, Okay, a belief that white people are literally the devil and have no inner divinity. And the belief was that these devils would rule the earth for six thousand years, but around the year nineteen fourteen that tide had turned and the era of white supremacy would come to an end.
And that part I'm entirely cool with. In this theology, some white people tried to become black again, and in the process they became gorillas. Quote, all of the monkey family are from this two thousand year history of the white race in Europe, which is an interesting inversion of the traditional racist trope.
Right yeah, I was just gonna say that, that's yeah, it is interesting.
I know, and I can't figure out later Muhammada he is going to call his black opponent Joe Frasier a gorilla, and I don't think it's related to this, but it's like an interesting right Yeah.
I did know about that part.
I was gonna bring that up when we got there, but we'll talk about when we get there.
Yeah, I feel bad, I'm like leading with like I think Muhammad Ali is really fucking cool. I want to be like really clear about that when I talk about all this context.
It just so happens that whenever you do the context for this show, it feels like it's behind the bastards.
I know, I know.
I'm like, I'm like, you definitely lead up to the good.
Yeah. Well, and it's like I wouldn't do Nation of Islam as like a pure bastard either, right.
Like, no, no, no, no, it definitely seems like there's multiple sides.
Yeah, things, It's almost like there's nuance and yeah.
So the Nation of Islam they believe that knowledge of the self is the path to divinity, and that basically all people, actual people, not white people, are themselves gods or part of God, and there is no afterlife, that the material world does everything, and that one could develop one's own psychic powers. Dinosaurs are a hoax created by
white people. Islam is the original religion Arab because the original language a Ufo called the mother plane, the mothership or the wheel is going to show up and transport all of the righteous up into it and then bomb everyone else on earth. That's the beliefs in a nutshell. Okay, the beliefs aren't what matter. What they do as an
institution matters, and as an individuals. My rough takeaways at what they do as an institutions lots of bad stuff with some good empowerment mixed in, and then what they do is individuals is like a lot more balanced.
Okay.
Their institutional promotion of anti Semitism is not good, their intense patriarchy and anti queer politics aren't good, and their interest in black separatism and black supremacy put them in bed with some interesting people. In nineteen sixty one, they invited the leader of the America Nazi Party to speak of alongside their famed spokesman Malcolm X, because both groups are separate the races.
Okay, yeah, that's not good.
Yeah. And then Elijah Muhammad himself was taking a ton of money from this white supremacist oil baron and used it to buy himself a bunch of houses. Because that's also not good.
Yeah.
It's members crop up doing cool shit all the time. The only time I think we've brought them up so far on the show that I can remember off the top.
Of my head.
It was a Nation of Islam librarian who got radical books in the hands of Cha Chai Yumennez, the founder of the Young Lords. A lot of their recruiting happened in prisons, and they built infrastructure within prison for black and brown empowerment. Like a lot of them got jobs as librarians, so they get rad books to people and that's fucking cool. And the teachings that they had about black self reliance, about Pan Africanism, about black pride, about
economic self determination. There's the shit was game changing when they started doing it. And they needed a way to talk about white supremacy. All white people being the devil is not the most subtle or nuanced way, but I don't know, like, just look at what the white people have done the world.
At least.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, it is a reasonable conclusion to have reached with the evidence that is available to them. I will say, yeah, And then I'm going to talk about one of the more famous Nation of Islam people. But first I'm going to talk about sweet, sweet deals. Stuff. Just fill your life with stuff. Do you have a room and it's not full of stuff? You could do something about that. Uh, literal stuffing. We are brought to you by stuffing, vegan stuffing.
Okay, nice, Yeah, everybody can enjoy it.
Yeah yeah, oh god, but if it's gluten free and vegan, then no one will enjoy it. All right, here's some ads and we're back. We were talking about Malcolm X. I'm reasonably sure he'll get his own week at some point, but he was a mentor and a friend to Muhammad Ali and also kind of presages a lot of the kind of arcs that a lot of Nation of Islam people, including Muhammad Ali, are going to have. So I want to talk about him also because he's really fucking cool.
I was gonna be like, yeah, and the coolness factor.
Yeah, No, he's just Yes, he's really fucking cool. So Malcolm X is this fucking amazingly charismatic speaker and thinker. He is incredibly polarizing of a figure, especially during his day. Now everything gets like whitewashed, and so he's like less polarizing, you know. M I think he's rad. He was first and foremost for the liberation of black people, and his opinions about what would get them there changed over time,
but they didn't waiver from militancy. He openly discussed how his politics countered that of the nonviolent but also rad Martin Luther King Junior. Like, basically, Malcolm X was like, look, you better give it to Martin and the pacifists or you'll be dealing with us and we're not pacifists. And that is a good position of strength to argue from.
Yeah, that's pretty badass. I like that.
Yeah, Yeah, And I like that he was conscious about it. I had always knew of this dynamic, but I didn't specifically know that it was that. He was very aware of it. Yeah, And he didn't see eye to eye with Martin Luther King Junior, but they did talk. They were aware that they were on the same side.
You know. Great, there's that mutual respect there, I'm sure.
Yeah. He was also a black nationalist, and what that meant to him seems to have had two different forms. For most of his political career, he was in the
Nation of Islam. He referred to himself as being used by Elijah Muhammad during this time, and during this time he was a black separatist as well as a nationalist, and he advocated the teachings of the Nation of Islam and He also changed his last name to X to remove his slave name, the name he'd inherited from a legacy of slavers, to something that signified how his heritage
and even his name had been stolen from him. And a lot of people within the Nation of Islam took the last name X. Obviously, Malcolm X is the most famous of these people. Then, Malcolm X became disillusioned with the nation around nineteen sixty four or so. Particularly, he became disillusioned with Elijah Muhammad. He became disillusioned for two major reasons that I know of. First, Malcolm X is a militant right and he believes in building black power.
Some cops raided a temple, a Nation of Islam temple in la and they shot seven Muslims and they killed one of them, and Malcolm was like, all right, it's fucking on right, this is what we're gonna do. And Elijah Muhammad was like, no, let's like talk with politicians and do really boring stuff instead. So Malcolm X wasn't excited about that. There was another thing that disillusioned him. Elijah Muhammad's a fucking pedophile, oh no, and a hypocrite
the nation. He preaches absence before marriage. Elijah admitted to sleeping with the word here would be raped, but his admission is to sleeping to with, so be specific about that eight different teenagers who worked as secretaries under him, impregnating seven of them.
Oh my god, Oh my god. Yeah.
Yeah. Power corrupts people, and the people who attracted the power often start off corrupt. So Malcolm finds out and accuses of him of it and Elijah. The reason that we know Elijah admitted it is because he defended himself. And his defense was like, well, lots of biblical prophets fucked kids. It's like fine, right.
Oh my god, yeah yeah.
And it was this willingness to stand up to the authoritarian leader slash prophet that got Malcolm X killed. In nineteen sixty four, he left the Nation of Islam. He was still a black nationalist and a Muslim, but he wasn't a cultist. Essentially from this context, he converted to Sunny is and he went on a pilgrimage and he saw Muslims of every race coming together, and this like
changed him. And he talked a lot about how he was like I shared plates with like blonde haired, blue eyed Muslims and we were like all together in Islam. He started to reject the term black Muslim and started to refer to himself as a Muslim who was black. This is not this is not because he like doesn't care about blackness still as his first and foremost thing, just like specifically the context of how black and Muslim
relate to each other. And that famous photo of him holding a rifle right standing by a window and like looking out the window looking all like badass and sketchy. You know, that's him looking for a nation of Islam assassins who are trying to come kill him. That's not him like standing down the cops or like white supremacy. That is him defending himself from the nation of Islam. So he leaves, and he tries to convince his young friend Muhammad Ali to join him and leaving the nation
of his lif but it didn't work. Muhammad Ali later referred to not listening to Malcolm as one of the biggest regrets of his life. He has a whole little chapter in one of his later books that I read The Soul of a Butterfly, talking about how he wasn't ready to go with Malcolm because he had just really joined, but he wished he had and that would have you know. Anyway, So the Nation of Islam starts making their desire to
kill Malcolm X really fucking plain. They run statements in their paper that are basically like, we're going to assassinate Malcolm X though like show like political cartoons that are just like Malcolm X decapitated, very subtle. Yeah. Yeah. Then on February twenty first, nineteen sixty five, he was speaking to a crowd of four hundred people in Manhattan when three men from the Nation of Islam rushed the stage with a sawed off shotgun and handguns. He was shot
like eleven times. He died shortly after arrival at the hospital, but there wasn't justice for his killing. Three people were thrown in prison, three people from the Nation of Islam. Two of them were innocent. One of them, Talmadge Hair, confessed but he was like, look, these other two guys, they weren't with me. And they were like, well, who was with you? And He's like, man, I'm not going to fucking tell you he was with me. I'm not a fucking snitch. I'm just telling you it's not These
two guys right. All three got convicted, the other two maintained their innocence. Talmadge and the two innocent men, all three of them, while they were in prison, left the Nation of Islam and converted to Sunni Islam. The two innocent ones were later exonerated in twenty twenty one when it was proven that the FBI and the NYPD intentionally held withheld evidence and the guilty guy regrets what he did. It was also proven that co Intel pro was heavily
involved in creating at tension between Malcolm and Elijah. An FBI infiltrator met with the assassin the night before the cop showed up at the scene of the murder with their like hands in their pockets, and they like didn't give a shit, you know. So if one were to ask who killed Malcolm X, you could go with what the poet James Baldwin had to say. He told white reporters in France, you did it. It is because of you, the men that created this white supremacy, that this man
is dead. You are not guilty, but you did it. Your mills, your cities, your rape of a continent started this. In more practical terms, I assume it was the FBI playing the Nation of Islam to assassinate him. There's a wrongful death suit filed by his kids currently against the CIA,
the FBI, and NYPD. But I think part of why he had to die from the Nation of Islam and from the government's point of view, is that he was on this page of uniting people right near his death right his black Yeah, like, his black nationalism turned from segregation to what black nationalism is mostly understood as starting from the late sixties, which is self determination for black people. He didn't stop hating white supremacy, he didn't stop having
that be his like main enemy. I think it was in nineteen sixty four someone was like, oh, are you a socialist? And he's like, look, I'm for whatever for these black people, Like that's what I'm talking about, you know.
Yeah, they viewed him as a threat because he was getting everybody to realize that, you know, we're stronger together when we're all you know, fighting against a common oppressor instead of you know, infighting and trying to divide ourselves.
Yeah. I can see how some people would feel threatened by that notion.
Yeah. Yeah, I'm not like a big men of history kind of girl. But it's like really hard when I read about the nineteen sixties, it's hard to have to think what could have happened if Malcolm X and m okay I had gone to like live a while.
Longer, right, I think about that a lot too.
Yeah, because because Martin Luther King is becoming more and more radical near his death, and Malcolm X stays just as radical but becomes more tempered. You know, I don't know, I don't fucking know. What do you think would have happened?
I honestly feel like the outcome would have probably been inevitable with both of them, just because they were a threat to the establishment for a lot of people.
But I don't know.
I mean, I think they could probably could have got a lot more shit done before they were gone, But yeah, I don't know, I think I mean, I think that's kind of a one of the what ifs of history that we'll never really know.
But yeah, totally interesting.
Yeah. Yeah, And it's like it's like half I want them to have lived longer just because, like.
Well because they didn't deserve to die yet.
Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly, Like, which is like fucking mad.
You know.
Yeah, it's like twenty years before I was born. But I'm fucking mad so to close out on the Nation of Islam to show their arc, because I think their arc matters. Throughout the late sixties and early seventies, they were in conflict sometimes the Black Panthers and also other black Muslim organizations. But it's like I'll read this, right, you know, I read like, oh, they were in conflict with Black Panthers and things like that, right, and sometimes
like actual conflict. But then there's also like Muhammad Ali was a you know, was a Nation of Islam, and he was not a Black panther, but like later we're going to talk about how a lot of the Black panthers liked him, you know, and like that. Right, So it's still messy, but there was conflict. And then in nineteen seventy five, Elijah Muhammad died his son, who he didn't like, Like Elijah didn't really like his kid at this point because they were in conflict all the time.
His son takes over and his son had like actually left Nation of Islam several times over ideological stuff. His son converse it to Sunni Islam far it is no longer a god, there's no longer a UFO. White people are no longer devils made by a rogue scientist named Yaka, and his new teaching around this is honestly really good.
The issue, as he referred to it as mental whiteness, not light skinned people, and as someone who believes that the creation of the social construct of whiteness is one of the worst things that ever happened in human history, that seems like a fair way to put it.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I like that that framing of it. Yeah, that kind of like you know, mindset and hatred and oppressing it. That's that's taught, you know, that's that's learned. That's not people are just aren't born one day they're like, oh yeah, you know, thinking that that's kind that came from somewhere, you know.
What I mean.
Yeah, yeah, totally. And so so Elijah's son, who's for some reasons, name I didn't write into the script because I terrible, because I didn't expect him to be in it for more than like a paragraph when I first started writing it. But his son converse the whole organization towards Sunni Islam and against racial separatism. He renamed it the World Community of Islam in the West and later
the American Society of Muslims. And this group kicks around for about a decade before basically the leader was like, you know what, you should just go join your local mosque. There's already Muslim organizations, they're called mosques. But in nineteen seventy seven, two years after most of the organization converted to Sunni Islam, this guy named Lewis Farrakhan, who's still around, he split off from the new version and restarted it as the Nation of Islam, complete with things like I
was in the UFO and bonus points. I bet you were thinking, ian You were thinking to yourself before we started recording, there's no way el Ron Hubbard is going to come up right.
This isn't astard.
Oh no, shut the fuck up, no way.
Oh yeah, oh god, we both just got so triggered.
I yeah, like so triggered, and we can't even talk about it.
But we're that triggered. Just no, just so the E and are fucking triggered right now. Yeah. So, so they all get into dianetics because it's fair enough.
Oh this just took a really bad turn, okay, And that's the that's the ship the scientologists are into, and specifically, Farakhon is like, white people go join Scientology, black people join Nation of Islam.
We'll all do Dianetics. Oh gosh, they're still around. The Southern Poverty Law Center considers them a hate group. The Anti Defamation League takes issue with how constantly Lewis Ferrikhon talks about how all the evil Jews who run the world to be fair. Fara gets a question mark here. Farakhn insists that he's only against the evil Jews who rule the world, not the working class Jews, and he doesn't seem to understand why this conspiracy shit is anti Semitism.
But uh, I'm more positive. I don't know. I'm Bala Shabaz, Malcolm X's daughter.
You you've dropped dianetics in this episode.
I'm just I'm like, I'm like, how do I how do I move on from that?
Maganize? How do we recover from this?
Fuck?
Uh?
The fact that this is not what most the people of Nation of Islam did. Most of them became Sunni Muslim and stayed consistently against white supremacy and for black power and didn't get into dianetics. That's the that's the positive.
Okay, that a little bit better.
Malcolm X's daughter Keabias Shabaz, she probably tried. She might have tried to kill Ferikhon for killing her father. She maintains her innocence, but you know the old saying, we'd support her even if she is innocent, And she might have been set up for this by the FBI, and FBI informant tried to seduce her and was in on the plot to kill Ferikhon. And that's this all brings us to Muhammad Ali, who will talk about on Wednesday.
All right, No, we set the stage. This is good, this is yeah.
Yeah, and I think that that ARC stuff is like is what really interests me is the like because there's really interesting shit that they're doing about just black empowerment, you know, I like, and it's like really easy to like point at the like really specific bad stuff, right and it's like harder to quantify like economic improvement in areas and things like that, you know. Yeah, but yeah, uh so that's what you can listen to us talk about what you actually tuned in for today.
Oh god, no, no, this is good.
The context is always important. That's what makes the show great, it's the context, you know.
Yeah, thanks, because, like I I've paid a lot of attention to how people talk about Muhammad Ali and it, and most of it is this like fairy tale version. Is this like right simple story of a kid who becomes the greatest and that's true, you know, but like there's just more story. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So tune in on Wednesday. And in the meantime, Ian, you guys think to plug.
Uh, just cool Zone Media, this wonderful show that I get to work on every week. I guess you're already listening to it, so I don't need to plug it. But uh yeah, you know, just our wonderful team at Cool Zone Media. We do a lot of cool stuff. We have some more cool stuff coming up on the way later this year's and uh, just a good time. I love I love working with this crew.
I'm so glad you I don't know, I really like this crew too.
Just keeping us humble, I have respected.
Yeah, So if you guys think to plug, yeah, I'm gonna plug plug once again. My my dear dear dear friend and your dear friend and Ian's dear friend, Jamie Loftus's book Raw Dog that is about hot dogs, which was my favorite edit Note You've ever given me? Bagpie is available for pre order now and comes out May twenty third.
I worry that fewer people go out and check it out because I insist that we point out that it's about hot dogs. Maybe we're all doing Jamie at the service. It's totally about sex.
It's about hot dogs, but it's also like really cool. There's like some really good labor labor stuff in there as well. It's it's you know, definitely should just.
Just let people find out what the book is about. Yeah, how about that?
How about Yeah it's fair enough.
But yeah, that's what I got. And you know, at cool Zone Media.
All right, we will see you all Wednesday. All thank you.
Cool people who did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts of