Free Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight by Max Wallace, Howard Bingham

full year after the war came to an end. If Muhammad was bitter toward white America before, his prison experience only served to intensify his antagonism. His biographer Claude Clegg crystallized his feelings. “The persecution and imprisonment of the Muslims seemed to confirm to Muhammad the white man’s innate adverseness to truth and fairness,” Clegg wrote. “In his view, he and his followers had done nothing to deserve incarceration except teach the knowledge of self and others to the so-called Negroes. No’lost-found’ had joined the German or Japanese armed forces, turned American top-secret documents over to Hitler or Hirohito or cached weapons for a fifth column offensive. They had simply practiced their religion of peace and asked for freedom, justice, and equality.”
    After Muhammad’s release from prison, his movement struggled to regain the momentum it had begun to build up before the war. It was slow going, each convert a hard-won victory. The movement seemed destined to remain marginal—until salvation arrived in the form of a letter.

    Seven months before he was released from federal prison, a former hustler and petty thief named Malcolm Little was convicted in Boston of armed robbery and incarcerated for six years.
    Little’s parents were organizers for Marcus Garve’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and traveled the country preaching a message of racial pride. Despite these black nationalist roots, however, Little was unmoved by his parents’ beliefs and his memories of childhood weren’t fond ones.
    “I actually believe that as anti-white as my father was, he was subconsciously so afflicted with the white man’s brainwashing of Negroes that he inclined to favor the light ones, and I was his lightest child,” he recalled in his autobiography, while noting that his mother treated him more harshly because his light complexion stirred memories of her own mixed-race ancestry. His parents’back-to-Africa sentiments failed to stir him as a young child. “My image of Africa, at that time, was of naked savages, cannibals, monkeys and tigers and steaming jungles.”
    Little’s life fell apart when he was six. His father was run over by a streetcar and his mother was forced onto welfare. She managed to hold the family together for seven years, but after a nervous breakdown she was finally committed to a mental hospital. The institutionalization of his mother meant that at the age of thirteen, Malcolm was removed from his brothers and sisters and sent to reform school. Within two years, he was involved in Boston’s criminal underworld. Nicknamed “Big Red,” he gained a reputation as a hustler, pushing dope, playing the numbers, and peddling bootleg whiskey. Before long, he switched his operation to Harlem—the big time for a black hoodlum—where he continued his ways as “Harlem Red.”
    On January 12,1946, Malcolm was arrested in a Boston jewelry store while trying to reclaim a stolen watch he had left for repair. While in prison, he received frequent visits from his three brothers and one sister, all of whom had converted to what they called “the natural religion for the black man,” the Nation of Islam. They were determined to bring their brother into the fold. At first he resisted their attempts at conversion, but they persisted until one message in particular resonated—the theory that whites are devils in disguise. As he thought back over his life, he couldn’t think of a single white person who hadn’t been cruel to him. He especially remembered the day he informed his high school teacher that he wanted to be a lawyer, only to be told, “That’s no profession for a nigger.”
    Profoundly moved by his new realization, Malcolm succumbed to his family’s urging and devoted his life to Islam. He quit cigarettes and drugs, stopped eating pork, and finally brought himself to pray to Allah. He later described how difficult this process was for him. “Bending my knees to