Although Muhammad Ali's decision to assume a new name has often been
portrayed as a sudden transformation, Cassius Clay's conversion to Islam
was a process, not an event. For many months he received guidance from
Malcolm X, who had traveled from Harlem to Miami to be his mentor as he
studied for his entry into the deeply divided and fratricidal Nation of
Islam. The name he assumed over those now-forgotten months was Cassius
X. This is the story of Cassius X over twelve months in Miami, a city
that was changing faster than America itself, as he trains for the fight
that will bring him global fame: his world heavyweight title fight
against Sonny Liston in February 1964. Change was happening on every
conceivable front, not least in music where two significant coincidences
brought Cassius X into contact with the two major forces in sixties
music: Beatlemania and the newly emergent soul music. The Beatles
famously turned up at Clay's training camp at the 5th Street Gym and Sam
Cooke negotiated a recording deal for the flamboyant Cassius X. However,
his music career, which included a cover version of Ben E. King's "Stand
By Me" and a brief love affair with the dance-craze queen Dee Dee Sharp,
never came close to echoing his career as a championship fighter.
Politically, the Warren Commission, the FBI's "Informant 88," and the
philosophical differences between Martin Luther King Jr. and the
emergent black power movements were all at work. Cassius X's experiences
came to pre-empt and predict the major cultural and ideological shifts
that would unfold in the decade ahead.
