“The Champion”: Muhammad Ali, Bigger Than Boxing
I was 10 years old in March of 1971 when Muhammad Ali faced Joe Frazier in what was billed as “the fight of the century.” Ali had been stripped of his title in 1967 and barred from fighting in the United States. The case Clay vs. United States, captioned under his birth name, Cassius Clay, because the world at large wasn’t yet ready to recognize his chosen name, was working its way up to the Supreme Court. In the meantime, Atlanta, Georgia and the state of New York licensed him to fight, so in 1970 he finished off two tune-up opponents to prepare for his showdown with Frazier, who’d won the championship while Ali was sidelined.
It was a huge event. Not just a huge sports event, but a huge cultural event. At a time when these kinds of things didn’t happen, the pre-fight hype made the nightly newscasts; Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor had to talk about it. They’d show clips—Ali, urbane, machine-gun fast with his put-downs of Frazier; Frazier, poor Frazier, inarticulate, grunting, uncharismatic. Ali knew it wasn’t a fair fight, and in truth, he was mean and demagogic, as he was later to George Foreman. He called Frazier a “gorilla,” mocked him, belittled him. Frazier couldn’t hold a match to him.
Dad got four tickets to a closed-circuit screening of the fight at the U.S. armory in Fairmont, about 20 miles down the road from Morgantown, where Fairmont State played its basketball games. There was a huge screen, and, I don’t know now, maybe 2,000 seats. God, was it smoky. Smoke smoke smoke. And it was black and white. And if my mind isn’t playing tricks on me, there was no commentary. Just 2,000 chain-smoking men watching a silent screen.
Dad took a friend, I don’t remember who, and I chose my friend Steve Szapanos, which turned out to be unfortunate only in that Stevie was for Frazier. I was Ali all the way. Ever since I’d become aware of him, he’d embodied everything I liked. He was against authority. He did it his way. He said to the makers of rules that their rules were a fantasy, weren’t for him. This was right up my alley. Dad, a liberal atheist and normally an admirer of rule-flouters of every stripe, had a bit of an old-fashioned streak when it came to Old Glory (he volunteered for the Navy two days after Pearl Harbor), and didn’t like loudmouths besides.
Frazier put Ali on the canvas early in the 15th round and won a unanimous decision. I was crushed; thought he was finished. Then, in January 1973, George Foreman came out of nowhere and pulverized Frazier. Ali got a fight against Frazier. They put it in Kinshasa, Zaire, in October 1974. No one thought Ali had a chance. No one. Many people thought Foreman would literally kill him. Ali knocked him out in the eighth round. It was staggering.
Ali was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1942—in segregation. He had little schooling. The draft board rejected him, initially, because he could barely read and write. But he could think. He wondered why his name was Clay, the same name as the famous, and white, 19th-century Kentucky senator. He wondered why he wasn’t allowed into places white people were. He took the gold medal he’d earned in Rome at the 1960 Olympics and threw it into the Ohio River.
He ran rings around every other heavyweight contender, back in a time when boxing was a much bigger sport than it is now. It was baseball, college football, horse racing, boxing. He predicted the rounds he’d drop his opponents, and he was right every time. It was like Stephen Curry. Or Curry plus. Moved the sport to a place it had never been.
But then he did more. He transcended the sport. In February 1964, he was training for his big title fight with champion Sonny Liston in Miami. The Beatles were in town, on their first trip to America, and his people and their people understood somehow that Clay (as he was then called) and the Beatles were revolutionaries in the same vanguard, so they did a press thing together. He clobbered Liston, and the next day, he changed his name, joined the Nation of Islam, told America: I will not be what you want me to be.
He never was. He was, frankly, hated, and for many years. Despised. But in the end, America realized he’d been right and came to him. I remember now watching the opening ceremony of the 1996 Summer Olympics, in Atlanta. This and that person ran around the track carrying the torch. Finally, the last runner brought it up to the dais and handed it off, and the spotlight shone—on Ali. The crowd went mad. His right hand shook as he leaned down to light the torch. Parkinson’s had taken him. I knew. I knew because Dad, who strode so confidently into the Fairmont Armory in 1971, had been felled by the same disease. Dad couldn’t get out of bed by himself in 1996. He died on Pearl Harbor Day the next year, 55 years and 363 days after he’d enlisted, his organs laid waste, just as Ali’s have been now.
I had the great good fortune to meet him, in the early 1990s. He even shook his fist at me, that fist that was the most famous fist of the century, and pulled that face on me, raising his eyebrows, overbiting just as he did when he said “Mmmm, Frazier, you’re going down!” It was an ecstatic moment of my life. But my main memory of him isn’t selfish. It’s shared. Because, like all historical giants, he belonged to all of us. Meeting him was something, but the real thrill was just to have been alive in his time; to have had the chance to contemplate how a black baby born into segregation, whom fate might have made an elevator operator or a railroad station shoe-shine man, could change the world. He deserves for us all to spend some time marveling at that.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, June 4, 2016
“Trumpkins Beware, It Get’s Worse”: Why We’re Segregated On Super Tuesday And How It Helps Explain Trump
The most segregated place in American politics just might be a partisan primary.
The massive racial disparities in voter turnout between Republicans and Democrats help explain how Donald Trump seems to be insulting his way to the nomination. But this same dynamic also underscores how screwed the GOP is in terms of national demographic shifts if they choose to go further down this dangerous path.
Today is Super Tuesday, nicknamed the SEC primary because it includes many states in the Southeastern college sports conference. Contrary to stereotypes, the South is more racially diverse than many regions in the United States. Also contrary to stereotypes, Republicans field a more diverse set of statewide elected officials than Democrats, as evidenced by the presence of two Hispanic senators from the South running for president on the right side of the aisle.
But the good news stops there. The racial polarization beneath our politics becomes clear when you look at who turns out to vote in partisan primaries.
Let’s start with a look at South Carolina—a state where black people make up 28 percent of the population, roughly double the national average.
Hillary Clinton won a massive victory there this past weekend, winning 86 percent of black vote in a primary where African Americans made up 61 percent of the turnout.
A week earlier, Republicans ran in the same state and CNN exit polls showed that black support for Republicans was almost nonexistent—or, in the statistical parlance of exit polls, “n/a”—not applicable.
This troubling trend is likely to become only more pronounced on Super Tuesday. Eight years ago—the closest comparison we have to this open-seat presidential cycle—voter turnout was high but the diversity was also skewed to one side, especially in the South.
In delegate-rich Texas, for example, black people make up 10 percent of the population, but made up only 2 percent of the voters in the 2008 Republican primary. Hispanics made up 38 percent of the Lone Star State population, but only 10 percent of the Republican votes. But in the Democratic primary, black Americans were 19 percent of the vote and Hispanics 32 percent of the vote, respectively.
In Alabama, black people make up 26 percent of the population, but made up only 4 percent of GOP primary voters in 2008. On the Democratic side of the aisle, black voters made up 51 percent of the primary electorate.
The same dynamic was evident in Georgia. Black Americans made up 31 percent of the population in 2008, but only 4 percent of the GOP primary vote. In contrast, black voters made up 52 percent of the Democratic primary turnout.
We’ll round out the sample set with Virginia, where black people make up 19 percent of the total population but made up only 3 percent of GOP primary voters in 2008. On the Democratic side, black voters constituted 30 percent of the primary turnout.
If you’re from the South or have spent much time there, these results may seem unremarkable. But they are a sign of a deeper sickness in our political system, where race is too often a partisan signifier.
Here’s the short version of how this happened in the South: This division is rooted in the legacy of slavery and the Civil War: The states of the former Confederacy voted against the Party of Lincoln for a hundred years (and blacks who could vote were loyal Republicans) until conservative Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Southern Strategy began. White Southern Democrats became Republicans, but they remained conservative populists.
This dynamic was compounded in recent years by collusion between the two parties in the form of the rigged system of redistricting, which gerrymandered the South into white and black congressional districts, rural and urban, driving the Bill Clinton-era Blue Dogs—centrist white Southern Democratic congressmen—into extinction. There are no swing seats left but the racial polarization of the parties in the South is intact, further reinforcing the sense that partisans can simply play to the political and racial base rather than reach out to form new coalitions.
Almost needless to say, this racial polarization does not mean that voters in the respective parties are racist—especially by the standards of a generation ago—but it does mean that the rank and file of our political parties are more segregated than our society at large. And the elevation of Donald Trump to the GOP nomination will only compound these problems.
This primary turnout explains how the rise of a Trump is possible while spewing divisive racial rhetoric: There is no short-term political cost and quite possibly some short-term political benefit in playing to fears of demographic change, cultural and economic resentment and anger toward the first black president. But the long run is all downside.
That’s because partisan primary turnout is often unrepresentative of the overall state. So you can win a partisan primary without having those results be a predictor of how the state will vote in the fall, especially in the case of a crucial swing state like Iowa, New Hampshire, Colorado, or Virginia. The primaries become the tail that wags the dog: A small number of voters, represented by an even smaller number of professional partisan activists and special interests, get massive attention from candidates trying to win the nomination. If you’re campaigning for the Republican nomination, you can safely ignore diverse communities, but that play-to-the-base path to winning the nomination is a surefire path for losing a general election.
Say what you want about George W. Bush, but he was genuinely passionate about increasing the reach of the Republican Party into communities of color. The foundation of his 2000 presidential run was his landslide re-election as governor of Texas in 1998, when he won 40 percent of the Latino vote.
Trumpkins will point out that The Donald won the Latino vote in the Nevada caucus last month. This is true and doubly impressive/depressing running against two actual Hispanics, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz—as Ruben Navarrette predicted in The Daily Beast. But it’s not incidental to point out that while a record 75,000 Republicans caucused, only an estimated 6,000 were Latino—well below the 27 percent of the population that is Hispanic. Cut this stat with two other facts—President Obama won the Latino vote by 50 points in Nevada and 80 percent of Latinos nationwide have a negative view of Trump—and you quickly pack up any notions that Trump’s Nevada caucus victory is an indicator of general-election strength.
And so it goes. The increasingly narrow base of the GOP, dominated by conservative populists, has created the conditions for a celebrity demagogue like Donald Trump. The absence of a strong center-right or real depth of diversity among the Republican constituency means that the party can be too easily hijacked in five weeks of partisan primaries by pandering to an electorate that doesn’t look much like the America that candidate will have to win—let alone govern.
While the polls show that Donald Trump is primed for a big night, don’t believe the hype: No matter how “yuge” the win, the underlying electoral math is apocalyptic for any party that chooses to not only ignore but insult the growing diversity in America.
By: John Avlon, The Daily Beast, March 1, 2016
“Nikki Haley Living In Fantasyland”: Comfortably Indoctrinated In A Kind Of Civic Mythology
Nikki Haley’s 44th birthday is this week. You would think her a little old for fairytales.
But a bizarre, little-reported remark the South Carolina governor made last week suggests that, age notwithstanding, Haley lives in Fantasyland, at least insofar as American history is concerned. The comment in question came the day after her Tuesday night speech in response to President Obama’s State of the Union address, in which she cuffed Donald Trump for his strident anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant bigotry.
Haley told reporters, “When you’ve got immigrants who are coming here legally, we’ve never in the history of this country passed any laws or done anything based on race or religion.”
Some observers found that an astonishing thing for her to say as chief executive of the first state to secede from the Union in defense of slavery, a state that embraced segregation until forced to change by the federal government. Others observed that any fair reading of Haley’s quote makes it pretty clear she was speaking only in the context of legal immigration.
They’re right. The problem is, even if you concede that point, Haley is still grotesquely wrong. She thinks no immigration laws have been passed “based on race or religion”? What about:
The Naturalization Act of 1790, which extended citizenship to “any alien, being a free white person…”?
Or the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, whose title and intent are self-explanatory?
Or the Immigration Act of 1917, which banned immigrants from East Asia and the Pacific?
Or Ozawa v. U.S., the 1922 Supreme Court decision which declared that Japanese immigrants could not be naturalized?
Or U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind, the 1923 high court ruling which said people from India — like Haley’s parents — could not become naturalized citizens?
So yes, however you slice it, Haley is wrong and Haley is ignorant. But one wonders if Haley is to blame.
Americans, the historian Ray Arsenault once said, live by “mythic conceptions of what they think happened” in the past. And as school systems, under pressure from conservative school boards, retreat from teaching that which embarrasses the nation’s self-image, as ethnic studies classes are outlawed, as textbooks are scrubbed of painfully inconvenient truths, as standards requiring the teaching of only “positive aspects” of American history are imposed, we find those mythic conceptions encroaching reality to a troubling degree.
Suddenly, slaves become immigrants and settlers. The Civil War has nothing to do with slavery. Martin Luther King becomes a tea party member. And America has never passed laws “based on race and religion.”
Yes, Haley’s ignorance might be willful. There’s surely a lot of that going around. But it might also be that she’s simply part of that generation which has been taught fairytales under the guise of history. Such teaching will leave you comfortably indoctrinated in a kind of civic mythology — and wholly unprepared to interpret or contextualize what’s happening before your eyes.
To wit: What makes Donald Trump’s proposed restrictions on Muslims troubling is not that they represent the coming of something new, but the return of something old, a shameful strain in the American psyche that we have seen too many times before. It is not a deviation from America, but the very stuff of America, an ugly scapegoating that has too often besmirched our character and beguiled us away from our most luminous ideals.
This is something all of us should know, but do not. As a state official, perhaps a candidate for vice president, perhaps eventually a president of the United States, Nikki Haley might someday change history. It would be good if she understood it first.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, January 17, 2016
“Let’s Not Ever Do That Again”: SC Gov. Nikki Haley; The U.S. Has ‘Never’ Passed Laws Based On Race And Religion — Um…
Gov. Nikki Haley’s (R-SC) decision to speak out against Donald Trump and other anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim forces in the Republican Party is certainly laudable — but her awareness of American history needs a little work.
The Hill reports:
She said Wednesday that Trump’s call for a temporary ban on Muslim immigration to the country is what compelled her to speak out.
“You know, the one thing that got me I think was when he started saying ban all Muslims,” she said.
“We’ve never in the history of this country passed any laws or done anything based on race or religion,” she added. “Let’s not start that now.”
Of course, the state of South Carolina is itself a grand exhibit of America’s history of racially-based laws. It was the state where the Civil War began, as the first state to secede in the South’s effort to preserve and expand the institution of slavery, and it was where the first shots of the war were fired at Fort Sumter.
During the Jim Crow era, the state was also home to Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrat rebellion of 1948, a political mobilization for segregation that rallied against the emerging post-World War II civil rights movement.
To be sure, both South Carolina and the United States as a whole have made progress, climbing upward from these tainted beginnings to build a great country. But it sure does sound odd to hear a political leader say that we’ve “never in the history of this country” passed such odious laws — and, “Let’s not start that now.”
A better thing to say would’ve been: “Let’s not ever do that again.” That sort of myth-busting — against the idea of America as not just a great country, but a perfect one — would, in fact, be the right way to avoid doing it again.
By: Eric Kleefeld, The National Memo, January 13, 2015
“GOP Take Heed”: Donald Trump Is The GOP’s George Wallace
Tuesday night, following the fourth Republican presidential primary debate, the pundit class will dutifully declare Marco Rubio the winner, extolling his debate prowess with the usual breathlessness. And then, the overnight polls will find that once again, Donald Trump has won the night (with Washington GOP bête noir Ted Cruz likely coming in second), and establishment GOP heads will explode again.
The Trump phenomenon might feel both interminable and unprecedented to Republican elites, but of course it isn’t. American populist politics has a long tradition, from Andrew Jackson to Huey Long to Joseph McCarthy. But the politician Trump is most like could be George Wallace. And if the rumors of an establishment plot to somehow prevent the current frontrunner from getting the nomination are true, Trump could wind up as the GOP’s Wallace in more than just style and bluster.
Back in Wallace’s day, it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were bedeviled by their extremist flank. The Southern wing of the party was in full rebellion over the push for racial integration in schools and public accommodations; over the civil rights laws pushed through by a majority Democratic congress with the help of Republicans and an apostate Southern Democratic president; and even over the war in Vietnam, which drew a spirited investigation by ardent segregationist Sen. William Fulbright of Arkansas.
Wallace ran for Alabama governor in 1958 touting his ability to “to treat a man fair, regardless of his color.” He lost and vowed to “never be out-niggered again.” He ran for governor in 1962, this time as a hard-line segregationist, and won. The new George Wallace was a political thespian, dramatically “tossing the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny” on behalf of the “great Anglo Saxon Southland” and declaring “segregation now and segregation forever.” He staged his “stand in” at the entrance of the University of Alabama in June of 1963 to dramatize the fruitless fight to keep two black students, and their armed federal escorts, out; and ran his soon-to-be ailing wife, Lurleen, for governor when the Democratic state legislature refused to let him vie for a second term.
In 1966, Wallace declared his independence from the political establishment, calling himself “an Alabama Democrat, not a national Democrat,” and adding: “I’m not kin to those folks. The difference between a national Democrat and an Alabama Democrat is like the difference between a Communist and a non-Communist.” He commiserated with conservative white voters, saying both major parties have “looked down their nose at you and me a long time. They’ve called us rednecks—the Republicans and the Democrats. Well, we’re going to show there sure are a lot of rednecks in this country.”
When he ran for president as an independent in 1968, Wallace did so as a pure populist, capitalizing on a segment of the electorate’s disdain for traditional politicians.
His campaign focused on law and order in the face of hundreds of riots in 1967. He declared it a “sad day in our country that you cannot walk even in your neighborhoods at night or even in the daytime because both national parties, in the last number of years, have kowtowed to every group of anarchists that have roamed the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles and throughout the country.”
He zeroed in on white working-class voters’ anxieties over the decline of traditional values, deriding the Supreme Court for promoting a “perverted agenda” that ripped prayer from public schools while concocting a right to “distribute obscene pornography.” He lamented the inordinate amount of time Washington elites spent pandering to communistic black civil rights scoundrels and “welfare cheats” while prying into the affairs of the common white man who just wanted to run his business as he saw fit or sell his home to someone with “blue eyes and green skin” via restrictive covenant if he so chose.
Like Trump, Wallace rose steadily and improbably in the polls, with consistently high ratings for “saying it the way it really is” and “standing by his convictions.” New Republic columnist Richard Strout in 1967 dubbed Wallace “the ablest demagogue of our time, with a voice of venom and a gut knowledge of the prejudices of the low-income class.” Even John Wayne donated to his campaign, which raised most of its money through small donations.
By December 1967, Wallace made Gallup’s list of America’s 10 most admired men, at No. 8, one notch above California Gov. Ronald Reagan. Gallup would later note that Wallace’s support was strongest among those “with a high school background or less” and those who strongly disliked President Lyndon Johnson.
Wallace ran in some Democratic primaries, as he had briefly in 1964. But; his segregationist views had become an anathema to the party of LBJ, and he got almost no votes. Instead he accepted the nomination of the new, far-right American Independent Party, and he chose retired General Curtis LeMay, who wanted to nuke Vietnam, as his running mate.
Though his principal strength was in the South, Wallace also held large and raucous campaign rallies up North; drawing 20,000 people to Madison Square Garden in October 1968, as anti-Wallace protesters clashed with police outside. One Wallace strategist, arch-segregationist John J. Synon, boasted of Wallace’s Northern supporters in a 1967 column: “Who faced down M.L. King in Cicero, last summer [by throwing bottles and bricks at black civil rights activists who marched through the all-white Illinois town]; who takes the brunt whenever there is trouble? Blue collars, that’s who.”
Wallace’s campaign rallies were characterized by intermittent spasms of violence, including in New York, where several of his supporters notoriously surrounded a group of black protesters and began chanting “kill ’em! Kill ’em!” And Wallace, like Trump, seemed to encourage their bravado, declaring at Madison Square Garden: “We don’t have riots in Alabama. They start a riot down there, first one of ’em to pick up a brick gets a bullet in the brain, that’s all. And then you walk over to the next one and say, ‘All right, pick up a brick. We just want to see you pick up one of them bricks now.”
In the end, Wallace’s independent presidential run took more votes from Richard Nixon than from Hubert Humphrey—four out of five Wallace votes would have gone to Nixon were Wallace not in the race, pollsters concluded at the time, and Nixon won by fewer than 1 million votes, while Wallace pulled 9.9 million. Wallace won five states in the Deep South, along with more Electoral College votes, at 46, than any third-party candidate before or since (one “faithless elector” in North Carolina stubbornly cast a vote for Wallace over that state’s victor, Nixon). The results prompted Nixon campaign strategist Kevin Phillips in 1969 to devise the “Southern strategy” to capitalize on Wallace’s popularity with disaffected conservative white voters in the South.
By 1972, it was Nixon and the Republicans who would never be “out-niggered again.”
Wallace ran twice more for president, both times as a Democrat. He finished a close third to George McGovern and Humphrey in the 1972 primary and came in third again in 1976, behind Jerry Brown and Jimmy Carter. But he was returning to a party he had helped break, by accelerating the realignment of the two major parties that began in 1964. Wallace never came close to being president, but his 1968 bid helped kill the New Deal coalition of black and white working-class voters. The Democratic Party was forever changed.
Which brings us to the Republican Party in 2016.
If their George Wallace—Donald Trump—wins the nomination, the party’s die is cast with a message that’s doomed among the increasingly multiracial presidential-year electorate. If he loses but his opponents continue to pander, self-protectively, to the most hateful aspects of Trump’s message, that die is cast anyway.
If he loses, particularly through some convention gamesmanship, and his supporters decide he was robbed of the nomination by a party elite who looked down on him, and on them, Trump could launch a third-party effort of Wallace-like proportions and tear the GOP in two. And that, in the end, is what Republican elites fear most.
By: Joy-Ann Reid, The Daily Beast, December 15, 2015
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