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One Night in Miami (2020) Blood Brothers: Malcolm X & Muhammad Ali (2021) Muhammad Ali

2022; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/21558450.49.1.04

2155-8450

Kate Aguilar,

American History and Culture

In the beginning moments of each of these films, which explore the life of boxing legend Muhammad Ali, it is difficult to miss the cameras. The journalists ringside snapping photos of his 1963 fight against Henry Cooper. Malcolm X with a camera around his neck at the Hampton House playfully looking over Ali's shoulder. The throngs of fans taking pictures and screaming Ali's name as he moves through the crowd while cradling his young daughter, Hana. Each frame serves as a reminder that Ali is both himself and for public consumption, an athlete and a celebrity, both man and symbol. Depending on the lens, he is also a hero or a villain.Ali is not new to scrutiny, by the press, artists, or scholars. In the over sixty years since he has captured the American imagination, more than a dozen nonfiction films have taken on The Champ, along with several books. These include an autobiography, biography, and scholarly collections that explore him within the ring of public history. Each lens strives to focus in on the real Ali, who sportswriter Jack Olsen once referred to as a “jigsaw puzzle.”1 In their book Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X (2016), historians Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith provide snapshots of Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., the Louisville Lip, Cassius X, and Muhammad Ali, conceding, “He was all of these characters, and sometimes more than one at the same moment.”2Each angle—the Amazon original film adapted from a play, the Netflix original documentary adapted from the book, and the Ken Burns documentary—reveals that context matters. Each shows Ali's evolution in conversation with different facets of the long Black Freedom Movement, including the role of sport, music, Black intellectualism, religion, the arts, and politics in the shaping of his Black consciousness. Although larger than life, Ali, alone, rarely fills the frame. He is understood, misunderstood, celebrated, and scorned in conjunction with other Black figures of the period; all must contend with the greatest threat to the historical moment and movement: Jim Crow.In One Night in Miami (2020), based on Kemp Powers's award-winning play, the storyline centers on one day—February 25, 1964—the day of the fight between Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston at the Miami Beach Convention Center. While the events are true—Malcolm X, Jim Brown, and Sam Cooke all gathered to watch the fight and then celebrate one of the greatest boxing upsets of all time—their conversation and what it means for the future of the Black Freedom Movement is imagined. The result is a rich discussion on the role and duty of Black men and Black celebrity in the struggle for civil rights.Ali's fight is at the center of the film. His fight, after all, is what brings the activist, football star, and singer together. It appears that the fight is the one that occurs in the ring, the one in which Clay becomes the heavyweight champion of the world. But what both director Regina King and screenwriter Kemp Powers do so deftly is move quickly away from the ring into the real battleground at play: the ideological. Clay is a twenty-two-year-old man about to join the Nation of Islam. Malcolm X is a middle-aged man who recognizes his time with the organization is limited. Brown is also a twenty-something athlete contemplating a career after football, and Cooke weighs his image for middle America. What ensues is a poignant analysis of Black activism, facilitated by political theorist Malcolm X, who challenges Cooke, “Strike with the weapon that you have, man: your voice.”Malcolm X argues that economic freedom is not the end game. In fact, despite Ali and Brown's earnings, both had to stay at the Hampton House, a segregated hotel in Liberty City, because Jim Crow's segregation laws did not permit Black celebrities to stay in Miami Beach. Cooke's ability to check in at the Fontainebleau Hotel was not in relation to his fame but facilitated by his white manager who booked the room. Malcolm X highlights the intersectionality at play, in which class alone cannot free Black celebrity from racial segregation or violence. The end game is to use their platform to draw attention to the issues facing Black Americans. As Jim Brown remembered years later, “Standing up was a big thing for all of us because we defied second-class citizenship and being considered inferior. Being outspoken, the risk was to lose money, or to lose your popularity with middle America. But those of us who were there that night cared nothing about that. We were talking about standing up as human beings and demanding our rights.”3 Little did they know that a year later both Malcolm X and Sam Cooke would be dead.In some regards, the audience cannot fully appreciate the power dynamics at play in One Night in Miami without watching Blood Brothers: Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali (2021). This film provides historical context as to the weight of that fateful night, especially for Clay and Malcolm X. A mere week after the fight, Elijah Muhammad would demand Clay cut ties with Malcolm X and bestow upon him the name Muhammad Ali. In doing so, Ali had officially joined the Nation of Islam. And yet this documentary begins with Malcolm X's daughter Ilyasah Shabazz contending that it was he who “gave [Ali] the power that he needed to speak.” The film then cuts to Ali's brother Rahman Ali, who agrees that his brother loved being around Malcolm X, who had an energy he recalled as “divine.” In this Netflix original documentary by Marcus A. Clarke, the film zooms out from that one night in Miami to explore the three years in which Malcolm X and Ali met, became friends, and were torn apart. It investigates these moments of transition, where Clay moves from Cassius Clay to Cassius X then to Muhammad Ali, from friend of Malcolm X to foe, from one who spars in the ring but refuses to join the struggle outside of it to the foundational figure of the revolt of the Black athlete.The documentary suggests that perhaps Malcolm did not give Ali the power to speak but the historical framing from which to do so. In the film, Reverend Al Sharpton argues, “Martin Luther spoke to who we must become; Malcolm spoke to who we were and what put us there.” Born a year after Emmett Till, Clay rose to fame in the 1960 Rome Olympics and had to return to the segregated Jim Crow South. Malcolm X provided the history of Black self-reliance and empowerment that helped him “shake up the world.” While there is no doubt that Ali became a pawn in the chess match between the Nation and Malcolm X, the documentary unveils a true friendship that shapes both men's lives and Ali's future role within the long civil rights movement. Ali mirrored Malcolm X's commitment to self-creation, for example, which eventually included embracing a more inclusive view of Islam that rejected the Nation of Islam's teachings that all white people were devils.Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon's documentary Muhammad Ali (2021) traces a much larger arc. The eight-hour event explores Ali's evolution from a child of the civil rights movement to an apolitical boxer and his faith journey as a friend of Malcolm X to an official member of the Nation of Islam, analyzing his transformation in both public and private into Muhammad Ali. It looks at his refusal to go to Vietnam, vilification in the white popular culture, and the eventual celebration of him as an anti-war hero. Muhammad Ali emphasizes his time within the ring to appreciate his image and growing influence outside of it. Ultimately, the directors explore the question of freedom. What does it mean for a Black man—and in this case, the Black athlete—to be free in America? What does it look like? Freedom of movement? Freedom of religion? Freedom of speech? Free to think and live differently than white America? Free to think and live differently than others within Black America? What does it mean to be Black, as told through bouts with other Black athletes? Burns attests, “We don't know him. He knows him, and we let the record speak for itself.”Of course, Ali is not the only voice present. Burns cuts to Randy Roberts, among other scholars, writers, and activists, to help tell history. This film, like One Night in Miami, builds on the rich research of Blood Brothers. It includes mini biographies of the Black historical figures who impacted Ali's thinking. It is a reminder that Ali is not only a legend for American history but a product of it. All three works center race and sport as significant to analysis of the American experiment.The documentary uses 15,000 images, along with interviews, to provide what it hopes to be one of the most complete pictures of The Champ.4 It is difficult while watching not to think of Malcolm X with his camera around his neck, both a friend and a fan of the greatest boxer in the world. Malcolm X was arguably one of the most media-savvy leaders of the Black Freedom Movement. He recognized the power of visual representation to tell his and the movement's story. He did so to attempt to get the picture right. The importance of these three films in conversation is that they similarly seek to set the record straight through their own lens. Together they show a complex figure that recent history has simplified. They reveal how central Ali's friendships and his faith were to his understanding of himself as both a Black man and a part of a larger struggle. They demonstrate how critical sport was to his ability to speak and live freely. They show how much he served his country, even when he saw himself as a part of a global Black community and even when the country, for a time, denied him access to the ring. As Ali proclaimed before his 1974 fight with George Foreman, “I am representing the freedom of Black people in America. I want to win so I can come home and speak for the brother who's living in rat-infested housing.”Muhammad Ali thus set the stage for the revolt of the Black athlete, for a new generation of athletes to own their power, speak their minds, and to do so in service to the larger community. He is the giant on which today's activists like Colin Kaepernick stand. He towers in American history just as he does in that picture of him over Sonny Liston in the 1964 fight: a larger-than-life figure with an enormous belief in himself and Black power. It is a picture, like his life, that will forever speak a thousand words; but, as each film reinforces, the visual alone does not have to because Ali was always willing to speak for himself.