This is news?
That was my first question. Why is this being packaged as some sort of revelation? Which part of “Black Muslim” escapes notice? If we chose to drop the blinders I doubt there’s a civil rights icon after Booker T. Washington whose reputation could survive.
Only because it shows the FBI hates black people and moose limbs? Not everybody know everything like most of us FReepers. ;-)
“This is news?”
Only on this web site.
There is plenty of instances over the past 30 years when this was stuff was published, or a YouTube video shows it.
Ali himself admitted many years ago he was wrong on these pronouncements.
Here’s an interesting excerpt from a 1968 interview he gave to Bud Collins:
In a wide-ranging 1968 interview with Bud Collins, the storied Boston Globe sports reporter, Ali insisted that it was as unnatural to expect blacks and whites to live together as it would be to expect humans to live with wild animals. “I don’t hate rattlesnakes, I don’t hate tigers — I just know I can’t get along with them,” he said. “I don’t want to try to eat with them or sleep with them.”
Collins asked: “You don’t think that we can ever get along?”
“I know whites and blacks cannot get along; this is nature,” Ali replied. That was why he liked George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor who was then running for president.
Collins wasn’t sure he’d heard right. “You like George Wallace?”
“Yes, sir,” said Ali. “I like what he says. He says Negroes shouldn’t force themselves in white neighborhoods, and white people shouldn’t have to move out of the neighborhood just because one Negro comes. Now that makes sense.”
This was not some inexplicable aberration. It reflected a hateful worldview that Ali, as a devotee of Elijah Muhammad and the segregationist Nation of Islam, espoused for years. At one point, he even appeared before a Ku Klux Klan rally. It was “a hell of a scene,” he later boasted — Klansmen with hoods, a burning cross, “and me on the platform,” preaching strict racial separation. “Black people should marry their own women,” Ali declaimed. “Bluebirds with bluebirds, red birds with red birds, pigeons with pigeons, eagles with eagles. God didn’t make no mistake!”