HONS

Obit Sonny Mehta

Sonny Mehta, a publishing industry titan, made his mark - The Washington Post

It was 1997, and I was on the hunt for a publisher for my biography of Sammy Davis Jr. The idea had already been rejected by my previous publisher, and I balked when it was suggested that I pursue another subject.

My literary agent, Esther Newberg, had left a voice mail. I was on the road, somewhere in the Midwest, when I checked my home phone having dialed from the airport phone. Airports had phones in the late ’90s. Her tone was hushed, but also charged with the air of importance. I was to call her right away, which I did.

“Can you get to New York next week? Sonny is interested in Sammy,” she said. Everyone in the book world knew who Sonny was; he was Sonny Mehta, editor in chief of Knopf books. Knopf was supreme. It had published Toni Morrison and John Updike and Robert Caro. It had in earlier decades published my man Langston Hughes. And the groundbreaking African American Chester Himes, too. Heck yes, I told her, I could hop down to New York City.

I arrived at the restaurant  first. Then in walked Sonny Mehta, along with Peter Gethers, a Knopf editor. I made my pitch offering why I wanted to write the book: Sammy had integrated nightclubs and dated white women when it was taboo and was a Rat Packer with Frank and Dean and appeared in that strange Old South-tinged  movie “Porgy and Bess”; and because he hugged Richard Nixon and was sometimes loved and hated by white people and sometimes loved and hated by black people. And because he could be a genius, and a fool, in the span of a single day. I wanted to do the book because Sammy was America.

Sonny and Peter listened. They nodded. They were too cool for comfort; I kept talking. Then Sonny started telling me stories about being a young man in London and having seen Sammy and how Sammy mesmerized Londoners during the hip 1960s. He told me that Sammy kept the Fleet Street reporters hopping with his carousing. A small smile began creeping across Sonny’s face. Peter smiled, too. Sonny finally turned to the bartender. “Can we have a bottle of champagne over here, please?” he said.

That was how I met Sonny, a publishing industry titan. The Sammy Davis Jr. biography was the first of four books I published for him and Knopf. I’m now at work on a fifth.

And now <a href="https://www.thebookseller.com/news/one-worlds-best-editors-sonny-mehta-dies-aged-77-1144086" title="www.thebookseller.com">Sonny is gone</a>.

He died Monday at the age of 77 from pneumonia.

[Sonny Mehta, visionary head of Alfred A. Knopf, dies at 77]

“Mehta’s contributions to the world of letters and publishing are without precedent,” Penguin Random House said in a statement announcing his death. “His exacting standards — in editorial, production, design, marketing, and publicity — were a beacon to the book industry and beyond. He was a friend to writers, editors, and booksellers around the world.”

Even when books are successful, publishers and editors so often remain quite anonymous. But the publishers who have taste and commercial acumen and bravery and who do not get deterred from the wickedness of the world sometimes become known. Sonny became very well known.

He found new talent. He showed vision. He had faith in writers. What to make of a man who published both Bill Clinton and E.L. James of “Fifty Shades of Grey” fame? Who published both Tony Blair and Bret Easton Ellis? You can say that he had a sense of the marketplace because books by those aforementioned authors sold well.

Those who love culture will come to read about Sonny Mehta in the days and years to come. They will find out he studied at Cambridge University and that his father was a diplomat. That he started out in British publishing and made a name for himself by choosing smart authors and insightful books. His reputation in London spread across the pond. He came to America in 1987 to head Alfred A. Knopf as president and editor in chief. He told people on most days he felt like he had the best job in America.

My own chats with Sonny were always brief, quick, happening at book soirees and publishing events. I heard he much liked my Sammy book, and nothing made me prouder.

[If you love books, you owe a debt to Sonny Mehta]

But there was something else — aside from his having brought me into the house of Knopf — that I greatly adored about coming upon Sonny: It was his cultural heritage, his brown face. He was Indian. He had conquered something; he had climbed mountains.

Publishing needs more color. The founders of the publishing house, Alfred and Blanche Knopf, had slipped into Harlem in the 1930s and signed black writers up and published them. Those writers added something special and unique to the American literary landscape. It was more than just the swirl of their prose. It was like jazz.

They gave jazz to literature in that big meaningful heartfelt way that jazz can leave you uplifted when you hear it coming from another room in the house. Sonny gave jazz to the world of book publishing, I thank him for that, and I thank him still for the champagne.

Haygood, a former Style writer for The Washington Post, is the author most recently of “Tigerland.”

Wil Haygood

The Washington Post

iptc-media/arts_culture_entertainment_and_media/arts_and_entertainment/literature

iptc-media/arts_culture_entertainment_and_media/arts_and_entertainment/music

iptc-media/arts_culture_entertainment_and_media/arts_and_entertainment/music/musical_genre

iptc-media/economy_business_and_finance

iptc-media/economy_business_and_finance/economic_sector/media/book_industry

iptc-media/arts_culture_entertainment_and_media/arts_and_entertainment

iptc-media/arts_culture_entertainment_and_media

iptc-media/economy_business_and_finance/economic_sector/media

iptc-media/arts_culture_entertainment_and_media/arts_and_entertainment/music/musical_genre/jazz_music

client-blocklists/Client List: Morgan Stanley KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Amazon KWs - EXCLUDE ALL 

client-blocklists/Client List: Becton Dickinson KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/CLIENT LIST: Nomura KWs 2021 - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Boeing KWs 2021- INCLUDE ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: Exxon Mobil  - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/GEICO KWs - INCLUDES ANY_4.26.21

client-blocklists/Client List: T. Rowe Price KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Microsoft KWs 2 - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/T. Rowe Price KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/HBO KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Ford/Lincoln KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/ExxonMobil 03312021 KWs - INCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Bank of America KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/WaPo: Combined Disaster Keyword List - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: Navy Federal Credit Union NFCU KWs 2 - EXCLUDES ALL - 12.23.20

client-blocklists/Client List: Eli Lily KWs - INCLUDES ANY

advertising/B2_Corporate Responsibility_legacyaux_FTM

advertising/B2_Embassy, Ambassador, & Diplomat Content_legacyaux_1ho

client-blocklists/Client List: Purina KWs - INCLUDES ANY

advertising/Qualcomm Custom KW - 5G

client-blocklists/BP KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/ CLIENT LIST: AT&T KWs 2021 - EXCLUDES ALL

advertising/B2_Positive News_legacyaux_hlt

advertising/B2_Women's Beauty_legacyaux_9jv

advertising/B2_Men's Grooming_legacyaux_1ve

client-blocklists/Client List: KPMG KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Navy Federal Credit Union NFCU KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Verizon KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Novo Nordisk KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Siemens KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Porsche KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Cisco KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: AT&T ALT KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Mercedes KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/FX Excludes All Disney

client-blocklists/Client List: PMI KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Inpixon KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: Boeing KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: Aetna KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Google KWs - INCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Philip Morris KWs - INCLUDES ANY 

client-blocklists/Capital One KWs 2 - INCLUDES ANY - 1.4.21

client-blocklists/Bank of America Merrill Lynch KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Google PG KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: Office Depot KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Chase KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: ETrade KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

Lifestyle

Washington Post Lifestyle gives you the latest fashion and beauty trends, home d&eacute;cor pointers, food and recipe ideas and reviews, relationship advice, travel ideas, wellness tips and much more.

staff

Wreath-Laying Ceremony At MLK Memorial

One day with Dick Gregory made me know he was truly one of a kind - The Washington Post

Dick Gregory was an outright hoot. The comedian and activist, who died Saturday at age 84, couldn’t have been conjured up by any author,  though Chester Himes or Langston Hughes might have come close if they had tried. The age of vaudeville would have loved him.

It was in the summer of 2000 when I first met Gregory, having come to Washington from Boston to write about him. Many thought he was dying. He was down to 130 pounds. He had been diagnosed with lymphoma. When I entered the house where he was staying, it suddenly seemed as if I was meeting one of those people you imagine you’d never meet, someone who belonged to newsreel footage mostly. But there he stood, quite bony, eyes sparkling. The Abe Lincoln beard looked a little unkempt. You couldn’t help but feel sad for him. He was famous, and infamous, and dying.

[Dick Gregory, cutting-edge satirist and uncompromising activist, dies at 84]

He had given me an address, and told me to meet him there at 4:30 — “in the morning.” I thought the comedian was joking. He was not. He also told me to bring a pair of sneakers.

The next morning I found myself inside a house not far from Rock Creek Park. Gregory came bounding down the stairs. “Hey, baby.” That’s how he talked, like a Motown soul singer. He was crashing at this house. Through the years, people had liked putting him up. After all, he was Dick Gregory, the raconteur of the civil rights movement, the interpreter of modern-day American politics and a one-time presidential candidate. So he slept on sofas, in sleeping bags, on floors. On this particular visit, he explained to me, somebody in Marion Barry’s camp was putting him up. Before we got out the door, he was talking about radiation in cellphones and the danger of it. I was rubbing sleep from my damn eyes.

A driver dropped us off at Rock Creek Park. The morning darkness worried me a bit. Hmm, muggers? “Dick Gregory!” Some fool had been out running at this ungodly hour. “Hey, baby,” Gregory responded. “How you doin’? Okay now. Okay.” It was that kind of soulful clipped patter common to black folk.

<div class="inline-content inline-video">
<div class="inline-video-caption">
Legendary comedian Dick Gregory, who maintained a busy role as an activist, died Saturday, Aug. 19. He was 84. 
</div>
</div>

We kept moving. I wondered if the running had become a recent activity for him. He explained that he had been running since high school. He had been a cross-country runner. “The great thing about running the long distance,” he said, “is you run at your integrity. Running made me forget I was poor.”

[‘He taught us how to laugh. He taught us how to fight’: The world mourns Dick Gregory]

Before the sun came up in Rock Creek Park, he had me laughing out loud. There were a good many stories about his peripatetic life. Funny stories about white people, black people, southern sheriffs and the CIA, whose agents he described as “spooks.”

He talked about the scholarship he received to attend Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, from which he did not graduate. He talked about comedy clubs in New York City, other clubs in the Midwest, that kept food on the table. He couldn’t remember if he went to his father’s funeral; it was a strained relationship.

We talked about the civil rights movement, and how he had gotten involved. He said it was because of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, the civil rights workers who were murdered in Mississippi in 1964. I told him I had gone to Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, where the three men — along with other civil rights volunteers — had trained before taking off for Mississippi. Heck yes, he confided, he was scared of that state. He’d get all spastic up in the face of the sheriffs. They thought something was wrong with him, mentally. “That night I was there, in Mississippi, talking to Sheriff [Lawrence] Rainey, putting my finger in his face, saying, ‘You know you did it. And we’re going to get you!’”

His political career was, well, interesting. He ran for mayor of Chicago against the big bad wolves of the Daley machine. He didn’t stand a chance, was crushed and decided he needed to set his goals higher. When he launched his run for the White House, he got fan mail — though there were also letters suggesting he check himself into Bellevue, a mental hospital. To boost his presidential ambitions, he printed fake American currency with his picture on it. Agents from the. Treasury Department didn’t think that was funny at all, and arrested him. The politically-inspired shenanigans of the official government — wiretapping civil rights leaders, for instance — had sparked Gregory’s mind so much he became, as the years rolled by, a champion conspiracy theorist. “I woke up with power,” he told me with a straight face, referring to the election in which Richard Nixon won in a landslide.

[Read Dick Gregory’s old jokes. You’ll see why they still resonate decades later.]

The stories kept coming once his jog through Rock Creek Park had ended. He once drove a Rolls-Royce. That was when the money from the comedy gigs and his trenchant autobiography, “Nigger,” was very good. Then the money wasn’t so good and the repo man came knocking on the door. He moved his family to a farm in Plymouth, Mass., in the early 1970s. Money woes continued.

But then in the ‘90s, he found new respect, a diet plan bonanza, more speaking engagements and chroniclers of the civil rights movement giving him new respect for the bravery he had shown.

For the past few years, I’d run into Gregory in my Northwest D.C. neighborhood. He’d pull me into a restaurant and start whispering. “Can you believe what’s happening to Obama? He’s not really running the government.” It would be rude to break away quickly, so I’d sit and listen. “Just watch what’s gonna happen in the election: They gonna put that fool in the White House.” I told him I doubted it.

It was sometime last spring when I had my last conversation with Gregory. I hadn’t seen him since the election.

He was whispering again. “Trump. I told you. It was all in the cards. The FBI, the CIA.”

I couldn’t help but to hug him before leaving his side. “Take care, baby,”  he said, walking away, a bunch of newspapers and magazines in the crook of his arm.

Wil Haygood, a former Post reporter, is the Patrick Henry Writing Fellow at the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College.

Style

other

Sportscaster John Saunders’ quiet battle with the demons of depression - The Washington Post

Wil Haygood, author of seven nonfiction books and Scholar-in-Residence at Miami University, Ohio, has just been awarded the 2017-18 Patrick Henry Writing Fellowship prize at the C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College.

This posthumously published memoir is dark, edgy, revelatory and quite sad. John Saunders was a much-admired ESPN sportscaster, notable for his suave delivery on air and talent for analysis amid the studio banter. He seemed totally in control. But Saunders was engulfed by demons, suffering for decades from depression. He harbored suicidal thoughts, harmed himself with razor blades, became addicted to prescription drugs and spent time in a psych ward where the screaming patients terrified him. He died Aug. 10, 2016, from a combination of ailments exacerbated by a heart attack. He was 61 years old. In a sports-mad nation, the mourning for him seemed genuine.

[John Saunders, longtime ESPN sports announcer, dies at 61]

Saunders, along with co-author John U. Bacon, had been working on this memoir for quite some time before he died. His hope was to shine a light from his personal perspective — a man who happened to be a well-known black broadcaster who was engaged in a years-long attempt to conceal his mental suffering. Just as much of the black church-going populace had a hard time coming to grips with the AIDS crisis, so it has seemed, at times, with the stigma surrounding depression.

Saunders was born in Toronto in 1955. For the next 10 years his family moved between Toronto and Montreal. His father, Bernie, was a good friend of the great pianist Oscar Peterson, who became godfather to young John. But Bernie Saunders was a tyrant, a black man in white Canada visiting his pain upon John, his oldest of three children. John was kicked, slapped, punched and made to feel worthless. “If I was stupid enough to mouth off —  and I was, many times — his fists proved the most convenient weapon,” Saunders writes. His mother, Jacqueline, had her own issues: She abided the beatings and told fabulous lies. She wanted more than anything to be a jazz singer.

Kids, of course, can withstand a lot of pain, but often the abuse becomes an  anchor that settles inside  and sinks ever downward. Such an anchor found a home inside young John Saunders.

He was still a kid when an older girl molested him, more than once, while giggling —  incidents that forever thwarted his outlook on intimacy. In high school he played hockey, listened to Jimi Hendrix and smoked dope. Between the drugs, the abusive father and the sexual abuse, he whirled in and out of tailspins. “Killing myself seemed the only option that could end my pain, but the idea of actually doing it scared the hell out of me,” he writes.

He was good enough to be welcomed to Indiana University in 1974 to play hockey. But upon arrival, he was introduced to old-fashioned American racism. A hockey player, lolling about the dorm with other families during move-in week, used the n-word to refer to him. A group of white parents stood by in mocking silence. “Back home,” Saunders writes, referring to Canada, “racists like that were dinosaurs — you heard about them, but you didn’t think they still existed. I’d been called ‘n-----’ on occasion, usually by a hockey opponent looking for anything he could think of to rattle me. But I had never tasted real racism until I set foot in that Indiana dorm room.”

He bolted Indiana and enrolled at Western Michigan in the fall of 1974. At his new school, there was less overt racism, but he was bewildered by the black students who wondered why so many of his friends were white. His friends, for the most part, were hockey players.

Still, his dream of playing hockey at Western Michigan died for two reasons: He suffered an injury, then flunked out of the university. He returned to Toronto and got into Ryerson Polytechnical Institute — now known as Ryerson University — where he got his chance to play hockey.

But all was hardly well. He got married to a nice woman but felt he didn’t deserve her, and the marriage went bust. He began hearing voices — “not the kind a psychotic killer hears but my own inner voice, telling me to harm myself.” He wrote a suicide note. “Sorry and goodbye to those I love and who love me. This act is solely the responsibility of Bernard and Jacqueline Saunders. May they burn in hell.” Even though it was never sent, it’s a wincing note and shows the vise he was in.

[John Saunders showed how good he was by not telling anyone about it]

So one wonders: How did Saunders hold it together and become so renowned? His rise began in radio, then it was back to America and work at a Baltimore television station. He was good, sharp, a beautiful mind with a beautiful delivery on air. ESPN came calling. He rose before our eyes on those football Saturday afternoons, the cool black cat holding the telecast together.

All the while — and this is the madness of the disease — he was sinking. He stood atop bridges and thought of jumping. There were hospital stays. Some of the medicines worked, others were awful. His second wife, Wanda, and two daughters loved him deeply. He had good friends inside ESPN.

The triggers, like ceaseless lightning bolts, hit him across the decades. His father had a secret family in Ohio; his sister, Gail, suffered from depression and died of an overdose of antidepressant medication. She was 41.

Though this is Saunders’s memoir, one wishes for more insight from two heroic figures: Wanda, his wife, and Bernie, the younger brother named after their father, who would often race to his brother’s side during times of crisis.  As it is, this is an important book about mental illness and a man who was loved, but whose mind could never find peace.

Opinions

The Washington Post Opinions section features opinion articles, op-eds, editorials by the Editorial Board, global opinions and letters to the editor on the issues of the day. Offerings include columns by Washington Post opinion writers, political cartoons by editorial cartoonists Ann Telnaes and Michael de Adder and podcasts by Jonathan Capehart.

The Washington Post Opinions section features opinion articles, op-eds, editorials by the Editorial Board, global opinions and letters to the editor on the issues of the day. Offerings include columns by Washington Post opinion writers, political cartoons by editorial cartoonists Ann Telnaes and Michael de Adder and podcasts by James Hohmann and Jonathan Capehart.

Opinion | The tall, phenom on the basketball court remembering his legendary coach - The Washington Post

Wil Haygood, author most recently of “Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination that Changed America,” and scholar-in-residence at Miami University (Ohio), is at work on a book about a high school in Columbus, Ohio.

Athletes rarely write books about their coaches. That relationship — player and coach — is often fraught and adversarial. Rare, also, is the college athlete who devotes time to becoming a writer. It helps mightily, of course, to have a story to tell, a celebrated season of glory or even one of unforgettable heartbreak. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has plenty to tell, and it's a story of stardom and glory, all against the backdrop of a racially charged America.

Abdul-Jabbar was one of the greatest basketball players of all time, who had a phenomenal career at UCLA and then with the Milwaukee Bucks and the Los Angeles Lakers. (He remains the National Basketball Association’s  all-time leading scorer.) He has since gone on to carve out an eclectic career as essayist, pop-culture critic, commentator and author. He’s written many books, sometimes with a co-author. In “Coach Wooden and Me: Our 50-Year Friendship On and Off the Court,” he goes it alone in writing about his relationship with John Wooden, his college coach and a legendary figure in his own right.

[The special challenge Steph Curry presents to LeBron James]

The UCLA coach and his extraordinary player couldn’t have been more different. Wooden was born in 1910 in Indiana, and like all young whites of his era in that state, he knew the powerful influence of the Ku Klux Klan. He had a decency about himself and concluded that the group of vigilantes was nuts.

Abdul-Jabbar (born Lew Alcindor) was raised in the Harlem section of New York. As a teen, he found himself caught in the throes of the infamous Harlem riot of 1964. A white police officer had shot a black kid dead. (Yes, that story again.) Abdul-Jabbar at the time was already more than seven feet tall. The Harlem scene, all four days of it, was horrific. “Even crouching,” Abdul-Jabbar writes of the riot, “I still hovered over everyone else. I had never been so scared in my life as that night. But I’d also never been so angry at the police, who dismissed the protesters by shouting, ‘Go home!’ Holding up photos of the young victim, protesters hollered back, ‘We are home!’ ”

His college choice — as the most highly recruited high schooler in the country — was UCLA. The West Coast school was seen by many as progressive. Baseball legend Jackie Robinson had attended at a time when most major colleges rarely bothered to recruit black athletes. Abdul-Jabbar entered college in the fall of 1965, an Afro-wearing black hipster. “I was all about fast subways, hot jazz, and civil rights politics,” he writes, and of his coach he adds: “He was John Wooden, a fifty-five-year-old five-foot-ten-inch white man from a hick town in Indiana. He was all about, what? Tractors, big bands, and Christian morals? We were an odd-couple sitcom waiting to happen.”

Abdul-Jabbar didn’t play varsity until his sophomore year because of nationwide NCAA rules at the time, but when he did play, the winning seemed unstoppable, and the reign of national championships began. He perfected his “sky hook” with Wooden’s help. The NCAA nincompoops, however, outlawed the dunk; many felt it was a punishment inflicted on the tall kid from Harlem.

Real life and protest intervened in that la-la land of make believe and running up and down a basketball court. The ’60s, the movement, black power were erupting right alongside the sky hook. For all his decency, and his homilies about winning not being all that important, Wooden most certainly wanted to win. The suffering of the black athlete did not really move him. Abdul-Jabbar touches upon this, but far too delicately. The scenes of fans spearing him with the n-word after games — or in public, with Wooden standing close by in shameful silence — are stomach-churning. Wooden later apologizes in private to his star player about these incidents, but it’s too late indeed. Coaches are teachers, too. “When it came to racism, I thought Coach Wooden had a good heart, but he was on the sidelines in this game,” Abdul-Jabbar admits.

[Stengel and Durocher: smart alecks at war with each other]

“Friendship” can be a tricky word. There are trade-offs in many human relationships. Abdul-Jabbar became a Muslim; didn’t wish to play in the 1968 Olympics — where Tommie Smith and John Carlos famously raised a black fist and stirred controversy; and got involved in political causes. They were all moments of his life when Wooden was not very visible. Abdul-Jabbar realizes in these pages that many whites viewed him as some sort of “mythological beast” as they ignored the battles of everyday black lives: “I couldn’t help but wonder if that wasn’t how Coach Wooden saw me, too.”

Wooden was no Al McGuire, who became the Marquette University basketball coach in 1964 and gained insight into his black ballplayers and the politics of the nation. When many had lashed out at Jim Chones, one of his star black players, for announcing that he was jumping to the pros, McGuire explained that he had looked in Chones’s refrigerator, saw it empty and shoved him out the door toward the pros so he could feed his family. McGuire simply seemed to say: Damn the wickedness of poverty.

Still, even if there is some hagiography in this chronicle, there is much to admire. There is a host of lovely revelations of how player and coach managed to stay in touch and connected after both left the game. Here they are, time and time again, sitting in the coach’s den at his home watching old western movies, talking about aging and life. And sometimes history as it relates to black Americans. Who knew that  Wooden could easily quote Langston Hughes?

Wooden lived to be 99 years old. One of his unforgettable players — the tall black kid from Harlem — has bequeathed him an eloquent book about the mysteries of time and remembrance. The coach would be proud.

Our 50-Year Friendship On and Off the Court

The connected worlds of Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X - The Washington Post

Wil Haygood is the Boadway Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Miami University, Ohio, and the author, most recently, of “Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination that Changed America.”

In the early 1960s, America was alternately beguiled and frightened by the urgency of demands for equal rights from its black citizenry. Attempts to register to vote, to integrate colleges and universities, to become part of the American Dream, as it were, often resulted in bloodshed. The news footage of the clashes — against the backdrop of state-sanctioned segregation — shocked the world.

Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali were two of the marquee figures from that fire-next-time era. Both were in the vanguard of black independent thinkers who shook up a host of people and institutions, among them J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, local police departments and mainstream society. They talked of racism in raw terms. They even made some blacks of a conservative bent quite nervous. Being denied the vote might give way to bullets, Malcolm X ominously intoned. As for Ali — who changed his name from Cassius Clay in 1964 — he pronounced he would not abide by the military draft. These were not men with the patience to wait for justice.

Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith’s “Blood Brothers” tells the story of these two galvanizing and hypnotic personalities and of the America that produced them. Although the book promises more than it delivers, it is earnest and, by focusing mostly on the years between 1962 and 1965, smartly constructed.

Family dysfunction lay in the upbringing of both men. Cassius Clay Sr. was a mean and petty man who beat his wife. The younger Clay — feral, handsome and loud — was a star in the Louisville boxing scene who wanted to get away from his father. He brought home a boxing medal from the 1960 Rome Olympics and began to find it harder to swallow that he must still dine in segregated restaurants.

Earl Little was Malcolm’s father. His life came to a gruesome end in 1931 in Lansing, Mich., after 
a streetcar accident. Did he really slip beneath the streetcar? Blacks scoffed, believing it foul play at the hands of whites. Earl Little was a black nationalist, a follower of the teachings of Marcus Garvey and a man who unsettled many Lansing whites. “One man was scarred by his father’s absence,” the authors write, “the other by his father’s presence.”

Young Malcolm, fatherless and restless, became a thief, a pimp and a convict, entering a Massachusetts prison in 1946, where he would remain for six years.  Once out of prison, Malcolm X — who had found Islam behind bars — became a rising star in the Nation of Islam, steadily promoted by Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad.

The young Clay, entering the ranks of professional boxing, became intrigued with the Nation of Islam. Its teachings and guidance began to salve his wounds of second-class citizenship.

There was something at ground level that seemed to intertwine the sport of boxing and religion. “Both worlds — boxing and the Nation of Islam — demanded physical fitness and a purity that rewarded resistance to temptation,” the authors note.

If the morphing of Cassius Clay into Muhammad Ali needed a final push, the stardom of Malcolm X seemed to provide it. Malcolm was leading protest marches through an assortment of major cities. He was claiming headlines and gathering followers. Elijah Muhammad, whose presence hovers over this book like Mephistopheles, treated him like a son. “My hobby is stirring up Negroes,” Malcolm had said.

The prizefighter first met Malcolm X in Detroit: the young lion and the older lion, both trying to figure out how to tear at the bone of racism. “My first impression of Malcolm X,” the boxer confided, “was how could a black man talk about the government and white people and act so bold and not be shot at?”

Soon enough, politics and Malcolm X’s growing dismay over Muhammad’s serial infidelities give way in this narrative to Clay’s boxing prowess. In 1964 the underdog Clay — fond of spouting silly and rhythmic poetry in pre-bout press gatherings — fights Sonny Liston and takes his first championship belt. He is world champion; he is “king of the world”; he is now Muhammad Ali, a converted Muslim for the world to see.

The authors are good at chronicling the sportswriters, mostly white men, who belittled Ali for his religious decision and political awakening. This was not an apolitical Joe Louis-like figure, and the sportswriters found it hard to adjust.

The narrative tightens considerably as Malcolm X becomes despondent about Muhammad’s affairs. Children are born out of wedlock, infuriating Malcolm. His inquiries into Muhammad’s personal life are considered an insult by the Nation of Islam leader.

When President John F. Kennedy is assassinated, Nation of Islam officials are ordered by their leader to say nothing that would deepen the country’s hurt. Malcolm X believed that Kennedy had had a role in the murders of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. He also felt the president didn’t respond vigorously enough to violence against blacks in the South. Malcolm X ignored the Nation of Islam directive and told the press that Kennedy’s killing was an example of “the chickens coming home to roost.” The comment infuriated many, especially Muhammad, who silenced Malcolm X, forbidding him for a period to speak on behalf of Muslims in the country.

Malcolm X — the fissures between him and the Nation of Islam deepening — took a pilgrimage to Mecca, coming back a changed man. He softened his fiery rhetoric. He intended to work with integrationists and mainstream civil rights leaders. He desperately reached out to Ali, wanting him to understand, hoping that Ali would distance himself from the philandering Muhammad. Ali would not.

In mid-February 1965, Malcolm X’s home was firebombed, but the family escaped injury. On Feb. 21, Malcolm was gunned down while delivering a speech in Harlem, the murderous deed carried out by fellow Muslims.

Because their face time in life was actually rather limited, there is not quite enough here to convince one that Malcolm and Ali were “blood brothers.” They were, true enough, figures in the brewing ferment of politics, sports and race, rather quickly enmeshed in a splintering, colossal family feud. But there is enough here to make one appreciate the dynamism of both men, whose reputations have undergone transformations, leaving both as fuller and more dimensional figures in the American mind-set.

The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X

Zimmerman acquittal reignites passions over race, justice and the South - The Washington Post

When Bill Baxley assumed office as Alabama attorney general in 1971, he was determined to bring to justice the bombers who lit the dynamite beneath the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four little black girls Sept. 15, 1963.

A state jury had refused to convict one of the men, Robert Chambliss, on murder charges.

But in 1976, Baxley reopened the case and eventually got a murder conviction for Chambliss, who died in prison. Many across the South believed that with the guilty verdict, Southern juries — once defiantly loath to convict whites for the murder of blacks — had begun a judicial trek toward fairness.

With the acquittal this weekend of George Zimmerman, who fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, those feelings, especially among many blacks, were upended. A jury of six women — five whites and one described as a white Hispanic — found the neighborhood watch volunteer, who said he shot the unarmed Martin in self-defense, not guilty of second-degree murder and manslaughter. The jury deliberated more than 16 hours after a three-week trial in Sanford, Fla.

A Southern jury — when it comes to race and the perception that a black person has been wrongly accused or harmed — operates under the wide, whispering shadow of history. And there exists a roster of names and cases that has exploded onto the national scene and claimed headlines against this backdrop of race and geography: the Scottsboro Boys, Emmett Till, Isaac Woodward, Medgar Evers, the four girls killed in the Alabama bombing.

After the Zimmerman verdict, civil rights activists have clamored for charges of federal civil rights violations. President Obama referred to Martin’s death as “a tragedy.” On Monday, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. called the teenager’s death “unnecessary” and said the Justice Department would continue its investigation of the shooting.

The case, fairly or not, has reignited passions about the South and Southern juries when it comes to justice for blacks. It is a story line so often mentioned that it is now wedded to popular culture, in literature — the works of Eudora Welty, William Faulkner and Ralph Ellison — as well as in movies. In “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman is convicted despite the defense waged by his heroic white attorney. FBI agents in “Mississippi Burning” seek justice for three voting- rights activists.

Baxley began working as a lawyer in Alabama at the height of the civil rights movement, when blacks were routinely tossed in jail for protesting. “When I started practicing,” Baxley says, “there were no women on juries. And very few blacks, if any.”

Baxley acknowledges, in light of the Zimmerman verdict, that Southern juries may have to constantly fight to overcome history and the perception that they cannot mete out justice when it comes to blacks who have been wronged. “It requires evolution,” he says of certain juries. “And evolution is slow. There are ingrained attitudes, and some of those are based on fear.”

Baxley, who is white, believes that the South has made appreciable advances when it comes to courtroom justice and must be viewed in terms of history. “It’s a vast difference from what it used to be,” he says. “I remember the 1960s in Alabama. Sometimes you would have a confession by whites who had done violence against blacks. And the jury would still come back with acquittals! Sometimes the police would do a great job, but the jury would turn them loose.”

He says he understands the strong emotions in the Martin case but argues that the prosecution had a high hurdle. “I think this case would have been hard to win in any state,” he says. “I think it was just difficult for the prosecution. You did have a guy [Zimmerman] with some kind of injuries.”

The fact that there were still culprits loose in the Birmingham church bombing after Chambliss had been sent to prison was not lost on Doug Jones, who as a U.S. attorney in Alabama, brought and won convictions against two others, Tommy Blanton in 2001 and Bobby Frank Cherry in 2002.

Jones, who is white, says that he believes there is a racial dynamic to the Martin killing but that the jury was in a difficult position. “I believe Zimmerman racially profiled Martin,” he says. “We know there was an altercation. So I think there are intervening factors here that the jury had to look at.”

Zimmerman’s mother is Peruvian,  and his father is white.

Clifford Alexander, who is black, was a young lawyer when he worked in the White House under President Lyndon B. Johnson. He well remembers discussions about judges and juries in Southern courtrooms in those days. And he understands why conversations reverted to such reflections in the aftermath of the Zimmerman verdict. “The clear reason why Zimmerman had the audacity to approach this child was that he saw the color of his skin as a threat,” he says.

He says it was particularly galling that after Martin was killed, there was no immediate arrest, which only hardened sentiments about Southern law enforcement. “We all know Zimmerman wasn’t arrested until later. And you had a dead young man right there!” he says.

Alexander, who went on to head the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, said the Zimmerman verdict and other actions by law enforcement, such as New York City’s stop-and-frisk policy,  leave blacks with impressions of unfair treatment.

“Jurors in the past often were not treating black life like they would a white life. There are still, today, too many differentials in treatment,” he said. “We have been, as a society — and often as a government — unable to describe the racism of certain things.”

It was Welty, a white writer from the South, who sought in 1963 to describe racism in a short story, “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” Revered as one of this country’s most gifted writers, she did not regularly write about race and crime in her native South. But Evers’s killing so affected her that she sat down at her typewriter and, according to legend, wrote the five-page story in one day. Her story was a fictionalized portrait of the night Evers was murdered in the driveway of his Jackson, Miss., home. The narrator is the gunman. “Something darker than him, like the wings of a bird, spread on his back and pulled him down. He climbed up once, like a man under bad claws, and like just blood could weigh a ton he walked with it on his back to better light. Didn’t get no further than his door. And fell to stay.”

Evers’s real-life killer, Byron De La Beckwith, was tried twice in 1964, each time resulting in hung juries. Thirty years later, in 1994, after new evidence was uncovered, a jury of eight blacks and four whites found him guilty of first-degree murder.

Politics

Post Politics from The Washington Post is the source for political news headlines, in-depth politics coverage and political opinion, plus breaking news on the biden administration and White House, Congress, the Supreme Court, elections and more.

Post Politics from The Washington Post is the source for political news headlines, in-depth politics coverage and political opinion, plus breaking news on the Trump administration and White House, Congress, the Supreme Court, elections and more.

Inauguration will cement ties between Obama, Martin Luther King Jr. - The Washington Post

President Barack Obama, with the nation and world watching, will share his Inauguration Day spotlight with a Baptist preacher from Georgia who launched a moral crusade six decades ago to wrest America from its brutal Jim Crow laws.

Future generations may mull the divine meaning of Barack Obama’s celebration and pageantry taking place on the very day set aside to honor Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader gunned down on a Memphis hotel balcony in 1968.

“President Obama represents the last lap of this unfinished race” to achieve equality, said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was near King on the day he was slain in Memphis.

The Obama-King moment is already imbued with a palpable resonance. “It is all so very deep to me,” said Clarence B. Jones, who in 1963 helped King draft his luminous “I Have a Dream” speech that he delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, opposite the Mall from the Capitol, where Obama will deliver his second inaugural address.

In the days leading up to the inauguration, Jones found himself in the throes of writing a letter to the president. “I’m going to ask him, ‘If you could just pause during your speech on Inauguration Day and look at the Lincoln Memorial, and then in the direction of the King Memorial, and say as you are taking the oath of office, “Martin, this one’s for you,” ’ ” he said.

National

Jones imagines that Obama might be more than a little introspective Monday. “It is magical,” he says of the confluence of events.

Nearly 45 after his death, King remains the lodestar when it comes to the great political causes launched in the United States.

It was his nonviolence movement, sweeping across the country in the late 1950s and early 1960s, that helped bring about passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Bill and 1965 Voting Rights Act, both of which began toppling the legal roadblocks that had inhibited black progress in the nation for so long.

Early in his presidential quest, Obama went to lengths to honor both the rhetorical and geographical landscapes of King’s life and legacy.

Just weeks after he announced his first presidential run in 2007, then-Sen. Barack Obama ventured to the Brown Chapel in Selma, Ala.

Wil Haygood

Sonny Mehta, a publishing industry titan, made his mark

One day with Dick Gregory made me know he was truly one of a kind

Sportscaster John Saunders’ quiet battle with the demons of depression

The tall, phenom on the basketball court remembering his legendary coach

The connected worlds of Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X

Zimmerman acquittal reignites passions over race, justice and the South

Inauguration will cement ties between Obama, Martin Luther King Jr.

For many blacks, Obama’s reelection cements his legacy

Book review: ‘My Song,’ a memoir by Harry Belafonte

Manning Marable’s ‘Malcolm X’