Slavery Legacy—Cassius Clay vs. Muhammad Ali
By Ellis Washington
June 10, 2016
‘Success has many fathers, while failure is an orphan’
When 3-time boxing champion and civil rights activist, Muhammad Ali was laid to rest today, I thought about the 24-7 fawning news coverage by the Democrat Socialist Press and how their Marxist revisionist history re-wrote how they really felt about this strong, out-spoken Black man during a time (1960s and 70s) when Black people outside of a Socialist-Progressive paradigm had no voice. Contrary to White society and White sports writers of today who feign universal love with Ali, praising him for being a proud strong Black man, it was a very different story in the 1960s and 70s where Ali faced a constant barrage of hateful, racist rhetoric by these same media figures and politicians and their progenitors, “He was, for many years, a radical figure for many Americans. For years, many refused to call him by his new name. “I pity Clay and abhor what he represents,” the columnist Jimmy Cannon wrote. Even Red Smith, the most respected of all sports columnists, compared Ali to the “unwashed punks” who dared to march against the war.”
I won’t restate his biography here which is laudatory and legendary, but I will discuss his paradoxical name change he made to the world on Feb. 25, 1964 just after against all odd he defeated Sonny Liston to become the world boxing champion at age 22.
Ali defeats Sonny Liston (Feb. 25, 1964)
Lacking a formal education in racially segregated Louisville, Kentucky and longing for a strong father figure to fill the torturous void in his life due to his own father, Cassius Marcellus Clay, Sr. being an inveterate drunk, womanizer, and wife-beater, young Clay sought the friendship and tutelage of civil rights icon and American Muslim, Malcolm X, which eventually led to his conversion to the Nation of Islam and allegiance to their controversial leader, Hon. Elijah Muhammad. Now Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali, because as Ali often said, “I got rid of my slave name.” … or did he?
Clay-Ali: The Slave-Freedom Dualism
Writer, David Remnick, in an insightful New Yorker article published earlier this year, The Outsized Life of Muhammed Ali, poignantly addresses this existential dualism that was Clay-Ali in this manner:
Louisville, when Cassius was growing up in the nineteen-forties and fifties, was a Jim Crow city. American apartheid. Not quite as virulent as in Jackson or Mobile, but plenty bad. At movie theatres like the Savoy, whites sat in the orchestra, blacks in the balcony; most other theatres were for whites only, and so were the stores downtown. There were white schools, white country clubs, white businesses. Blyden Jackson, a black writer from Louisville, who was in his forties when Clay was growing up, wrote, “On my side of the veil everything was black: the homes, the people, the churches, the schools, the Negro park with Negro park police. . . . There were two Louisvilles and, in America, two Americas.” It was a childhood in which Cassius saw his mother turned away for a drink of water at a luncheonette after a hard day of cleaning the floors and toilets of white families. These were daily scenes, the racial arrangements of Louisville.
Revisionist history (i.e., lies, propaganda, misinformation) isn’t only related to White society and sports writers which now all hypocritically sing Ali’s praises all day long while in the 1960s and 70s was Ali’s avowed enemies and critics. We find that Cassius Clay’s Muslim name, Muhammad Ali has some historical problems. Of course ‘Muhammad’ was the prophet of Allah and the creator/progenitor of the Muslim religion Islam, yet historically Muhammad was a big trader in slavery and not a man historically known to give liberty and freedom to others. In other words, slavery not freedom is synonymous with Islam… then and now.
Islam and Revisionist History
One thing Islam has in common with the Socialists-Progressives of today is their allegiance to the Eternal Lie to further their Machiavellian agenda at all costs. Karl Marx, the father of communism and socialism gave today’s criminal politicians, religionists and academic class their marching orders— “The first battlefield is the rewriting of history.” Thus, the revisionist lies perpetuated by Islam continuously over 14 centuries is this— “Our Prophet (peace be upon him) never approved of slavery. He once purchased the life of a slave who came to him, liberating him from his master!”
On a revelatory website, What Makes Islam so Different? we see firsthand Islamic revisionist history operating in many sectors today. For example, the existential myth that Muhammad was an abolitionist who acquired liberty for his slaves, that’s a lie, but according to Sahih Muslim 3901 Muhammad actually “purchased” the slave by trading two black slaves, which is the opposite of emancipation by perpetuating their bondage. Furthermore, it creates the fact that the Prophet Muhammad owned and trafficked in Black African slaves. As a rich Arab tribal leader, he surely could have emancipated all three slaves, yet chose instead to sell the two Africans into a certain short, tortuous and brutish life as seventh-century slaves.
Throughout this historical record nothing exists of the Prophet Muhammad “liberating” slaves seized in battle, except there was a quid pro quo or a means to an end where he personally benefitted from the slave transaction. In reality, he made slaves out of those who were formerly free people, villages, cities, countries, nations he conquered, where the tactics was usually to kill all the men and enslave the women and children who were, (like ISIS does today), used and trafficked as sex slaves whether old women or children as young as 8 years old. Occasionally Muhammad used families as clout to force conversion of their male relatives or associations into accepting Islam. For example, in the passage from Ibn Ishaq/Hisham 879:
The apostle told them to tell Malik that if he came to him as a Muslim he would return his family and property to him and give him a hundred camels.
Like the unspeakable atrocities of ISIS in modern times in Syria and Iraq, Muhammed in seventh century Arabia seized women by the tens of thousands and passed them around as rewards to his soldiers and traded with other soldiers and trafficked hapless sex slave victims like animals. This verse below chronicled Muhammad giving women as sex slaves to the three men who would become his descendants, the future caliphs Umar, Uthman and Ali, the last person being the same name given to the celebrated boxer Muhammed Ali. The passage in Ibn Ishaq/Hisham 878 reads:
The apostle gave Ali a girl called Rayta; and he gave Uthman a girl called Zaynab; and he gave Umar a girl whom Umar gave to his son Abdullah.
Islam is synonymous with slavery and the Muslim religion has perpetrated slavery for over 14 centuries to this day. In fact, there are more slaves in America and throughout the world in 2016 than at any other time in history due in large part to Islam. In the Quran 4:24,33:52, Allah gave Muslim men a divine commandment to own as many sex slaves as they desired. This may sound strange to us today because the Marxist academics that dominate today’s Academy have rewritten history.
In rewriting history modern apologists of the Socialist-Progressive Left often imagine that Allah’s sex slave commandment only applied to women captured in battle (see also Myth: Muhammad Would Never Approve of Rape), nevertheless the same perverted, inhumane license is approved of to all Muslim men in 70:30, a passage “revealed” to the Muslims in Mecca, outside the context of battle or warfare of any kind.
Cassius Marcellus Clay = Liberator; Muhammad & Ali = Slavers
In conclusion, as the boxer and most famous American Muslim, Muhammad Ali is laid to rest today, think about the bitter irony of how Ali gave up a very laudatory abolitionist name, Cassius Marcellus Clay (1810-1903), who not only freed his 40 slaves after listening to a speech by the legendary abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison while a student at Yale in 1832, but was one of President Abraham Lincoln’s most trusted advisors, serving as Ambassador to Russia (1861-63) and bringing freedom in part to Czarist Russia while witnessing the Czar’s Emancipation Manifesto or “The Peasant Reform of 1861” which abolished serfdom (slavery) throughout the Russian Empire.
Then there is the Prophet Muhammad who as the founder of Islam and all of their derivatives sects Wahhabism and in modern times, ISIS, whose legacy of millions and millions of slaves over 1400 years to this day has caused the deconstruction of Europe and America with unchecked mass Muslim illegal immigration, global terrorism, child rape, Christian beheadings and young Yazidi girls burned alive for refusing to become sex slaves to ISIS, and existential, global religious war—all Muslim grotesqueries that are without parallel in human history.
Indeed, a name can determine the course of history… for good over for evil. R.I.P. Muhammad Ali (formerly Cassius Clay).
Category: Commentary
