Introduction
There has been a very interesting development in the construct known as race. The phrase White Supremacy has entered the vernacular. The phrase has become so popular that it’s now being used around the world. Particularly in the Western European nations. The meaning of the phrase has even evolved from the way to discuss “White to Black” relations into the way to discuss “White to People of Color” relations. Although most American Blacks don’t like this latter way of using the phrase because they see it as another acquiescence for Whites. That is, another example of how Whites like to limit recognition of their racism against Blacks by conveniently lumping other ethnicities into the equation.
The concept of White Supremacy in the U.S. dates to 1492, when the first Europeans came to what would become known as “the new world,” and the genocide against the Aboriginals ensued. In 1619 White Supremacy found itself enslaving Africans. In 1787 White Supremacy found itself unable to decide whether to constitutionally abolish the business. This created a continuous debate about the issue throughout U.S. expansion westward to California.
Before the phrase White Supremacy, there was no such convenient phrase for race relations. This made race a much more difficult subject to discuss. The only phrase everyone knew was Jim Crow.
Initially Jim Crow was a real person. A struggling White actor named Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice of Louisville, Kentucky. Daddy Rice was able to stop struggling when he found he could earn a lot of money by making fun of Negroes. “Negro” is another old time phrase. In vogue today is “Black.” One day in the 1830’s Rice gave himself the name “Jim Crow,” came on stage wearing black make-up, acting like a singing, and dancing fool. The act was so successful he was able to get it booked across the United States as well as internationally. He was even able to expand his act to include other characters, such as Jim Dandy, Zip Coon and Sambo.1
However, Jim Crow did not just come out of Daddy Rice’s imagination. Jim Crow was a metaphor for America’s slavery business, and the way of life it promulgated. A way of life, again constantly debated, but legitimized and affirmed in 1857 by a decision of the Supreme Court. The case, Dredd Scott v Sanford, ruled that Negroes were neither citizens nor people, but property. This decision is now recognized as one of the leading causes of the American Civil War between the Union North and Confederate South. However, the absolute leading cause of the Civil War occurred when Abraham Lincoln of the new anti-slavery Republican Party was elected President in 1860. For the pro-slavery leaders in the South, it was essentially the final straw. Thirty-seven days after Lincoln’s inauguration in 1861 the American Civil War began, Jim Crow the person coincidentally died in the same year Lincoln was elected and Jim Crow the mimicked way of life had to be put on standby until the Civil War could be resolved.
During the war President Lincoln freed some of the enslaved with the Emancipation Proclamation. Those who were enslaved in the rebellious states and least likely to know they were free. On April 9, 1865, in what standard histories consider the end of the Civil War, one Confederate army, General Lee, surrendered at Appomattox, Virginia. But other battle sites and their generals didn’t surrender until June of 1865. The newest national holiday, Juneteenth, when Negroes in Texas learned they were “free,” speaks to this contradiction.
The Confederates never really surrendered because immediately following General Lee’s surrender they started creating laws, initially called Black Codes, that discriminated against Negroes. It was these Black Codes that resuscitated the Jim Crow way of life. These laws codified in the Southern and Border states (slave states that bordered the free states), denied Negroes the right to vote, excluded Negroes from public transport and facilities, from juries, from jobs, and from neighborhoods. Lynching (murder of Negroes) was legal and oftentimes, public social events. Most of the victims of Lynch Law were hanged or shot, but some were burned at the stake, castrated, beaten with clubs, or dismembered. Many Christian ministers and theologians taught that Whites were the “Chosen People,” Negroes were cursed and meant to be servants, and God supported racial segregation. “Craniologists,” eugenicists, phrenologists, and Social Darwinists, at every educational level, buttressed the belief that Negroes were innately intellectually and culturally inferior to Whites. Newspaper and magazine writers routinely referred to Negroes as Niggers, Coons, and Darkies.
There was even a Jim Crow etiquette. Some examples: a Negro male could not offer to shake hands with a White male; a Negro male could not offer his hand or any other part of his body to a White woman, and Negroes and Whites were not supposed to eat together. If they did eat together, Whites were to be served first, and some sort of partition was to be placed between them. Negroes were not allowed to show affection toward one another in public. Negroes were introduced to Whites, never Whites to Negroes. Whites did not use courtesy titles of respect when referring to Negroes, who were called by their first names. Negroes had to use courtesy titles when referring to Whites and were not allowed to call them by their first names. If a Negro person rode in a vehicle driven by a White person, the Negro person sat in the back seat, or the back of a truck. White motorists had the right-of-way at all intersections. Negroes were NEVER to assert or even intimate that a White person was lying, impute dishonorable intentions to a White person, lay claim to, or demonstrate, superior knowledge or intelligence, curse a White person, laugh derisively at a White person, or comment upon the appearance of a White female.2
Another aspect of the surrender that really wasn’t and evolution of Jim Crow was the fraud now known as Reconstruction. There were two primary aspects of Reconstruction. One was the garrisoning of federal troops in the rebellious Confederate states to help keep the peace and allow negroes to gain political autonomy. However, Reconstruction was prematurely brought to an end because of a bipartisan compromise by the federal lawmakers to sacrifice Negroes and the formerly enslaved, as part of the question of which party’s candidate for President would be named the victor. Rutherford B. Hayes, Republican, would be named the victor.
The second primary aspect of Reconstruction was the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. The so-called Reconstruction Amendments. The 13th Amendment was supposed to abolish slavery. However, the following tragic story exposes how much of a fraud the 13th Amendment was. The story was published in a book entitled Slavery By Another Name; The Re-enslavement of Black People In America From The Civil War To World War II:
“On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the sheriff of Shelby County, Alabama, and charged with ‘vagrancy’,
Cottenham had committed no true crime. Vagrancy, the offense of a person not being able to prove at a given moment that he or she is employed, was a new and flimsy concoction dredged up from legal obscurity at the end of the nineteenth century by the state legislatures of Alabama and other southern states. It was capriciously enforced by local sheriffs and constables adjudicated by mayors and notaries public recorded haphazardly or not at all in court records and most tellingly in a time of massive unemployment among all southern men, was reserved almost exclusively for black men. Cottenham’s offense was blackness.
After three days behind bars, twenty-two-year-old Cottenham was found guilty in a swift appearance before the county judge and immediately sentenced to a thirty-day term of hard labor. Unable to pay the array of fees assessed on every prisoner—fees to the sheriff, the deputy, the court clerk, the witnesses—Cottenham’s sentence was extended to nearly a year of hard labor.
The next day, Cottenham, the youngest of nine children born to former slaves in an adjoining county, was sold. Under a standing arrangement between the county and a vast subsidiary of the industrial titan of the North—U.S. Steel Corporation—the sheriff turned the young man over to the company for the duration of his sentence. In return, the subsidiary, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, gave the county $12 a month to pay off Cottenham’s fine and fees. What the company’s managers did with Cottenham, and thousands of other black men they purchased from sheriffs across Alabama, was entirely up to them.
A few hours later, the company plunged Cottenham into the darkness of a mine called Slope No. 12—one shaft in a vast subterranean labyrinth on the edge of Birmingham known as the Pratt Mines. There, he was chained inside a long wooden barrack at night and required to spend nearly every waking hour digging and loading coal. His required daily ‘task’ was to remove eight tons of coal from the mine. Cottenham was subject to the whip for failure to dig the requisite amount, at risk of physical torture for disobedience, and vulnerable to the sexual predations of other miners—many of whom already had passed years or decades in their own chthonian confinement. The lightless catacombs of black rock, packed with hundreds of desperate men slick with sweat and coated in pulverized coal, must have exceeded any vision of hell a boy born in the countryside of Alabama—even a child of slaves—could have ever imagined.
Waves of disease ripped through the population. In the month before Cottenham arrived at the prison mine, pneumonia and tuberculosis sickened dozens. Within his first four weeks, six died. Before the year was over, almost sixty men forced into Slope 12 were dead of disease, accidents, or homicide. Most of the broken bodies, along with hundreds of others before and after were dumped into shallow graves scattered among the refuse of the mine. Others were incinerated in nearby ovens used to blast millions of tons of coal brought to the surface into coke—the carbon-rich fuel essential to U.S. Steel’s production of iron. Forty-five years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freeing American slaves, Green Cottenham and more than a thousand other black men toiled under the lash at Slope 12. Imprisoned in what was then the most advanced city of the South, guarded by whipping bosses employed by the most iconic example of the modern corporation emerging in the gilded North, they were slaves in all but name.”3
That’s right. The same Amendment that was supposed to abolish slavery, the 13th, is the same Amendment that was used to re-enslave Negroes. The Amendment reads, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Passed by Congress on January 31, 1865, and ratified on December 6, 1865, it’s an obvious loophole clause. Compounding this is the fact that the lawmakers knew the loophole was being implemented and ignoring it. The 13th Amendment is open statutory fraud.
Likewise, for the 14th Amendment. This Amendment supposedly gave citizenship to Negroes and the formerly enslaved. However, citizenship meant nothing. That’s the point of the Cottenham story. Moreover, the clause does not specify Negro. Instead, it reads, “All persons born or naturalized in the US.” It should have read, “all Negroes born or naturalized in the US.” The failure to be specific makes the 14th Amendment another loophole and White acquiescence. This is even though the new President following the assassination of Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, a staunch racist, had to be impeached before the 14th Amendment could be ratified in 1866.
The 15th Amendment may be the most difficult of them all to reconcile. This Amendment supposedly gave all citizens the right to vote. Putting the whole citizenship for Negroes issue aside for a moment, the clause reads, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” It was ratified on February 3, 1870.
The problem starts with the fact that the very idea of all citizens having the right to vote was completely new. That is, until the 15th Amendment, the Constitution did not mention “voting rights.” Voting was left for the individual states to decide, and those states decided voting would only be allowed for White men who owned property. The failure to have the Amendment speak to this new thing called “voting rights” plus the fact that the Amendment was promoted as something to benefit Negroes led to it not being enforced and just plain ignored. Although the truth is the Amendment was only ratified after it could be shown to help Whites too. This is why, as if the 15th Amendment or even the newer 24th Amendment do not exist, “voting rights” and even “voter suppression,” continue to be debated by lawmakers to this present day. With all the additional “voting rights” laws that have had to be enacted since the 15th Amendment, the 15th Amendment has been de facto repealed.
Even in terms of education the surrender of Confederate General Lee to Union General Grant has been allowed to be known and taught in public schools in the South to this present day, as “The Lost Cause.” A narrative that says the Civil War was not about slavery, but States-Rights and a myriad of other nonsensical lies.
The common denominator with all these anti-Jim Crow efforts is the lack of commitment on the part of the federal government. Add to this the ability of lawmakers who don’t agree with a Supreme Court decision, or an Amendment to the Constitution, to simply create new laws that circumvent those decisions or laws and we get Jim Crow the legal system. A fake person metamorphosized into a racial system.
Basically, Jim Crow was a whole other legal system, inside the main federal legal system. Being practiced and abided by, even though the laws were supposed to be illegal pursuant to the U. S. Constitution. This of course led to Jim Crow coming before the Supreme Court for a decision in 1896. The case was called Plessy v. Ferguson. The case was about a Negro not being able to sit in any available seat on a public railroad train. In a shocking decision the Supreme Court ruled Jim Crow segregation was legal if there were equal accommodations. The so-called “separate but equal” doctrine. But of course, accommodations were never equal. The decision is shocking because it involved a legal entity, the Supreme Court, basically breaking the law. The law being the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. It was also shocking in terms of its unmitigated support of Jim Crow compounded by the lack of outrage over it. Bottom line, Jim Crow was further emboldened.
In 1954 this duo-legal system again forced an inevitable return of the question of Jim Crow to the Supreme Court. This time it was the well-known case Brown v. Board of Education. The case was about the unfairness of a Negro girl having to walk several miles to an all-Negro school, despite another all-White school being much closer to her home. In this decision the court rationalized that if the issue is all about segregation just for the sake of segregation, then it is wrong, particularly when the subject matter is education. The Brown v. Board of Education case concluded that “separate is inherently unequal” thereby reversing Plessy v. Ferguson and making segregation illegal.
However, by the time Brown v Board of Ed was made the law of the land, Jim Crow, was so widespread that it influenced every state and every aspect of American culture. It was going to take more than a simple Supreme Court decision to fix. A comprehensive government sponsored strategy, for example. Or perhaps something as simple as a survey, eradication, and clean-up of Confederate vestiges like their flag and statues. Or even simpler still, a plain old announcement, or proclamation, saying that as of Brown v Board of Education all Jim Crow laws are illegitimate and unconstitutional. But none of it ever happened. It didn’t happen for all the same lack of commitment reasons manifested in the Emancipation Proclamation, the casual acceptance of surrender at Appomattox, the Reconstruction, the Reconstruction Amendments, Plessy v Ferguson, etc. It also didn’t happen because of another item agreed to by all. An insidious taboo that the words “Jim Crow” was not to be mentioned. Jim Crow was not mentioned in Plessy nor Brown.
An interesting example of this insidious taboo of denial is found in a circa 1930’s through 1960’s book The Negro Motorist Green Book. Negroes used it when they had to drive outside of their community. It was a negro survival guide. It listed locations where they could rest, eat, and fuel-up without fear of being lynched. Nevertheless, until the 2018 release of Green Book, the movie, most people had never heard of it. Not its publication, not its various editions, not its contributors, not its required companionship, because discussing it would require mentioning Jim Crow. Nevertheless, it was the Brown v Board of Education outlawing of Jim Crow that re-ignited the Civil War. Politicians and the fourth branch (the media) gave it the misnomer of “the Civil Rights Era,” But it should be known as Phase Two of the Civil War (CWII). It involved the same white supremacy issue and it included all the trappings of war, the military, kill or be killed, bombs, etc. Phase two took 89 years, but the casualness with which General Lee’s surrender was accepted left a lot of unfinished business. In fact, the “civil rights era,” is nothing but another White Acquiescence, promulgated by the forces of Jim Crow itself.
I have been curating a Muhammad Ali archive since October 27, 1970. The day after his bout against Jerry Quarry and return from exile. Thousands of articles, photos, letters, editorials, cartoons, and other media. All of it contemporaneous to when it was written, unfiltered, and uninfluenced by time. Thousands of interviews, everything Ali ever publicly said, from the beginning of his career through to 2016 the year he passed. I call it The Primary Source.
It is extraordinary how closely Ali’s boxing career follows the Jim Crow vs Brown era. The Ali v U.S. legal case, for example, exposed the notorious Cointelpro FBI program of surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. et al. If not for that case who knows when the public would have learned of what the FBI was doing.
Usually, fourth branch coverage of Ali is limited to the four corners of his boxing career. Thus, inherently discounting the role Jim Crow played in his life, our understanding of Ali, and Jim Crow. A Sports Illustrated cover story about Ali by Tim Layden dated October 2015, less than a year before Ali’s death, is further evidence of this. It reads, “The source of his (Ali’s) influence is difficult to pinpoint.”4 But it’s only difficult because the four corners of his boxing career are all Mr. Layden wants to discuss. Add in the taboo against using the phrase Jim Crow and “Ali’s influence (becomes) difficult to pinpoint.” However, it was Jim Crow that was Ali’s biggest opponent. The evidence of this is locked in the law. Making something such as segregation law, is what it does to the meaning of “law-abiding.” It forces everyone to become a Jim Crow supporter or a criminal. Not just White, politicians, judges, police, etc, but paradoxically, Negroes too, and it expresses itself, not just in the states that codified Jim Crow, but throughout the nation.
My career as a high school economics, politics, and American History teacher further informs that this aspect of law is never examined in our schools. “Should a person comply with an unjust law?” Should the persecuted law-abiding citizen remain law-abiding? Can a persecuted Negro be a law-abiding citizen? The non-persecuted, White, law-abiding citizen doesn’t have to ask himself these questions. In fact, White law-abiding citizens simply comply with the law and rationalize that all who fail to comply are criminals. But what if the people are not made clear on what the law is? Jim Crow or Brown’?
Muhammad Ali was a persecuted Negro who had to ask himself the question of Jim Crow or Brown’ every day. Thus Untold’ is about Jim Crow versus Brown’ and how Ali answered this question. That is, despite the mere mention of Jim Crow being taboo. It’s an untold part of American History.
1 Rite of Passage
Jim Crow and Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., who would later become Muhammad Ali, were both born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. Jim Crow in the 1830’s and Cassius Clay on January 17, 1942.
Cassius’ father, Cassius Marcellus Clay Sr., had a somewhat steady income as a freelance sign painter. Mother, Odessa Lee O’Grady Clay, did domestic work. Cassius had one sibling, a brother, Rudolph Valentino Clay, who was just one day from being exactly eighteen months Cassius’ junior. The family lived on the Negro side of town.
Cassius was raised “a good Christian Negro boy.” Southern jargon for both his mother and father were in tow. Also, Southern for his parents were god-fearing church goers who brought Cassius to church with them. Also, Southern for he was not a juvenile delinquent. The “Negro boy” part refers to the fact that all Negroes, adults included, were called “boy.” Something both Clay’s and Rudy learned at an early age. Adding “Negro” to the statement is the way to distinguish that the person referenced was indeed a boy in the regular sense of the word. The “good Christian” part means Cassius and the family self-identified as “American Negroes,” not as Africans or dark-skinned people from some other part of the world. This is an important Jim Crow distinction. The rationale being if they were indeed dark skinned “Niggers,” but visiting from another country they aren’t “our Niggers” and therefore were to be treated differently. That is, better, with more respect. Of course, “better” and “with more respect” was all dependent upon Jim Crow having had the opportunity to learn in advance that the “darkies” in question were not “their Niggers.” Otherwise, all bets were off, and Jim Crow therefore could not be accused of presuming. In other words, the Clays suffered all the same demeaning, dehumanizing, psycho-social retarding, and abusive lessons that the other Negroes had to endure under Jim Crow.
There are three Jim Crow based experiences that are crucial to knowing how Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali. They coalesced to occur relatively close to each other, all when Clay was pubescent, and his most malleable. The first occurred in the spring of 1954, when the Supreme Court knocked out its own standing landmark Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” decision of 1896 and put the Brown v. Board of Education “separate is inherently unequal” decision of 1954 in its place. Thus, making segregation or Jim Crow illegal throughout the nation. After fourth branch (media) coverage the Clays surely knew something of its significance. Cassius was 12 years old.
The second major experience occurred a couple of months later in the summer of that same year, 1954. Cassius began learning to box. All but the Jim Crow aspect of this story is well-known. Young Cassius had been so enthused with a social event at a Catholic School recreation center that he failed to lock and secure his new bike before going inside. When he came back out the bike was gone. He immediately sought out a police officer to report the theft. It is here that the Jim Crow part comes in. Back then, 1954, Negroes did not report anything to the police. The police were White and part of the problem, whatever the problem was. Cassius, however, was so distraught about his bike and the “whuppin” he was surely going to get from his father that young Cassius ignored Jim Crow to find the nearest police officer he could. Whuppin, is more Southern jargon and a word well-known to be used by Clay/Ali. It’s derived from “whip.” What the White slave owners did to the Negro enslaved. The term offers both insight into how ingrained in Southern culture the concept was, and how casually it was adapted into mainstream vernacular.
Cassius found the officer he was looking for at a boxing gym adjacent to the recreation center. There is no known report or investigation of the theft. Instead, after hearing what Cassius had to say, the officer Joe Elsby Martin, did what he did for all young men who came down to his gym. He invited Cassius to join. In his book, The Greatest, Muhammad Ali says it was not until a short time after when he saw Martin on television that he decided to take him up on his offer. The show was called Tomorrow’s Champions and it featured kids from the community.1
In his book Muhammad Ali further explained that from the outset working with Officer Martin was a conflict for him. The problem was Cassius quickly learned there was another boxing teacher and trainer nearby, Fred Stoner, a Negro, who was superior to Martin. But Martin, a White, as Clay says, “(had) the complexion for the connection.” His television show included payment of $4.00 every time one of his boxers appeared on it. Plus, Martin told Cassius in no uncertain terms that he was not allowed to work with Stoner. To solve the problem, Cassius worked with Martin by day and sneaked over to Stoner by night.2 As a result, Cassius, already an extrovert, was started down the road to stardom at the tender age of twelve.
The third major Jim Crow experience occurred the following year. In August of 1955, with the well-known lynching of Emmett Till in Jim Crow Mississippi. Normally, this would have been just another lynching that was not covered by the fourth branch. But the influence of Brown v Board of Education and Emmett’s mother, Emmett was only 14 years old, insisting on an open casket “so the world can see” what Jim Crow had done to her son forced the fourth branch to cover it. The fourth branch decided not only to report the lynching, but to report it from the point of view of a moral indictment. The in-casket photo of her son’s mangled face and body captured both national and international attention. Cassius, now 13 years of age, was only 6 months younger than Till. In The Greatest Muhammad Ali wrote, “I felt a deep kinship to him.”3 Unfortunately, he was not referring to the largest kinship of all. How Reconstruction and Brown v Board of Education both allowed Negroes to die.