There have been so many documentaries made about Muhammad Ali, you might think, what else is there left to say? Cassius X answers that by honing in on the pivotal years of Ali’s life, the development of his political consciousness and the fights which established him as a serious force in the boxing industry. That story is told through the transition of his name, from Cassius Clay, to Cassius X, to Muhammad Ali.
Covering 1959 to 1965, you forget just how young he was. This is really his coming of age story, where his identity is formed. He’s at the Olympics winning gold in lightweight boxing, and journalists in Italy are asking him, Cassius is an ancient Roman name, how did it end up on a boxer from Kentucky? He gives the answer anyone would about their name, Cassius Clay is a family name, passed down from father to son. He’s never really thought about it much, any more than anybody else would.
But it was fashionable back in the day for slaveholders to give their slaves classical names, especially when it came to men who did heavy manual labour. It was their snide little in-joke to give these lofty names from intellectual tradition to men they saw as little more than beasts. It was a mockery and a denigration.
People were stripped of their name when they were taken into slavery, as they were stripped of everything else. Their surname was the surname of their owner. They carried it the same way they carried their brand.
But these things were not commonly known in America before the 60s, even among African-Americans. The history of enslaved people in the U.S. was yet another thing that had been taken, silenced when slaves were barred from literacy that might help them pass down their experiences. Schools taught only the history of White America and white Americans.
Into this erasure came like a bombshell the Nation of Islam. There were many, many organisations working towards the betterment and protection of African-Americans, spanning a huge spectrum of opinions and worldviews. But undoubtedly the Nation was one of the most influential. Stressing self-reliance instead of integration, self-defence instead of non-violence, and Black power and pride instead of forming coalitions. They were considered radical and dangerous. And one of the most radical things they spoke on was recovering a Black identity as part of the African diaspora, linking the oppression of today in segregation back through the oppression of the past in slavery, and extending it globally across colonialism and imperialism, to give a name and shape to white supremacy as a global destructive force. It was these ideas Cassius heard when listening to Elijah Muhammad on the radio.
This was as his career was just beginning, when he was regarded as charming but a braggart, someone who had not yet paid their dues. And seeing these early fights, there was some basis for that. He had won at the Olympics, but he wasn’t an established professional boxer. He had yet to go up against men who were in the prime of their career, who had real experience. There were lots of fights which are retroactively swept up in his legend as The Greatest, which at the time were touch and go.
Cassius X follows that early development of him as a man, as a boxer, as a Muslim, as politically conscious, as a cultural icon. It is the journey from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali which describes not just the character of the man, but the epoch in which he was living.