Tag: Ezra Beinart
A New Kind of Black Man: Muhammad Ali’s Political Conversion to the Nation of Islam
Ezra Beinart shows that Muhammad Ali’s conversion to the Nation of Islam in 1964 outraged sports journalists, boxing promoters, civil rights leaders and millions of White boxing fans. It provoked them because his new faith signified not just a religious identity but a political one. As Ali detailed in a 1967 letter to his wife, his embrace of the Nation of Islam (NOI) and rejection of Christianity represented a rejection of what he saw as the slave master’s religion, forced upon Black Americans to keep them submissive.
