Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [44]
Herbert was going to make sure that his father would never hear the words debt and money emanate from Ali again. In the meantime, he was allowed to forage for paydays. The college lectures were fewer in number, his novelty either having faded or the kids having become wise to his narrow platform. When the boxing film archivist Jimmy Jacobs approached him about appearing in a documentary, Ali nearly kissed his hand. There were five days of shooting, and at the end of each Ali was given a thousand dollars in cash. By carrier pigeon, perhaps, Herbert notified Ali that he was going to relocate him in Philadelphia, in the shadow of the most violent Muslim mosque in the country and under the watchful eye of a diligent “minder” named Jeremiah Shabazz.
As bleak as the picture was, especially with Richard Nixon now president and exercising his own brand of dementia on Vietnam, the bandwagon was definitely heading Ali’s way. The national consensus for the war was fragmenting rapidly, with mainstream families whose sons were exposed to the draft, who were only thirteen when it had begun in earnest, now leaning heavily on their politicians. The atmosphere was fast becoming perfect. The government wouldn’t risk a loss of face by giving him his passport back, but it couldn’t interfere with commerce. So thought Harold Conrad, to whom the opposition out there was now just “a few big-mouth congressmen.” Conrad was the reigning authority on the campaign to reinstate Ali. “I’ve been to more states than rain,” he said. “Reagan stopped me in California. I was close in Montana. They wanted a hundred grand or so for pocket money. I think we’re getting close again; the hysteria is over.”
What Conrad needed was the perfect juxtaposition of motive and power. “Politicians did in Ali,” Conrad said, “and they’ll let him back.” And well into 1970, he found a triad of influence that disputed reason and proved how anemic imagination is when it comes to politics. He had a black state senator, a Jewish mayor in, of all places, Atlanta, an Old South town in a state run by a governor who told his troopers during Martin Luther King’s funeral that if marchers got out of hand at his capitol they were to “shoot ’em down and stack ’em up.” On the narrow plus side, it was true that Atlanta was heavily black and the base camp of civil rights leaders. It was also evident that Atlanta had grown bored with its Gone with the Wind reference in the national mind and eager to replace magnolia and rustling crinoline with the high-rise office buildings, job markets and culture that identified the classic cities of the world. Where was the common ground for such a spectacular event as Ali’s return? While state senator Leroy Johnson and Mayor Sam Massell of Atlanta supported the fight, Governor Lester Maddox opposed it.
Though he had a lot of company at the time, Maddox would prove to be the last practitioner of what Robert Sherrill called the “gothic politics of the South.” He was from the lineage of Earl Long, Herman Talmadge, Leander Perez, Orville Faubus, and George Wallace, his Alabama peer, who seemed to wonder why critics wasted column inches on Lester when he could do away with him in one line: “Y’know, Lester ain’t got much character.” Wallace always treated him as if he were Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, the harmless simpleton, his political actions dictated by moon phases. Civil rights leader Hosea Williams didn’t think he was harmless, calling him a “living crime, an offense to God Almighty, a cancer that must be rooted out.” In another life, he ran a chicken shack