In
a wide-ranging 1968 interview with Bud Collins, the storied Boston Globe sports reporter, Ali insisted that it was as unnatural to expect blacks and whites to live together as it would be to expect humans to live with wild animals. āI donāt hate rattlesnakes, I donāt hate tigers ā I just know I canāt get along with them,ā he said. āI donāt want to try to eat with them or sleep with them.ā
Ali was many fine things, but a champion of civil rights wasnāt among them.
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Collins asked: āYou donāt think that we can ever get along?ā
āI know whites and blacks cannot get along; this is nature,ā Ali replied. That was why he liked George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor who was then running for president.
Collins wasnāt sure heād heard right. āYou like George Wallace?ā
āYes, sir,ā said Ali. āI like what he says. He says Negroes shouldnāt force themselves in white neighborhoods, and white people shouldnāt have to move out of the neighborhood just because one Negro comes.
Now that makes sense.ā
This was not some inexplicable aberration. It reflected a hateful worldview that Ali, as a devotee of Elijah Muhammad and the segregationist Nation of Islam, espoused for years. At one point, he even
appeared before a Ku Klux Klan rally. It was āa hell of a scene,ā he later boasted ā Klansmen with hoods, a burning cross, āand me on the platform,ā preaching strict racial separation. āBlack people should marry their own women,ā Ali declaimed. āBluebirds with bluebirds, red birds with red birds, pigeons with pigeons, eagles with eagles. God didnāt make no mistake!ā
