Читать книгу Sporting Blood. Tales from the Dark Side of Boxing онлайн

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“I ain't no Christian. I can't be, when I see all of the colored people fighting for forced integration getting blowed up. They get hit by stones and chewed up by dogs and they blow up a Negro church and don't find the killers. I get telephone calls every day. They want me to carry signs. They want me to picket. They told me it would be a wonderful thing if I married a white woman because this would be good for brotherhood. I don't want to be blown up. I don't want to be washed down sewers. I just want to be happy with my own kind. I'm the heavyweight champion but, right now, there are some neighborhoods I can't move into. I know how to dodge booby traps and dogs. I dodge them by staying in my own neighborhood. I'm no troublemaker. I don't believe in forced integration.”

—Muhammad Ali, 1964

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That a naive young man who fainted after getting his first kiss from a high school sweetheart would someday turn into the most prominent member of a lucifugous sect is hard to imagine. With its odd cosmology, its talk of “white devils,” its militant stance and its hellfire outlook—so in tune with the times—the Nation of Islam shocked the heartland.