The world has been paying tribute to the late Muhammad Ali who died recently. He has been praised for his sporting achievements, his courageous opposition to the Vietnam war and his advocacy on behalf of fellow African-Americans. But some still believe he was disloyal to his country.
Before passing judgment it would be wise to consider the things that shaped his life. For example, when he returned home having won a gold boxing medal for his country in the 1960 Rome Olympics, he was refused service in a “whites only” restaurant, a not uncommon practice at the time. This experience fired his civil rights activity and he later renounced his Christian faith and what he described as his “slave” name, Cassius Clay, and became a Muslim, Muhammad Ali. His disowning of Christianity is understandable given that the anti-black sentiments he experienced were supported in white fundamentalist Protestant churches in the South. The racist ideology supporting such views, however, was by no means a 20th-century American phenomenon.
In 2006 when the Church of England general synod was celebrating its positive role in the abolition of slavery 200 years previously, the then Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said that the church ought also to acknowledge the role it played in the 18th century in benefiting from slave labour in the Caribbean. “To speak here of repentance and apology is not words alone; it is part of our witness to the Gospel, to a world that needs to hear that the past must be faced and healed and cannot be ignored.”
More recently the New York Times reported that many of today's leading American universities, including Columbia and Harvard, once had ties to the slave trade. The article detailed the sale and transportation of slaves in 1838, hundreds of men, women and children, to work on plantations in the deep south. "This was no ordinary slave sale. The enslaved African-Americans belonged to the nation's most prominent Jesuit priests. and they were sold to help secure the future of the premier Catholic institution of higher learning at the time . . . Georgetown University." The slaves were mostly Christian, which is significant given what we read in tomorrow's epistle about relationships: "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." How could our spiritual ancestors read that in church one day and engage in the slave trade the next? Furthermore, what are the churches doing now or failing to do that will shock in years to come?
Theme music chosen for a BBC television tribute to Muhammad Ali included the song To be Young, Gifted and Black. It was co-written by Nina Simone, a talented black musician from North Carolina, the daughter of a pastor. As a young woman she hoped to become a concert pianist and with help from friends enrolled in a New York music school. She then applied for a scholarship to the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia but she was turned down despite a well-received audition, a decision she attributed to racial prejudice. She used her later musical career to promote civil rights. Two days before she died in 2003 the Curtis Institute of Music, which had denied her a scholarship all those years previously, gave her an honorary degree.
People like Nina Simone and Muhammad Ali represent generations of innocents destroyed by people and institutions who considered them inferior. They also represent those who refuse to lie down, as a verse from Young Gifted and Black makes clear: "When you feel really low/ there's a great truth you should know/ When you're young, gifted and black/ Your soul's intact".
Archbishop Williams left us nowhere to hide when he told that synod in 2006: “We . . . share the shame and the sinfulness of our predecessors, and part of what we can do, with them and for them in the Body of Christ, is prayerful acknowledgment of the failure that is part of us, not just of some distant ‘them’.”