Tuesday, conservative columnist and once suspended plagiarist Jeff Jacoby of The Boston Globe felt the need, and no doubt, concern, to point out to the world in a Coumn titled “Muhammad Ali’s abhorrent views on race.” that the recently deceased and almost universally mourned boxing great and human rights champion Muhammad Ali once said, as a twenty five year old recent convert to Elijah Muhammad’s brand of Black Separatist Islam, some things about about race relations in 1968 that he, Jacoby, freaking God Almighty, in 2016, thought not politically correct.
In the column, undoubtedly rushed to print, lest Ali be properly laid to rest before it’s shit-stirring emergence, and still dripping virtual spittle, Jacoby wrote.
“...when Ali was in his prime, the uninhibited “king of the world,” he was no expounder of brotherhood and racial broad-mindedness. On the contrary, he was an unabashed bigot and racial separatist and wasn’t shy about saying so.
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. “I don’t hate rattlesnakes, I don’t hate tigers — I just know I can’t get along with them,” he said. “I don’t want to try to eat with them or sleep with them.”
This bit of rhetoric which, I presume many here, being the well read group we comprise, are already familiar with, comes from an interview Ali did with the aforementioned amiable (and obviously star struck) ace Professional Tennis Commentator Bud Collins conducted during the time period when an essentially apartheid white power structure had stripped Ali of his World Champion Title, restricted him from traveling abroad, and effectively destroyed his ability to practice his profession and provide for his family. I will post it below the fold for context.