Locally, some people might point to his fight against Chuck Wepner at the Richfield Coliseum in 1975 as the late Muhammad Ali’s biggest moment in Northeast Ohio.
While that was indeed huge – it was Ali’s only fight not just in Cleveland/Akron area but in Ohio overall, and it served as the inspiration for the movie, “Rocky,” a year later – it was not his lone, or even his most significant, event in the region.
There was something much, much bigger, and even tremendously historic. It came eight years before the fight with Wepner, and in fact occurred exactly 49 years ago today, on June 4, 1967.
The moment, which had a heavy Browns influence and also was a who’s who of top African American athletes at the time, took place on a Sunday afternoon along Euclid Avenue in Cleveland at the offices of what was then the Negro Industrial Economic Union, and later became the Black Economic Union.
In what would come to be known simply as the “Ali Summit,” these athletes – these burgeoning social leaders – held a press conference to do a litmus test on the boxer to see if he had the courage of his convictions over his newly-formed stance as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. Ali had just recently refused to obey his draft orders and serve in the war and, just weeks later, would be stripped of his heavyweight title because of it. More than that, it would cause him to lose 3½ years in the prime of his boxing career.
Indeed, that’s how firm – how committed, how unrelenting – he was to abstain from the war and all of its killing.
It was an enormously tough sell, for many of the African American notables there at the Summit had served in the military. He was unwilling to do something that they had done.
But sell it Ali did – in grand fashion, no less — and as such that day, that press conference and its impact became a seminal moment not just in African American history, but American history overall. It changed society tremendously going forward.
There is a great photo of that meeting. In fact, when you look at it and see it, it’s almost jaw-dropping. But it’s real. There was no photo shopping back then.
Those who attended did so at their own expense, and of their own free will, because they sensed something important, even life-changing, was about. And they were right on point with their hunches.
There are 13 African Americans – all men — in the photo who can be seen and identified (one is obscured).
Four are seated at a table on which a bevy of microphones and tape recorders set. It can be clearly seen that one of the mics is from Cleveland’s WGAR, which was then an AM news and talk station and still exists today as an FM station playing country music (99.5). Its former 1220 AM slot id now occupied by WHKW, a Christian station.
Give credit to the people at WGAR then for themselves and their station out there at an event that, while today revered, was highly controversial, to say the last, at the time and probably caused the station a lot of grief.
Seated from left to right in the photo are:
*Basketball Hall of Famer Bill Russell, who had just taken over as player-coach of the Boston Celtics.
*Ali, who, though only 25, was the undisputed king of boxing and one of the greatest and best-known athletes in the world.
*Pro Football Hall of Famer Jim Brown, who had retired from the Browns a year earlier and is arguably the greatest player in the sport’s history.
*Basketball Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, then known by his given name of Lew Alcindor, who was between his sophomore and junior seasons at UCLA.
Standing from left to right behind that quartet are:
*Carl Stokes, who would become the first African American mayor of a major American city when he was elected in Cleveland five months later.
*Walter Beach, the starting right cornerback on the 1964 NFL champion Browns (wearing a polo shirt and as such being the only man pictured who was not adorned in a suit, white dress shirt and tie, the standard dress attire of that time).
*Bobby Mitchell, who by then was a wide receiver for the Washington Redskins but had been drafted in 1958 by the Browns and was a running back alongside Brown for four seasons (he is standing in front of the man whose profile is obscured in the photo).
*Sidney Williams, a linebacker and special teamer for the Browns in that title season of 1964.
*Curtis McClinton, a star running back for the AFL’s Kansas City Chiefs/Dallas Texans.
*Hall of Famer Hall of Fame defensive end Willie Davis, who was finishing up his career with the Green Bay Packers after starting his career as a defensive end/left tackle for the Browns in 1958 and ’59.
*Frank Shorter, a defensive back for the Browns in 1962 and ’63.
*Cleveland Browns Legend John Wooten, a guard who was getting ready to play his ninth and final season for the team.
There likely would have also been some African American Major League baseball players there except for the fact that it was a weekend smack-dab in the middle of their season. As such, there was no way they could have attended.
Cleveland was a great place to hold this monumental event. In addition to being on the verge of putting Stokes into the mayor’s office, the city had long been the leader in the African American movement in sports. Why? Because:
*Paul Brown permanently integrated pro football when he signed Hall of Famers Bill Willis and Marion Motley for his first Browns team in 1946, pre-dating the arrival of Jackie Robinson with baseball’s Brooklyn Dodgers by 8½ months.
*A year later, in July 1947, Indians owner Bill Veeck signed Larry Doby, making him the first African American player in the American League.
*In 1961, when he was hired to coach the Cleveland Pipers of the American Basketball League, John McLendon became the first head coach of a pro sports team. The Pipers were owned by Cleveland native George Steinbrenner. McLendon was hired as head coach at Cleveland State in 1966.
*All this led the way for Frank Robinson to be the first African American manager in the Major Leagues when the Indians hired him for the 1975 season.
How far was Cleveland ahead of the curve in giving opportunities to African Americans in sports?
So much so that when the Redskins worked a trade with the Browns in 1962 to get Mitchell, it was to help integrate that team with a great player. The Browns were integrated a full 16 years earlier.
Up until that press conference in 1967, African American athletes were just that, athletes. They weren’t supposed to speak up – they were blatantly afraid to speak up — about inequities either in sports or society. By doing so – by straying off the reservation, so to speak — they could have risked being ex-communicated by their sport. Really. A black man who liked to talk too much about touchy subjects was a bad, bad look public relations-wise in the eyes of the all-white contingents of team owners in every sport. The African American athletes’ job – in and out of sports — was to just shut up and take it, and be thankful they had jobs.
But the times, they were a changing,’ and this press conference really jump-started that movement on a grand scale beyond all the historic work done by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King with his protest matches. When Ali refused to go to war and was more than willing to pay dearly professionally and financially to do it, it gave a voice to African Americans in all phases of society, not just sports, and gave plenty of fuel to the anti-war movement.
Just 11 months earlier, in July 1966, in Cleveland’s Hough neighborhood, located not far from the site of that press conference, there had been extensive race riots, and in 1967, not long after the presser, there was epic rioting in both Detroit and Newark, N.J.
It was a time of great upheaval, of changing minds and hearts in America. It has proven to be a costly effort, both in terms of lives (King was assassinated 10 months later, in April 1968) and money, and an extremely difficult one. And all these years later, it is still far from being over.
But many of the seeds for that were planted in that press conference in Cleveland in 1967. To think that Ali passed away on, essentially, the 49th anniversary of that big day for him, African Americans and American society overall – a day that altered things throughout every state and will continue to do so for decades to come — is both chilling and fitting.
It personifies exactly the man, who, even in death, knew how to steal the moment like no one ever has. It adds an appropriate and fitting final chapter to his great story.
And, in the grand scheme of things, that’s a whole heckuva lot more important than one fight and a hit movie, wouldn’t you say?
