The great football superstar, Jim Brown, joined the ancestors a few days ago. Let’s make note of one of his not-so-well-known achievements.
Jim Brown was the greatest all-around athlete in Syracuse University’s history and arguably the greatest in American history. I will have more to say about that in a later article.
While Brown’s legacy was tarnished by allegations of domestic assault, mostly against women, during his younger years and in his old age by accompanying Kanye West in groveling to Donald Trump, nevertheless, he did some noteworthy things off the sports field.
Muhammad Ali was drafted into the Army in 1967 but refused to go. For this, he faced intense public backlash and a possible prison term. So on June 4, 1967, Brown organized an event known as the Cleveland Summit and, alternatively, the Muhammed Ali Summit to assist Ali.
The group consisted of 12 African American men, including eight prominent professional football players, Bill Russell, the great NBA star, and one collegiate basketball player, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, then known as Lew Alcindor. The other person was Carl Stokes, who later that November would win the election as Mayor of Cleveland, Ohio.
They met at an office of the Negro Industrial Economic Union, an African American empowerment organization founded by Brown.
Interestingly, one of these football players was Walter Beach, who, as a cornerback for the AFL Boston Patriots, had rallied his fellow Black players (all five of them) in 1962 to discuss the planned racially segregated hotel accommodations for the players for an exhibition game in New Orleans.
The Black players requested they did not stay overnight but that the team allows them to fly down and back the day of the game. Unfortunately, the team did not provide Beach with a plane ticket. Instead, they cut him from the team. This is the environment in which several still active players ventured to address the Ali situation.
Ali had refused to be inducted into the Army because of his religious beliefs and his ethical opposition to the war in Vietnam. And legend has it that these men met with Ali to provide him with cover for his ultimate decision. If he changed his mind, as many people thought he would, they would take the “blame” for convincing him to do so. But, on the other hand, they would support him if he did not change his mind.
While it worked out that way, some participants told a different story, a story that might be better than the legend. Bob Arum, the powerful boxing promoter who controlled the closed-circuit television rights for Ali’s fights, had asked Jim Brown to call such a meeting to persuade Ali to accept a deal that one of Arum’s law partners had negotiated with the government. The draft-dodging charges would be dropped if Ali agreed to perform boxing exhibitions for U.S. troops.
The athletes would be rewarded with local closed-circuit franchises if they were successful. But, of course, they failed to persuade Ali to change his mind.
I could have told them that Ali would not change his mind. I had met Ali at a Muslim Mosque in D.C. on a Sunday in April 1967, a few days before he refused to step forward and accept induction into the Army. I had witnessed his commitment up close.
Several of the men gathered in Cleveland came seeking economic opportunity: however, I am glad that the men met. They could have walked away when they recognized that they would not change Ali’s mind and would not see any money from a deal with Arum. Instead, they used their collective power to support Ali, knowing they could receive some public backlash. They sacrificed some of their popularity to stand up for religious freedom and to stand up to a government that seemed to be singling Ali out for punishment because he was Black and outspoken.
This kind of united action by prominent Black athletes did not occur previously, nor has it happened since.
