So did the man who Louisville's city council decided to rename its airport in honor of.
Hint: It is a Muslim and he wishes people should be killed if in a mixed relationship.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/gov_northam_and_the_guy_who_said_kill_people_in_mixedrace_relationships.html
What the writer leaves out is that:
* Muhammad Ali gave the two-part
Playboy interview cited in the article well
before it was actually published, and for several years Ali often spouted rhetoric in line with Nation of Islam teaching not out of any real conviction but out of self preservation for as long as Elijah Muhammad was alive.
Blood Brothers: The Fateful Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X (2016) revealed that Ali actually wanted out of the Nation of Islam for several years before Elijah Muhammad died in early 1975---but feared the old man would order his murder if he bolted, just as happened to Malcolm X a year or so after
he bolted the NOI, denounced Elijah's hypocrisies, and renounced racism.
* No less than former boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson discovered as much as far back as before Ali fought Zora Folley, in his final title defense in 1967, before being stripped of his title over his draft refusal. Telling Robinson he was afraid to submit to the draft because it would have gone against Elijah Muhammad's wishes, when Robinson replied "Forget the old man, is Elijah going to jail and all those other Muslims," Ali almost broke to tears in answering, "But I'm afraid, Ray, I'm really afraid."
"Afraid of what?" Robinson replied. "Of the Muslims if you don't do what they told you?"
Ali didn't answer but Robinson figured it out at once. "If you ask me," he told another sportswriter, "he wasn't afraid of jail. He was afraid of being killed by the Muslims." (Considering Malcolm X's fate at the hands of gunmen tied to the NOI, it was hardly misplaced fear.)
George Plimpton also believed Ali was scared for his life, possibly the reason he continued fealty to Elijah Muhammad despite being suspended by the NOI during his exile from boxing. (The suspension came after Ali told Howard Cosell in a TV interview that he'd go right back to boxing if he could. Elijah Muhammad considered that a sign of weakness.) Ali had already dealt with enough grief because he wouldn't accede to the NOI and dismiss the white advisors and trainers in his camp, including the almost father-and-son relationship he had with trainer Angelo Dundee.
* At a reception in Louisville a few months before Elijah's death, Ali snapped away a pair of the NOI's notorious Fruit of Islam guards who tried forcing him to leave while he was talking to
Louisville Courier-Journal writers. Sportswriter Dave Kindred was there as well. "They always got somebody watching," Ali told Kindred, referring to the Fruit of Islam guards. When Kindred asked who "they" were, Ali replied, "I would have gotten out of [the Nation of Islam] a long time ago. But you saw what they did to Malcolm X. I ain't gonna end up like Malcolm X."
* After Elijah Muhammad's death in 1975 and the split between Wallace Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan, over Muhammad
fils's renouncement of his father's racism and separatism, Ali stayed with Muhammad
fils and declared publicly he didn't hate whites. He became a converted Sunni Muslim and remained so until 2005, when he converted to Sufi Islam.