‘White Devils’: Muhammad Ali’s Racist Mosque Speeches Revealed

Muhammad Ali

FBI files detailing speeches delivered by heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali in American mosques in the 1960s show a different, more racist and radical face of the famed sportsman.

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The speeches, which were released after a Freedom of Information Act request by Washington watchdog group Judicial Watch, revealed that Ali had far more radical views about race than his more benign public persona might have led people to believe.

Not only did Ali thunder that the 1964 civil rights act was a “swindle” on blacks, he also went on to excoriate whites, calling them “blue-eyed devil white people,” and insisting that “the so-called Negro is the original man and is superior to the white devil.”

The FBI files show that Ali told a crowd at a Washington D.C. mosque that he preferred “dying outright” or going to jail than going into the U.S. Army. In another speech delivered at a Cleveland mosque, Ali said the American flag “represented death and destruction,” but the so-called “Muslim flag” represents “life and prosperity, justice for all black men.”

According to the FBI reports, the groups Ali spoke to were congregations of the Nation of Islam, an extremist hate group the FBI defined as an “all-Negro, quasi-religious organization which espouses a line of violent hatred of the white race, Government, law and law enforcement.”

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