Nobody gave Cassius Clay a hope in hell, but Malcolm X had faith. Why wouldn't he? Not only had the young upstart been training harder than his rival, World Heavyweight Champion Sonny Liston, but he also had Allah in his corner. “This fight is the truth,” Malcolm told his protégé in the days before the 1964 title bout. “It’s the Cross and the Crescent fighting in the prize ring for the first time. It’s a modern Crusades – a Christian and a Muslim facing each other with television to beam it off Telstar for the whole world to see what happens!”
The pair had been inseparable for months, and Clay’s headline-baiting ties with The Nation of Islam continued to deepen as the fight approached. And yet, when the bell rang out and the 22-year-old held his arms aloft to a shell-shocked, half-empty stadium, it wasn’t Malcolm X who he pulled into the ring to celebrate by his side – it was Sam Cooke. “This is the world’s greatest rock’n’roll singer,” he announced to a bemused and somewhat irritated TV host. “We gonna shake up the world!”
The hours that followed, in which Cassius Clay, Sam Cooke and American football star Jim Brown retired to Malcolm X’s motel room to discuss who knows what, have taken on a near mythic quality over the years. That night in 1964 also sets the framework for Regina King’s brilliant new film, One Night in Miami, based on Kemp Power’s 2013 play of the same name. In it, four Black icons on the precipice of great change passionately debate each other’s roles in the struggle for Black empowerment; their achievements, their fears, their power and their complicity. In the morning, Clay emerges from the motel with a new name – Muhammad Ali – and a new purpose.
WATCH 'ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI' HERE
But Ali is not the main player here. In fact, it’s Sam Cooke that catches much of the spotlight and comes in for the bulk of Malcolm X’s ire. For pandering to white America and supposedly placing money above kinship. But while One Night In Miami characterises Cooke first and foremost as a man who believes in the radical value of Black economic freedom, it doesn’t delve into his previous attempts to defy white supremacy, nor his tragic fate. The film never purports to be true-to-life retelling of that night (the quartet weren’t the only ones in the motel room, for starters), but it’s probably fair to say that more liberties are taken with Cooke’s story than anyone else’s.
We first meet Cooke backstage at the Copacabana club in New York, where he bombs in front of a disinterested white audience. This, in truth, is a time-muddled reference to a doomed performance five years earlier – one that turned the Copa into something of a white whale for Cooke. Over the proceeding years he lamented to friends that he just wasn’t ready – and publicly rallied for a return after watching Nat King Cole perform in 1964. His series of shows at the venue that same year actually went a lot better: The New York Times commended his “dignity, humility [and] strong voice”, while the Harlem-based Amsterdam News said that he retired to “ear-splitting applause and shaking hands along his exit route, [leaving the audience] begging, begging and begging for more.” One of the performances was even recorded for a live album: ‘Sam Cooke at the Copa’.
It’s a very different record to ‘Sam Cooke: Live at the Harlem Square Club’, recorded in front of a predominantly Black audience one year earlier. Whereas his Copa show leant on a mix of gentle American standards and playful, up-tempo swing, his Harlem gig was brimming with raw energy and frenzied excitement. The atmosphere is electric, claustrophobic, the screaming crowd a near-constant participant throughout.
Passionate, soulful and unfettered in a way that he would never get away with in front of a white audience or during a TV performance, it is now considered one of the greatest live albums ever recorded. The stark contrast between these records is something that Malcolm X alludes to in One Night In Miami, when he accused Cooke of pandering to white America like a “wind-up toy in a music box”, and again later, when he talks about the (fictional) foot-stomping gig he performed in Boston. "What kind of message are you sending by doing one show for white folks and a completely different show for black folks, Sam?" he asks.
Cooke’s association with powerful white industry figures and his refusal to write protest songs can give the impression of passive complicity. That would be an unfair assessment. In the Netflix documentary, ReMastered: The Two Killings of Sam Cooke, his contemporaries reminisce about him standing up to policemen and segregationist business owners during tours of the Deep South. He also spoke out publicly about the suffering of Black people under Jim Crow laws, telling a radio show in 1960: “I’ve always detested people of any colour, religion or nationality who lack courage to stand up and be counted. It is a difficult thing to do, but I hope, by refusing to play to a segregated audience, it would help to break down racial segregation here.”
A year later, he refused to play a gig at the Memphis City Auditorium if the Black and white crowds weren’t allowed to watch together. The other performers on the bill agreed to boycott the show too, but ultimately reneged on their commitment and played their sets, fearful of the consequences. Regardless, Cooke remained in his motel room (the Lorraine, where Martin Luther King was later assassinated).
Still, it’s true that his music didn’t explicitly touch upon Black issues – and it’s true, as One Night in Miami shows, that Bob Dylan’s 'Blowin’ in the Wind' inspired him to write his majestic civil rights anthem, ‘A Change is Gonna Come’. It should come as no surprise, though, that it wasn’t Malcolm X who shifted his perspective on the matter. In reality, the song had already been written and recorded before the night in Miami.
The Bob Dylan record was given to him in the summer of 1963, and Cooke eventually confided in his friend that listening to it was a revelatory experience. "You know, it almost makes me ashamed that a white boy should have written a song like this," he said. "I should have written a song like this."
Two or three months later, Cooke was turned way from an all-white Louisiana hotel and subsequently arrested for blowing his car horn too loudly. He was thrown in jail and nearly killed by police officers, and he wrote 'A Change Is Gonna Come' mere weeks later. According to 'Dream Boogie', the acclaimed biography of the late singer by Peter Guralnick, he said it was almost as if it had come to him in a dream. He showed the song to his protege, Bobby Womack, who remarked that “it feels like death […] It feels eery, like something’s going to happen.” He only performed the song once, on the Tonight Show, but the tape has since been lost. In ReMastered, Jim Brown says that, "there is no doubt about Sam moving into the centre of the movement, because the satisfaction of hit records didn't do it." (He also recorded and sang 'Blowin’ in the Wind' live on several occasions, including at the Copa).
Cooke first met Ali years prior, and they were first seen publicly together in 1960. The boxer, eighteen year's old and fresh from the Rome Olympics, joined Cooke on-stage at one of his gigs. Their friendship grew over the years, and they eventually recorded a song together: 'The Gang's All Here' (Easter egg: Ali references the song in the film when he walks into the motel).
According to 'Ali: A Life', Jonathan Eig's authoritative biography, the young pretender had already joined the Black Muslims by the time he met Cooke, and he would attend his first Nation of Islam meeting a year later. His association with Malcolm X began in 1962, growing closer over time. Cooke reportedly didn't care much for the preacher's Muslim beliefs, but respected his principles of self-determination. (Unlike in the film, Ali actually received his full Muslim name from The Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad a few weeks after the night in Miami. It was an attempt to win his loyalty in the ever-growing feud between Malcolm X and the organisation, and it worked. Ali ditched his former mentor, and rebuked him when they ran into each other months later at an airport. "Man, did you get a look at him?" Ali asked a companion. "Dressed in that funny white robe and wearing a beard and walking with that cane that looked like a prophet's stick? Man, he's gone. He's gone so far out he's our completely. Doesn't that go to show that Elijah is the most powerful? Nobody listens to that Malcolm anymore.")
Cooke’s decision to break away from his manipulative recording contract, enlist the help of infamous music manager Allen Klein and begin his own record label focused on Black artists was as much about duty as it was financial ambition. “I am aware that owning a record company is a losing deal much too often for comfort,” he told a radio show in 1962. “But this company of mine is focused on recording negro artists that I feel have the ingredients to become as successful as I have, and if I lose a few dollars along the way, in the end, it will be worth it to me.”
One thing the film doesn’t address, however, is just how many dollars that turned out to be. After scrutinising his recording contract in 1964 during a bout of the flu, he realised that Allen Klein had screwed him over. He'd promised that Tracey Limited, their new recording company, would place Cooke in control of the company and his masters, but the actual contract had put Klein in a position of full ownership. Furious at essentially being made an employee at his own company, he decided to fly to New York four days later and challenge Klein. Sam Cooke died the next day.
Sixty-eight days before Malcolm X was gunned down by three members of the Nation of Islam, Cooke rolled into the Hacienda Motel, Los Angeles, California, with a woman named Elisa Boyer, who he'd met at a bar. At this point his marriage to Barbara Cooke was beyond repair, and both were in the midst of regular affairs. Nobody knows for sure what happened next that night; only that Boyer fled his room with his possessions while he was in the bathroom, including most of his clothes, and that Cooke subsequently approached motel manager Bertha Lee Franklin's apartment looking for answers.
Elisa Boyer and Bertha Lee Franklin
According to Franklin, who was 55 year's-old at the time, he banged angrily on the door and demanded to know where the girl went, eventually shoulder-barging it off its flimsy hinges. After a struggle, Franklin says she reached for her gun and pulled the trigger three times. One bullet hit the ceiling, while the other two tore through the singer's lungs and heart. According to Franklin, he looked down at his injuries and said, "Lady, you shot me," before lunging for her once again. She hit his head with a stick, so hard it broke in half, and he fell to the ground.
Ali views the body of Sam Cooke at his wake in Chicago
He died that night. In his car, they found a bottle of scotch and a copy of the Muslim newspaper, Muhammad Speaks. Fuelled by Boyer's inconsistent account of the night, Cooke's previous run-ins with the mob over business deals, as well as the fact that the Los Angeles Police Department didn't deem his death worthy of an investigation, conspiracy theories continue to rage about the true story. Some of them are more convincing than others. One thing's for sure, though: he wasn't the only man in that Miami motel room who had so much more to give.
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Nick Pope
Site Director
Nick Pope is the Site Director of Esquire, overseeing the digital, video and social media strategy for the brand. He has worked in culture, fashion and lifestyle journalism for over a decade, with a focus on menswear, food and film.
