9 minutes.
The speed bag flutters, history stings.
9 perfect minutes of film. It's 1964. Miami. Night. 9 years since Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat; 1 year before Malcolm X is shot dead; 55 years before America's first black president. Muhammad Ali runs. He is a night runner, floating through surveillance and silhouettes. White traffic. White lights. White hoodie. White credits. White noise. White moon. White reticence. Sam Cooke sings, “Don't fight it! We gonna feel it!” The women in the audience answer: “Gotta feel it!” Ali keeps running, to blue music and from blue cops. Sirens on, patrol cops ask (knowing the answer), “What you running from, boy.” Half-indignant beneath his huddie, Ali keeps running – 67 years of running before patrol cop Derek Chauvin is found guilty of the murder of George Floyd. Sam Cooke sings in a Miami club. “How you doin'?” Drums roll. Saxophones unsheath. Audience vibrates. Speed bag flutters, history stings. EVERLAST. BRYLCREEM. FLASH CAMERAS. Feet dance on brown and bloodied canvas. White, blonde, blue-eyed Jesus mural being touched up in a black ministry. A black boy's questions never answered. Sonny Liston whispers low and street, “Gonna fuck you up. Gonna beat you like I's your daddy…” Fist to face, black v black for the white parade. Ali, as a boy, walks down the bus aisle to the “COLOREDS ONLY” section. The headline on the newspaper reads NATION SHOCKED AT LYNCHING OF CHICAGO YOUTH. The boy's name? Emmet Till. Tortured and killed for winking at a white girl in Alabama, the same year Rosa Parks didn't stand up. He was 14. There on the newspaper is the photograph of the open casket, 61 years before Dana Shutz would paint the same open casket for the Whitney Biennial as an empathetic mother, not a black woman. Right? Wrong? Black? White? Enter Malcolm X: “...and those of you who think you came here to hear us tell you, like these Negro leaders do, that times will get better and we shall overcome someday, I tell you: you came to the wrong place. Cause your times will never get better until you make them better. And any of you who think you came here to hear us tell you to turn the other cheek to the brutality of the white man and the established system of injustice in this country, to beg for your place at their lunch counter, I say again! You came to the wrong place. Cause we don't teach you to turn the other cheek. We don't teach you to turn the other cheek in the South. We don't teach you to turn the other cheek in the North. The Honourable Elijah Muhammad teaches you, instead, to obey the law. To carry yourselves in a respectable way. And a proud Afro-American way. But at the same time...we teach you...that anyone who puts his hand on you? Do your BEST...to see he doesn't PUT HIS HAND on any...body…else…AGAIN.”
The speed bag stops fluttering, history keeps stinging.
9 minutes.
"TIME!"