An Open Letter to Muhammad Ali
May 14, 2008
Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali Enterprises LLC
P.O. Box 160
Berrien Springs, MI 49103
U.S.A.
Ali.com
Dear Champ:
I have a special request or favor to ask of you, something I’d like you to consider. First of all, congratulations on the upcoming anniversary of your decisive May 25, 1965 defeat of Sonny Liston. And Happy Father’s Day next month! It was a great treat to receive email from you as a member of your mailing list. Anyone who is old enough to remember your emergence onto the world stage and followed your illustrious career knows that you were much more than a unique boxer from Louisville, Kentucky who did well for himself, coming up through the ranks of the Golden Gloves, going onto the Olympics and continuing with your first defeat of Liston in 1964.
Like no one else in the history of human civilization has any public figure, in any arena, captivated and inspired a worldwide audience in the way you did, and as you still do.
And while your detractors, many of whom motivated by racial hatred and war, have fallen silent and irrelevant, you have remained a virtual pillar in and out of the ring, never buckling, never losing your cool and earning the respect of a global population, even those who didn’t like you, for being an unwavering man of sensible convictions and deep religious faith. And where are they now who condemned you, who tried to enlist you, who jailed you?
In addition to maintaining your personal poise, you let them beat up on you, because you had no choice … and then you came back and proved just how special you are, by stepping back into the ring, after everyone had taken their shots, and picking up where you had left off — where they had forced you to leave off.
With every moment of athletic brilliance, every summoned bit of courage, strength and will, most notably displayed in your stunning and unexpected defeat of George Foreman in Zaire, you struck blows for the little guy, like me (who was drafted and forced to serve) against a corrupt and still corrupt, most assuredly corrupt global war-for-profit movement, for whose present-day instigators punishment steadily, unquestionably approaches, uninterrupted like the ticking of a clock.
A lot of people would have wilted, caved, never achieved their potential in the face of such enormous often reckless opposition. A mere athlete might have won a few fights, or scored some more points, but you were not merely an athlete, but a statesman, with a sense of responsibility to those who looked up to you … who did and still do, even now to remind themselves and to be certain of which side did the right thing. And you danced and wrote poetry … while you were doing it. My goodness! … that was sweet. Weren’t those good times? Great times?
But the racists have not gone away, nor have the warmongers. Indeed, we see now in a new era that they have regrouped, reloaded … even as they reveal themselves to be, as we always suspected, one in the same — evil, with a singular, one-world objective, motivated now on the soil once occupied by your earliest ancestors and mine to cleanse the land of its people so that they might bore underground into the vast lake of oil, which they crave, like Nimrod drew up the pitch he used for mortar to build his the Tower of Babel.
I did not serve in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam era, but in Africa, in Egypt and Ethiopia, where evil concentrates its energies today, its human minions being deceived and fooled to believe that man can somehow artificially create a substitute utopia, a cheap copy of what God has promised us he will deliver. How naive can one or so many people be … to believe that a powerful “angel of light” must be God because he is not a man of color? The deliverer will be a man of color, because he will be comprised of all races, including white, the race to which I belong.
The campaign that has brought about the deception of the racists, who have bought the lie that men of color, black men, are deficient by nature, by natural selection, when the paradoxical opposite is true, is a lengthy ongoing campaign, which even now is being played out, in blockbuster, best-selling fashion, by way of an “intriguing code,” which is nothing more than subterfuge to hide the coverup evident in a painting and in the Holy Scriptures, meant to obscure the contributions to mankind by a learned, scholarly African man, who wrote two gospels and the book of Revelation, among other things … and maybe more.
The man of whom I speak, an historical figure from ancient times, whose story has never been told. Consequently, Africans, the black men, women and children who might have been inspired by this person, have lacked his inspiration to rise above and do what he has done.
His name was John. His nickname was “the Hammer,” or Mark or Marcus.
He must have been a lot like you, Champ, because he intimidated Paul, who had once killed believers, while people like John “the Hammer” were doing all they could to remain alive and keep other believers alive. After being bashed by Paul, the Hammer shows up on his doorstep, with two other men, whom Paul reluctantly and wiltingly is forced to call “pillars” … “superapostles.”
John “the Hammer,” the African scholar and poet, who outran Peter easily to the empty tomb, and who was an imposing figure standing in Paul’s doorway, returning after departing on important business of his own, must have been a lot like you, Champ. When we first see him, he is a young man, sensitive and scrawny, grieving the recent death of his father, along with his mother, whose name was Mary. They were refugees, having had to flee Cyrene, what is known today as Libya, because of racial and religious persecution. They arrived in Jerusalem at precisely the time that Jesus was beginning his ministry.
John Mark was a scribe, a scholar, and very likely a priest — with some clout, but not enough to save the life of his friend, an innocent man. It the home of John Mark and Mary, and only their home, where Jesus was welcome. This is the John and Mary who stood and received instructions to encourage one another, as Jesus, a black sheep, hung dying on a cross above them.
They have wanted us to believe that it was John, a fisherman’s son, and Mary, Jesus’ mother, who stood at the cross of Jesus. But that has never made any sense, and, indeed, our scholarship shows that John, the son of Zebedee, probably was already Mary’s nephew, Jesus’ cousin. Why would he have also been chosen to be her son? He wasn’t.
John Mark and his mother Mary have been hidden from us … for the same reason that Jesus was crucified. And for the same reason that Simon of Cyrene was forced to help Jesus carry his cross.
Champ, will you help us tell the truth about this African scholar and hero, “the Hammer,” whose elimination from that ruined painting on a wall in Milan, Italy is the only reason why there is anything called “the Da Vinci Code” and why there has needed to be? Racists are profiting off of the lies associated with this so-called “code,” which they continue to tell to hide from us the accomplishments of the African John Mark, who wrote in Latin and Greek, as well as Hebrew. And what these racists, who have deceived us for so long are doing with their money as Africa falls prey to a new breed of goose-stepping racists we can only painfully imagine.
Who knows how many black children, how many children of color, how many children of all races might have been inspired by the determination of John Mark, “the Hammer,” as they have been inspired by you … if they had only had the chance to know he ever existed and wrote most of the New Testament … which the white man, the most insecure, brutal ones, has had the audacity to call his own.
God bless you, Champ. Will you meet with us … and help us? We pray that you will.
Most respectfully,
Randall Carter Gray
and TANATA staff
Janet Devlin
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