Thomas Aiello's "Return of the King"

Thomas Aiello is a professor of history and Africana studies at Valdosta State University. He is the author of White Ice: Race and the Making of Atlanta Hockey and Dixieball: Race and Professional Basketball in the Deep South, 1947–1979.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Return of the King: The Rebirth of Muhammad Ali and the Rise of Atlanta, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Return of the King describes the racial state of play in Atlanta in January 1970, wherein a new administration was sworn into city government with more Black representation than ever before, but with court-mandated teacher desegregation mandates causing a furor among white students and parents, protests eagerly celebrated by Georgia’s governor, Lester Maddox. It was a city in transition, as white flight to suburban areas created Black majorities in the city, but the majority of money and power in Atlanta still remained with white leaders, many of whom were antagonistic to Black social and political gains.

The book itself is about Muhammad Ali’s return to boxing after a three-year forced exile for refusing his draft notice for the Vietnam conflict, and Muhammad Ali does not appear on page 99. Nor does boxing. Or sports more broadly. But the book is also a story of race in Atlanta and the conditions that created the possibility of Ali’s return to the ring in a Deep South city beset by racial contradictions. Page 99 goes a long way to demonstrating those contradictions at the beginning of a year that would see, by its conclusion, the revival of Ali’s boxing career. The racial contradictions depicted on page 99 weren’t new in January 1970. Atlanta had long cultivated an image of itself that stressed business-friendly racial moderation. It was, in the words of mayor William Hartsfield, “The City Too Busy to Hate.” When the civil rights movement began, it did not experience the kinds of televised violence that beset Birmingham, New Orleans, Selma, and other southern cities. But under the surface of that moderation was a seething mass of Black frustration at the limits placed on Black economic development, the continued segregation, and the social neglect of city officials. Ali’s return to boxing in Atlanta, facilitated by Black state senator Leroy Johnson, representing a district in the city, would be one of the first and most effective uses of Black power, a channeling of that anger into a legitimately successful venture that would have an outsized and indelible influence on the city and its national and international reputation. And the efforts of Black Atlanta to make the fight happen would come despite attempts to thwart them by segregationist governor Lester Maddox, who was, back in January 1970, celebrating white students for protesting against teacher integration in public schools.

In that sense, even without an appearance by Ali himself, page 99 of Return of the King does demonstrate much of what the book is about—racial transition in the Deep South’s most important city at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s.

Visit Thomas Aiello's website.

The Page 99 Test: Jim Crow's Last Stand.

The Page 99 Test: Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration.

--Marshal Zeringue