Why Did the FBI Monitor Muhammad Ali?

This short book is the first truly intellectual engagement with the FBI’s recently declassified files on Muhammad Ali. It seeks to explain the FBI’s motivations for recording the activities of the late boxer throughout the 1960s and beyond, and outlines the main factors which caused him to be considered politically subversive and worthy of such surveillance. The FBI files on Muhammad Ali discussed in this book have been publicly available in the FBI archive since December 2016. Josh Keen is the first to analyse them in a scholarly way in their biographical and historical context. Keen shows that no one has yet really come to grips with the Ali evidence and how much it contributes, not only to Ali’s biography but also to our understanding of the FBI in the period and within the wider history of the 1960s. He argues convincingly that the FBI’s attention to Ali was not merely part of its broader investigation of the Nation of Islam movement to which Ali belonged. It was pursued and extended because of Ali’s outspoken challenges to white America and the Vietnam War and the effect his words and actions had as the most famous sportsman in the world.