Ali, Muhammad (1942–)

Boxer, Antiwar Activist

Muhammad Ali was born Cassius Clay on January 17, 1942, in Louisville, Kentucky. He grew up in a society where African Americans were supposed to be poor and humble, but his talents as a boxer and thinker, as well as his temperament, ensured that he would be neither. Ultimately he became a three-time world heavyweight champion and arguably the most famous antiwar activist in U.S. history.

Clay credits his embrace of fighting to the theft of his bicycle when he was 12. He thirsted for revenge, but Joe Martin, a local boxing coach, convinced him to learn something about boxing first. Clay was a natural. Six years later, in 1960, Cassius Clay won a gold medal representing the United States at the 1960 Olympics. But after a segregated Ohio restaurant refused him service, Clay threw his gold medal into the Ohio River.

Clay possessed a keen mind and a sharp wit, what reporters termed the “Louisville Lip.” After predicting “to prove I’m great he will fall in eight,” he bested the heavily favored world heavyweight champion Sonny Liston in a 1964 [Page 25]bout. Clay then announced “I am the greatest!” and refused to play the role of the modest athlete who let white reporters define his public persona. Clay was an amazing fighter, able to dance around the ring while jabbing his opponent (abilities that he later summed up as being able to “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee”).

Meanwhile, Clay had begun to consider joining the Nation of Islam (NOI), the so-called black Muslims. He entered into long discussions with a leading NOI minister, Malcolm X, a radical who advocated both black pride and self-defense in the face of racist violence—striking a sharp contrast to the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., whose Christian nonviolence was often applauded by white liberals. Malcolm X recruited Clay to the NOI. On March 6, 1964, he announced he had joined the NOI and had renounced his “slave name” in favor of Cassius X.

The sporting world was shocked. The heavyweight champion was viewed as representing the United States, and Ali's renunciation of Christianity was an act with political overtones. Ali announced that “I don’t have to be what you want to be, I’m free to be what I want.” Elijah Muhammad, the head of the Nation of Islam, then gave him the name Muhammad Ali in honor of a storied African and Muslim ruler. Many refused to call him Ali, although some, including reporter and sports commentator Howard Cosell, did adopt the new name. In 1967, when boxer Ernie Terrell sought to intimidate Ali by calling him “Clay,” Ali destroyed him in the ring, taunting him with the line: “What's my name?”

By this point, Ali had come into conflict with the U.S. government over the war in Vietnam. After passing his preinduction physical examination in Houston on April 28, 1967, he refused to be inducted into the Army, despite a promise by the government that if he kept quiet he would not have to serve in Vietnam. Instead Ali announced, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong—no Vietnamese called me nigger.” Amidst a rising tide of protest over civil rights and the war in Vietnam, the significance of his words were clear: Ali's fight, and that of all African Americans, was at home. Many white Americans were horrified that a man who made his living by boxing refused to fight for his country and claimed conscientious objector status for both religious and racial reasons. Opponents of the war, both at home and abroad, were electrified. Here was a true heavyweight champion of the world, standing on principle against the most powerful government in the world.

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