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Muhammad Ali (b. 1942), prizefighter. Despite the
considerable achievements of such important African American athletes as Jesse
Owens, Joe Louis, Wilma Rudolph, Jim Brown, and Jackie Robinson, the young brash
prizefighter from Louisville, Kentucky, may very well have eclipsed their
significance.
He surely eclipsed their fame as, at the height of his career in the early and
middle 1970s, Muhammad Ali was, without question, the most famous African American
in history and among the five most recognized faces on the planet.
Born Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., in 1942 (named after both his father and the
famous Kentucky abolitionist), the gregarious, handsome, and extraordinarily gifted
boxer garnered world attention by winning a gold medal in the 1960 Olympics. He
further stunned the sports world by beating the heavily favored Sonny Liston to win
the heavyweight title in 1964, and shocked white America by announcing right after
that fight that he had joined the militant, antiwhite Nation of Islam, the Black
Muslims, whose most well-known figure was the fiery orator Malcolm X. He also
announced that he was changing his name to Muhammad Ali.
When he opposed being drafted during the Vietnam War on religious grounds and
was subsequently convicted of violating the Selective Service Act in 1967, he was
denied a license to fight anywhere in the United States. He was, at this time,
among white America, probably the most hated black public figure since heavyweight
boxing champion Jack Johnson.
After an exile of three and a half years, Ali returned triumphantly to boxing in
1970, even though he lost his title to Joe Frazier in 1971. He eventually won back
his title in 1974, and after losing it once in 1978 regained it again later that
year.
Ali exercised an extraordinary influence on African American culture in the 1960s,
doing much to keep the Nation of Islam popular in the black community after the
assassination of Malcolm X in 1965.
He figured in the writings of such important 1960s black literary figures as
Amiri Baraka Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X, and Larry Neal, not to mention numerous
black journalists and poets.
He came to symbolize black manhood and masculinity, unbowed and uncompromising,
adversarial and combative, a virtually one-person definition of African American
self-determination in the middle and late 1960s. But his boyish bragging and his
poetic predictions of doom for his opponents made him an important public prefigure
for the performance art of rap.
Source : Some of the information on this page came
from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU Documentation
License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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Muhammad Ali
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