Muhammad Ali

A Man of Many Voices

Barbara L. Tischler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138023062
• eBook ISBN: 9781317691204
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Muhammad Ali was not only a champion athlete, but a cultural icon. While his skill as a boxer made him famous, his strong personality and his identity as a black man in a country in the midst of the struggle for civil rights made him an enduring symbol. From his youth in segregated Louisville, Kentucky, to his victory in the 1960 Olympics, to the controversy that surrounded his conversion to Islam and refusal of the draft during the Vietnam War, Ali's life was closely linked to the major social and political struggles of the 1960s and 70s. The story of his struggles, failures, and triumphs sheds light on issues of race, class, religion, dissent, and the role of sports in American society that affected all Americans.

In this lively, concise biography, Barbara L. Tischler introduces students to Ali's life in social and political context, and explores his enduring significance as a symbol of resistance. Muhammad Ali: A Many of Many Voices offers the perfect introduction to this extraordinary American and his times.

Part I
MUHAMMAD ALI

Chapter 1
FROM GOLD GLOVES TO A GOLD MEDAL

Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr. was born in Louisville, Kentucky on January 17, 1942. He was an African-American whose birth likely attracted no more attention than any other in this mid-sized segregated city in the Upper South. His was an elegant name for a small boy: Cassius Clay Senior named his son not only after himself, but also after a white Kentucky abolitionist who leaned more toward the pronouncements of New Englander William Lloyd Garrison than the “Great Compromiser” and son of Kentucky, Henry Clay. Young Cassius carried the weight of Kentucky history in his name from birth. He would soon make boxing history as the Greatest of All Time, Muhammad Ali.

The famous Kentuckian for whom Cassius Clay was named was a well-known abolitionist, lawyer, newspaper publisher, and bowie knife fighter. Born on the Clermont plantation near Richmond, Kentucky on October 19, 1810, Cassius Marcellus Clay flirted with the ministry in his studies at Kentucky’s Transylvania College but abandoned the life of the cloth for secular studies. While studying at Yale University, Clay was inspired by the antislavery oratory of William Lloyd Garrison. He earned a degree from Yale in 1832 and returned to Transylvania College to complete his legal studies, soon establishing himself in central Kentucky as a prominent “emancipationist.” In the 1830s and 1840s, Clay was a member of the Kentucky General Assembly representing Madison County. True to his anti-slavery principles but in opposition to the prevailing wisdom in his part of the state, Clay freed his own slaves in 1844.

In the mid-nineteenth century, opposing the peculiar institution, even in the Upper South, could be dangerous. In 1845 Clay began to publish The True American, an abolitionist newspaper in Lexington, Kentucky. He posted guards at the paper’s office, but this did not prevent the seizure of his printing press by his opponents. From 1845 to 1846, Clay was forced to publish The True American in Cincinnati, across the Ohio River. He continued to distribute the paper throughout Kentucky, where slavery was not only tolerated but was the engine of the plantation economy. In the antebellum period, the Ohio River was a symbolic dividing line between South and North, slavery and freedom. Alexis De Tocqueville noted that difference in 1831:

Ohio is perhaps the State of the Union in which it is easiest to see, in a striking way and close up, the effects of slavery and of liberty on the social state of a people. The State of Ohio is separated from Kentucky just by one river; on either side of it the soil is equally fertile, and the situation equally favorable, and yet everything is different.

Here a population devoured by feverish activity, trying every means to make its fortune; the population seems poor to look at, for they work with their hands, but that work is the source of riches. [Speaking of Kentucky] There is a people which makes others work for it and shows little compassion, a people without energy, mettle or the spirit of enterprise. On one side of the stream, work is honored and leads to all else, on the other it is despised as the mark of servitude. Those who are forced to work to live cross over into Ohio where they can make money without disgrace.¹

One hundred and thirty years later, the young boxer Cassius Clay would find that his hometown of Louisville on the south bank of the Ohio River embodied many of those same forces and attitudes that could hold him back, as an athlete and as a young black man. He would have to cross that river and transcend the barriers of his youth to become “The Greatest.”

The nineteenth-century Clay was forthright in his condemnation of slavery, but he was also loyal to his state. He served honorably as a captain of a Kentucky militia company in the Mexican War, but he saw slavery as a national problem. In 1860, the New York Times described Clay as:

a man who speaks out upon Slavery with as much frankness as any Northern Free-Soiler. He condemns it morally, and economically, and politically—declares it to be a curse and a crime, and avows his desire to see it abolished.²

This perspective was reflected in his early support for the national Republican Party in the years leading up to the Civil War. Clay met and befriended Abraham Lincoln and served as the United States ambassador to Russia in 1861–62 and again from 1863 to 1869. He strongly supported the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867. He was a man of national vision and ethical action from a state committed to its own definition of sovereignty and the peculiar institution.

Cassius Marcellus Clay supported the education of African-Americans in the founding of Berea College in 1855. In that year, he donated cash and land to Rev. John G. Fee, who began construction on Kentucky’s first college to educate black and white students at the same time in the same location. Throughout his life, Clay continued to support the cause of racial equality in the Upper South and was a prime mover in the creation of Kentucky’s modern Constitution in 1890. On the occasion of his death, his funeral procession passed through streets lined with African-Americans who paid their respects to the “Abraham Lincoln of Kentucky.”³

Marveling at the fact that Clay was such an active stump speaker on behalf of the abolitionist cause who had nevertheless escaped the tar and feathers faced by others who dared to speak on behalf of the slave, the New York Times declared that Clay escaped molestation and death because he was willing to fight in support of his beliefs:

he has twice defended his right to free speech, pistol in hand, has killed and wounded those who sought to put him down, and has himself been left for dead on the field. Moreover, he openly avows that he will still resist any attempt to gag him, or disturb him by force, and he mounts the rostrum all ready for the fray.⁴

Writing in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat long after the Civil War from Clay’s hometown of Richmond, Kentucky, journalist Frank G. Carpenter observed that General Clay’s life had been one

of constant fighting. Kentucky has always been a hot-blooded State. Here a word is always followed by a blow, and an insult has to be wiped out in death. Life is of less account here than in the North, and it was of still less value in the days of Gen. Clay’s youth, nearly two generations ago. It is sixty years now since he delivered the Washington Centennial oration at Yale College, in which he espoused the cause of the negro and became the most hated man in Kentucky among the slaveholders. All his life he has had to fight for his ideas, and the stories of his personal encounters reads like a romance.⁵

General Clay’s reputation was based not only on his outspoken antislavery position, but also on his reputation as one of the best bowie knife fighters of his day. The nineteenth-century Cassius Marcellus Clay was his day’s version of the “the greatest.”

Young Cassius Clay was proud to be identified with the great Kentucky abolitionist—so proud in fact that he incorrectly claimed he was related to him. Indeed, early in his career, Clay expressed some pride in his white heritage. Of the relationship between his family and the original Cassius Marcellus Clay, the young boxer said:

My own grandfather was brought up on the old man’s land, he never [was] a slave. My grandfather was with the old man, but not in a slave capacity, no sir!⁶

Later in his life, Muhammad Ali would denounce his “slave name” Cassius Clay as representing the oppression of black people, much to the disappointment of his father and his family in Louisville. It is true that the name “Clay” might have come from slavery, but this was true of the names of many African-American families, both North and South. Nevertheless, in his career, Ali proudly claimed (either mistakenly or conveniently) to be the descendant of the Kentucky slave owner, abolitionist, and bowie knife fighter.

There was more than one white ancestor in the young boxer’s lineage. In addition to the claim by Ali’s aunt, Mary Clay Turner, that “Henry Clay was Cassius’s great-great-grandfather, and that’s no legend,” the Clay family on the maternal Grady side included a white great-grandfather, Abe Grady of Ennis, Ireland, who came to the United States shortly after the Civil War. Grady married a black woman, the daughter of Lewis and Amanda J. (Mandy) Walker, who hailed from nearby Todd County, Kentucky. The couple gave birth to John Lewis Grady, whose daughter, Odessa Lee Grady, was Ali’s mother.

There is irony here in the white lineage in the man who became known as “the greatest” black man as well as heavyweight champion. When the young champion converted to Islam and changed his name to Muhammad Ali, he asked, “Why should I keep my white slave master’s name visible and my black ancestors invisible, unhonored?”⁷ Reflecting on the white blood in his family, Ali decried the fact that his white blood “came from the slave masters, from raping.” He declared that “White blood harms us, it hurts us. When we was darker, we was stronger. We was purer.”⁸ But those sentiments were years and many fights away from the life of the boy who grew up in working-class, black Louisville.

Eventually, Ali would soften his attitude toward his racial heritage. In September of 2009, at the age of sixty-seven and suffering from Parkinson’s Syndrome, Ali visited Ennis, the home of his ancestors in Western Ireland. More than 10,000 spectators witnessed a concert and the unveiling of a plaque in Ali’s honor. Signs in store windows sported messages like “Welcome Home Ali O’Grady.”⁹ The champion had come full circle in acknowledging his diverse ancestry.

The young Clay’s family also included his other maternal great-grandfather, Tom Morehead, who was the son of a white man and a slave named Dinah. Morehead served during the Civil War in Company B of the 122nd infantry regiment of the United States Colored Troops. His company, which consisted of volunteers from Louisville and surrounding counties, fought in Portsmouth, Virginia from December of 1864 to February of 1865, and later at the final battles at Petersburg, and Richmond, Virginia between February and the end of the war in April of 1865.¹⁰

Family, specifically his father, mother, and brother in Louisville, was a central and essential element in the growth and development of the young Muhammad Ali. Cassius Clay, Sr. (November 11, 1912–February 8, 1990) earned his living as a sign painter, but he was also a religious muralist. The elder Clay occasionally took his sons, Cassius and Rudolph, on jobs with him, teaching them “how to paint pretty good.”

Before he started fighting, Muhammad could lay out a sign. Draw letters, do the spacing, mix the paint, and fill it in right … I was an artist, not just a sign painter. I was born painting. And if it wasn’t for the way things were at the time, a lot more people would have known what I could do.¹¹

Clay’s mother, Odessa Lee (Grady) Clay (February 12, 1917–August 20, 1994), was a domestic servant whose own upbringing was influenced by “the way things were.” She barely knew her father and was raised by her mother and aunt. In spite of hard times and little education, Mr. and Mrs. Clay possessed skills that made it possible for them to earn a respectable living. Cassius Clay, Sr. was proud of the fact that he provided for his family. He told Thomas Hauser that Cassius and his brother, Rudolph

didn’t come out of no ghetto. I raised them on the best street I could: 3302 Grand Avenue in the west end of Louisville. I made sure they were around good people; not people who would bring them into trouble. And I taught them values—always confront the things you fear, try to be the best at whatever you do. That’s what my daddy taught me, and those are things that have to be taught. You don’t learn those things by accident.¹²

The Clay family lived in relative comfort compared to the poorest people, black and white, in Louisville and surrounding Jefferson County. Clay’s parents owned their own home in the West End neighborhood populated almost exclusively by working-class black families.¹³ By all accounts, Cassius and Rudolph were well cared for. In 2012, in recognition of Muhammad Ali’s 70th birthday, the City of Louisville placed a historic marker at the Clay house. The marker said, in part, “Here is where young Clay’s values were instilled, transforming him into a three-time heavyweight champion and world renowned humanitarian.”¹⁴

The relatively secure financial circumstances of the Clay family notwithstanding, the range of action and ambition for a black teenager in segregated Louisville after World War II was severely limited. Neighborhoods were defined by race, and public facilities and schools separated white and “colored” citizens. Soldiers coming home from service in a segregated Army fighting fascism in World War II were understandably disappointed to discover how little had changed in their time away. This was the world into which Ali was born...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Muhammad Ali's Many Voices
• Part I Muhammad Ali
• Part II Documents
• Bibliography
• Index