The Legend
The Legend
"I am America. I am the part you won't recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me.”
-Muhammad Ali
What most people fail to realize about Ali is the intense courage that he possesed and the incredible risks that he had to take during the civil rights movement. Imagine playing a sport you love, expressing your opinions on an important topic, people lashing out at you for your actions, these people then not allowing you to play that sport ever again, and in addition to that, you could spend up to 5 years in jail for those same actions. What would you do? What makes Ali one of the great leaders of the civil rights movement is that despite all this pressure, he stayed firm in his opinion and refused to give in to what others wanted him to do. He was willing to give up his heavyweight championship, his boxing license, as well as his social life, for a cause that he felt was just. He did this not only for himself, but for other oppressed black people all over the United States, because people began listening to him.
Oscar Wilde was once quoted as saying "you kill the thing you love". In Ali's case, it was the exact opposite: what he loved, in a sense, killed him. The man who was the most talkative of athletes now says almost nothing: he moves slowly through the crowds and signs autographs. He has probably signed more autographs than any other athlete that ever lived. It is his principal activity at home, working at his desk. He was once denied an autograph by his idol, Sugar Ray Robinson ("Hello, kid, how ya doin'? I ain't got time"), and vowed he would never turn anyone down. The volume of mail is enormous, yet he answers everyone. Still to this day, his inspiration lives on, and we continue to see the man that instilled so much hope and freedom into so many people. (Plimpton)
The ceremonial leave-taking of great athletes can instill some beautiful memories, — Babe Ruth with the doffed cap at home plate, Lou Gehrig's voice echoing in the numerous hollows of Yankee Stadium. Muhammad Ali's was not exactly a leave-taking, but it may have seemed so to the estimated 3 billion or so television viewers who saw him open the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. Outfitted in a white gym suit that made him seem to glisten against a dark night sky, he approached the unlit saucer with his flaming torch, his free arm trembling visibly from the effects of Parkinson's, but his mind and spirit as sharp as the flame he carried. It was a kind of epiphany that those who watched realized how much they missed him and how much he had contributed to the world of sport and of civil rights. Students of boxing will pore over the trilogy of Ali-Frazier fights, which rank among the greatest fights in boxing history. They would remember the poetry, the verbal ridiculing of opponents, the Ali Shuffle, the Rope-a-Dope, the fact that Ali had brought beauty and grace to the most uncompromising of sports. And they would marvel that through the wonderful excesses of skill and character, he had become the most famous athlete, and indeed, the best-known personality in the world, not only for what he brought to boxing, but also for what he brought to thousands of oppressed people during the Civil Rights Movement. (Plimpton)
- The following video clip that we put together shows broad and basic examples of his influence and primary accounts of his public speeches.
Plimpton, George, "Heroes and Icons: Muhammad Ali", The Time 100, 14 June 1999, Time Magazine, The Most Important People of The Century <http://www.time.com/time/time100/heroes/profile/ali01.html>
Pierre, Hugo. "Ali & the black struggles of the 1960s" Socialist View, 2002. <http://www.geocities.com/socialistparty/Documents/Ali.htm>