ONE-OF-ONE

Filmmaker and visual artist Arthur Jafa once said the paradox of Black America is that if you took away the centuries of trauma inflicted on Black Americans, you’d erase the people, vaporize the internal colony known as Black America. You’d snuff out a generative spark that has electrified the world. Muhammad Ali—iconic boxer, American hero, and global citizen—is Jafa’s irony-drenched observation given flesh. Boxing gloves in tow, Muhammad Ali was a poet, warrior, and comedian, astute philosopher and low-key forerunner of the kid who brilliantly freestyles in the underground hip-hop cypher. He was forged in and by America and then, through force of will and spirit, transcended it. Muhammad Ali was the very definition of one-of-one while being emblematic of his people. It’s important to view him and his life within the context of the collective, which he would have insisted upon.

Muhamad Ali (birth name Cassius Clay) was born to a middle-class family in Louisville, Kentucky on January 17, 1942. “But black middle class, black southern middle class, which is not white middle class at all,” Toni Morrison is quoted as saying in King of the World, David Remnick’s excellent 1998 biography of Ali. (Ms. Morrison was also the editor of Ali’s 1975 autobiography The Greatest: My Own Story.) Though Cassius, his brother, and their parents never wanted for basic necessities, they didn’t have much more than that, which still positioned them materially above most of the area’s Black community of the time. By his own admission, Muhammad Ali had the occasional childhood scrap but didn’t have a propensity for fighting until he was twelve years old and the bicycle he’d received as a Christmas present was stolen. He was advised to take boxing lessons to handle the guy who’d stolen it, and proved to have a gift that propelled him to a gold medal in boxing, light heavyweight division, at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome.

Flash forward to February 25, 1964 and twenty-two year-old Cassius, having turned professional boxer, is very much the underdog in a match with Sonny Liston, reigning heavyweight champion of the world. Malcolm X, Sammy Davis Jr., and a fraternity of mob dudes from Vegas, Chicago, and New York are all in the crowd. Clay is predicted to soundly lose by almost all odds-takers. Everyone expects him to get his ass handed to him. Nearly every major sports columnist and barbershop loudmouth says as much. To the shock of everyone but himself, Clay wins by a technical knockout in the sixth round. The next day he announces he’s a member of the Nation of Islam. A few weeks later he announces his new name: Muhammad Ali. The legend was born.

Black athletes, whatever their sport or level of athletic giftedness, are always embedded with other people’s projections and expectations; with stereotypes, clichés, and the unasked-for responsibilities to dismantle them. That demand of contradictions—to embody expectations, to hold the projections, to uphold cliché and stereotype for one faction while dismantling them for another—is collectively issued from sports fans across race and around the globe. Some athletes (Ali, Kareem Abdul Jabar, Colin Kaepernick) assume the mantle of responsibility to challenge racism’s myriad manifestations (in the sports world and beyond) because they’re plugged into the centuries-long struggle for Black liberation and equality, and don’t confuse their individual career and material success with collective political progress. 

Muhammad Ali took on injustice and inequality as though activism were as much his calling as the boxing ring. His refusal to serve in the Viet Nam war earned him a prison sentence of five years (which was overturned before he had to serve it) as well as getting him stripped of his heavyweight title and having his boxing license suspended, all in 1967. Through it all he was a steadfast Civil Rights activist on behalf of Black America, despite non-stop death threats and steep costs to his career. His name is rightly  mentioned alongside celebrity activists like Nina Simone, Dick Gregory, and Harry Belafonte, but also with such political heavyweights as Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) and Malcolm X, both of whom were his close friends and major influences.

James Brown released the classic Black Pride anthem “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” in 1968, a politically tumultuous time that was also artistically fecund for Black America in terms of music, literature, and the visual arts. Brown’s track was the score of a movement and it could be argued it was a tailor-made track for Muhammad Ali, whose fiery, funny, often moving soundbites and interviews weren’t limited to sports outlets. He was a frequent and popular guest on leading talk shows of the day. Armed with a rapier wit that oscillated from deadpan quips to stinging zingers, and the ability to drop into a register of solemnity that made clear where the joking ended, Muhammad Ali was unwaveringly political in ways it’s impossible to imagine any athlete being now.

Widely considered to be the best heavyweight fighter of all time, Muhammad Ali fought many matches that remain some of the best boxing spectacles in history: his 1964 fight with Sonny Liston; the “Fight of the Century” between him and Joe Frazier in 1971; the “Rumble in the Jungle” in 1974; 1975’s “Thrilla in Manilla” rematch with Joe Frazier. If all he’d done was fight and keep quiet about politics, he’d have a secure place in the record books. But he didn’t keep quiet.

One of the things that made and makes Ali such a spectacular figure far beyond his athletic prowess is his certainty of his self-worth as a Black man at a time of scalding anti-Blackness. It was rooted in scholarship of the African continent and peoples, in connecting the dots between his faith and politics, in actually being in community with his community, and in enjoying the fruits of celebrity and accepting the massive responsibilities that come with it.

By the time Muhammad Ali was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in the 1980s, he’d solidified a permanent position within the public imagination and popular media. He continues to resonate because of his strength of character, and his constant application of his ethics and integrity. In countless ways, he remains a true one-of-one.