Muhammad Ali

He was named for a 19th-century Kentucky abolitionist, and said later that the man freed his slaves and kept his white supremacy. His father painted signs and billboards, his mother cleaned other people's houses, and he was dyslexic in a school with no word for it, so reading stayed hard for life. The murder of Emmett Till in 1955 marked him: nothing, he told his daughter, ever shook him up more. At 12 somebody stole his bicycle, and he told the Louisville policeman who ran a gym downstairs that he was going to whip the thief. The policeman told him to learn to fight first. Six Kentucky Golden Gloves, two national ones, two AAU titles, an amateur record of 100 and 8, and light heavyweight gold at Rome at 18.

He took the title off Sonny Liston in Miami in February 1964, at 22, and confirmed the next day that he had joined the Nation of Islam. Elijah Muhammad renamed him over the radio 10 days later. Then the draft board, the refusal, three and a half years without a licence, and a Supreme Court that threw the conviction out in 1971. He came back and took the title twice more, the only three-time lineal heavyweight champion there has been. BriefHistory has the stand and what the country did about it. This page has the body it was made with.

He was cruel in a way the tribute reels leave out, and mostly to Black men. He called Floyd Patterson the Rabbit and an Uncle Tom. He called Joe Frazier too ugly to be champ, too dumb to be champ, a dumb tool of the white establishment, and an Uncle Tom too, and a man in Frazier's camp remembered what it did to him. The third Frazier fight, in Manila in 1975, ran 14 rounds in heat near 100 degrees, and Ali said it was the closest thing to dying he knew. His physician Ferdie Pacheco quit in 1977 after Ali ignored a commission report that his kidneys were failing. He fought Larry Holmes anyway in 1980, and Sylvester Stallone, at ringside, said it was like watching an autopsy on a man still alive. The Parkinson's diagnosis came in 1984.

The most repeated story about him is one his friends deny: he wrote in his 1975 autobiography that he threw his Olympic gold into the Ohio River after a whites-only counter refused him. Bundini Brown and Howard Bingham said it never happened, and Hauser's biography has him losing it a year on. In 1996 the Olympic committee replaced the medal in Atlanta, where he lit the flame before an estimated 3.5 billion people, shaking. George W. Bush gave him the Medal of Freedom in 2005, the year the Ali Center opened. He died of septic shock on June 3, 2016, at 74, and was buried after a funeral he had scripted himself. Louisville renamed its airport for him in 2019.

Muhammad Ali's life against the full span of the corpus.

• I Am the Greatest album
  Spoken word, on Columbia, and Grammy-nominated 1963
• Clay v. United States case
  The Supreme Court reversed his draft conviction 8 to 0 1971
• The Adventures of Ali and His Gang vs. Mr. Tooth Decay album
  A children's record, also Grammy-nominated 1976
• The Greatest: My Own Story book
  The autobiography that carried the Ohio River story his friends denied 1975
• Muhammad Ali Center building
  A 54 million dollar museum on the Louisville riverfront, opened with his wife Lonnie 2005
• The Soul of a Butterfly book
  Written with his daughter Hana 2004

• 1954 aged ~12 Starts boxing at 12 after his bicycle is stolen The policeman Joe Martin told him to learn to fight before he went looking for the thief.
• 1960 aged ~18 Wins light heavyweight gold at the Rome Olympics at 18
• February 25, 1964 aged 22 Beats Sonny Liston for the heavyweight title He confirmed his Nation of Islam membership the next day.
• April 28, 1967 aged 25 Refuses induction in Houston and is stripped of the title that day The New York commission pulled his licence within hours.
• June 28, 1971 aged 29 The Supreme Court reverses his conviction, 8 to 0 Thurgood Marshall recused himself, having been solicitor general at the time of the case.
• October 1, 1975 aged 33 The third Frazier fight, in Manila Stopped before the 15th round. He called it the closest thing to dying he knew.
• October 2, 1980 aged 38 Loses to Larry Holmes in a fight his doctor had begged him to skip
• 1984 aged ~42 Diagnosed with Parkinson's syndrome Doctors have disagreed since about how much of it the ring caused.
• July 19, 1996 aged 54 Lights the Olympic flame in Atlanta The IOC gave him a replacement for the 1960 gold medal at the same Games.
• June 3, 2016 aged 74 Dies of septic shock in Scottsdale, Arizona

• Malcolm X 1925–1965
  Civil-rights leader whose critique of racism and advocacy of Black dignity reshaped American political thought. mentor, then broken with
• Elijah Muhammad 1897–1975
  Leader who built the Nation of Islam into a major religious and Black nationalist movement. renamed by
• Jack Johnson 1878–1946
  First Black world heavyweight boxing champion whose reign provoked national controversy over race and sport. predecessor as a hated champion
• Joe Louis 1914–1981
  Heavyweight boxing champion whose 1938 rematch against Max Schmeling became a symbolic battle against Nazism. the champion he was measured against
• Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968
  Baptist minister and civil rights leader whose nonviolent activism ended legal segregation in America. shared the antiwar ground
• Jackie Robinson 1919–1972
  First African American to play in Major League Baseball in the modern era, breaking the color barrier. opened the door before him