{"id":4699,"date":"2016-06-07T08:00:14","date_gmt":"2016-06-07T15:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/ali-a-symbol-of-black-pride\/"},"modified":"2016-06-07T08:00:14","modified_gmt":"2016-06-07T15:00:14","slug":"ali-a-symbol-of-black-pride","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/sports\/ali-a-symbol-of-black-pride\/","title":{"rendered":"Ali: A symbol of black pride"},"content":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON<\/strong> \u2014 For Muhammad Ali, the idea of being a humble athlete \u2014 someone pre-packaged and palatable for white America \u2014 was never an option.<\/p>\n

Instead, he demanded respect not only as a boxer but as a brash, unbought and unbossed black man and endeared himself to African-Americans as a symbol of black pride. He radiated courage and confidence, skill and showmanship.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe became the incarnation of black defiance, black protest and black excellence at the same time,\u201d said Rev. Al Sharpton, a longtime friend of Ali\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Ali, who died Friday at 74, gave voice to many blacks frustrated with a white society that asked them to fight communism in Vietnam but openly practiced segregation and discrimination at home.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt a time when blacks who spoke up about injustice were labeled uppity and often arrested under one pretext or another, Muhammad willingly sacrificed the best years of his career to stand tall and fight for what he believed was right,\u201d said retired NBA star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who like Ali converted to Islam. Abdul-Jabbar was among several prominent African-American athletes in the late 1960s who supported the boxer for his religious beliefs and as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War.<\/p>\n

Unapologetically arrogant about his looks and his skills, Ali taunted opponents by reciting playful poetry and frequently declared himself \u201cpretty\u201d and \u201cthe greatest.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many people had never heard a successful black man talk about himself so boldly in front of whites. And it made a difference, Ali biographer Thomas Hauser said.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery time that Muhammad Ali looked in the mirror and said \u2018I\u2019m so pretty,\u201d what he was really saying \u2014 before it became fashionable \u2014 is \u2018black is beautiful,\u201d Hauser said. \u201cI can\u2019t tell you how many people … have come up to me and said, \u2018Before Muhammad Ali, I thought it was better to be white than black. I was ashamed of my color, and Ali made me proud. Ali made me just as happy to be black as somebody else being white.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Ali\u2019s blackness infused everything he did and everything he was.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you wanted to make it in this country, you had to be quiet, carry yourself in a certain way and not say anything about what was going on, even though there was a knife sticking in your chest,\u201d recalled the late black journalist Gil Noble in an essay written by Hauser.<\/p>\n

\u201cAli changed all of that. He just laid it out and talked about racism and slavery and all of that stuff. He put it on the table. And everybody who was black, whether they said it overtly or covertly, said \u2018Amen.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The day after winning his first world heavyweight championship, Ali announced he had joined the Nation of Islam and had shed his \u201cslave\u201d name of Cassius Clay. He refused to be drafted into the U.S. military to fight in Vietnam. He was convicted of draft evasion, banned from boxing and stripped of his heavyweight title.<\/p>\n

When asked about his stance on the North Vietnamese, Ali famously said: \u201cThey never called me nigger. They never lynched me. They didn\u2019t put no dogs on me. They didn\u2019t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was eventually cleared by the U.S. Supreme Court and won back his boxing title. With that, Ali had defeated what many blacks saw as a racist system \u2014 regardless of whether Ali was right or wrong in his particular stance.<\/p>\n

It would have been easier and more lucrative for Ali to keep quiet and go along with what many in white society wanted from him, said his longtime friend and sports commentator Howard Cosell. They wanted \u201ca white man\u2019s black man,\u201d Cosell once said.<\/p>\n

The United States has a long history of expecting deference from black athletes, said Clarence Lang, chairman of the African and African-American studies department at the University of Kansas.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe expectation is that you will keep your head down, that you don\u2019t make white people uncomfortable by being excellent and being mindful and outspoken about the fact that you are excellent,\u201d Lang said.<\/p>\n

Ali didn\u2019t do deference.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am America,\u201d he boasted. \u201cI am the part you won\u2019t recognize. But get used to me \u2014 black, confident, cocky. My name, not yours. My religion, not yours. My goals, my own.\u201d<\/p>\n

The boxer \u201cmade people accept him as a man, as an equal, and he was not afraid to represent himself in that way,\u201d NFL great Jim Brown said.<\/p>\n

President Barack Obama, the nation\u2019s first black president, keeps a set of Ali\u2019s gloves on display in the White House.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe stood with King and Mandela, stood up when it was hard, spoke out when others wouldn\u2019t,\u201d Obama said. \u201cHis fight outside the ring would cost him his title and his public standing. It would earn him enemies on the left and the right, make him reviled and nearly send him to jail. But Ali stood his ground. And his victory helped us get used to the America we recognize today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lang said it would be wrong to assume that Ali was beloved during his time as a boxing champ. He stepped outside of the mainstream of the civil rights movement with some of his rhetoric, outside of the religious community with his conversion to the Nation of Islam and outside of the black military community with his refusal to go to Vietnam.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn some ways, Ali became a loveable figure after his heyday, after his career,\u201d Lang said. \u201cI think people love to love him now.\u201d<\/p>\n

But even back then, people who might not necessarily agree with the rhetoric of militant black activists such as H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael or Malcolm X \u201ccould nevertheless respect Ali\u2019s talent,\u201d Lang said.<\/p>\n

Ali, Sharpton said, \u201cwent from one of the most despised figures in the world to one of the most popular men in the world because people respected that he really authentically believed and sacrificed for what he believed in.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf there was a Mount Rushmore erected for influential black figures in America,\u201d Sharpton added, \u201che would not be on the mountain. He would be the mountain.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2014 For Muhammad Ali, the idea of being a humble athlete \u2014 someone pre-packaged and palatable for white America \u2014 was never an option. Instead, he demanded respect not only as a boxer but as a brash, unbought and unbossed black man and endeared himself to African-Americans as a symbol of black pride. He […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":6,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-4699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4699\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4699"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=4699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}