Muhammed Ali 0

I once saw Muhammed Ali.

It was only for a moment and he never knew my name.

At the time, my office was in 30th Street Station Philadelphia. On a break, I was wandering about the waiting room (one of the pleasures of working in 30th Street) and Ali and a small group of persons who cared about him (today they would be called “an entourage”) were waiting for a train. He was already in the early stages of Parkinson’s and you could see some of its effects.

As I read the homages to his passing, I note an absence of acknowledgement of the hate that confronted him.

He was hated in the Jim Crow South, where I grew up.

Once he revealed that he had become a Muslim and had taken the name, “Muhammed Ali,” no one in the Jim Crow South, where I grew up, was willing to refer to him as anything other than “Cassius Clay.” When he fought, in the Jim Crow South, where I grew up, the white folks rooted against him, cheered when he lost, and seethed when he won.

When he did what I consider the bravest act of his career, something I would not have had the courage to do, refusing to fight in America’s war for a lie in Viet Nam, the war for a lie of his and my generation, he was reviled as a traitor in the Jim Crow South, where I grew up.

Muhammed Ali committed the gravest crime that any black man could do in the Jim Crow South, where I grew up, for all that America is better for his being, a crime that took more courage than I can imagine.

Muhammed Ali was uppity.