Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Reflections: Remembering Muhammad Ali: Myths, Memory, and History

2017; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/rah.2017.0025

1080-6628

Johnny Smith,

Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence

ReflectionsRemembering Muhammad Ali: Myths, Memory, and History Johnny Smith (bio) On June 10, 2016, Muhammad Ali received a tribute befitting a man who once called himself the King of the World. His funeral was a spectacle like few others in U.S. history. Never before had an athlete received such an outpouring of love from people across the globe. Celebrities, religious leaders, and political luminaries gathered in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, to honor him. Thousands of fans lined the streets, standing for hours, eight to ten deep, cheering and tossing flowers onto his black hearse as the procession traversed more than twenty miles throughout the city. At nearly every turn, they swarmed the hearse, shouting, “Ali! Ali! Ali!” It was a familiar chant that echoed from decades earlier when he was truly the King of the World. He heard it shortly after winning the heavyweight title in 1964, when he traveled to Ghana, Nigeria, and Egypt; when he regained the title against George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire, in 1974; and when he defended his title in Kuala Lumpur, Puerto Rico, Munich, Bogotá, and, most memorably, Manila.1 Hours after the procession began, nearly 20,000 people packed the KFC Yum Center arena for a memorial that lasted more than three hours. During an interfaith service, Muslims, Christians, and Jews eulogized Ali, a testament to his remarkable ability to bring people together long after his radical views about race, war, and religion had divided America. Former President Bill Clinton stood on the stage beneath large flags of the United States and the Olympic Games, symbolic reminders that Ali was an American hero and a citizen of the world. Dressed in a sharp blue suit, he appeared a shadow of his presidential self, his white hair thinning, forehead creased with wrinkles, and a raspy voice weakened from a relentless speaking tour stumping for his wife’s White House campaign. He reflected on the poignant moment in 1996 when he was still president and Ali, full of poise and grace, his hands trembling from Parkinson’s disease, lit the Olympic flame. Clinton recalled that day in Atlanta, “weeping like a baby,” admiring Ali’s strength and courage, his refusal to be imprisoned by a disease.2 [End Page 177] Clinton spoke about Ali as a young man who decided “to write his own life story.” Ali, the president noted, determined that he would never “be disempowered. He decided that not his race nor his place, the expectations of others, positive or negative or otherwise, would strip him from the power to write his own story.”3 Undoubtedly, Ali embodied black empowerment and self-determination. But his story—and how Americans responded to it—was also formed by social and cultural forces beyond his reach. And that complex narrative continues to be revised and simplified by politicians, television producers, filmmakers, corporations, curators, and journalists. For all that has been said about him—a man who once held the Guinness World Record as the most written-about person in history, an unsubstantiated claim—no academic historian has written a biography of his life. This is especially curious since historians have written serious treatments of black heavyweight champions Jack Johnson and Joe Louis, both renowned cultural figures who shaped U.S. racial attitudes. Furthermore, academic histories of the 1960s and the Black Freedom Movement have mostly excluded Ali, compartmentalizing him in the history of sports. Confining Ali to the history of sports diminishes his broader cultural importance in an era of dissent and black empowerment. During the 1960s, Ali stood at the very center of U.S. debates about race, war, and religion. Arguably the most famous black American of his time, Ali’s career as a boxer offers historians a link between the Black Freedom Movement, the Vietnam War, and popular culture. Recent debates over his legacy raise important questions for historians. How have journalists—who have written far more Ali books than historians—influenced our collective memories about him? How have the few academic historians who have written about Ali assessed his import as a boxer, political figure, and icon? And how should we remember him, especially now that he is gone...