Muhammad Ali: 4 Ways He Changed America

Without question, Muhammad Ali (who died on June 3rd, 2016) transformed the world of sports. Winning the heavyweight title three times — beginning with his shocking upset of Sonny Liston in 1964, which made him the youngest boxer to unseat an incumbent heavyweight champion — Ali is considered, alongside Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson, one of the best boxers ever to enter a ring. Though his pugilistic style was unorthodox and an affront to boxing purists at the time, his dazzling combination of speed and power revolutionized the sport, and most boxing observers have now come to agree with Ali’s longtime boast that he was “The Greatest of All Time.”

But while his achievements in the ring may have earned him the title of Sports Illustrated‘s “Sportsman of the Century” in 1999, it was really Ali’s appeal outside the arena that made him perhaps the most recognizable and beloved figure on the planet. Other than Jackie Robinson, who shattered baseball’s racial barrier in 1947, no one can rival his impact as a transcendent 20th Century American sports figure. The only things quicker than his fists and feet were his mind and mouth: Speaking truth to power, the loquacious Ali said things in a confrontational, even “arrogant” manner that mainstream America was not yet prepared to hear, especially coming out of the mouth of a young black man.

Expressing himself with force and forthrightness — not to mention no small amount of charm and charisma — Ali became a magnetic symbol of dignity and self-determination to several generations of African-Americans, a titan worthy of the honorific “the People’s Champ.” Here are four ways his legacy helped shape modern America:

Introducing “Black Power” to White America

Four years before James Brown recorded “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud” in 1968, and two years before Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Stokely Carmichael first used the term “Black Power” within weeks of each other in the spring of 1966, Ali had become the physical manifestation of the concept. Shortly after defeating Liston on February 25th, 1964, the new heavyweight champion announced that he was changing his given “slave name” of Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali, one chosen for him by Elijah Muhammad’s black-separatist sect the Nation of Islam. Many sportswriters (and even some of Ali’s boxing rivals) refused to address him by his new name, continuing to call him Cassius Clay. “I know where I’m going and I know the truth and I don’t have to be what you want me to be,” Ali said at his first post-championship press conference. “I’m free to be what I want.”

In the months and years that followed, Ali transformed himself from being merely a boxing champ to a champion of his people, speaking out against injustice and racial inequality. He was frequently misunderstood by the media, which at the time was almost exclusively white (as opposed to just overwhelmingly so today). At the height of the Civil Rights era, his embrace of the Nation of Islam’s rejection of racial integration was seen by many as just another form of bigotry — the NOI was considerably feared at the time and targeted by the FBI — and throughout the rest of his life he was called on to act as an ambassador for his religion as probably the most famous Muslim American in history, other than perhaps his mentor Malcolm X.

Ali left the NOI for the more mainstream Sunni Islam in 1975, devoting much of his later life to charitable work. After 9/11, he spoke out against the terrorist attacks: “That really hurt me, because Islam is peace and is not violent,” he said. “The few that do these things make the religion as a whole look bad.” His commitment to freedom of speech and of religion truly embodied the constitutional freedoms our Founding Fathers proscribed, something made even more resonant by our current political climate of dangerous demagoguery.