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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Muhammad Ali Unfiltered by Muhammad Ali Recalling Muhammad Ali – His life, impact and influence on his daughter Maryum. Days before Ramadan, a deeply spiritual month, Maryum “May May” Ali buries a man whom the splintered world collectively mourns. That the two coincide during such vitriolic times seems an extraordinary coincidence. The loss of Muhammad Ali – the only globally celebrated black and Muslim athlete – becomes a necessary paradigm for the intolerant present. “ [My father] looked at his religion and the inequalities in the world and he saw himself being equal to every other African-American or downtrodden person,” Ali’s eldest daughter, Maryum, reflects a week after her famous father’s burial and televised memorial. Indeed the legendary boxer’s draw was his stentorian voice that confronted injustice and represented his beliefs on the public platform. He was the quintessential alpha male, his daughter recalls. “There was not a wave of energy that went against him,” she adds. His well-documented life attests to how defiantly Ali charted his own course. That confidence to stand for something earned him the love and respect of the people who saw themselves in him. “I am them and they are me,” he once told his daughter. The poignancy of his words within the context of his deeds is what made him The People’s Champ. Even in death, his connection with people was palpable. Though relatively obscure in the public eye, Ali’s daughter isn’t much different. She too sees herself in her community and uses her platform to help at-risk youth. And like her father, Maryum’s natural certitude permeates her often-unfiltered speech, challenging current political rhetoric and socioeconomic discrepancies. Problems like mass incarceration and economic disparities that plagued her father’s time are still relevant today, she feels. But nobody challenges them the way he did, she thinks. Ali went beyond symbolic gestures of protest and consistently resisted oppressive norms, even when it touted controversy. His was no silent or scripted rebellion. When some athletes stood against police brutality toward African-American men in the past, “they got torn apart for [it],” Maryum reveals. Others were instructed “not to be a hero in the neighborhood.” Their activism was relegated to selective philanthropy. Muhammad Ali with his daughter Maryum. Maryum believes that her father’s existence informed institutions how to condition others so they wouldn’t follow suit. “[They] didn’t want a bunch of Muhammad Alis running around, you better believe that one,” she states. Apart from his intrinsic candor, Ali made conscientious choices to be who he was regardless of his wealth and fame. “I don’t care about the money. I gotta die and meet [God],” he’d exclaim. What’s Right Now. The difference in Ali’s choices was also a result of his strong faith, which the media generally glosses over when highlighting his trademark confidence – behind the rope and the mic. “If he contemplated anything, it was based on ‘what does my faith tell me to do.’ He didn’t care about what John was saying over in the corner. John didn’t hold a candlelight to his God,” his daughter contends. Ali’s religion gave his voice reason, his mind strength, and his relationships guidance. Shunned by white America, how Muhammad Ali found his voice on campus tour. T ime had sanitized the past. Portraits of Muhammad Ali’s activism in the wake of his death at 74 on Friday paint a picture of a fighter who helped change American culture with his refusal to be drafted into the US military but cannot explain how dire his situation actually was in 1967. Much of America hated and feared him. He was facing five years in prison for saying no to the military. He was through as a fighter, stripped of his license by the New York State Athletic Board and facing a long court fight to overturn his conviction. “Everyone turned on him,” fellow boxer George Foreman told CNN on Saturday. “I mean literally everyone. I hadn’t even gone into boxing yet. No one wanted to be in his presence. No one wanted to be his friend and he was dropped.” This was one of the toughest parts of Ali’s life. As his backers in the Nation of Islam pushed him further into activism, much of white American shunned him. His passport had been taken away. He complained, at one point that: “I’m not allowed to work in America and I’m not allowed to leave America.” And yet the three-year period – at the height of his sporting powers, from when he refused to step forward as draft officials in Houston called his name to 1971 when the supreme court overturned his conviction and five-year sentence – helped shape the Ali who would later become beloved. It became the time that he grew into his voice. Ali embarked on a series of college tours across America delivering lengthy soliloquies on his faith, his decision to conscientiously object to the war in Vietnam, and his experiences of racism in America. At first the speeches were stunted, narrowly repeating Nation of Islam dictums. But quickly Ali began to thrive, sparring with students who challenged his views and delivering characteristically pithy retorts. In one adversarial speech, just months after the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr in April 1968, Ali told a packed auditorium at Union College in Schenectady, New York: “We don’t hate white people – we know them too well.” Adding: “And the only solution to today’s racial problems is separation.” According to college newspaper reports the entire address was received with cheers, applause and laughter. Ali, dressed in a double-breasted silk suit, continued: “Even Tarzan, king of the African jungle, is a white man swinging around each week with diapers on.” Bill Siegel, director of the documentary The Trials of Muhammad Ali, argued these years not only helped Ali forge his dissident voice, but showed him he was part of a broader, younger, grassroots anti-war movement. “It forced him to become even more himself and develop himself as an independent thinker, and also to recognise that he had allies that he didn’t know he had, meaning white college students, who were coming around to where he was,” Siegel said in an interview. But the tours were also born out of financial necessity. Ali, then in his mid-20s and a young father, could no longer make a living from boxing following his criminal conviction. Ali ended his address to students at Union college with a short rhyme: “I like your school and admire your style, but your pay is so small, I won’t be back for a while.” “It’s one thing to be a marcher at a symbolic rally,” civil rights leader Jesse Jackson told CNN on Saturday, “[But] he lost of all of his wealth, he almost became a pauper, [going] school to school giving speeches because he’d gave it all up for his principles. That made him a very different guy.” Former Washington Post and Atlanta Journal Constitution columnist Dave Kindred, who knew Ali well and wrote a book about the fighter’s relationship with broadcaster Howard Cosell called Sound and Fury, believes Ali enjoyed the college tours. “I think he was surprised at finding an audience that he never really knew existed,” Kindred said. To Kindred the hardest thing about that time for Ali was that he could not fight between the ages of 24 and 29, which are the peak years for most athletes. As successful as his boxing career was, he might have had even greater success in the ring had his license not been taken away. “I don’t think he suffered much in other ways,” Kindred says. “Money didn’t matter to him at all. He wanted money just to get by. The Nation of Islam was supporting him as best as they could.” Ali feared the Nation and their leader Elijah Muhammad. After Ali’s friend and adviser Malcolm X was banished from the Nation by Muhammad and later assassinated, Ali worried the same thing could happen to him. He once told Kindred he didn’t want the Nation to kill him, too. “Ali was not a leader, he was a follower,” Kindred says. “Ali wanted to be guided – as independent and eccentric as he wanted to be. He attached himself to leaders. All the racist harangues, the “white man is the devil” – that was the Nation’s ideology and he became its most vocal mouthpiece. He was coached by the Nation.” But Ali’s words were heard. The more he spoke them on college campuses and the more they reached new ears, the bolder he became. “He loved the sound of his voice,” Kindred said. “His voice at that time was getting a lot of attention.” After the three-time heavyweight champion retired in 1981 that voice grew silent, however. Aside from the occasional commercial or interview he did not appear much as his body started to feel the effects of Parkinson’s disease, which slowly took away his ability to move and speak. He was no longer the raging presence in the ring or on college campuses. He was just gone, re-emerging before the world as the surprise torch-lighter at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. “I don’t think there was any relationship with America,” Kindred said. “Then when he reappears frail and trembling and vulnerable he was embraced. It was kind of a guilt. Look at what he gave for us as a fighter.” Muhammad Ali.

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