Muhammad Ali

Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on the seventeenth of January 1942, the son of a sign painter and a domestic worker. He began boxing at twelve, won six Kentucky Golden Gloves titles by sixteen, and took the gold medal in the light-heavyweight division at the 1960 Rome Olympics at eighteen.

He won the World Heavyweight Championship from Sonny Liston on the twenty-fifth of February 1964 at the Miami Beach Convention Hall, at twenty-two. The day after the fight he publicly announced his membership in the Nation of Islam. He changed his name to Muhammad Ali three weeks later.

In April 1967 — having been classified 1-A and ordered for induction into the U.S. Army for service in Vietnam — Ali refused induction at the Houston induction station on religious and conscientious grounds. He was convicted of draft evasion in June 1967, sentenced to five years in prison and a ten-thousand-dollar fine, and stripped of his championship title and his boxing licenses. His passport was confiscated.

He did not fight for three and a half years across his physical prime. The Supreme Court unanimously overturned his conviction in Clay v. United States on the twenty-eighth of June 1971, holding that Ali's conscientious-objector status met the legal standard.

He returned to boxing in October 1970, regained the heavyweight title from George Foreman at the Rumble in the Jungle in Kinshasa, Zaire, on the thirtieth of October 1974 — a fight that took place in Mobutu Sese Seko's Zaire and was promoted alongside the Zaire 74 music festival featuring James Brown, B.B. King, Miriam Makeba, and Celia Cruz. He regained the title a third time from Leon Spinks in 1978 — the only fighter in heavyweight-title history to do so.

He suffered from Parkinson's syndrome from the early 1980s. He lit the Olympic cauldron at the 1996 Atlanta Games — his most-watched public appearance.

He died in Scottsdale, Arizona, on the third of June 2016, age seventy-four.

He is honored here as the heavyweight champion who refused the war.