the last book I ever read (The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage, excerpt eleven)

from The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage by Lewis A. Erenberg:

African Americans celebrated Ali’s victory as a matter of racial solidarity, a pattern not seen since Joe Louis’s heyday in the 1930s and 1940s. Even though his opponent was black, Ali’s triumph was viewed as a victory over the injustices of the white world. As president of Morehouse College, Hugh M. Gloseter, told Ali in front of four thousand students: “As much as you are admired by boxing fans in general, you are admired even more by the members of your own race. You are our main man.” Taking back his title that “’they’ had taken from him” because of his religion and his refusal to be drafted, made him an overarching symbol of racial pride in an era when black pride was at its apex. As the Chicago Defender put it, “Now the self-appointed Messiah of black everywhere, to Harlem, to South Africa, to the slums of the cities of all the world, he preaches pride in being black, pride in the determination to overcome, to meet the white man’s world on its own terms, and to defeat it.” He amuses many, frightens some with his tirades: “There are blacks who greet him with laughter and glee as he excoriates the white world, but there are also blacks who take his vitriolic, militant speeches as a green light to overthrow the white man’s establishment.”

Ali’s antiestablishment stance was highlighted when he returned to Louisville, Kentucky, on November 8 for Muhammad Ali Day. At a central plaza, seven thousand people, mostly black, but many whites too, gathered to honor a “black folk hero and the most famous defender of the faith of Islam.” Although a boxer, he stood before the crowd “like a Black Prince,” with his face unscarred and, “as men’s faces can be, . . . something approaching beautiful.” A triumphant living symbol that black was beautiful, Ali received greetings from “those who genuinely loved him,” as well as, finally, “some of the bigshots who shied away from him in the old days when he was considered a traitor and a bum for refusing to enter military service and for changing his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali.” As he walked through the crowd, people nearly trampled one another to touch him. “It was,” wrote Charles Sanders in Ebony, “an outpouring of black love upon a man for whom black people have gained profound respect – for refusing to knuckle under despite the cruelest pressures; for standing up for what he believed even though it cost him, in dollars and otherwise, far more than most men are willing to lose, and for refusing to give up and for trying hard enough and often enough to eventually triumph.”