My father was a boxing fan. His hero was Rocky Marciano, the only undefeated heavyweight boxing champion of the world. I remember seating beside my father at a closed circuit theater broadcast of Marciano’s last title defense. The fight was so brutal I buried my head on my father’s shoulder. Later, my father took me to the home of another Italian boxer. He was a middleweight known within his community for his courage, but to the outside world as the boxer with a glass jaw. He invited me, a 12 year old kid, to hit him: “you can’t hurt me, you’ll see.” I took a swing and caught him flush on that jaw. As he staggered backward, I knew at once that he could not have been a very good fighter. But both of these boxers were revered within an émigré community exiled by circumstances from their native land and ridiculed for their ethnicity. Both were bold and confident they could make it in America.

My grandparents escaped violence and famine in Europe during and after World War I. They were refugees. When they came to this country, they faced recession and the task of raising another generation to endure a world war. As Italian Americans, their very ethnicity was a handicap. They were stereotyped as Mafiosi and as illiterates. My grandfather and namesake was a band leader who tried to win acceptance by Americanizing his name. But he was still identified by an ethnic slur. He died in his early twenties, working in a coal mine. My father and uncle, as pre-teens, gathered coal from abandoned mines in order to survive the harsh winters in upstate Pennsylvania. Their future did not seem promising; yet they persevered. Both raised children who went to college. Both were bold and confident they could make it in America and provide a better future for their children. Of course, not every Italian émigré succeeded, but hope is a strong motivating factor and is magnified by the courage of recognizable heroes, like Rocky Marciano.

Muhammed Ali was one of those recognizable heroes, though not just for African-Americans.

While the press caricatured him as brash and clownish, he manipulated them to draw attention to his fights. He introduced the mantra, it is not bragging when you can back it up. The government branded him a traitor for refusing the draft, but after a multi-year struggle in the courts he won his case as a conscientious objector. Even today, his stand as a peace loving Muslim is a rebuke to radical jihadists/terrorists. Ali not only had the courage to fight in the most brutal athletic arena, but to stand up to a government that prosecuted him for his religious beliefs and to a media-drawn image that belittled him as an illiterate black man. His braggadocio was deliberate, playful and entertaining (perhaps even prescient of contemporary hip-hop), but it was never intended to be offensive. That prerogative is more a contemporary phenomenon.

Ali became more than his exploits in the ring. His metal was fired in the cauldron of a life beset with challenges. He not only had to overcome persecution by his government and ridicule by the press, but he also took on Parkinson disease for the last 29 years of his life. He once said that if a fifty year old man claimed he was the same man he was at twenty, he would have wasted thirty years. His life demonstrated the value of courage and perseverance. He was actually grateful for the physical challenges he faced; for he said they gave meaning to his life—“they made it all worthwhile.” After leaving the ring, he became an international figure that inspired people to overcome failure and obstacles in their lives and to show compassion for others. But he was more than a retired pugilist or Parkinson patient advocating for peace and love. His message became the raised fist that calls for universal justice while celebrating individual achievement. There is a special irony his life exemplifies. Whereas the South is the only part of the country that has suffered the loss of a war and a way of life, Ali was a member of the only group in America that won freedom in that war along with a more promising future. Some parts of the South still look to the past with nostalgia, while the African-American community looks to the future with hope. Ali, like Malcom X, one of his mentors, and Martin Luther King projected himself into that future and brought us all along for the ride.

This blog, however, is not really intended to be a eulogy, for there are others who can more appropriately perform that task. Nor is my intent to explore the irony of a man once rejected and now revered by the very same public institutions. What brings me to write about Muhammed Ali, formerly known as Cassius Clay, is the role he played in a still unreconstructed pluralist society. He was a bridge persona who somehow persevered on a fickle world stage to bring people together without losing his dignity or integrity. Who can do so today? Who will?

“I am America. I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me—black, confident, cocky. My name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own. Get used to me.” (Muhammed Ali, 1942-2016)