DNA links Ali to celebrated former slave: family
WASHINGTON When Cassius Clay joined the Nation of Islam in 1964 and changed his name to Muhammad Ali, he had a straightforward explanation. “Why should I keep my white slavemaster’s name visible and my black ancestors invisible, unknown, unhonoured?” Ali asked.
Back then, it was more of an abstract concept, a statement against white oppression; Ali did not know much, if anything, about his ancestors or his own family tree. Decades later, though, Ali’s family has made a discovery that appears to shed new light on the boxer’s lineage: where he came from and also his place in American history. Ali, according to his family’s research, is the great-great-great grandson of Archer Alexander, a slave who heroically fought both for his own freedom and against slavery.
Alexander escaped from bondage and surreptitiously fed information to the Union Army during the Civil War. He was later the model for the slave depicted in Washington’s Emancipation Memorial east of the U.S. Capitol.
“The beautiful thing about Ali is that he acted all along as if he were royalty, that he had a claim to greatness,” said Jonathan Eig, the author of Ali: A Life. “Ali spent much of his life attacking racist ideas. If he had known that his great-great-great grandfather was such a brave and intelligent man, it surely would have strengthened his argument.”
After being alerted to the family ’s discovery in recent weeks, Eig investigated the claim and then included it in the paperback edition of the biography, which comes out this week.
“To the best of my ability to confirm this, it checks out,” he said.
Ali’s daughter Maryum said that her father would have been proud to call Alexander family. “He would have loved knowing he was connected to someone like that,” she said. “He was ahead of people in understanding that there was a connection that went back through slavery to the kings and queens in Africa.”
The discovery was made by Ali’s third cousin Keith Winstead, who is retired from a career in computer manufacturing and is an amateur genealogist. Winstead discovered the connection between Ali and Alexander while conducting research on the website 23andMe. The finding is supported by DNA, which, according to Maryum Ali, was collected when Ali and his wife Lonnie participated in a study to raise awareness for Parkinson’s disease, from which Ali suffered.
Ali was born in segregated Louisville, Ky., in 1942 and his role as a pioneer and activist would become as much a part of his legacy as his boxing career (he died in 2016).
In the 1960s, he joined the Nation of Islam, which was led by Elijah Muhammad, who advocated for racial separation, believing White America had stripped African-Americans of their family histories. Indeed, descendants of slaves can have a difficult time tracing their ancestry because their forebears had their identities purposely and systematically stripped.