The skinny kid who stood up to racist white America with his courage, charisma, wit and wisdom How he beat bigots and became a legend

1967. How many high- profile black Americans would even contemplate saying today what he said back then: “I can’t take part in nothing where I’d help the shooting of dark Asiatic people, who haven’t lynched me, deprived me of my freedom, justice and equality, or assassinated my leaders.” It was courage that inspired his 1970 return to the ring for the Joe Frazier trilogy, the Rumble in the Jungle with George Foreman, and eight years after his comeback, victory over Leon Spinks, which made him the first boxer ever to win the world heavyweight title three times. And it was courage that made him refuse to be beaten by Parkinson’s Disease, which froze his central nervous system in the mid-80s, and left him a shadow of his former self.

Here was the one shackle he could never throw off, but he never let the disease beat him.

And when three billion people watched him defy his shaking limbs and light the Olympic Flame in Atlanta in 1996, the world remembered, if it had ever forgotten, that our lives had been blessed by a giant of a man.

He was born Cassius Marcellus Clay on January 17, 1942, in the racially segregated Kentucky city of Louisville.

The older of two boys, he was named after his father, signwriter Cassius Marcellus Clay, who himself was given his name in honour of the 19th century abolitionist and politician of the same name.

His mother, Odessa O’Grady Clay, was a housemaid who brought up Cassius Jnr and his younger brother Rudolph Valentino “Rudy” Clay as Baptists.

Odessa’s paternal grandfather was Abe Grady, a white Irishman who emigrated to the United States from Ireland soon after the US Civil War.

Her maternal grandfather was Thomas Morehead, a soldier who served in the United States Colored Troops during the Civil War. His first encounter with the art