In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Y ou’ve heard the story. A youngster goes into a merchandise fair in his hometown Louisville and parks his new Schwinn bicycle against a nearby wall. When he returns, the bike is missing. The agitated boy finds the nearest policeman and vows to beat up the culprit. The cop offers to teach the lad how to box. The kid becomes one of history’s greatest fighters. Twelve-year-old Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. took up boxing in 1954, several months after the Supreme Court issued the landmark Brown v. Board of Education verdict, which ordered public schools to be desegregated and thus jump-started the civil rights movement. Told and retold by virtually everyone who has chronicled his life as if it were one of its central events, the origin narrative pairing young Clay with policeman Joe Martin, his first amateur trainer, has become one of the seedbeds in which his cultural image has flourished. It is wrong to assume that the genesis of Clay’s amateur boxing career would necessarily become a cornerstone of the Ali Story. Its rising to such prominence is an important clue as to how people have made meaning of the legendary figure now known as Muhammad Ali. It is the first tale of the Ali mythology. Prior to 1960, when Clay won the Olympic gold medal and achieved national recognition, his fame was local. Once he was introduced to a wider audience, interest in Clay’s backstory developed. The young fighter’s relationship with Martin, and then his business agreement with the Louisville Sponsoring Group (LSG), became the focus of coverage meant to acquaint people with him. Both Martin and the members of the LSG were white. Martin was Louisville’s Favorite Son The Professional Debut 8 Louisville Sponsoring Group a cop, a source of great displeasure to Clay’s father, who had had his share of minor run-ins with the police. The LSG was made up of old-moneyed aristocrats who used Clay’s career for sport and investment. What is critical here is that the earliest presentations of Clay to a national audience featured his ties to Martin and the LSG, and observers made sense of Clay’s essential character and standing within American culture based upon the racial composition of these alliances. Early in his public life, Clay’s acceptability emanated from his ties to white people. The civil rights movement was a key reason that these narratives, both in their packaging and consumption, became central to the tradition of telling Cassius Clay’s story. By the time Clay made his professional debut, the civil rights movement was changing life in the South. The movement generated support—although its halcyon days of public approval wouldn’t come until a few years later—but it also engendered bitterness and resentment. The passion it produced made the black freedom struggle the leading domestic story of the period, and it could be seen and heard all over the cultural landscape. The sit-in movement and its spawning of the vanguard Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were the two most important civil rights developments of 1960, the year Clay first achieved national recognition . Led by teenagers and people in their twenties, particularly college students , the sit-in movement rippled through places that had held fast to segregation . It started in February in North Carolina, when four protesters sat down at the white-only lunch counter at a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro. News of their courage spread like wildfire, and by the middle of the month, young people throughout the state, as well as in South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, had taken similar stands. Most impressive about the sit-in movement was how it marshaled participation by young black people who wanted to be a part of the civil rights struggle. Coordinated by SNCC, sit-ins gripped nearly the entire South by the end of the year, even in places like Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. As these campaigns grew stronger, owners of segregated businesses began to feel the economic pinch. They had to worry about disruptions in day-to-day activity, negative press coverage, and threats of violence against protesters. Targeted storeowners met the dilemma of having to either resist the demonstrators and face legal action or capitulate to them and face the wrath of segregationists . That showdown after showdown was featured in the media only escalated tensions. White resistance took on many forms, the most spectacular and deadly occurring when people assaulted...

Share