osx-frog

dick applebaum said:

It is useful to remember the racial attitudes at the time ...

For example, when Ali fought Patterson in Las Vegas (1965*) neither participant could stay at a Las Vegas hotel -- Las Vegas was a segregated town.  Hotels in the [separate] town of North Las Vegas was where non-white minorities stayed.

* Also, this from the same era:

On the night of June 21–22, 1964, three civil rights workers were abducted and murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi, an event which has since been called the Freedom Summer Murders. The civil rights workers were James Earl Chaney of Meridian, Mississippi, Andrew Goodman, and Michael "Mickey" Schwerner of New York City, New York, and were associated with the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) and its member organization, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). They had been working on the "Freedom Summer" campaign, attempting to prepare and register African Americans to vote after they had been disenfranchised since 1890.

The three young men were chased in their car, abducted, shot at close range, and buried in an earthen dam by members of the local White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Neshoba County Sheriff's Office, and the Philadelphia, Mississippi Police Department.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_civil_rights_workers'_murders

I don't know if this changed for Ali's later fights in Las Vegas, as we moved to ChicagoLand in 1968.

As a Swede, I can only confirm the racial attitude in boxing from the heavyweight champion fight between Floyd Patterson and Ingemar Johansson (INGO) when the Patterson lost the title to INGO in 1959. Unfortunately, it was the white supremacy ideas that got hold of Europeans and white Americans of the time - boxing was back "at home" where it belonged.
In the return fight, the following year 1960 F. Patterson won the title back with a spectacular KO in 5th where INGO was counted out unconscious. After the count, Patterson showed his concern for Johansson by cradling his motionless opponent and promising him a rematch, which INGO also lost.

Some years later an Olympic Champion from (ROME 1960) named Cassius Clay won the title from Sonny Liston in 1964.

Boxing was now an affair among Americans that could not ride the same bus, sit on the same bench, go to same schools, etc. as White Americans. The apartheid system of some States Of The Union would not allow this until the middle of the decade of 1970.

I still remember when Muhammad Ali declared that he changed his SLAVE name and religious belief because neither of them would ever help him. 

I still remember how upset we Europeans were when Ali was stripped of his title because he refused to fight an unfair war against Vietnam - "No VietCong have never called me nigger" became a slogan against the Vietnam war.

Muhammad Ali became an icon and front figure that was applauded around the world for his continued fight for a modern nonracial USA.

RIP Muhammad Ali and thanks for all the inspiration you have given humanity!