This Is Muhammad Alis Louisville
The city of Alis birth adores him but still struggles with the racial segregation he fought during his life
Travis Waldron
LOUISVILLE, Ky. They flocked to Louisville from all over the world to pay last respects to Muhammad Ali a week after The Champ had died. A Nigerian from Venice Beach who spent a two-hour flight telling everyone around him how much Ali meant to him and the people of Africa. A woman from Ohio who, just days after hip surgery, had suffered four hours on the road to see Ali one last time. A man from Georgia who, in the airport the day after the ceremony, said he knew this was where he had to be.
They came to Louisville to mourn and celebrate the life of the citys most famous icon, the boxing great who was a three-time heavyweight champion of the world inside the ring, and had an immeasurable political and cultural impact outside of it.
If any of the visitors were unaware of what Ali meant to his hometown before they arrived, they couldnt help but understand once there. Tens of thousands of people lined Bardstown Road, south of the city, for the start of a 19-mile processional that snaked through Louisville. An estimated 50,000 more waited for the processional along Muhammad Ali Boulevard and Broadway downtown. City workers in orange I Am Ali T-shirts were ubiquitous downtown; public buses changed their displays to read Ali The Greatest. Banners marking his death flew from lampposts. Tributes were visible on theater marquees and in shop and restaurant windows across town.
A banner that declares him Louisvilles Ali hangs from the side of the Louisville Gas Electric building downtown, visible to travelers on both Interstates 64 and 65. It has been there for more than a decade, but its message was particularly poignant now: For the week following his death, the city and its most famous athlete had become inseparable.
It wasnt always this way.
The Louisville of Alis birth was a city still plagued by Jim Crow, a town to which he, a black Olympic gold medalist, returned from Rome in 1960 to find he couldnt sit in the same downtown restaurants as his white neighbors. Even as he shot to national and international fame, large swaths of white Louisville rejected Ali for his unflinching embrace of his blackness; for his conversion to Islam; for his resistance to the Vietnam War; and most of all, for challenging and questioning the racial status quo that white Louisville and white America had created and demanded he respect.
Alis activism and outspokenness once sharply divided opinions of him in his hometown. And though the city united to celebrate Ali in the week following his death, there were still concerns among some in the African-American community that the city was celebrating a simpler version of its hero, one who became more ambassadorial and statesman-like in his later years, and whose boisterous voice was silenced by his fight with Parkinsons syndrome. Louisville has certainly changed since Alis most controversial days, and its embrace of Ali reflects that. But it also seemed possible that this city-wide celebration could serve to paper over the many divides that Ali once challenged and that still exist today.
There is a great danger of making Muhammad Ali our convenient hero, said Dr. Kevin Cosby, the senior pastor at St. Stephens Church in West Louisville and the president of the historically black Simmons Bible College downtown. Because then we can feel comfortable with the reinvented Ali, to continue to perpetuate the systemic evils that Muhammad Ali fought against.
To do that, he added, minimizes the courage of Muhammad Ali, and the purpose of his pronouncements.
Those feelings lingered after his retirement. In the late 1970s, when the city council launched an effort to rename a stretch of Chestnut Street one of the main roads downtown after Ali, white business owners opposed the plan. They hid behind specious claims that it would cost them too much money to replace stationery and signage, and pushed city leaders to choose another alternative, like giving the street dual names or naming Central High School, Alis alma mater, after him instead. The implication, as a letter from one black resident laid bare, was obvious: The businesses didnt want their addresses associated with Ali, and pitched naming something in black Louisville after him instead to avoid it. Local citizens wrote to the Louisville Courier-Journal, whose editorial board and sports columnists supported the Chestnut Street change, to complain that Louisville should name the street Draft Dodger Boulevard. One resident asked if the council planned to honor Adolf Hitler next.
But what made Ali a pariah to many whites had quite a different impact on African-Americans.
Any accomplishment that a black person made from 1930 through 1960 chipped away at the mythology of white supremacy, Cosby said. It infused in the collective minds of African-Americans that we are not inferior, and it infused in African-Americans much-needed pride. In medieval theology, pride is one of seven deadly sins. In African-Americans, the absence of pride is the pre-eminent sin.
That Ali was from Louisville only inspired more pride in the citys African-American communities.
Every time they would introduce him From Louisville, Kentucky, the heavyweight champion of the world, Muhammad Ali for a black kid growing up, to hear Muhammad Ali connected with Louisville, Kentucky? A tremendous source of pride, Cosby said. Because Im from Louisville, and he looks like me.
When Ali came home in the 1970s for speaking engagements and other conventions, the crowds that greeted him were made up of mostly young blacks, as the Courier-Journal noted in a story about one such appearance. They couldnt wait to see him in person.
I believe wholeheartedly that weve always thought about him in our mind in trying times, said Christopher 2X, a local community activist whose office sits on Muhammad Ali Boulevard in West Louisville. A lot of us always thought about his fighting spirit as it related to our own lives and trials and tribulations.
In West Louisville especially, 2X said, Ali was our Moses that landed.
The crowds began to gather in front of the little pink house on Grand Avenue, in the West Louisville neighborhood of Parkland, before 9 a.m. on the Friday morning of Alis funeral ceremony. All week, people from around the world had come to visit the house at 3302, where Ali lived as a boy. But on this day, the majority of the 1,500 or so people who swarmed the street were West Louisvillians themselves. Jackie Hughes waited along Grand Avenue with two friends under a homemade sign that read, like the banner downtown, Louisvilles Ali!
He was inspirational, motivational, sensational. He meant the world to me, Hughes said. He gave a lot of people courage and hope.
This was Alis Louisville: West Louisville. Black Louisville.
And though the city as a whole has changed since the days he lived here as a boy, it doesnt require a deep dig to see the ways in which this part of Louisville has been left behind.
The countys school system, which includes city schools, has earned national praise for its decades-long efforts to integrate. But that culture of integration hasnt extended to the rest of the city, even 50 years after it first instituted fair housing laws.
Nearly half of all Louisville residents live in neighborhoods that qualify as extremely segregated, according to a 2014 report from the Louisville Metro Human Rights Commission. Forty-eight percent of white Louisville residents, the report found, live in neighborhoods that are at least 95 percent white, while 40 percent of African-Americans live in areas that are at least 80 percent black.
The metro area as a whole which includes counties across the Ohio River in southern Indiana and those that border Jefferson County is the fourth-most segregated in the country, according to another survey.
Louisvilles black population, which makes up nearly 23 percent of Jefferson Countys 615,000 residents, is heavily concentrated in the citys western neighborhoods. West of Ninth Street, decades of widespread disinvestment and policies that perpetuated the legacies of Jim Crow have created neighborhoods that are poorer, less educated and less healthy than the wealthier, primarily white neighborhoods to the east. Louisvilles black unemployment rate is three times higher than the rate for whites, and these neighborhoods are also more exposed to pollution and violence. Last year, nearly half of all shootings and three-quarters of Louisvilles homicides occurred in the West End. Two-thirds of the victims were black.
Even before Alis death, there were signs that Louisvilles political leadership was taking steps to address these issues, even if as acknowledged by both city officials and leaders in the black community that progress wont be quick.
The Human Rights Commission report laid out a 20-year plan to address housing segregation, and last year, the citys Democratic mayor, Greg Fischer, unveiled a $12 million plan to build 2,500 new affordable housing units, the first phase of a goal to build 24,000 such units over the next 15 years. The Louisville city council has also tried to update the areas housing codes to allow the development of more affordable housing, according to WFPL, a local news station.
Before the end of the year, the commission plans to release detailed maps of how and where redlining took place across the city. Carolyn Miller-Cooper, the executive director of Louisvilles Human Rights Commission, called it another step in the process of understanding how we ended up where we are, and how we move forward and change this.
In January, Cosby appeared on a panel at a forum about economic development in West Louisville, and challenged the city to have an honest conversation about race. Why, Cosby asked, had many of the economic development efforts in West Louisville targeted a traditionally white neighborhood, instead of seeking to create opportunities and promote black-owned businesses in African-American communities?
We integrated everything, or we attempted to integrate everything, except what needed to be integrated: the power and the money, Cosby told HuffPost.
Christopher 2X, whose Hood 2 Hood organization works with children in the hopes of reducing gun violence across the city, describes himself as a realist when it comes to racial progress in his hometown.
We have to judge by the actions. And as of right now, he said, pausing for a few moments and looking down at his desk, we havent got there. We gotta work really hard. Those people who are really behind the eight ball, lets try to connect, at least feel some of their pain. That was [Alis] message.
Jazz tunes played over a loudspeaker on Grand Avenue in the hours before Alis processional rolled by. A man who lived nearby pranced down the street, urging others to join him in Ali, Bomaye! chants. A young man who grew up here carried a painting of a proud, beautiful Ali hed painted it just this week and said hed donate it to the Muhammad Ali Center downtown. Hes Still Pretty, another sign read, playing off of one of his most famous declarations, Im pretty! As the clock ticked toward noon and the procession fell more than an hour behind schedule, some called their bosses to say they might be late to work. To kill time, anyone with an Ali story shared it.
This was more of a celebration than a mourning and that the parts of Louisville that created Muhammad Ali remain underserved, underdeveloped and largely ignored only added significance to his life in this neighborhood and others like it. That was particularly true for the generations who hadnt experienced The Greatest firsthand.
Last year in Smoketown, a poor neighborhood in the eastern part of downtown Louisville, James Dixon opened Louisville TKO, a gym just a few blocks from the one where Ali first trained. A mural of a defiant Ali in his most iconic pose is painted on one of its outside walls.
It was very important to me when I opened this gym that I got to the right kids, said Dixon, who is from Upton, Kentucky, but has lived in Louisville for two decades. With the violence, the gangs, the drugs, I got tired of turning on the TV and seeing young men going off to jail, and shooting one another. I just knew they had to be exposed to something else.
It was a deliberate choice to open the gym so close to where Ali got his start. Dixon wants to share Alis message through boxing.
Every kids not going to make the Olympic team. Every kids not going to become a champion, Dixon said. But you can become a world-class citizen.
The morning of Alis ceremony, Robert Cox paused while taking out the trash in front of his house, on 32nd Street just around the corner from Alis former home, and ran back inside.
He returned holding a worn manila envelope filled with two dozen original black and white images of Ali fighting in the 1960s. Jagged on the edges and yellowed from age, the pictures were so fragile it felt they might disintegrate if handled at all. Cox, 42, hadnt seen Ali fight himself, but his father loved The Champ so much he gave Robert Ali as a middle name. In the days after Alis death, Cox began to pass his fathers stories down to his own son.
Im just letting him know: Its easy to get out here, easy to get caught up, easy to quit. But knowing about Muhammad Ali, thinking about the things hes accomplished, youve just gotta keep pushing, Cox said. Keep fighting and pushing and trying to do the right thing, and speaking up. Thats the only way to really win.
On Grand Avenue, a dozen black children gathered under a tree that provided respite from the beating sun. Ali Is Parkland, read a sign they held. For an hour, they chanted: Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. R-I-P, Muhammad Ali.
Huffington Post
