Jack Johnson’s early 1900s Blackness enabled Muhammad Ali’s later defiant Black Muslim identity

Evidence

The “unforgivable Blackness” that Jack Johnson reckoned with, when he became the first Black world heavyweight boxing champion in 1908, enabled the unapologetic Black Muslimness of Muhammad Ali decades later. While Ali’s iconic rounds against bigotry are recounted again and again, racism remains a central pugilist within the rings of combat sports today. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1079

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Could enrich the complaint/immodesty and class-signaling article’s frame that visible identity defiance is a historically layered inheritance, here traced across Black sporting icons.