January 17, 1942
Early Life
Muhammad Ali was born on January 17, 1942, in Louisville, Kentucky. His birth name was Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.
At an early age, young Clay showed that he wasn’t afraid of any bout—inside or outside of the ring. Growing up in the segregated South, he experienced racial prejudice and discrimination firsthand.
At the age of 12, Clay discovered his talent for boxing through an odd twist of fate. After his bike was stolen, Clay told police officer Joe Martin that he wanted to beat up the thief. “Well, you better learn how to fight before you start challenging people,” Martin reportedly told him at the time. In addition to being a police officer, Martin also trained young boxers at a local gym.
Clay started working with Martin to learn how to spar and soon began his boxing career. In his first amateur bout in 1954, he won the fight by split decision. Clay went on to win the 1956 Golden Gloves tournament for novices in the light heavyweight class. Three years later, he won the National Golden Gloves Tournament of Champions, as well as the Amateur Athletic Union’s national title for the light heavyweight division.
Clay attended mostly Black public schools, including Central High School in Louisville from 1956 to 1960. Clay often daydreamed in class and shadowboxed in the halls—he was training for the 1960 Olympics at the time—and his grades were so bad that some of his teachers wanted to hold him back from graduation. However, the school’s principal Atwood Wilson could see Clay’s potential and opposed this, sarcastically asking the staff, “Do you think I’m going to be the principal of a school that Cassius Clay didn’t finish?”
