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Exhibition Review
Muhammad Ali Center. Louisville, Ky. http://www.alicenter.org.
Permanent Exhibition, opened Nov. 2005. 93,000 sq. ft. Greg Roberts, president/chief executive officer.
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| On January 19, 2009, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, there was a birthday party for Muhammad Ali in Washington, D.C. Celebrities from the worlds of sports, entertainment, religion, and politics feted the former heavyweight boxing champion. The next day, not far from where Ali celebrated his birthday, in a historic ceremony Barack Obama was sworn in as the forty-fourth president of the United States. A boxer and a president—two African Americans, one a convert to the Muslim faith and the other born the son of a Muslim father—helped define what it meant to be an American in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Long ago, Ali told a group of reporters, "I don't have to be what you want me to be, I'm free to be who I want." Ali lived that line. He chose his paths, shaped his destiny—reinventing himself along the way—and changed the notion of what an athlete, and especially a black athlete, is capable of being. In some ways he helped shape the America that Obama now leads. Ali was a boxer, certainly, but one who refused to be labeled as just a boxer. As Ali noted many times, people did not talk to him in the same way they did other athletes. They addressed him like he was a congressman or a senator, a world leader or a man of God—indeed, like he was the president of the United States. |
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The Muhammad Ali Center is as unique as Ali himself, a fitting tribute to the African American boxer, minister, spokesman, humanitarian, world figure, and lightning rod for American racial and political controversies in the 1960s and 1970s. In its 93,000 square feet over six floors, the center celebrates and explains Ali's multifaceted career, as well as provides space for educational, social, and humanitarian gatherings. It is a motivational, multimedia, hands-on center, committed to the notion that the past is never dead and that Ali's life should serve as an example for political and spiritual change in America and the world. |
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To be sure, the center/museum houses some predictable artifacts of the champion's career—a few boxing gloves, robes, awards, and contracts from his fighting days. But the center is not wedded to mementos from Ali's glory days. Such tokens never meant much to Ali, and the soul of the Muhammad Ali Center is not in its artifacts. The center celebrates the champion's legacy and vision, his humanitarianism and faith in human possibilities, more than his athletic career. It focuses on who he became and who he is more than who he was. And it has something for just about everyone—fans of the boxer, people interested in Ali's impact on the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, those intrigued about how an athlete or any individual can make a difference, and children who just want to have a good time dancing in a ring, punching a heavy bag, or shadowboxing. |
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That said, the Muhammad Ali Center does not neglect the singular career of the boxer whose given name was Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. A tour of the center begins on the fifth level. Two spaces immediately capture the visitor's attention. One is called "Ali the Artist." It contains replicas of some of Ali's poems and drawings. Most are products of the bitter years of the late 1960s when Ali was excoriated more than he was praised, booed more than cheered. Fittingly, a few of the drawings are hard-edged. One contrasts his Muslim faith with Christianity. In it, Ali lists the benefits that "Islam Offers": "Freedom, Justice, Equality." "Past Religions," he observes, resulted in "Slavery, Suffering, Death." The drawing equates Christianity with lynching. The ideology of the drawings is simplistic, a reminder of Ali's early days with the Nation of Islam when he reduced most issues to simple good and evil, black and white terms. The stick-figure pen-work and immature scrawl reinforces the notion that the drawings were examples of Ali's elementary, developmental stage. Visitors can see that Ali initially spelled equality "Iquality" and that someone changed the I to an E. |
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