Cassius Clay

Category
SPORTS

Language
ENGLISH

Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.[3] was born on January 17, 1942, in Louisville, Kentucky.[4] He had one brother. He was named after his father, Cassius Marcellus Clay Sr., who had a sister and four brothers[5][6] and who himself was named in honor of the 19th-century Republican politician and staunch abolitionist Cassius Marcellus Clay, also from the state of Kentucky. Clay's father's paternal grandparents were John Clay and Sallie Anne Clay; Clay's sister Eva claimed that Sallie was a native of Madagascar.[7] He was a descendant of slaves of the antebellum South, and was predominantly of African descent, with Irish[8] and English family heritage.[9][10] Ali's maternal great-grandfather, Abe Grady, emigrated from Ennis, County Clare, Ireland.[11][12] DNA testing performed in 2018 showed that, through his paternal grandmother, Ali was a descendant of the former slave Archer Alexander, who had been chosen from the building crew as the model of a freed man for the Emancipation Memorial, and was the subject of abolitionist William Greenleaf Eliot's book, The Story of Archer Alexander: From Slavery to Freedom.[13] Like Ali, Alexander fought for his freedom.[14] <

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