On Saturday, Muhammad Ali will celebrate his 67th birthday; two days later, the United States will observe its annual holiday commemorating the birth of Martin Luther King Jr; and one day after that, Barack Obama will raise his right hand at a ceremony in Washington DC to take the presidential oath of office. This curious alignment of dates has not gone unnoticed on the other side of the pond and has caused many to reflect upon the inextricable connection between the victory of Obama and the trailblazing achievements of the black pioneers who went before him.

Ali, for his part, is determined to take up his invitation to be at the inauguration ceremony. The former world heavyweight champion keeps his public appearances to a minimum these days, a consequence of his long battle with Parkinson’s disease. But it is understood that he will be present to witness Obama’s elevation to the White House, just as he was in Denver, Colorado, in August when Obama became the first black to accept the Democratic nomination. The man who wowed the world with poetry and punches, it seems, still has an eye for the theatre of history.

Ali’s presence in Washington would be fitting, in part because no sportsman, in any era, has made a greater contribution to black advancement, even if there is a fog of historically misleading sentimentality. When Ali pitched up in Denver, more than a few commentators felt moved to laud his contribution to the civil rights movement, seemingly unaware that the former champion was not merely one of the most outspoken critics of King in the 1960s, but openly contemptuous of the idea that blacks and whites could ever live in harmony.

That, of course, remains the central irony of Ali’s life. In an era when hope battled fear in the hearts and minds of Americans of every colour, Ali chose to fight on the side of fear. It was not just that he bought into a segregationist ideology that preached that whites were blue-eyed devils or that he was openly scornful of peaceful protest at a time when the entire nation had been energised by the dignity and power of the Montgomery bus boycott and the student sit-ins; more influential still was the potency of his persona in radicalising a new generation of politically self-conscious African Americans, handing the Nation of Islam an influence wholly out of proportion with its tiny membership and threatening the fragile consensus erected by King.

Many have argued that Ali was manipulated by his religious handlers into endorsing a crudely racist philosophy that was out of kilter with his consensual nature, but this is the opposite of the truth. Ali was radicalised, not by men in dark suits carrying guns, but by the tragedy of Emmet Till, a 14-year-old from Chicago who was lynched by white men for wolf-whistling at a white shop assistant while visiting an uncle in Mississippi in 1954. The two men charged with his murder were acquitted by an all-white jury in 67 minutes. “If we hadn’t stopped to drink pop, it wouldn’t have taken that long,” one juror said.

Ali was the same age as Till and the episode set in motion a chain reaction that would culminate in him asking a teacher if he could write an assignment on the Black Muslims, a request that was rejected. But Ali was undeterred, visiting mosques in the late 1950s as he sought an ideology that could channel his growing anger at a system of regional apartheid that continued deep into the 1960s.

It is, perhaps, the greatest irony of the era that so many black Americans came to endorse segregation (albeit on more equal terms) of the kind that had crushed the promise of Reconstruction.

Even as Ali was building up to his challenge with Sonny Liston for his first shot at the heavyweight title in 1964, the Civil Rights Bill was bogged down in Congress after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. But it was at this moment, more than any other, that Ali helped to alter the course of history. His increasingly militant pronouncements had not merely sent a deep tremor through white American consciousness; they had also opened the eyes of King to the possibility of a big political gamble. As he negotiated in Washington, King painted an apocalyptic vision of what might happen to the United States if significant reforms were suppressed and yet more black Americans were pushed into the arms of the Nation.

In a landmark column for the Chicago Defender, Jackie Robinson, the first black man in the modern era to play in baseball’s major leagues, provided what became the most insightful analysis of the period. “I don’t think Negroes en masse will embrace Black Muslimism any more than they have Communism,” he wrote. “Young and old, Negroes by the tens of thousands went into the streets of America and proved their willingness to suffer, to fight, and even die for their freedom.

“These people want more democracy — not less. They want to be integrated into the mainstream of American life, not invited to live in some small cubicle of this land in splendid isolation. If Negroes ever turn to the Black Muslim movement, in any numbers, it will not be because of Cassius Clay or even Malcolm X. It will be because white America has refused to recognise the responsible leadership of the Negro people and to grant us the same rights that any other citizen enjoys.”

President Johnson took the point, strengthening the Civil Rights Bill against opposition from within his own party. The 1964 act went farther than anyone would have deemed possible a few months earlier, banning employment discrimination and ending segregation. Thirteen months later the Voting Rights Act was signed into law, obliterating the disenfranchisement of blacks across the South. Taken together, these were the crowning achievements of the Civil Rights era, bringing the curtain down on the iniquity of Jim Crow segregation.

Ali would later repent of his support for a racist political and religious movement, eventually converting to a moderate form of orthodox Islam in the wake of his retirement from the ring after a string of destructive bouts in the late 1970s. But it was as he descended into Parkinson’s that his historical legacy was allowed to morph into the cuddly, consensual reinterpretation that has proved so marketable.

The tragedy is that the sanitisation of Ali, like that of other aspects of the civil rights movement, has served to obscure that, despite its many successes, the basic objective of that struggle has yet to be achieved. The 2000 census was unequivocal, recording the enduring nature of social and economic inequality. Blacks earn less than 75 per cent as much as whites, are twice as likely to be in poverty and, by the end of eighth grade (equivalent to third form in England), their score on standardised tests is equivalent to white pupils still in fourth grade.

As Obama heads to Washington, it would be timely indeed for the US to grapple not only with its complex past, but also to rediscover its righteous anger at the schism that continues to disfigure the nation. Ali, for all his mistakes and wrong turns, symbolises that complexity and anger. That is why it would be fitting for the former world champion to be in the capital as America sets out on a new, progressive era.

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