https://twitter.com/MuhammadAli/status/738953942634233856
"What Muhammad Ali meant to me" by @BarackObama: https://t.co/gX7QR9ql9c (Photo: AP) pic.twitter.com/ptTfkejEbN
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) June 4, 2016
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He shook up the world, and the world's better for it. Rest in peace, Champ. pic.twitter.com/z1yM3sSLH3
— President Obama (@POTUS44) June 4, 2016
Ali's greatness lay in his refusal to surrender his beliefs, including in himself, to a system designed against him. pic.twitter.com/eNW9gS2ZFp
— Emo Desperado (@JoyAnnReid) June 4, 2016
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World mourns death of legendary Muhammad Ali https://t.co/JmyGFB3cR3
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) June 4, 2016
https://twitter.com/KhalidAlAmeri/status/739002130913239041
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RIP Muhammad Ali. One of the greatest anti-war heroes of our age. pic.twitter.com/oNi4da4Zd9
— Tory Fibs (@ToryFibs) June 4, 2016
The Greatest. His biggest win came not in the ring but in our courts in his fight for his beliefs. #MuhammadAli pic.twitter.com/3NKuxZNiAn
— Eric Holder (@EricHolder) June 4, 2016
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"I can drown the drink of water, and kill a dead tree. Wait till you see Muhammad Ali."
— Luvvie (@Luvvie) June 4, 2016
Rest in Power. pic.twitter.com/bmmp3QiOrO
"I ain’t draft dodging. I ain’t burning no flag. I ain’t running to Canada. I’m staying right here." - Muhammad Ali ✊🏽
— Luvvie (@Luvvie) June 4, 2016
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"You want to send me to jail? Fine, you go right ahead. I’ve been in jail for 400 years. I could be there for 4 or 5 more." - Muhammad Ali
— Luvvie (@Luvvie) June 4, 2016
"You my opposer when I want freedom. You my opposer when I want justice. You my opposer when I want equality." - Muhammad Ali
— Luvvie (@Luvvie) June 4, 2016
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A phenomenal human being
For folks asking about Muhammad Ali's rejection of Malcolm X (at age 22) here are Ali's OWN WORDS about it. pic.twitter.com/TNAsAFNAwV
— Dave Zirin (@EdgeofSports) June 4, 2016
I read this account when Michael Mann was making Ali | Not gonna lie, brought a tear to my eye pic.twitter.com/SNS7rRzi3x
— Shibbir Ahmed (@Shibbir1) June 4, 2016
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When you remember him and eulogize him, remember how much he loved his Blackness. Don't whitewash his legacy. #MuhammadAli
— Luvvie (@Luvvie) June 4, 2016
— THE BREASTIFICATION OF AMERICA (@thatladyj) June 4, 2016
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Remember that Blackness. Because when the greats die, folks love to windex away their melanin. Nah. He was unapologetically BLACK.
— Luvvie (@Luvvie) June 4, 2016
"Want me to go somewhere and fight for you? You won’t even stand up for me right here in America, for my rights, my religious beliefs." #Ali
— Luvvie (@Luvvie) June 4, 2016
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"My conscience won't let me go shoot my brother or some darker people or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America" - #Ali
— Luvvie (@Luvvie) June 4, 2016
"They didn't rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother father and ancestors.
— Luvvie (@Luvvie) June 4, 2016
Shoot them for what?" - #MuhammadAli
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Unapologetically Black.
— #RIPBassemMasri 🙏 (@Delo_Taylor) June 4, 2016
Unapologetically Muslim.
Salam brother.#MuhammadAli #TheGreatest pic.twitter.com/vg5AIYbwTu
Muhammad Ali refused to go to the Vietnam war and paid a high price. pic.twitter.com/NA0NJGI3lo
— Negar Mortazavi نگار مرتضوی (@NegarMortazavi) June 4, 2016
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The Greatest he was, from the first fight to his last. https://t.co/q47NCMPJFZ pic.twitter.com/3aGvjh0FKS
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) June 4, 2016
Muhammad Ali's star power elevated Parkinson's awareness and care in Arizona. https://t.co/cu91hNeSLy pic.twitter.com/SsOh4uyoUq
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) June 4, 2016
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https://twitter.com/MazMHussain/status/738948866221985793
Muhammad Ali: Three-time world champ and full-time world citizen. https://t.co/RCRHSvZ3eP pic.twitter.com/Eq7cPKBGUc
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) June 4, 2016
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President Barack Obama: “He is, and always will be, the champ.”
How Ali wants to be remembered.#RIPMuhammadAlihttps://t.co/1EeAmveAU7
— BenchWarmers (@BeWarmers) June 4, 2016
The Obama Diary 
Happy Saturday…
⭐📿🌹🕉🙌
Thank you Nerdy and all the contributors for keeping me knowledgeable and informed. I am here every day soaking up your goodness.
NerdyWonka, this is a beautifully done and loving tribute to the Greatest – thank you so very much. You are a blessed salve to our missing the CIC of TOD, she is ever in our thoughts and prayers.
Prince, meeting his childhood hero:
Above picture along with SI’s 100 greatest photos of Muhammed Ali
Hello TOD.
What a Beautiful Tribute, NW for The Champ! Thank you.
It’s been a hard 6 weeks. Prince & now, Ali; two of my favorite people in Music & Sports.
Congrats, MissPat on your Gold ⭐
He’s in a corner, not even using his hands. Incredible instincts.
For a heavyweight too! The closest to be able to slightly imitate him with the same prowess was Roy Jones Jr in his prime.
Gotta be inspiration for Neo’s bullet dodge in The Matrix!😄
Thank you so much for doing this, NW. I loved Muhammad Ali for his courage.
On a lighter note, I wondered why he said he was pretty. Yeah, I thought he was handsome, but pretty? Then I met him at a local Masjid. And he WAS pretty. His complexion was flawless. I mean his skin looked liked a baby’s skin. He had a rosy glow to his skin – almost peaches & mocha.
There are some wonderful quotes by him here and many other places online:
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/muhammad_ali.html
Outrageously, authentically, audaciously pretty.
Lebron, heeding Ali’s advice and commenting on Muhammad Ali’s death
“As I got older and started to read about him and watch things about him, I started to realize what he did in the ring was secondary to what he meant outside of the ring — just his influence, what he stood for. “The reason why he’s the GOAT is not because of what he did in the ring, which was unbelievable. It’s what he did outside of the ring, what he believed in, what he stood for, along with Jim Brown and Oscar Robertson, Lew Alcindor — obviously, who became Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar] — Bill Russell, Jackie Robinson. Those guys stood for something. He’s part of the reason why African-Americans today can do what we do in the sports world. We’re free. They allow us to have access to anything we want. It’s because of what they stood for, and Muhammad Ali was definitely the pioneer for that. “People forget what you did as a professional. People forget the championships and all the other things you were able to accomplish. But they will never forget how you made them feel. That’s a Maya Angelou quote, but I’ll transcend that into what Muhammad Ali was able to do. So it’s very important.”
Good West Coast morning NW and TOD family.
I had to go back and read last night’s post because I knew my TOD peeps would give a great tribute to the honorable Mohammed Ali.
And this compilation is perfect.
WOW!
Oh my gosh, I love the photo of these two men.
“….As I watch him eat, I have never been more sure of a man’s inner contentment. Except maybe when he eats the second piece.
It’s not supposed to be Buddha. It’s supposed to be Allah, because it is Allah who has ruled his life since even before Liston, and Allah who controls it now more than ever before. The contents of his briefcase say so. He is carrying the briefcase as he enters the room, so still even in walking that he does not disturb the air around him. He opens the briefcase to reveal hundreds of well-thumbed sheets of paper filled with typewritten words. It is the briefcase a man would carry if he were to knock on your screen door to convert you to his faith, and on this day, dressed in black, shoulders slumping toward his paunch, gray sprinkling his temples, he looks like such a man. He shuffles through the papers, finds one, hands it to me. “First Chronicles 19:18,” I read aloud while he listens. “‘Then the Syrians fled before Israel. David killed 7,000 charioteers and 40,000 foot soldiers of the Syrians.’ Second Samuel 10:18: ‘Then the Syrians fled before Israel, and David killed 700 charioteers and 40,000 horsemen of the Syrians.’ Was it 700 or 7,000? Was it foot soldiers or horsemen?” “The Bible has contradictions,” he says to me, the voice sandpapered raw by the disease. “Not in there,” he says, nodding at the Koran. His briefcase also holds a black-and-white photograph of three boxers—Ali, Joe Louis, and Sugar Ray Robinson; it looks like a snapshot from the turn of the century—but most of the case’s contents are there to do Allah’s work….
…It’s easiest for him to talk about Allah, although it is not easy for him to talk, because the muscles of his face don’t work as well as they once did. His wife, Lonnie, has asked if I want her to sit with us so she can tell me what he is saying. Lonnie is a strong woman who walks through a room like a beautiful storm approaching. But right now I ask her if Ali and I can be alone and if she could close the door, which she does, leaving the two of us in silence in a small room in the suite of offices on Ali’s southern Michigan farm. The farm used to belong to AI Capone’s bookmaker. A workman doing renovations recently dug some bullets out of the floorboards from back in the days when people were shooting one another here. Now it’s just about the quietest place on earth. After he hands me several more tracts, I tell him I’m pretty much a nonbeliever, and at this his eyebrows arch up and the words come quickly.
“Do you believe that phone made itself?”
No, I say.
“Do you believe the chair made itself?”
No.
“Do you believe the table made itself?”
No.
“Do you believe the sun made itself?”
No.
“The Supreme Being made it.”
The Bible’s inconsistencies don’t persuade me, nor do the sermons. It’s when he levitates that I start to come around. Well, not when he levitates—when he pretends to. His levitation trick is like his handkerchief-in-the-fake-thumb trick or the trick where he rubs his fingers together behind your ear and what you hear sounds like a cricket. He’s been playing pranks since he was a kid, to complement his verbal trickery, but now his pranks are the currency with which he communicates. It’s when he’s pretending to levitate that I figure out what’s happening with Ali now, and it sounds an awful lot like something involving divine intervention. At the very least, it sounds like the sort of parable that ought to be typed up and carried around in the briefcase of someone trying to convert you. “For decades,” it would read, “Allah had Muhammad Ali doing Allah’s work. Ali was the most remarkable young black man the nation had ever seen, unafraid to take on the mightiest of the white man’s institutions, speaking out, yes, for the black man, but even more for Allah, in a fashion that Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad never could have….continued”
Take 10 minutes to watch this incredible tribute:
Bob & Jeremy never stated how much Muhammad Ali gave pride to the black people of America, how his stance on political and religious issues encouraged black people of America to be proud of their race and to stand with pride. The two reporters danced around it and I wish they had just come out and said it.
Don’t white wash it, tell it
ESPN went from 12-4a.m. commercial free, GGail. Those were just some anecdotes wee into the morning. I watched the coverage wall-to-wall and they covered any and everything from boxing aficionado to young black reporters who grew up during his hey day and are now the face of the network.
Sen. Oran Hatch, Bryant Gumbel, former President Bill Clinton, and Billy Crystal will be among those (not all speakers finalized) that will eulogize Mohammed Ali, at his funeral service beginning at 2 E.T. Friday, in Louisville, KY.
From Luvvie:
Muhammad Ali. His Fight is Done, The Greatest Has Won
Awesomely Luvvie — June 4, 2016
Muhammad Ali. The Greatest is gone.
Unlike the other iconic deaths of 2016, Muhammad Ali’s doesn’t break my heart or render me unable to function, because he was older than most of the others, and his life was lived fully. Although he spent the last 32 years of his 74 battling Parkinson’s, he still managed to LIVE.
……………………………………
He was so much more than that bae ass athlete with the smile that lit up a room. LAWD, young Muhammad was FAHN, bruh. With swag for days and weeks. And he knew it, and was insufferable because of it, calling himself pretty. But when you can’t argue with it, all you can do is sulk and take peeks at him because he surely was a handsome somebody.
He was so much more than the EPIC shit talker who would call your mama to the carpet and you had to deal because he could back that up ALL day. He was a rapper before we even know what rapping was, because he had BARS. He ethered folks each and every day. Like when he said: “Joe Frazier was so ugly that when he cries, the tears turn around and go down the back of his head.”
LMAO!!! That is so disrespectful and hilarious at the same damb time. KING PETTY WAP IN THE BUILDING. You know how I feel about icons who were also shade savants. They hold special place in my shady heart.
About Ali:
I was sad, but prepared for this loss.
Doesn’t make it any less painful, but I can accept it.
Ali was so much more than a boxer.
Ozzie Davis said about Malcolm X at his funeral
” Malcolm was our manhood.”
That might be so, but Ali had to have been our BLACKness.
When Ali stood up there, it was as if he were channelling all the ancestors before him when he called America on its shyt. He put that mirror right up there and said
LOOK AT YOURSELF
and, then tell me why you think I should give a rat’s ass what you think of me.
YES! Tell it!!!!!
Amen.
Ali was also instrumental in getting 15 people detained by Iraq released from Iraq, years ago.
David Cameron and Caitlyn Jenner both tweeted about the death of Muhammad Ali last night, for some reason I thought that was so cool.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BGPo7XFQafc/
I remember my old man talking about Ali many years ago, he would say “Man, that cat was something else.” That cat, that cat, that’s the way that men talk back back in the day.
Yeh jack, dass da way dem cats talked back den. 😉
Thanks for the memories.
President Obama and the First Lady won’t be attending Muhammad Ali funeral Friday.
That’s Sasha’ birthday and Malia’s graduation day, I think.
Okay so they have plans. I think of POTUS who said he was going to be wearing shades cause he know he will be crying at Malia graduation.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BGPo3oisSPA/
Didn’t he tell it?
What do you think about the way the fight turned out?
“For the black man to come out superior,” Ali said, “would be against America’s teachings. I have been so great in boxing they had to create an image like Rocky, a white image on the screen, to counteract my image in the ring. America has to have its white images, no matter where it gets them. Jesus, Wonder Woman, Tarzan and Rocky.”
Excellent video:
Excellent!
Beautiful !
Ali – Baby whisperer 😀
Thank you VP Biden for giving props to what Muhammad Ali fought for – inside and outside of the ring. PBO and VP Biden always find the right words to say.
Now THAT is one of the best-worded tributes yet. He was himself; didn’t have to be anyone else, didn’t have to transcend anything, either. He wasn’t asking for acceptance. He was accepting himself, and the rest followed.
And in doing so, gave so much pride to black people. For that we should all be eternally grateful.
Love me some John Dingell!
I do too Dudette 🙂
Your guy here, VC!
🙂 🙂
Nothing like the truth !!
Nothing worse than a scorned loser; he is dangerous. 🙂
This is how you keep the babies safe from the animals in the zoo. Kid can’t get in; animal can’t get out.
New post.
https://theobamadiary.com/2016/06/04/muhammad-ali-unapologetically-black/