One of the consequences, for good or ill, of the long history of black repression, was the founding of a black supremacy movement, which in some ways resembled the Ku Klux Klan in reverse: a strong antipathy, if not outright hatred of whites. One such movement, the Nation of Islam, combined black empowerment sentiment with elements of Islam and expanded into a political force under the leadership of Prophet Elijah Mohammed, mentor to the activists Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan, and the boxer Cassius Clay.

On this day, March 6, in 1964, just hours after a guided tour of the United Nations building by Malcolm X and his renaming to Cassius X (the X symbolic of their slave past), Clay was renamed a second time by Elijah Muhammad. The new name, Muhammad Ali, meant “beloved of God.”

Ali cited his Muslim faith as a contentious objector to the Vietnam War. Eligible for the draft, he refused to be called up, also famously stating “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Vietcong. No Vietcong ever called me [the n-word]”. Due to his well- publicized objections, he was denied a boxing license by the state of New York, until a state supreme court ruled the denial was unfair.