Muhammad Ali opened British eyes to America’s race problems

A question for those of you of a certain age. Who was the first articulate black person you ever saw or heard? My guess is that it would be Muhammad Ali or, if you are a little older, Cassius Clay. Obviously if you yourself are black the question should be a little different. Then it would be who was the first articulate black person you saw on TV?

Of course there were plenty of black people in the world before Clay came along, loads of them. Back in the 1960s they impinged on the rest of us largely as entertainers, if they were famous black people, or as the unwitting cause of indigenous race riots if they were not. But they did not really speak to us; we knew nothing of them, here in England. No matter how much we appreciated Fats Domino and his rather literal manqué, Chubby Checker, the entertainers were somehow aloof from the fray: one was accustomed to negroes singing things, they had a certain talent for it, we believed. But their concerns, their aspirations, were a mystery to us. Until Cassius Clay came along.

I do not want to overstate Clay, or Ali’s, articulacy. There was a mildly witty braggadocio about him, a winning and sometimes prolix self-confidence, and that was about it. He was not, as some might paint him, a sort of pugilistic George Bernard Shaw. And there was an undeniable awkwardness about his television appearances – both ringside and, famously, with Michael Parkinson – the vague suspicion that we were in the presence of a performing seal: a sportsman, a black sportsman, a working-class black sportsman, who could talk!

And yet that self-confidence – born, one supposes, of the knowledge that he could beat the shit out of anyone who crossed him – was itself revolutionary.