Before changing his name to Muhammad Ali, the three-time boxing Heavyweight Champion of the World was known as Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr, named after his father Cassius Marcellus Clay Sr, who was in turn named after a white anti-slavery crusader Cassius Marcellus Clay, who was born on this day 199 years ago and lived in Madison County, Kentucky. The original Cassius Clay was the son of one of the wealthiest slave owners in Kentucky, and Muhammad Ali’s ancestors were slaves on the Clay plantation.
While a student at Yale College in the early 1830s, Cassius Clay was inspired to join the anti-slavery movement after hearing a speech by William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison was the editor of the radical abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and a vocal supporter of women’s suffrage. Clay was a supporter of gradual abolition, rather than immediate emancipation as proposed by Garrison.
Clay’s opposition to slavery made him unpopular with many, and he was the recipient of numerous death threats. He was one of the founders of the Republican Party and a friend of Abraham Lincoln, serving as Minister to Russia under Lincoln, and then pressuring Lincoln to issue an emancipation proclamation. The Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution banning slavery throughout the US came into effect in 1865.