Becoming Muhammad Ali

Content Warning: This section of the study guide includes discussion of racial violence.

Becoming Muhammad Ali is tied to not only the life of the famous boxer but also the way that his environment and surroundings shaped his life. The novel takes place between 1954 and 1958, though the epilogue explores Ali’s life beyond that point until his death in 2016. The socio-historical context of Cassius Clay’s life undoubtedly had a large effect on his aspirations and actions as an adult. As Granddaddy Herman tells Cassius and Rudy, there are “two Louisvilles / […] / One for whites / and one for blacks” (49).

Lucius “Lucky” Wakely, the fictionalized narrator of each section’s introductions, provides important historical context for the novel. His accounts and “memories” of Cassius are completely fictional, since he himself isn’t real. However, they speak to a larger truth of what it was like for a young Black boy to grow up in the United States in the 1950s. One example of this is the conversation between Lucky, Cassius, and Odessa Clay in which Cassius’s mother explains that “[w]e had to be one way for ourselves and another way for the rest of the world.