How ‘Irish’ Ali’s ’72 visit altered champ’s view of whites

By Dave Hannigan

At a press conference in Dublin Airport on July 11, 1972, a reporter asked Muhammad Ali whether it was true that his maternal great-grandfather was an Irishman called Abe Grady. Brandishing a shillelagh in his hand, Ali answered with an oblique reference to the stories of slave owners taking advantage of slaves.

“You never can tell,” he said. “There was a lot of sneakin’ around in them days.”

Last week’s announcement that genealogists in County Clare had unearthed definitive proof that Ali’s maternal great-grandfather was indeed Abe Grady from Ennis has revitalized the issue of his Irish lineage. However, the denizens of the Town Council who have already made noises about inviting Ali to visit Ennis should understand that he has always regarded the white branches of his family tree with suspicion.

“Oh yeah, how did I get white blood in me?” Ali said in an RTE interview shortly before his fight with Al “Blue” Lewis at Croke Park 30 years ago.

“Way back a 100 or something years ago, the old slave master’s wife used to get tired and he would sneak back in ould granny’s shack, and she had big hips, she was pretty, and had big breasts and big legs, she was strong cause she worked all day to clean up the white lady’s house, raise the white lady’s babies and the poor white lady was tired and weak, and old black slave was strong, he would snuck back at night and close the door and you know what he would do.”

Ali was in the midst of his radical Nation of Islam phase then, preaching a black separatist ideology and offering a wholly inaccurate representation of the Grady line in his background. Having departed Ennis for America, Abe Grady fetched up in Kentucky after the Civil War and ended up marrying a freed slave whose name, despite the best efforts of the Family History center in Utah, remains a mystery. The couple had a son John Lee Grady, who was born in 1887 and was named, as per tradition, after Abe’s father back in Clare.

John L. married Birdie Morehead around about 1914 and they had two children of their own, the second of whom, Odessa, was born in 1917. At the age of 25, Odessa Grady, by then married to a Louisville sign painter, Cassius Clay, gave birth to a son on Jan. 17, 1942. She named him Cassius Marcellus and by the time he first set foot in the country of his ancestors 30 years later, he had changes his name to Muhammad Ali.

Despite his ambiguous answer to the question about his roots in Clare, Ali was treated royally throughout his nine-day stay in Ireland. The taoiseach at the time, Jack Lynch, became the first Western head of state to invite him to formally visit his government offices and out on the streets, it was common for crowds to follow him everywhere he walked.

“It was amazing the reception he got everywhere he went,” said Jose Torres, journalist and former world light-heavyweight champion who accompanied Ali to Dublin. “I want to tell you something now: I think that it was his experience in Ireland that reminded him of the goodness of white people and he began easing his attacks on the white man after that. It was when he began to take out of his dictionary the talk about the white devils. How could he think bad of white people when every street he walked down in Ireland, he had all these white people loving him?”

(Dave Hannigan’s book, “The Big Fight,” which tells the story behind Muhammad Ali’s 1972 fight in Croke Park, will be published by Yellow Jersey Press this summer.)