The death of a celebrity whose heyday came before I was born often fascinates me. The deluge of obits, thinkpieces and published appreciations helps me contextualize people about whom I knew little, illuminating cultural moments I didn’t experience firsthand.
Muhammad Ali is the most recent example. I knew he was one of the greatest boxers of all time, if not “The Greatest.” I knew that he had been tragically silenced by Parkinson’s disease. I knew that he was important in popularizing the Nation of Islam. But since his death on June 3, I have learned so much more.
I learned how deeply inspirational he was to many people I respect, people I am inspired by. I began to understand his importance outside the boxing ring.
I learned that he was tormented by the establishment — sports, media, government — for his uncompromising outspokenness on the greatest issues of the day: racism and the Vietnam War.
I learned that his livelihood and titles were stolen from him by that establishment as retaliation for his dangerous ideas — but he never went back on the bold stances he had taken, never compromised on the unpopular, controversial truths he knew to be essential.
Over the last week I have come to admire his poetically off-the-cuff way with words: “I have wrestled with a alligator. I done tussled with a whale. I done handcuffed lightning, throwed thunder in jail.”
I learned about the power behind his choice of name. I knew he chose the name Muhammad Ali for himself, but I thought it was simply part of his conversion to Islam. But as I’ve learned in recent days, his name change was more than that. It is the aspect of his legacy that I empathize with most.
I have a deep love for my given name and the history represented in it. But to Ali, his given name — his “slave name” — represented a repugnant history of oppression. He lashed out at those who refused to call him by his chosen name. One of his boxing opponents, Ernie Terrell, insisted on calling Ali by his old name. “My name is Muhammad Ali, and you will announce it right there in the center of the ring,” he told Terrell in a television interview.
It’s hardly comparable, but I’ve written one or two strongly worded emails to editors who neglected to include “A.M.” in my byline.
My last name ties me to a family of Texas Jews who arrived in Galveston, Texas, at the dawn of the last century. But my middle names are at least as important.
I’ve always had two middle names — Alexander and McKinney — but as a kid I simply went by David Wilensky. As I moved from childhood to adolescence and thought more about how I wanted the world to think of me, I came to cherish and use my two middle initials. The combination of David and Alexander, two of the ancient world’s fiercest leaders, suggests power and control of my own destiny. McKinney ties me to my mom’s family, Americans since before the American Revolution, and represents the feminism I inherited from my mother, who did not change her last name when she married my father.
My name is about loving the past that gave rise to my existence, but Ali’s choice of a new name was about changing his destiny. A new name can open up the possibility of a new existence.
Certainly many in Israel, where shedding one’s “diaspora name” is not unheard of, can understand the power of taking on a new name as a rejection of a bad history and an identity of powerlessness. Of course, the Jewish tradition of choosing a new name after a time of hardship goes back much farther than that.
My mother is a Jew-by-choice, so she had the privilege of choosing her own Hebrew name. Her name is Glenda Susan McKinney, and she hewed closely to that when she became Gilanah Shoshanah. But many years later, after a year of tragedy that tested her to her core, she needed a new future and a new name. So she became Maksimah, a name that rings with power and means “enchanted.” That’s who she wants to be. That’s who she is.
“I am Muhammad Ali, a free name — it means beloved of God, and I insist people use it when people speak to me,” Ali once said. That’s who he wanted to be. That’s who he was. And that’s how history will remember him.
David A.M. Wilensky is assistant editor at J. He can be reached at [email protected].