ArcaMax

In his autobiography "The Greatest: My Own Story," written with Chicago writer Richard Durham and edited by Nobel and Pulitzer-winning author Toni Morrison, he fondly recalls reading poetry at the Bitter End café in New York's Greenwich Village, where he met an African-American poet he had long admired, Langston Hughes.

Ali praised Hughes' classic "I, Too, Sing America" and asked Hughes "if he had any more," Ali recounted. Hughes responded by giving Ali three books of his poetry. "His were the kind of poems I liked," Ali wrote. "Straight, simple, and at least half of them were in rhyme."

They also helped Ali's poetry, loaded as it was with rhyme, braggadocio and swagger, to launch the first glimmers what we later would know as hip-hop. An art form that, like it or not, has changed the music world from the Sugar Hill Gang to the hit Broadway musical "Hamilton."

Ali was the first hip-hop heavyweight, whether he knew it or not. He fascinated, enraged or bemused us (take your pick) because he had to do things his own way, even when it meant risking his personal freedom by refusing induction into the Army in 1967.

Still, contrary to those who call him a "draft dodger," he didn't dodge anything. He thought long and hard before he refused the draft on religious grounds and took his punishment.

He was convicted and stripped of his boxing titles and banned from fighting for 3 1/2 years at the peak of his abilities. Only a Supreme Court ruling kept him out of prison and overturned his conviction.

With that, Ali made many of us rethink the war, the draft and a lot of other sticky issues.

If his earlier militancy -- often delivered with charming wit -- seemed to mellow in his later years, it was largely because the world had changed, too, even as he helped to change it.

========

(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)

(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.