He was born Cassius Marcellus Clay on January 17, 1942.
It was under that name he was charged and convicted for refusing to be inducted into the Army in 1967 and sentenced to 5 years in prison. At the peak of his athletic prowess he was stripped of his world championship and lost three and half years, before the Supreme Court decided 8-0 that his rights had been violated.
He began to be scorned and criticized when he joined the Nation of Islam and changed his name to Muhammed Ali.
In 1960 he has been a national hero when he won the Gold Medal as the light heavyweight boxing champion at the Rome Olympics.
He was restored as a national hero when at the opening ceremonies of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, and suffering from the tremors of Parkinson's Disease from the blows he had suffered in the ring, Muhammad Ali lit the flame.
To have a sense of his moral courage, I suggest you read this piece from the Zinn Education Project, which is a reprint of something written by sportswriter Dave Zirin.
Allow me to end by offering three sets of words from the Champ that appear in that piece"
I strongly object to the fact that so many newspapers have given the American public and the world the impression that I have only two alternatives in this stand — either I go to jail or go to the Army. There is another alternative, and that alternative is justice. If justice prevails, if my constitutional rights are upheld, I will be forced to go neither to the Army nor jail. In the end, I am confident that justice will come my way, for the truth must eventually prevail.
Boxing is nothing, just satisfying to some bloodthirsty people. I’m no longer a Cassius Clay, a Negro from Kentucky. I belong to the world, the black world. I’ll always have a home in Pakistan, in Algeria, in Ethiopia. This is more than money.
Some people thought I was a hero. Some people said that what I did was wrong. But everything I did was according to my conscience. I wasn’t trying to be a leader. I just wanted to be free. And I made a stand all people, not just black people, should have thought about making, because it wasn’t just black people being drafted. The government had a system where the rich man’s son went to college, and the poor man’s son went to war. Then, after the rich man’s son got out of college, he did other things to keep him out of the Army until he was too old to be drafted.
Happy birthday, Champ. You stood up for what you believed to be right. You followed your conscience. Would that we had political leaders who would consistently do the same.