Tolliver said she shared a warm, three-year friendship with Ali when he lived in Chicago during the 1970s.
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When planning his funeral a decage ago, the three-time world heavyweight champion also chose to open the memorial service to fans.
A public memorial service for Muhammad is now taking place at the KFC Yum!
“He wanted us to remind people who are suffering that he had seen the face of injustice. but he never became embittered enough to quit or engage in violence”, she said.
“A lot of people don’t have that courage”, she said. Just as he shook up the world in life, she said, he’s still shaking it up in death. “You’re the greatest”, Muhammad Ali fan, Dennis Dicky said.
Crystal was both amusing – “The most ideal athlete you ever saw – and those were his own words”, Crystal said of his friend – and touching. “And those were his own words”. He is gone, but he will never die.
“On the moment of impact, it lights up everything around it”, he said.
One of the organizers, Edward Ahmed Mitchell, executive director of the Georgia chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, says Ali was role model to all.
“Ali was a radical even in a radical’s time; a loud, proud, unabashedly black voice in a Jim Crow world”, Obama wrote.
She also recalled Joe Martin, the Louisville police officer who first taught a young Ali how to box when his bicycle was stolen when he was 12 years old.
Clinton mused on Ali’s origins and his transformation into a “universal soldier for our common humanity”.
The public funeral featured distinguished speakers, such as actor Billy Crystal, and former President Bill Clinton to eulogize Louisville’s hero.
Speaking at the service, former United States president Bill Clinton described Ali as a “universal soldier of our common humanity” who fought heroically against Parkinson’s disease. But he also praised Ali’s legacy. Among them were former US President Bill Clinton and English football star David Beckham.
Arnold Schwarzenegger was among the celebrities at Muhammad Ali’s funeral on Friday (10Jun16), and spoke movingly of his memories of the late sporting icon.
Crystal recounted how he first met Ali in 1974, when his stand-up act included an impression of both Ali and ABC sportscaster Howard Cosell.
Louisville pastor Kevin Cosby said Ali infused African-Americans with a “sense of somebodiness”.
Others brought their mothers and their daughters because Muhammad Ali promoted a message that crosses all generations.
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Ali’s body will ride in a miles-long procession spanning his life – from his boyhood home where he shadowboxed and dreamed of greatness to the boulevard that bears his name and the museum that stands as a lasting tribute to his boxing triumphs and his humanitarian causes outside the ring.
