Muhammad Ali Center

Permanent Exhibition, opened Nov. 2005. 93,000 sq. ft. Greg Roberts, president/chief executive officer. On January 19, 2009, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, there was a birthday party for Muhammad Ali in Washington, D.C. Celebrities from the worlds of sports, entertainment, religion, and politics feted the former heavyweight boxing champion. The next day, not far from where Ali celebrated his birthday, in a historic ceremony Barack Obama was sworn in as the forty-fourth president of the United States. A boxer and a president—two African Americans, one a convert to the Muslim faith and the other born the son of a Muslim father—helped define what it meant to be an American in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Long ago, Ali told a group of reporters, “I don't have to be what you want me to be, I'm free to be who I want.” Ali lived that line. He chose his

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