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Re: which is kind of a shame ...
I always knew about the abolitionist and, before the internet made finding things out so easy, I wondered if it was a coincidence that Ali had the same first and last name before he changed it.
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Maybe he meant "slave" in a different sense.
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Ali's brother had it worse ...His brother's name at birth was Rudolph Valentino Clay. If I was in that position, I'd find it more annoying to be named after a white movie idol, already long dead when I was born, whose main schtick was pretending to be a sheikh.
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It has to do with surnames.When slaves were emancipated many of them took the surnames of their former owners. Their surnames didn't "belong" to them the way that white people's surnames belonged to them. Malcolm X did away with his last name for the same reason.
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