Voices of the community: Muhammad Ali's daughter speak out about unrest
LOS ANGELES - There are people -- voices in the community, who are not on the streets and have frustrations & feelings. We’ve been talking with them. One of those is the daughter of Muhammad Ali.
To her, if her dad were alive today he might not be all that surprised at what he’d see out on the streets.
Maryum Ali, the eldest of the champ’s nine children, has watched the unrest on the streets from her Los Angeles area home -- the images on television day after day. She isn’t surprised by what she’s seeing, but on fires and looting, she says, “No, I don’t think people should. They need to stop. They are people that have worked really hard for the businesses. They’re not wealthy. They just worked hard."
The daughter of the champ says people, community groups and public policymakers all have to come together to deal with a problem generations have had to face that her father talked about when he was young. She posted a clip of her dad on her social media to make the point and that not much has changed since then.
On the video her dad said, "The white man 50 years ago told my grandaddy that when my daddy got free things would be better when he got grown. Now my daddy’s grown. Somebody told my daddy when I got grown things would be better. Now, I’m grown. Now, I’ve got a white boy today telling me that when my children get grown things would get better. So, see this is an old trick.”
On that social media post she lamented, “Yes, Daddy, you were correct, I’m grown and many things are not better.”
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Maryum Ali says, “Now, is the time where white, brown, president, governor… it's not about telling us things are going to get better…it's about us finding the information on how to exercise our power in the process.”
To Ali, all kinds of people are protesting because, the way she sees it, there’s an intersection here with people of many problems including unaffordable housing, drug addiction, people left behind, the poor, the struggling and police incidents like the one involving the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and a list of others.