And then all of the tension seems to dissolve. kara swisherĪnd having made that appearance at the Olympics that was so touching. Though Muhammad Ali is imprisoned in the last decades of his life by Parkinson’s disease, he dies the most beloved person on his planet. And the remaining decades of his life are dedicated to a kind of human reconciliation. When he loses to Joe Frazier in his first fight, after being away for a while, and being terrible to him, he’s now this person - he speaks with this calmness about how everybody has losses. And it’s a very unfortunate thing, but it’s part of this arc of somebody. As the scholar Todd Boyd says in the film, he’s using the language of a white racist in his description of his opponent. ken burnsĪll of this stuff - he’s ugly, he talks funny, he walks funny. In this case, he called Joe Frazier a gorilla, he made fun of, he did all kinds of things. Which he tried to reach out to Joe Frazier. kara swisherĪnd yet he begins, in his life, to have a journey - this is the classic hero story - to begin to reconcile all these spare parts and represents - kara swisher And it’s more complicated than that in that he uses the language of Jim Crow America to belittle his Black opponents, particularly Joe Frazier. ken burnsĪnd he goes back, and it’s very, very interesting the way in which, even if you’ve been opposed to him and you’ve hated him for whatever reason - you’re a racist, or you’ve served in Vietnam, you’ve lost a son in Vietnam, how could this guy not do this - a lot of this is dissolved. The thing they said was impossible, he’s done. Muhammad Ali has won, Muhammad Ali has won by a knockdown. And there was no way that he was going to win, no way that he was going to be able to do it. His first loss to Joe Frazier, and then his ability to come back and back and - kara swisherĪnd by finally coming back and reclaiming the title in the Rumble in the Jungle as he called it, the big fight in Zaire against George Foreman. kara swisherīy losing, he wins, you’re referring to his loss to Frazier, correct? ken burns And he works his way back to the championship, twice. And then so he loses 3 and a half years of the prime of his career as the heavyweight champion of the United States in an incredibly divisive period, but then works his way back. archived recording (muhammad ali)Īnd I will say directly, no, I will not go 10,000 miles to help kill innocent people.

And he becomes the crux of the whole Vietnam argument. He then refuses induction into the United States Army. He’s representing more a new redefinition of what Black manhood means from an earlier generation in which a Joe Lewis - or perhaps a better example is Jackie Robinson - is there. He’s interacting with the traditional Civil Rights movement, which is nonviolent and opposed to it, and he has the Nation of Islam, which is urging separatism, as opposed to the main thrust of the Civil Rights movement, which is integration. We don’t need to have barroom arguments about that, it just is.īut he’s intersecting with all of the currents of race, of religion, of faith, particularly Islam, or in his case, he joined the Nation of Islam, which was a kind of separatist religious sect.

He is, first and foremost, sort of the athlete of the 20th century, perhaps the greatest athlete of all times. Ali represents the intersection of almost all of the major themes and events of the last half of the 20th century. Well, I certainly agree with Norman Mailer. I’d like to know why you think that is so, if you agree with that. So at the very start of the Ali documentary, you quoted Norman Mailer, who followed Ali quite closely, as saying he was the very spirit of the 20th century. So I wanted to talk to you about how they are framing our present moment and maybe how that should change.

Millions of Americans have watched Burns’s films about America’s past. I love the series, and it made me think a lot, not just about Ali’s complicated legacy, but also how our history gets told and the power that comes with the telling. I’m Kara Swisher, and you’re listening to “Sway.” My guest today is Ken Burns, the award-winning filmmaker known for telling America’s stories of the Civil War, Thomas Jefferson, Vietnam, and his latest subject, Muhammad Ali. (SINGING) When you walk in the room, do you have sway? kara swisher The documentarian responds to the PBS letter and why he is “very troubled” by the Anthony Bourdain A.I. Transcript Is Ken Burns Taking Up Too Much Space? He Doesn’t Think So.

Ken burns narrator