Odessa Lee Clay was the mother of three-time World Heavyweight Champion Muhammad Ali and Rudolph Valentino Clay, now Rahman Ali and grandmother of Laila Ali.
Background
She was born in Hopkins County, Kentucky, one of six children of John Lewis O"Grady and Birdie B. Morehead. Her paternal grandfather was a white Irishman named Abe O"Grady, who emigrated to the United States from Ennis, County Clare, Ireland, soon after the Civil War and married a daughter of Lewis and Amanda J. "Mandy" Walker of Todd County, Kentucky. Her maternal grandfather, Tom Morehead, was the son of a white Morehead and a slave named Dinah.
Odessa Clay grew up in a segregated society in which African Americans were denied many of the rights and privileges of white Americans.
Career
Morehead served in the 122nd USCT. African Americans faced discrimination in finding jobs. Clay"s parents separated when she was young, and her mother worked as a domestic, taking care of the household chores and the young children of a white family. When she became an adolescent, she dropped out of school and also found work as a domestic.
They soon married and settled into their own house in Louisville, Kentucky.
The Clays" marriage was troubled. Ali told boxing promoters, "She"s afraid of him".
Muhammad Ali later said, "My mother is a Baptist, and when I was growing up, she taught me all she knew about God. She taught us to love people and treat everybody with kindness.
She taught us it was wrong to be prejudiced or hate.
I"ve changed my religion and some of my beliefs since then, but her God is still God. I just call him by a different name. She"s a sweet, fat, wonderful woman, who loves to cook, eat, make clothes, and be with family.
She doesn"t drink, smoke, meddle in other people"s business, or bother anyone, and there"s no one who"s been better to me my whole life."
Muhammad Ali was much closer to his mother, whom he lovingly called "Bird", than to his father.
After discovering boxing, it was his mother with whom he shared his dreams of greatness. Clay"s husband died in 1990.
Odessa Clay died of heart failure on August 18, 1994 at Hurstbourne Health Center, a nursing home in the Louisville, Kentucky area. She had been disabled by a stroke since February 1994, according to a family friend.
Odessa Clay appeared as herself in the film documentaries Muhammad Ali: The Whole Story (1996) and When We Were Kings (1996).
In the 1977 film The Greatest Odessa Clay was portrayed by Dorothy Meyer, and in the 2001 film Ali she was portrayed by Candy Ann Brown.
