structural:summarization
Early life

Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. (/ ˈ k æ ʃ ə s /) was born on January 17, 1942, in Louisville, Kentucky. He had one brother. He was named after his father, Cassius Marcellus Clay Sr. (1912–1990), who had a sister and four brothers and who himself was named in honor of the 19th-century Republican politician and staunch abolitionist Cassius Marcellus Clay, also from the state of Kentucky. Clay's father's paternal grandparents were John Clay and Sallie Anne Clay; Clay's sister Eva claimed that Sallie was a native of Madagascar. He was a descendant of slaves of the antebellum South, and was predominantly of African descent, with Irish and English family heritage. His maternal great-grandfather, Abe Grady, emigrated from Ennis, County Clare, Ireland. DNA testing performed in 2018 showed that, through his paternal grandmother, Clay was a descendant of the former slave Archer Alexander, who had been chosen from the building crew as the model of a freed man for the Emancipation Memorial, and was the subject of abolitionist William Greenleaf Eliot 's book, The Story of Archer Alexander: From Slavery to Freedom.

His father was a sign and billboard painter, and his mother, Odessa O'Grady Clay (1917–1994), was a domestic helper. Although Cassius Sr. was a Methodist, he allowed Odessa to bring up both Cassius Jr. and his younger brother, Rudolph "Rudy" Clay (later renamed Rahaman Ali), as Baptists. Cassius Jr. attended Central High School in Louisville. He was dyslexic, which led to difficulties in reading and writing, at school and for much of his life.

He grew up amid racial segregation. His mother recalled one occasion when he was denied a drink of water at a store: "They wouldn't give him one because of his color. That really affected him." He was also strongly affected by the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, which led to young Clay and a friend taking out their frustration by vandalizing a local rail yard. He once told his daughter Hana, "Nothing would ever shake me up (more) than the story of Emmett Till."