Beyond the Boxer: Ali and the Humanitarian Within
1998
Bestowed by the United Nations Secretary-General of the United States of America, Kofi Annan, for Muhammad Ali's global efforts to "promote tolerance, love, and peace," Ali was recognized and presented with the United Nations Messenger of Peace award on September 15, 1998.
The United Nations chose Ali for this honor due to his humanitarian works and international activism including his charity missions, like his goodwill mission to the Soviet Union and his trip to Cuba with his wife, Lonnie Ali, delivering medical equipment and supplies to children's hospitals. The Proclamation reads, "...noting your desire to help focus worldwide attention on the noble aims and objectives enshrined in the United Nations Charter, admiring your devotion to the creation of a safer and more stable world the fostering of human rights, and the liberation of the human spirit, honouring the fact that you have, over the course of your extraordinary career as an athlete and humanitarian, demonstrated time and again your dedication to what is best in humankind, conscious that your example has shown what can be achieved when people of good will join together on behalf of a better world, hopeful that through your contributions to sports and human rights, the message of peace, harmony and human dignity will resound throughout the nations."
