The Cleveland Summit, also known as the Muhammad Ali Summit, was a meeting on Sunday, June 4, 1967, among twelve leading African-American men, eleven athletes and one politician, on the East Side of Cleveland, Ohio. Football star Jim Brown organized it in response to Muhammad Ali's refusal, a month earlier, to enter the draft for the Vietnam War. The participants expressed support for Ali's decision in a press conference following the summit.

According to one account, the idea for the meeting came about when Ali's manager, Jabir Herbert Muhammad, asked Brown whether he would meet with Ali to assess his plans. Brown said, "I came up with the concept of having Ali meet with the top black athletes. We had a desire to find out the truth about his protest." Wooten invited the athletes.

The meeting took place in an office at 10511 Euclid Avenue, alternatively described as the Negro Industrial Building or an office of the Negro Industrial Economic Union, an African-American empowerment organization founded by Brown and later called the Black Economic Union. Its location is now occupied by an office of the American Cancer Society.

Several participants entered the meeting skeptical of Ali's position against performing military service. Some were suspicious of the Nation of Islam. Most were military veterans - at least eight of the eleven, according to Robert Anthony Bennett III's doctoral thesis, which identifies the military service of Beach, Brown, McClinton, Mitchell, Shorter, Stokes, Williams, and Wooten, and also notes that Davis and Russell had undertaken U.S. Government goodwill missions, in the case of Davis to visit U.S. troops in Vietnam.

Some accounts say that the participants' original purpose was to encourage Ali to reach a compromise with the U.S. Government. A 2012 Plain Dealer article reported that "[a]lthough it wasn't discussed as a group before the meeting, many of the men planned to convince Ali to accept his call to the military." That is how the press reported the Summit at the time: as an unsuccessful attempt to convince Ali to perform his military service, under headlines such as "Athletes Fail To Talk Ali Into The Army" and "Athletes Fail to Sway Clay."

Ali's biographer Jonathan Eig reported in 2017, as Branson Wright did in the Plain Dealer in 2012, that boxing promoter Bob Arum had negotiated a deal with the government that draft-evasion charges against Ali would be dropped if Ali agreed to perform a series of boxing exhibitions for U.S. troops. Brown and two Nation of Islam leaders reportedly had a financial stake in this planned arrangement, and "other black athletes" (presumably those in the Summit) would also be financially rewarded if they convinced Ali to accept it. Some saw the original purpose of the Summit as to convince Ali to accept this deal.

By contrast, Beach said, "None of us had any idea of trying to change Ali's mind. The meeting was there to support his position." Along similar lines, Brown told The New York Times a few days after the Summit, "We approached [Ali] on the basis that we were his friends, willing to give him any assistance we could. No one would pressure him. It would be a give-and-take, pro-and-con discussion."

Reports and recollections vary widely on the length of the meeting among the participants, ranging from the contemporaneous Washington Post report that the group met "for 1-1/2 hours" to Wooten's recollection that the group "sat down for about six or seven hours." Brown said "we met for about five hours," and in another interview Wooten said "about three hours." The latter recollection matches the statements that the discussion started at about 3pm, and adjourned for the press conference at about 6pm.