At the time Mr Carter was a highly ranked middleweight boxer. That year he would fight Joey Giardello for the world middleweight title, losing a 15-round encounter on points. With his shaved head, horseshoe moustache, intimidating stare, and muscular physique, Mr Carter was a menacing presence. And his ability to take a man out with one punch earned him many early-round victories and the nickname Hurricane.

But after his conviction for murder on June 17, 1966, his life was changed forever. He would spend the next 20 years in a prison cell. After a retrial in 1976 in which he was convicted a second time, his case was finally reopened in 1985, thanks to a group of Canadian activists. It was then that federal court Judge Haddon Lee Sarokin ruled that Mr Carter and his friend John Artis had not received a 'fair trial' under the constitution.

Judge Sarokin stated that the prosecution had been 'based on racism rather than reason and concealment rather than disclosure'. Rather than try to prosecute Mr Carter for a third time, 22 years after the fact, prosecutors decided it was not feasible and the case was dropped.

Today, Mr Carter lives in Toronto, because, he says: 'I refuse to live in a country that has the death penalty, after what they've done to me.'

He has since received two honorary doctorates of law, one from York University (Toronto) and one from Griffith University in Brisbane. And he continues to fight for the wrongfully convicted, as founder and chief executive of Innocent International. We met at his house in Toronto.

His still has his fierce gaze, and his horseshoe moustache, except that it's a little more sparse and greying slightly. He wears a big black cowboy hat and a pink, shiny shirt. He is still euphoric about the US election result and it seems only natural to talk about the newly elected president.

Mr Carter is a person who believes in destiny. Senator Obama was born in 1961, the same year that Mr Carter was released from Trenton penitentiary after serving his first jail term (for robbery and assault), and the same year he began his career as a prizefighter.

'Every civilisation develops along two defined lines. The line of construction and the line of destruction,' he says.

'The line of construction is where we build our schools and libraries, our health care. The line of destruction is where we destroy what we have built. But if the line of destruction gets too far from the line of construction, then that society is going to implode.

'Now, this is where America was under the offices of George W. Bush, and would have continued to be if John McCain had been elected president. Obama stopped the line of destruction, and has an opportunity to make a turn in a different direction and go back to the line of construction.'

Mr Carter knows President Bush well. In 1999, when Mr Carter was working as an executive director of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted, he led a Canadian delegation to Texas to try to stop the execution of a Canadian citizen, Joseph Stanley Faulder.

'I remember that period. George W. Bush was governor of Texas at that time, but too busy to talk to us, because there was a scheduled execution for six o'clock every day that week. Bush was governor of Texas for 51/2 years, and for that 51/2 years, 135 people were executed under his watch. In 2000, when he was running for the presidency, I campaigned publicly against him, and I said, 'If you elect this person president , he is going to kill 135 million people'.'

Mr Carter's living room is a shrine to the struggle against racial discrimination. The walls are covered in black and white pictures of ghettos in flames, of Nelson Mandela, Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, and Dylan, who chronicled Mr Carter's life in his 1975 song Hurricane.

Mr Carter lived through those years of struggle locked up in a 4-metre-square cell, becoming a symbol of the anti-racism movement from inside the system. But he knows how important the outside struggle was.

'It's like all the deaths, all the people that died in the streets all over the country ... they all came together on November 4 to be the society that can be. It's thanks to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X that today we can celebrate Obama's victory.'

When we speak of Malcolm X, Mr Carter's eyes fill with tears. 'Malcolm was one of my best friends. He was like a big brother to me ... I agreed with what he was saying: If you put your hands on me, I'll send you straight to the cemetery. Three years later, they killed Martin Luther King. If they couldn't put me in jail, they would have killed me, too. But they couldn't shoot me down in the streets. I was a so-called celebrity, an athlete. So, they just let the system get rid of me.'

African-Americans are still over-represented in all the worst statistics, Mr Carter says, and he knows that things are not going to be easy for Senator Obama. But he is sure that under the new president, things for African-Americans are going to change for the better.

'Today, one out of every three young black men in America between the ages of 12 and 37 is under the control of the criminal justice system,' Mr Carter says. 'There are more young black men in US prisons than there are in universities. And that's because we Africans-Americans, we won the battles, against segregation, against public discrimination, but we lost the war, because we didn't know what to do with the victories we had.

'Now, the election of Barack Obama to the White House should be an eye-opener for the black community and change the perspective of how we view ourselves, so we can get away from these baggy clothes, and stop looking like mobsters and gangsters, and start to perceive ourselves as intelligent, decent, honest, professional people who can make it to the White House. The perception, that's what it's going to change for us.'

Mr Carter has a deep, raspy smoker's voice which is easy to listen to. People from all over North America come to listen to it.

In Canada, he is well known for his public speeches. He is a motivational speaker and talks to women and men of all ages. He tells the story of his life and teaches them how to live theirs. 'I make my living with those speeches,' he says.

He admits he was no saint back then.

'I was full of myself, and arrogant,' he says. Before being sentenced to three life sentences, Mr Carter was arrested for a series of street muggings. No other perpetrators have ever been found for the killings for which Mr Carter was convicted and many people still believe he is guilty.

Before leaving, I ask one last question: is he at peace with the world?

The Hurricane takes a puff of his fifth cigarette, smiles, and says: 'If I hadn't come to some kind of understanding about this world and about myself, certainly I would not be sitting in front of you. I would still be in prison. And if I were still in prison, I would be dead.

'You see, I know it might sound crazy, but those 20 years of being locked up in a cage were the best thing that could have ever happened to me because they made me realise that we live in a wonderful world ... a fantastic island where everything is possible, where someone called Barack Hussein Obama can become the president of the United States.'

Then, putting out his cigarette, he adds, 'but that doesn't mean that I'm going back to the United States'.