On June 20th, Black boxer Mohammed Ali was convicted of draft dodging. The all-white jury made its decision in 21 minutes. Ali was fined $10,000, was sentenced to 5 years in jail, and was forced to surrender his passport. He had already been stripped of his world heavyweight boxing title. On the same day, the US Congress voted 337-29 to extend the draft for four more years and 385-19 to make desecrating the flag a federal crime.
The background was the escalation of the war in Vietnam, which still had the support of over half the US population. Ali defied this trend. When he was called up, he said: “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?” Later, he said: “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.”
This was not Ali’s first political act. Frustrated with the timidity of the Civil Rights movement, he joined the Nation of Islam and befriended Malcolm X. Ali’s opposition to war and racism was accompanied by a class consciousness. Years later, he said: “It wasn’t just Black people being drafted. The government had a system where the rich man’s son went to college, and the poor man’s son went to war.”
Ali avoided jail, but for 3½ years in his mid-20s, the peak of his physical condition, he was banned from boxing. He spent this time speaking out against war and racism. In 1968, his speech “Black is Best” attracted 4,000 students and staff at Howard University. He made many similar speeches to large audiences, which helped build the growing movement against war. By August 1968, support for the war had sunk to 27%.
While the public celebrates his athletic prowess, Ali’s politics are often ignored. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, both Democrat and Republican administrations considered him a national threat and bugged his phone. When John Carlos and Tommie Smith made the Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics, one of their demands was: “Restore Muhammad Ali’s title.” Ali was unrepentant. Speaking out against his sentence, Ali said: “I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail. We’ve been in jail for four hundred years.”
