After Muhammad Ali died, the best reflection on his life that I read was written by Kevin B. Blackistone, who teaches at the University of Maryland, is an ESPN panelist and writes sports commentary for the Washington Post. In the June 7, 2016 edition he writes:
“It is common for archaeologists to find in the graveyards of African American slaves in the Americas objects from their tortured lives. For the burial place became one of the few places where enslaved Africans could lay bare who they were and from whence they came.
The immediate wake of the death of Muhammad Ali reminds that he—progeny of Dinah, his great-great grandmother who was a slave—must be, like his ancestors, so memorialized.
With the secret FBI memo of Feb. 13, 1964, to FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover, categorized as a ‘security matter,’ on the findings of a meeting between FBI agents and Ali’s manager, Angelo Dundee, about Ali’s connection to the Nation of Islam.
With the announcement from the World Boxing Association on September 14, 1964, that it was defrocking him of the world heavyweight championship he’d won earlier that year against Sonny Liston because of his conversion to Islam, rejection of his given name Cassius Clay as, he said, a ‘slave name’ and openly taking counsel from the militant Malcolm X.
With the announcement from the New York State Athletic Commission and World Boxing Council on April 29, 1967, that both were stripping him of his restored world heavyweight champion’s belts for mustering the boldness that day to refuse conscription in the U.S. Army and saunter from the Houston Induction Center despite threat of a five-year prison sentence.” [Washington Post, 6/7/16, p. D3.]
Between his being stripped of his title in 1964, and his suspension from boxing in 1967, Ali would fight 9 more times, winning all of the bouts and in the process claiming all the heavyweight titles recognized at that time. However, because of the disfavor into which Muhammad had fallen with so many in America, four of those fights were overseas, in Canada, England and Germany, where a larger crowed could be drawn.
As explained in my last post, before Ali was defrocked the first time, he had had three years to be involved with the Islamic faith during which he had solidified his beliefs. He was thus very articulate from the beginning about the ways in which he found meaning in Islam as compared to his Christian upbringing. However, the events leading to his suspension started very differently, beginning with an off-the-cuff statement Ali made in frustration with being hounded by the press. First, the background.
Like all of us in that generation, Cassius registered with the Selective Service (military draft) at the age of 18 (1960). In January of 1964, a month before the first Liston fight, Cassius was ordered to take the military qualifying exam. He easily passed the physical portion of the test, but, being dyslexic and a poor reader, he failed the mental aptitude test. He retook the test three months later, and failed again.
When the press got ahold of this, there was an uproar that Ali was not being drafted because of his fame. For Ali, this whole process was embarrassing. But you have to love his response to reporters, “I said I was the greatest, not the smartest.”
By early 1966, with the war in Vietnam growing, the military lowered the aptitude percentile that was passing from the 30th to the 15th percentile (Cassius was at the 16th), making him now eligible to be drafted. Within hours Ali’s phone was ringing off the hook from the news organizations. About the 10th time he was asked about the war, Ali exploded, “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.”
The next day most of the sports writers across the country raged against him as an unpatriotic draft-dodger. One of the most famous sports writers of all time, Red Smith, penned: “Squealing over the possibility that the military may call him up, Cassius makes himself as sorry a spectacle as those unwashed punks who picket and demonstrate against the war.”
Thus began a series of legal hearings as Ali requested an exemption from the draft on the basis of conscientious objector status, a category the government reserves for those who, on the basis of their religious faith, are opposed to involvement in wars of any kind. In Ali’s words, “How can I kill somebody when I pray five times a day for peace.” [Hauser, 155]
His initial request was denied, and he was sentenced to five years in jail. However, a series of appeals kept him free until the Supreme Court overturned the denial some four years later, on the grounds that his conscientious objector status had not been properly recognized. However, with the New York commission stripping him of his title for the second time, all the other states following suit, and the US government confiscating his passport, Muhammad Ali, at the height of his career, was drummed out of boxing for 3 1/2 years. Famed reporter, Howard Cosell, fumed: “Due process of the law hadn’t even begun, yet they took away his livelihood because he failed the test of political and social conformity, and it took him seven years to get his title back. It’s disgusting. To this day I get furious when I think about it.” [Ibid., 173]
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| {Howard Cosell and Muhammad Ali, August 17, 1972) |
In theological ethics, we distinguish between principles and context. Conscientious objection is a principle, as one states that s/he believes all killing is immoral. The Just War Theory, recognized by many religious bodies (but not by the US government), argues that killing can be either moral or immoral, depending on the context. Ali seems to have believed both. He saw the war as another example of neocolonial racism, and he also, based on his religious convictions, felt killing was immoral. On April 28, 1967, he wrote, “‘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? . . . .I either have to obey the laws of the land or the laws of Allah. I have nothing to lose by standing up and following my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail. We’ve been in jail for four hundred years.” [Ibid., 167]
Ali was ahead of his time in raising the issue of the morality of the Vietnam War. Eventually Martin Luther King, Jr., would do the same, and the anti-war protest would continue to grow until it became a major campaign issue in the election of 1972. During his exile from boxing, (and in part to make a living), Ali would help that movement grow by going around to college campuses to explain why he was willing to risk jail rather than go into combat.
I think it could be safely argued that anyone who dares to challenge the extent to which the United States lives up to what has been called the “immortal declaration” that Thomas Jefferson wrote into the U.S. Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal,” will suffer greatly. Just take a look at the vitriol stirred up these days as we struggle with what race and religion mean when it comes to equality within our nation.
Charles P. Pierce shares his view of how Muhammad Ali fits into this ongoing struggle:
“In 1849, Herman Melville made the point that ‘the Declaration of Independence makes a difference.’ He meant that it changed how people should think about themselves, and how they should express themselves. He was talking about the contradiction in the nation’s birth, and he meant that the measure of an American must be how willing he is in his public life to call Jefferson’s great bluff. I am created equal? I have certain unalienable rights? O.K., watch me exercise them to their fullest. Or is your country a lie? Raise or call?
That was the implicit message of Muhammad Ali’s life. He was a great American athlete. He was an essential American. He was a powerful pivot in American history. He was such a better American citizen than the people who denigrated him for his brashness, who spat on his religion, who called him a coward because he wouldn’t be an accessory to mindless slaughter and who hounded him out of his profession at the height of his powers and influence. They were the American government. He was America, the great and self-evident contradiction of a nation, and that, as Melville warned us, makes all the difference.” [Sports Illustrated, 6/13/2016, p. 45.]
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