As we approach Muhammad Ali’s funeral this Friday, the political class and the newly-conscious sports reporters are now clamoring to express their love of Ali – despite decades of demonizing a man who stood for his principles against the U.S. war machine. Sentenced to prison for refusing to enter the military in 1967 and then having revoked his heavy-weight boxing title, the “Champion of the World” became for many of my generation a heroic Champion of War Resisters for Ali’s widely-covered public stance:
“I strongly object to the fact that so many newspapers have given the American public and the world the impression that I have only two alternatives in taking this stand: either I go to jail or go to the Army. There is another alternative and that alternative is justice.”
It may be hard for some to imagine a U.S.-born Muslim in the mid-1960s who was Black defying White Christian America, especially given the continuing rise in 21st century “anti-Muslim racism.” As a young college student who eventually received the military draft status of “conscientious objector,” I and many of others found inspiration to resist cooperating with U.S foreign policy because of Ali’s very public defiance of U.S. imperialism and his naming of racism at home and abroad.
Was Muhammad Ali part of the so-called “Vietnam syndrome” that President George H.W. Bush (1989-1993), a former CIA Director, claimed the U.S. had “kicked” in order to begin waging war in the Persian Gulf region that continues to this day? Although President Obama stated, “Muhammad Ali shook up the world,” Obama’s public statement conveniently ignores Ali’s pacifism over how Ali actually “shook up the world.”
Admired globally for his stance against racism, Ali was more than his boxing persona and lively poetry – he was a war-resisting anti-imperialist whose words 50 years later echo in the Black Lives Matter social justice movement:
“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?”
This is an inconvenient truth for the Obama administration – contrary to an era of promised “Hope” – that has continued to pursue and expand unconstitutional wars just like his presidential predecessors, but now with imprecise drones that have killed thousands of civilians, including the targeting of a U.S. citizen never charged with a crime but justified as only an imperial power can do when it poses as a democracy with a façade of judicial due process. Obama as president would have distanced himself from Muhammad Ali much the same way that President Lyndon Johnson (1963-1969) did over Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s anti-war position.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was also demonized for daring to make connections among domestic racism, economic inequities, and imperialistic wars, a position that many say cost King his life in 1968. Liberals – White & Black – turned on King. President Johnson never forgave Dr. King
“for breaking ranks; pro-war liberal Democrats afterward often dissociated themselves from his actions; and a large part of the civil rights movement deplored his stance as a violation of an unspoken contract. Civil rights, they thought, was about black Americans, and the cause of black Americans was civil rights. The violence of the cities had nothing to do with the violence of the war.”
So why should we expect that any imperial president, including Obama, would celebrate prominent dissent against costly U.S. military ventures?
The connection between Ali and King is not an imagined one. As the research of progressive sports writer Dave Zirin points out,
“The press was hounding King about why he wasn’t just focusing on the ‘domestic issue’ of civil rights, and King took that moment to draw upon thoughts of his private friend and said, ‘Like Muhammad Ali puts it, we are all—black and brown and poor—victims of the same system of oppression.’”
Eventually, in 1971 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the position of the U.S. Department of Justice to imprison Muhammad Ali for his refusal to participate in the military and conceded,
“The Government in this Court has also made clear that it no longer questions the sincerity of the petitioner’s beliefs.”
In a visit to the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville last year, I was taken by not only Ali’s biography but by how the museum has placed Ali’s life in the context of the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-War Movement. The museum is unflinching in presenting this important perspective, an important aspect of U.S. history that many unfortunately would prefer go the way of Orwell’s memory hole.