As the Vietnam War intensified, the draft call-up was expanded. In early 1966, the passing percentile in the intelligence test was lowered from 30 to 15, making Ali eligible for service. On 14 February, his lawyer asked the Louisville draft board either to postpone his reclassification or grant him a deferral. Three days later the request was denied and at the age of twenty-four—the top of the eligible range—Ali was reclassified 1-A, fit for combat.
Ali was training in Miami when he heard the news. His first reaction was bafflement. “Why me?” he kept asking. “I can’t understand it.” Robert Lipsyte, the New York Times sportswriter who spent much of that day with him, has described how, inundated by press queries, the disoriented champion finally blurted out the fateful riposte: “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.”
This sentence would prove to be one of the most resonant of the sixties, but unlike Ali’s exultant declaration after first winning the heavyweight championship—“I don’t have to be what you want me to be”—it was an off-the-cuff remark, a cry of defensiveness and uncertainty. No one, least of all Ali himself, could foresee the huge impact it was to have on his future, the future of boxing and the global opposition to the war in Vietnam. Today there are many, even among his admirers, who see Ali’s outburst as an accident, dismiss his heroism and question his motives. They note that Ali didn’t know where Vietnam was and that he kept calling the people there “Vietmanese.” The conservative commentator Stanley Crouch hails Ali as a great sports stylist, but regards his stand on the war as the action of “a dupe … not to be taken seriously.” From a different political perspective, Gerald Early believes that “Ali’s reasons for not wanting to join the army were never terribly convincing.” The man “hadn’t a single idea in his head” and relied instead on the “shallow simplistic sincerity that protected him like amulet or juju.” Yet the closer one looks at Ali’s actions and reactions in 1966 and 1967 and their historical context, the clearer it becomes that this man had many ideas in his head, and that it was his choice to act on them, come what may.
Ali’s outburst came eighteen months after the United States Congress had approved the Tonkin Gulf resolution licensing direct US attacks on North Vietnam. Johnson assured the electorate that “we will seek no wider war,” but as the Pentagon Papers make clear, with congressional endorsement of this “retaliatory action” (in preparation for at least five months before the alleged North Vietnamese aggression), “an important threshold in the war” had been breached with “virtually no domestic opposition.”
Six months later, in February 1965, the US launched its Rolling Thunder air war against North Vietnam. By the time the cease-fire was signed in January 1973, US planes and pilots had dropped on Vietnam three times the total tonnage of bombs unloaded on all of Europe, Africa and Asia in World War II. On 8 March 1965, the marines landed at Da Nang to become the first (officially acknowledged) US combat troops. They began offensive action against the insurgents on 1 April, initiating a ground war that was to last more than seven years. By July, 100,000 US soldiers had arrived in the country. Six months later, their numbers had doubled.
In early 1966, the United States was waging ferocious war against the Vietnamese population. Among the tactics deployed—and extensively documented—were crop destruction, rice denial, saturation bombings, forced evacuations, torture and mutilation of prisoners, immolation of homes and whole villages. The weapons used included napalm and anti-personnel cluster bombs. US pilots were flying 1500 sorties a week against the North, opposed only by anti-aircraft fire from below.
Although the reality of mass destruction was largely concealed from Americans by a compliant media, protests against the government’s policy grew steadily as the war escalated. The first signs of domestic dissent became visible in the spring of 1965, when anti-war teach-ins were held at more than one hundred universities across the country. The teach-in was a variation on the sit-in, the tactic popularized by black students in the South; in its early days, many of the activists in the nascent anti-war movement were veterans of the civil rights struggle, and they infused the gathering anti-war protests with its language and methods.
On 17 April 1965, in the first major national protest, 25,000 marched against the war in Washington, DC. The march was called by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and helped launch the organization’s meteoric career as the vanguard of the country’s radical white youth. In the call for the march, SDS had drawn explicitly on the experiences of the black freedom movement. The leaflet asked: “WHAT KIND OF AMERICA IS IT WHOSE RESPONSE TO POVERTY AND OPPRESSION IN VIETNAM IS NAPALM AND DEFOLIATION? WHOSE RESPONSE TO POVERTY AND OPPRESSION IN MISSISSIPPI IS SILENCE?”
At the demonstration itself, Paul Potter, the SDS president, delivered an impassioned indictment not only of the conduct of the war in Vietnam, but of the very premises of US foreign policy. It was necessary, he declared, to “build a movement that understands Vietnam in all its horror as but a symptom of a deeper malaise.” At the next major national action, held in Washington in October, Carl Oglesby, Potter’s successor as SDS president, took the analysis further. He lambasted the American liberal establishment—the tradition of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson—whose aim in Vietnam was “to safeguard what they take to be American interests around the world against revolution or revolutionary change, which they always call communism.” Invoking Jefferson and Paine, he lamented that America had lost “that mysterious social desire for human equity that from time to time has given us genuine moral drive.” Many people would “make of it that I sound mighty anti-American,” Oglesby concluded, “to them I say, don’t blame me for that! Blame those who mouthed my liberal values and broke my American heart.” In the coming years, this disenchantment, not only with the policies of the American government, but with the promises and premises of America itself, was to grow rapidly, affecting huge numbers of white youth, and incidentally creating a new constituency of support for Muhammad Ali, whose religious-political break with America had shocked so many only a few years before.
I agree with Paul Robeson absolutely that Negroes should never willingly fight in an unjust war. I do not share his honest hope that all will not. A certain sheep-like disposition, inevitably, born of slavery, will, I am afraid, lead many of them to join America in any enterprise, provided the whites will grant them equal rights to do wrong.
W.E.B. Du Bois
In the early years of the anti-war movement, organizers were much concerned by the absence of black faces from the protests. Yet opinion polls showed that blacks were always more likely than whites to question the government’s war polices, more likely to support complete withdrawal from Vietnam and less likely to support escalation. In 1965, 25 percent of blacks favored withdrawal; 50 percent a cease-fire; and 25 percent escalation. In the same year, white opinion divided 15 percent for withdrawal, 36 percent for a cease-fire, and 49 percent for escalation. Indeed, until 1970, blacks, low-income families and the over-sixties were the only sections of the population in which greater numbers favored withdrawal than escalation. Yet the notion that anti-war sentiment was largely a white middle-class student phenomenon remains widespread, among both critics and some (white, middle-class) veterans of the movement.
Vietnam was to become the first American war in which the dominant attitude among blacks was oppositional. Previously, participation in America’s war efforts was seen as a way of pressing claims for full citizenship and unfettered inclusion in American society. By serving his country in time of war, it was argued, the negro would re-enforce his claims for equality in time of peace. In 1918, Du Bois penned a famous editorial in The Crisis, the NAACP magazine, urging black people to “Close Ranks” with white Americans in the “fight for democracy.”
This is our country: We have worked for it, we have suffered for it, we have fought for it … then this is our war.
Du Bois later regretted this statement, especially as it was followed by the infamous “Red Summer” of 1919, when American whites lynched seventy blacks, including ten soldiers in uniform. But it remained the conventional wisdom up to and during World War II, which both the NAACP and the Communist party regarded as a great opportunity for the black struggle. According to an optimistic Langston Hughes, “Pearl Harbor put Jim Crow on the run.” But as Roosevelt, widely viewed as the best friend the negro had ever had in the White House, refused to desegregate the American armed forces, a note of bitterness crept into the Popular Front celebrations of the anti-Fascist effort. “Will V-Day Be Me Day Too?” asked Hughes in more forlorn mood. In Chicago, young blacks took this spirit further by forming a group called Conscientious Objectors Against Jim Crow and refusing military service.
During World War II, conscientious objection was mainly the preserve of the established pacifist sects. Like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Nation of Islam was in principle opposed to secular power, but its attitude to military service was also shaped by its rejection of American national identity in favor of a diasporic identity that was by definition extra-territorial. Accordingly, Elijah Muhammad and his followers refused to register for Selective Service. The FBI, which saw black nationalists as potential saboteurs, secured Elijah Muhammad’s indictment for draft evasion and sedition. The latter charge was dismissed, but in December 1942 Muhammad was convicted of violating Selective Service regulations and sentenced to one to five years in prison. Parole was denied in June 1945. Physically weakened but more determined than ever to build his Nation, Muhammad was finally released in August 1946.
The Nation’s ideologically motivated defiance was only one expression of a more widespread, informal black resistance to the draft in World War II. There was, as so often in black history, a gap between official and unofficial black perspectives on the war, between the gung ho commitment of recognized black leaders and the often cynical and pragmatic approach adopted by anonymous black youth. In 1943, during his street-hustler phase, the young Malcolm Little was called up for induction in Manhattan. He had no intention of subjecting himself to military discipline and acted crazy and drunk. “Daddy-o, now you and me, we’re from up north here,” he told a startled psychiatrist, “so don’t you tell nobody … I want to get sent down south. Organize them nigger soldiers, you dig? Steal us some guns and kill up some crackers.” Malcolm was declared psychologically unfit and exempt from service. In 1946, he was jailed on burglary charges. While in prison he underwent his famous conversion to the cult of Elijah Muhammad. He was released on parole in August 1952, in the midst of the Korean War. Malcolm was twenty-seven and therefore unlikely to serve (the age limit at the time was twenty-six) but refused to register on principle. Threatened with a return to jail, he acquiesced and applied for conscientious objector (CO) status. Once again, he was examined by an army psychiatrist. This time he was declared an “asocial personality with paranoid trends” and classified 4-F, unfit for duty.
In 1953, the Messenger’s son Wallace was classified 1-A but applied for CO status, which he was granted in 1957. Chauncey Eskridge, the Muhammad family attorney, used his political connections to arrange two years of alternative service for Wallace, but Elijah wouldn’t allow his son to take up the offer. In 1958, after Wallace refused to report to a state hospital for his work assignment, he was indicted, tried and convicted. Because of a technical error in the government’s handling of his service orders, a new trial was held in April 1960. The judge ruled that there was no factual basis to Wallace’s claim to be a minister of the Muslim faith and sentenced him to three years’ imprisonment, which commenced following the failure of his appeals in October 1961. The twenty-eight year old then spent fourteen months in a federal prison, where he studied the Bible and the Qur’an and concluded that his father’s teachings could not be reconciled with Islamic sources.
Ali was aware of the Nation’s history of draft resistance and of the black community’s informal tradition of draft evasion. He knew that his friend Howard Bingham had escaped conscription in early 1963 by feigning illness and a speech impediment. But it is telling that in his early responses to his draft reclassification, Ali made few references to the Nation’s policies. From the beginning, he tried to place his dilemma in a larger political context, however incompletely understood.
Black opposition to Vietnam was initially a product of the brutal cost of the war to black communities, coupled with the new expectations and intensified frustrations issuing from the civil rights struggle. During the entire course of the 1960s, 30 percent of black but only 18 percent of white males of eligible age were drafted. In 1966, black soldiers comprised 22 percent of all US casualties in Vietnam but only 11 percent of all US troops. In addition, blacks made up 13.5 percent of army enlisted personnel but only 3.4 percent of officers.
In Vietnam, integration on the battlefield came to seem cruel and hypocritical, not an advance for blacks but a further injury. A Newsweek poll showed 35 percent of blacks opposing the war abroad specifically because of the lack of freedom at home. As early as January 1964, this link was made explicit in a letter from a Harlem resident to the Amsterdam News. Responding to the dispute between Malcolm and Jackie Robinson, the correspondent argued:
As for Jackie Robinson I have one point to make. I will not fight for this country in war.… The most forceful thing that black men could have done after the Birmingham bombings would have been to send all draft notices back to the Defense Department until the bombers were found and punished. As long as I am treated as a second-class citizen I will act as a second-class patriot.
The mainstream of the civil rights movement had invested heavily in the rhetoric of American exceptionalism and at this stage endorsed uncritically the ideology of the Cold War. Malcolm, who had long since dispensed with the baggage of “Americanism,” was among the first major black voices to oppose the war. As early as 1963, he had condemned America’s meddling in Southeast Asia and its support for the corrupt dictatorship in Saigon. In the course of his last year, he had become increasingly preoccupied with US foreign policy, and his critique of the intervention in the Congo was often accompanied by references to American hypocrisy in Vietnam. In January 1965, reflecting on events of the previous year in Vietnam, the Congo and the Caribbean, he observed acidly:
The government should feel lucky that our people aren’t anti-American. They should get down on their hands and knees every morning and thank god that 22 million black people have not become anti-American. You’ve given us every right to. The whole world would side with us if we became anti-American. You know, that’s something to think about.
Three weeks later, in Alabama, Vietnam was one of the major themes in Malcolm’s addresses to black students and civil rights activists. It was taken up by SNCC chairman John Lewis. After Lewis was assaulted by police in Selma, he complained, “I don’t see how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam … to the Congo … to Africa and can’t send troops to Selma, Alabama.” In April, Lewis’s SNCC co-worker Bob Moses addressed the SDS rally in Washington. In July, activists in McComb, Mississippi (some of whom had spoken with Malcolm about Vietnam on a visit north in late 1964), issued a leaflet headed “Our Fight Is Here At Home!” It was the first formal protest against the war by an active civil rights group. The leaflet urged mothers to encourage their sons to evade the draft and not to risk their lives “fighting in Vietnam for ‘freedom’ not enjoyed by the Negro community of McComb.” A few weeks later, SNCC issued its first official statement on the war, arguing that blacks should not “fight in Vietnam, until all the Negro people are free in Mississippi.” Later in the year, the MFDP held a prayer meeting on the war, and Fannie Lou Hamer sent a telegram to Johnson demanding that US troops be withdrawn from Vietnam and sent to enforce black voting rights in the South.
In January 1966, SNCC strengthened its anti-war stand: “We maintain that our country’s cry of ‘preserve freedom in the world’ is a hypocritical mask behind which it squashed liberation movements which are not bound and refuse to be bound by the expedience of the United States’ Cold War policy.” The organization offered support to all young men “unwilling to respond to the military draft which would compel them to contribute their lives to US aggression in the name of the ‘freedom’ we find so false in this country.” As a result of this statement and others, Julian Bond, SNCC’s communications director, was barred by the Georgia House of Representatives from taking the Atlanta assembly seat he had won in November. Roy Wilkins and the NAACP castigated Bond and SNCC for giving the enemies of the civil rights movement a chance to attack it as “disloyal” and “un-American.” In contrast, Martin Luther King backed Bond’s right to free speech, but was careful, at this stage, not to condone draft evasion. Meanwhile, in a speech at Morgan State University, SNCC’s Stokely Carmichael issued an unequivocal and emotionally charged declaration: “Either you go to Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas or you become a killer. I will choose to suffer. I will go to jail.” Then, in a flourish that appalled both older civil rights leaders and editorial writers, he added, “To hell with this country.”
Clearly, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong” did not come from nowhere. In February 1966, Muhammad Ali was by no means alone in his reaction to the war, and his outburst in Miami should be seen as one manifestation among many of insurgent opposition in the black community, opposition that the community’s designated representatives were failing to articulate. Ali was part of a gathering wave of dissent that would ultimately wash across the whole of America and much of the rest of the world. But the full flood of anti-war protest was still several years away, and in February 1966 the heavyweight champion found himself part of a beleaguered and derided minority. At this stage, no significant figure in the Democratic party had come out against the war. No major newspaper or television network had questioned its premises, though some were becoming disturbed about its costs and conduct. And apart from a handful of actors and singers with long-standing connections to the left, no American celebrity performer—whether from movies, music or sports—had spoken out. Protesters (whom the media initially dubbed “Vietniks”) were routinely disparaged as unwashed idlers, psychiatric cases, spoiled adolescents or Communist dupes. Public dissent against American foreign policy was widely regarded as unpatriotic, even treasonous, and an affront to the brave boys on the battlefields. Even as Ali declared that he had no quarrel with the Vietcong, Barry Sadler’s belligerent “Ballad of the Green Berets” was climbing the charts and would hold the number one spot for several weeks in March. In a special issue entitled “Vietnam: The War Is Worth Winning”, Life magazine’s editorial staff cited “our massive build-up” and “the new mobility of our strike force” in confidently predicting a US victory within the year.
All of which makes Ali’s outburst against the war that much more remarkable. At a time when most educated people in the United States supported their government’s policy in Vietnam, and indeed when some of the most able minds in American academia were preoccupied with devising more efficient means of prosecuting it, Ali—the barely literate pugilist, the erratic loudmouth and one-man media circus—knew that something was deeply wrong, and that this wrong somehow affected himself and all people of color, well beyond America’s shores.
Ali’s response to the draft was a major boost to the anti-war movement. This was not an academic or a clergyman, not a beatnik or a bohemian, not someone whose style and image were alien to American working-class people. This was a heavyweight boxer, a figure from the mainstream of popular culture and one who could not be dismissed as “unmanly” or “cowardly,” as much an icon of masculine dominance as Miss America was of feminine subservience. Ali was, and remained, by far the most famous of the growing pantheon of anti-war heroes. What’s more, he was black, and his association with anti-war feeling gave that feeling legitimacy in the black communities and helped erode the lily-white image of the movement.
In his response to the draft threat, Ali was initially confused, uncertain, inconsistent. At first, his grievance seemed largely personal. “I buy a lot of bullets, at least three jet bombers a year, and pay the salary of fifty thousand fighting men with the money they take from me after my fights.” This was an argument he abandoned in the weeks to come. Nonetheless, it has been cited by historians (as it was by the Justice Department) as evidence that Ali’s claim of conscientious objection was bogus, an expedient concocted late in the day to justify his aversion to military service. But Robert Lipsyte’s contemporary report from the champ’s camp hints at the real background to Ali’s momentous utterance. Between phone calls from the press and banter with his entourage, Ali sang “Blowin’ in the Wind” to himself. Sam Saxon, a Korean War veteran, reminded Ali and anyone else in earshot, “I was dressed in the uniform of the United States Army and they still called me nigger.” Ali himself told Lipsyte:
Boxing is nothing, just satisfying to some bloodthirsty people. I’m no longer a Cassius Clay, a Negro from Kentucky. I belong to the world, the black world. I’ll always have a home in Pakistan, in Algeria, in Ethiopia. This is more than money.
This comment attracted little attention from the American media, who were preoccupied with the sensational “I ain’t got no quarrel” crack, but it shows that even at this early stage in his struggle against the draft, Ali defined himself and his social responsibilities in internationalist terms.
This is not to deny that among Ali’s immediate reactions to the draft threat were fear and personal resentment. The day after his reclassification, he vented his bewilderment to a television interviewer: “For two years the army told everyone I was a nut and I was ashamed. And now they decide I am a wise man. Now, without ever testing me to see if I am wiser or worser than before, they decide I can go into the army.… I can’t understand it, out of all the baseball players, all of the football players, all of the basketball players—why seek out me, the world’s only heavyweight champion?” Ali had reason to believe the government was out to get him. At this time, local draft boards across the South were calling up black civil rights activists. SNCC leaders John Lewis and Bob Moses had already been reclassified, apparently as punishment for their militancy. At the age of twenty-four, Ali must have assumed he’d slipped through the net. Had he refrained from criticism of the war, he could have quietly arranged an alternative to combat, as did so many others, including the future president Bill Clinton.
“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.” Was any declaration from the mouth of a sports star ever to prove so contentious, so audacious, so inspiring? The reaction was immediate, hostile and ferocious. Jimmy Cannon saw in Ali everything he detested in the era:
He fits in with the famous singers no one can hear and the punks riding motorcycles with iron crosses pinned to their leather jackets and Batman and the boys with their long dirty hair and the girls with the unwashed look and the college kids dancing naked at secret proms held in apartments and the revolt of students who get a check from dad every first of the month and the painters who copy the labels off soup cans and the surf bums who refuse to work and the whole pampered style-making cult of the bored young.
The Kentucky state legislature, which had honored Ali when he won an Olympic gold medal, now condemned him for bringing discredit to “all loyal Kentuckians.” In Congress, politicians called for a boycott of his upcoming fight with Ernie Terrell, scheduled for 29 March in Chicago. Congressman Frank Clark of Pennsylvania was among the most outspoken:
The heavyweight champion has been a complete and total disgrace. I urge the citizens of the nation as a whole to boycott any of his performances. To leave these theater seats empty would be the finest tribute possible to that boy whose hearse may pass by the open doors of the theater on Main Street, USA.
Terrell, who held the WBA version of the heavyweight crown, called his opponent “an irresponsible kid” whose “statement was unbecoming.” At 6 foot 6 inches Terrell was considered too tall for military service and was classified 1-Y, but that didn’t stop him declaring “when you’re called you have to go.” The Chicago Tribune demanded a ban on the fight; Governor Otto Kerner and Mayor Richard Daley echoed the call. Under pressure from the promoters, Ali agreed to appear before the Illinois State Commission to clarify his position. On 22 February, a New York Times headline claimed, “Clay Plans to Apologize for Remarks about Draft Classification.” This proved to be wishful thinking on the part of the boxing establishment. In Chicago, Ali told the commissioners: “I’m not here to make a showdown plea or apologize the way the press said. I came here because certain people would be hurt financially over what I said.” The commissioners asked again and again if he was apologizing for his remarks, but “I’m apologizing for making them to sportswriters and newspapers” was all Ali would offer. That day, the Illinois attorney general ruled the Terrell fight illegal, ostensibly because Ali had failed to sign his correct name on the contract. The promoters searched desperately for an alternative venue, but political pressure ruled out New York, Las Vegas, Miami, Louisville and Pittsburgh. They were forced to look beyond the borders of the US and agreed on Toronto. But with closed-circuit theaters being drawn into the boycott, Terrell himself withdrew from the fight. Canadian George Chuvalo stepped in. Ali’s promoter, Bob Arum, declared his client “a dead piece of merchandise. He’s through as far as big-money closed-circuit is concerned.”
On 28 February Ali made his first formal application for deferment as a conscientious objector. It was one of a sequence of steps he was to take in the coming year which diminished his room for retreat or maneuver, and which increasingly sharpened and politicized his conflict with the draft laws. On 17 March, he appeared before the Louisville draft board to request exemption, citing both his financial responsibilities and his conscientious objection. The board denied his request, and the long and circuitous process of appeal began.
Even at this stage, Ali could have apologized for his remark, or merely refrained from repeating it, while his attorneys negotiated a deal with the government. He chose another course:
Keep asking me, no matter how long
On the war in Vietnam, I sing this song
I ain’t got no quarrel with the Vietcong.
Ali’s hardening determination not to lend support to the American effort in Vietnam infuriated many, whose long-standing reservations about the champion now burst into the open. “Cassius Clay has been the world’s heavyweight champion for two years,” said Milton Gross in the New York Post, “Nobody has ever done less with the time and the title, and destroyed his image more.” Red Smith declared, “Cassius makes himself as sorry a spectacle as those unwashed punks who picket and demonstrate against the war.” In the Los Angeles Times, Jim Murray derided the champ as “the white man’s burden.”
However, there was also sympathy, if not support, from unexpected quarters, including from two prominent black sportsmen who strongly backed Johnson’s war policy. “During my own career in sports I came to learn that there are many writers who like tame Negroes who ‘stay in their place,’ ” wrote Jackie Robinson. “Of course, by backing up his words with deeds, Clay or Ali has clearly demonstrated where his ‘place’ is.” Floyd Patterson was another unlikely but powerful ally. “What bothers me about Cassius Clay’s situation is that he is being made to pay too stiff a penalty for saying and doing what he thinks is right,” said the man who had been humiliated by Ali only a few months earlier. “The prizefighter in America is not supposed to shoot off his mouth about politics, particularly if his views oppose the government’s and might influence many among the working classes who follow boxing.” When he wasn’t promoting himself as an all-American hero, Patterson was among the most thoughtful analysts of the realities of the ring. In his defense of Ali, he noted that boxers were expected to play roles in order to sell fights to the public. “Maybe he has overplayed the part, made it bigger than it was supposed to be, and the public is not sure that it likes its fighters, its hired haters, to go beyond the role it expects them to play, which does not include joining the Black Muslims or denouncing the draft or criticizing America’s policy in the Vietnamese War.”
On 5 June 1966, James Meredith, who four years before had braved racist mobs to enroll as the University of Mississippi’s first black student, set out on his “walk against fear” from Memphis to Jackson. The next day he was shot from ambush. The movement was appalled. If black civil rights workers couldn’t walk in safety on the public highway in broad daylight, what had been won in the South during these last years of sacrifice and suffering? SNCC, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the SCLC rallied to complete Meredith’s march (after clashes with SNCC, the NAACP and the Urban League withdrew). Within days four hundred volunteers were edging their way towards Jackson in the face of vigilante provocation and police harassment. They watched as Byron de la Beckwith, the killer of Medgar Evers, drove slowly up and down the length of their column. In Greenwood, where voter registration had made little headway since Dylan’s visit three years earlier, Stokely Carmichael was arrested for trespassing after he tried to set up a camp for the marchers in the playground of a black school. On his release, he addressed a crowd of supporters:
This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested. I ain’t going to jail no more. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power.
The slogan was picked up by the marchers and within days became a national cause célèbre. Carmichael’s fellow marcher Martin Luther King regretted “the term black power … because it tends to give the impression of black nationalism.” As the Meredith march continued, it came under repeated physical attack. The tear gas, clubs and shootings drove an ever-deepening wedge between older moderates and younger militants. At the final rally in Jackson, King told a reporter, “The government has got to give me some victories if I’m going to keep people non-violent.”
The Black Power slogan provoked outrage across the spectrum of white opinion. The New York Times described it as “a hopeless, futile, destructive course expressive merely of a sense of black impotence.” Vice-President Humphrey warned the NAACP, “There is no room in America for racism of any color.” And on behalf of the NAACP, Roy Wilkins rejected Black Power as “reverse Ku Klux Klan.” Rustin dismissed the new militancy as “utopian and reactionary.” Randolph called it “a menace to racial peace and prosperity.” Politicians up and down the country lambasted the “racist demagogues” and their message of “violence and hate.”
For the media, Black Power was principally a rejection of non-violence. And it was always the statements about violence, or anything that could be construed as a threat of violence, that received the most high-profile attention. One of the tragedies of the period was the falsely polarized debate that ensued, a debate in which tactics, strategies and principles were thrown together in a bewildering muddle. However, it must be remembered that in the face of racist violence and the abject failure of the state to protect black lives, self-defense was an urgent issue for activists. Physical attacks on blacks by white supremacists had increased fivefold between 1961 and 1966. In 1966, it seemed that racists could assault any black person any time, anywhere, and get away with it. It was not only that most whites thought blacks should turn the other cheek, but also that they somehow discounted racial violence as an unfortunate anomaly; whereas for many black people it was a defining and unavoidable American reality, and had long been recognized as such. The Meredith march, the last great assembly of the civil rights phase of the black freedom movement, was a “march against fear”—a public refusal to be cowed by white terror. From the beginning, the conquest, through collective action, of black fear of white power had been one of the driving motives of the southern activists. The Black Power slogan was initially raised in pursuit of that motive. Though it often took the form of a repudiation, Black Power was a logical outgrowth of the civil rights movement, a response to its mix of success and failure.
Twelve years after the Supreme Court’s order to desegregate public schools “with all deliberate speed,” integrated schools remained a rarity, both North and South. Many doubted whether the federal government would or could enforce the movement’s two great legislative victories, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, or whether either act would affect the core of racial inequality. Activists felt they had paid a terrible price for such uncertain advances: scores of murders, tens of thousands of beatings and arrests. Throughout, the federal government and the white establishment had stood aloof, and were even now catering to a “white backlash” against the nominal gains of the movement. Real equality seemed as distant as ever. It became commonplace to ask, what use was the right to eat in an integrated restaurant if you couldn’t afford the price of a hamburger? Here blacks North and South shared common ground.
The nationally televised struggles in the South had already made a powerful impact on the ghettos of the North and West, stoking a new, impatient and uncompromising race consciousness. The summers of 1964 through 1968 witnessed black rebellions in every major city of the country. Among the casualties were 250 dead (nearly all of them black) and 10,000 seriously injured; there were 60,000 arrests. After touring riot-stricken Watts in 1965, Martin Luther King told reporters, “it was a class revolt of under-privileged against privileged.” A year later, King was forced to concede that “these legislative and judicial victories did very little to improve the lot of millions of Negroes in the teeming ghettos of the north.”
The drive for legal equality had brought the movement face to face with economic inequality, a much more intractable obstacle. Black Power was a response to this impasse, but it was not a consistent one. While there was a general consensus on the desire to empower black communities, there was profound disagreement on the measures needed to achieve this. To the surprise of some, the slogan was quickly adopted by black businessmen and professionals. “Much of the black militant talk these days is actually in terms far closer to the doctrines of free enterprise than to those of the welfarist thirties,” Nixon noted during his 1968 presidential campaign. He called for “more black ownership, for from this can flow the rest—black pride, black jobs, black opportunity and yes, black power.”
In contrast, another strand of Black Power argued that blacks could not secure economic equality unless there was a general assault on economic privilege. This was the position held by both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King in the last years of their lives. Others went further, arguing that black freedom could not be won inside the capitalist system—because that system created and perpetuated racism. Thus a new generation arrived, by a new route, at the position held by Du Bois at the end of his long journey through “double consciousness.” Black Power engendered a revived black Marxism, as well as a new black working-class vanguard organized into groups such as Detroit’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers.
It is easy in retrospect to separate the individualist and collectivist, elitist and democratic strands of Black Power, but the distinctions were not so clear at the time. King always insisted Black Power was “a slogan without a program.” In 1967, Harold Cruse dismissed it as “nothing but the economic and political philosophy of Booker T. Washington given a 1960s shot in the arm.” The ambiguities and incompleteness of Black Power, its hybrid character, are what the movement, or rather the historical moment, is all about.
Black Power is often blamed, along with other sixties “excesses,” for the rise of the New Right and the political stranglehold it gained in the eighties and nineties. But the fact is that the New Right was on the march long before any of the alleged excesses gave it an excuse. The “white backlash” rolled across the country from 1964, when George Wallace took his presidential primary campaign to the North and secured 34 percent of the Democratic vote in Wisconsin. Seeking to capitalize on the sentiments uncovered by the Wallace campaign, George Bush, running for the Senate in Texas, told voters later that year, “The new civil rights act was passed to protect 14 percent of the people; I’m also worried about the other 86 percent.” In November 1966, Republicans rode the backlash to a stunning mid-term congressional victory. “The roots of racism are very deep in America,” Martin Luther King reflected sadly. From then on, through Nixon, Reagan, Bush and Gingrich, there remained at the core of the Republican political appeal a rejection of the claims of blacks and resentment of their partial advances. To many militants, the backlash confirmed that the civil rights movement’s strategy of appealing to white conscience was doomed. Black Power was thus as much a response to the nascent backlash as it was a source of it. It was one of the most characteristic products of the dialectic of rising expectations and deepening frustrations that shaped the interlocking social movements associated with the sixties.
In his rejection of integrationism, Ali had preceded Black Power by two years. Black separatism was always a sore point with the media, which was itself almost totally white. Malcolm, of course, was the bridge between the Nation of Islam and the new, secular advocates of Black Power, and it was his vision of autonomous black political and economic power, rooted in black solidarity, that stirred the militants. Black Power was a declaration of independence from white power, notably white political power in the form of the liberal wing of the Democratic party. “We don’t need white liberals,” said Carmichael, and those who remembered the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party and the sell-out of Atlantic City were quick to agree. SNCC and CORE converted themselves into black-only organizations, and in the coming years black-only caucuses were founded in a wide variety of occupations and institutions. Many white allies resented their exclusion, but for the militants the priority was black self-organization—an essential pre-condition for black advance in a racist society. In this, Black Power echoed the arguments of both Du Bois and Garvey, as well as drawing on the recent and sometimes painful lessons of the civil rights movement.
There was always a sense in which, as Carmichael himself insisted, Black Power was a typically “American” phenomenon—an attempt to organize an ethnic block to secure a better deal within the American system. Eventually, Black Power became the template for particularist interest group politics in general and, ironically, the new white ethnicity that emerged in the next decade. The victories scored by black candidates in big city elections in the late sixties and early seventies were viewed as testimonies to Black Power. A movement that started as a repudiation of black bourgeois leaders and their incorporation within the Democratic party and the white power structure ended up as a rallying cry for a generation of “identity” politicians who used the black vote to parlay themselves into positions of personal influence and affluence. That a craven servant of white power like Clarence Thomas should invoke the name of Malcolm X during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings speaks volumes about the ambiguities of black nationalism, and the ease with which its banner can be hijacked.
I come to the world with scars upon my soul
wounds on my body, fury in my hands
I turn to the histories of men and the lives of the peoples
I examine the shower of sparks the wealth of the dreams
I am pleased with the glories and sad with the sorrows
rich with the riches, poor with the loss
From the nigger yard of yesterday I come with my burden.
To the world of tomorrow I turn with my strength.
Martin Carter
In its early days, Black Power was a critique of the strategy of symbolic representation favored by the established black leadership. The young militants would no longer accept just any black face in a high place, and especially not any black face that appeared to be colluding with white opinion to stymie black progress. While Black Power emphasized the collective advance of the black community, it was also a search for a new type of symbolic representative, one whose job was not to placate, impress or entertain whites, but to speak up for blacks. The Black Power militants liked to claim that they were more in touch with the streets, with the poor, than the older civil rights leaders. “None of the so-called leaders could go into a rioting community and be listened to,” said Carmichael. In a manner characteristic of the era, the critique blended an awareness of the class divisions within the black population with a highly personalized claim of authenticity.
Shortly before his death, Malcolm was asked about appropriate heroes for young blacks. He answered, “Crispus Attucks laid down his life for America, but would he have laid down his life to stop the white man from enslaving black people? So when you select heroes about which black people should be taught, let them be black heroes who have died fighting for the benefit of black people.” In answer to this call for a new kind of black hero, Muhammad Ali appeared, ready-made.
Ali straddled all of Black Power’s constituencies—the cultural and the political, the anti-imperialists and the black capitalists—and he did it in a forum and language that gripped people in the streets. Ali illustrated a favorite Black Power tactic: the deployment of the black vernacular as a challenge to white assumptions and as a more realistic language than the honeyed words of the civil rights leaders. In the mouths of some, this idiom was to descend into willful coarseness, betraying a brutality that mirrored the forces against which Black Power raged. But Ali himself rarely indulged in obscenity. It’s one of his achievements that amidst all the hatred surrounding him, he retained his gentility and generosity, even when suffering fools.
Black Power’s striking achievement was that within three years of its birth it had displaced the word negro with the word black—thus bringing into general usage the terminology preferred by Malcolm, Ali and the Nation of Islam. Some would see in this shift the first victory of what was later ridiculed as “political correctness,” and Black Power was undoubtedly a key precipitate of what has been called “the cultural turn,” in which activists and scholars became increasingly preoccupied with questions of identity and cultural difference.
None of Black Power’s themes—black pride, economic and political independence, the emphasis on black America’s African origins —were new. What was new was their penetration into black popular consciousness. In this context, Ali became a central point of reference, because he had been among the first to articulate the rudiments of black consciousness to a mass audience. In 1968, James Brown followed suit with his soul anthem, “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud.” Soul food, natural hair, black history, African clothing styles (or what Americans took to be African clothing styles) became the dominant fashions on the streets and among the middle classes. Strikingly, the new assertion of the beauties and values of black culture was shared ground between militants and moderates. Ali, as the first black American male to boast of his ‘beauty’—at least, the first to do so without forfeiting public respect for his masculinity—became a hero for both cultural and political nationalists.
The fact that James Brown had been to Vietnam on a US government-sponsored tour shortly before recording his paean to blackness indicates that the cultural impact of Black Power was much wider than the radical politics associated with it. It also highlights Ali’s unique stature; he not only sang the song, he led the life. Many found it only too easy to embrace the style of Black Power without the substance. And there is no doubt that Black Power’s preoccupation with consciousness and culture made it vulnerable to charlatans and self-publicists. In the end, it was plagued by the same lack of accountability for which it criticized the old civil rights leaders. The very interaction between politics and popular culture that ensured widespread dissemination of the images and rhetoric of Black Power broke the organizational link between leaders and led, substituting for it the mediation of television. In the absence of durable organization and a clearly defined program, rhetoric ruled, along with sectarianism and macho posturing. It’s worth noting that Ali, though associated in the minds of many white people with the “violent and angry” stereotype of Black Power, never advocated violence in any form (outside the ring) and made a point of deploring it publicly whenever the subject arose. Thanks to his preference for the language of love and peace, and of course his sense of fun, he drew into his extended family of supporters many people, black and white, with little sympathy for some of the other media-promoted firebrands of the day.
Black Power is often associated with machismo, but it should be remembered that it served as the immediate model for the women’s and gay liberation movements, which emerged hot on its heels. Like Black Power, these movements sought to address long-standing and deeply rooted oppressions, viewed self-definition and self-expression as transformative political acts, and promoted a pluralist view of American society. Here, too, you can see Black Power as the first step in the march of the ever-fragmenting politics of cultural difference or, in its insistence on the unique capacity of the oppressed themselves to analyze and transform their condition, as a liberating and humanizing discourse. Speaking as a forty-six-year-old white heterosexual male, I don’t buy the facile polarity between “identity” and “class” politics. The African-American freedom struggle, in all its metamorphoses, is a resource for all humanity. It is part of my heritage not only because I choose to make it so, but because it shapes the world I share with others. The critics of Black Power tend to forget that the dominant form of identity politics in the United States remains the politics of a white-identified majority, the politics of American exceptionalism. Critics of the late sixties see Black Power as one of the era’s destructive phenomena. They argue that its self-indulgent, violent rhetoric alienated ordinary people, and charge it with substituting the compulsions of self-expression for political strategy. They are even more severe toward Black Power’s white allies and would-be emulators on the far left, who are usually portrayed as middle-class narcissists. And, crucially, they charge both the black and white radicals with abandoning the home-grown traditions of democratic change, the traditions and ideals nobly encapsulated by the civil rights movement in its non-violent phase, in pursuit of exotic ideologies and foreign-bred gurus (Marx, Lenin, Mao, Fanon, Che, Ho).
While some of the efforts to adapt the jargon of foreign struggles were far-fetched, the desire to learn from those struggles, and the identification with them, was a positive development whose rarity in American history makes it all the more precious. The internationalism of Black Power was much more than an abstract political ethic. It flowered from a revised and broadened definition of the individual and the community to which he or she belonged. “The masses of black people today think in terms of black,” Malcolm X had claimed. “And this black thinking enables them to see beyond the confines of America.” Blacks were no longer merely an inferior species of the genus Americanus, but part of a global community, a global majority even, and one that had risen from centuries of oppression to stake its claim in the modern world. Black Power was a key vector of the global sixties; it drew inspiration (as well as words and images) from a wide array of anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles, and its impact was felt in the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and Western Europe. As the decade wore on, militant black people in America increasingly identified themselves with the Vietnamese, America’s enemy. In 1970, Huey Newton wrote to South Vietnam’s National Liberation Front (NLF) offering to send a battalion of Panthers—to fight against American troops. The NLF expressed its gratitude for this expression of solidarity, but declined the Panthers’ offer. The exchange was only a small reflection of a wider sentiment, one that was also expressed in Ali’s stand against the draft.
Ali’s evolution in the sixties paralleled a broader evolution in black (and white) opinion. His assertion of his personal prerogatives led him to embrace a universal cause. Like Malcolm, he emerged from the cocoon of nationalism to spread his wings as an internationalist. But he did so under the pressure of circumstances—the war, the draft, the heavyweight championship, the pull of alternative constituencies. It was Ali’s capacity to embody so many of the underlying trends of the time—especially the interaction between personal self-definition and global politics—that made him a representative figure, a hero to the insurgents and a criminal in the eyes of the state.
It is important to remember that the government’s pursuit of Ali was only one episode in a wide-ranging campaign of harassment waged by federal agencies against Black Power and its perceived advocates. J. Edgar Hoover had always been hostile to black nationalists and long ago had tangled with both Garvey and Elijah Muhammad. In August 1967, he launched a counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO) designed “to neutralize militant black nationalists” and “to prevent the rise of a leader who might unify and electrify these violence-prone elements.” Within a year, the FBI had recruited more than three thousand “Ghetto Informants” to act as the eyes and ears of the (still overwhelmingly white) bureau in the black communities. They were instructed to ferret out all those “susceptible to foreign influences … from African nations in the form of Pan-Africanism,” and in New York City to beware specifically of “links between Harlem and Africa.” In 1969, Hoover declared the Black Panther party “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” That year 27 Panthers were killed by police; 749 were jailed. But the enigma of Black Power sometimes befuddled Hoover’s efforts. In 1970, his personal list of dangerous “black nationalists” included Jackie Robinson.
In the wake of the Voting Rights Bill of 1965, SNCC volunteers in Lowndes County, Alabama, had launched an independent Black Panther party to challenge the local whites-only Democratic machine. This early experiment in organizing black political power was a talking point among the Meredith marchers. Especially popular were the new organization’s bumper stickers, adorned with a panther silhouette and the slogan, “We’re the Greatest.” The invocation of Muhammad Ali, at this time the most famously defiant and assertively black male in the country, was by no means accidental. And the casual transition of the first person singular to the first person collective speaks volumes for Ali’s transcendence of the confines of the old role models. John Hullet, one of the Lowndes County organizers, explained the panther symbol to Andrew Kopkind: “He never bothers anything, but when you start pushing him, he moves backwards and backwards into his corner, and then he comes out to destroy everything that’s before him.” The Panther, initially, was not an icon of animal aggression, but of patience, restraint and cunning at the service of hidden power. It’s not surprising that the youths who were drawn to this icon would also feel a powerful affinity with Muhammad Ali.
In his first two years as champion, Ali defended his title twice. In the next year—the year following his remark about the Vietcong—he defended it seven times, demolishing every challenger with an ease and style that had critics invoking ballet, jazz, bullfighting and blitzkriegs. As Hugh McIlvanney observed, strange as it may seem, we may have never seen the best of Muhammad Ali. In 1966 and 1967, he was taking heavyweight boxing into new territory, and he seemed only to have begun to explore his own potential. During the three and a half years of exclusion from the ring that followed, he would have been at his physical peak. But in compensation for this loss boxing fans got something far more precious: the Ali who returned to the ring in what seemed a triumph over the system and over time itself.
Yet throughout this year of extraordinary boxing accomplishment, Ali was under the kind of pressure few if any sports stars have ever faced outside the arena. His views on Vietnam and his determination to stay out of the military were subject to test after test. Training for his rematch with Henry Cooper, Ali walked the Miami ghetto with writer-photographer Gordon Parks. It was clear that the beleaguered champ found the warmth of his reception on black America’s mean streets a welcome refuge from the chill wind of hostile officialdom. “These people like me around when they got trouble,” Ali told Parks. “Patterson, Joe Louis, Sammy Davis and other Negro bigwigs don’t do that. Too busy cocktailin’ with the whites. I don’t need bodyguards. You don’t need protection from people who love you.” Parks found Ali confused and troubled, vacillating between denying and embracing the anomaly of his situation and its probable cost, by turns flippant and ferocious.
I ain’t scared. Just show me a soldier who’d like to be in that ring in my place! I see signs saying “LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?.” Well, I ain’t said nothing about Vietnam. Where is it anyway? Near China? Elijah Muhammad teaches us to fight only when we are attacked. My life is in his hands. That’s the way it is. That’s the way it’s got to be … so what if I am the first black athlete to stand up and say what I feel! Maybe I’m like the Japanese flier who sacrifices himself so others can live. Hate! Hate! Hate! Who’s got time to go round hatin’ whites all day? I don’t hate lions, either—but I know they’ll bite! What does the white man care if I hate him, anyhow? He’s got everything going for him.
The reference to the Japanese kamikaze flier was pure American pop culture, just as the comparison between white people and lions, like the final reminder of the enduring perversity of white supremacy, came straight from the Malcolm X playbook.
Don’t care where you come from
As long as you’re a black man, you’re an African
No min’ your nationality
You have the identity of an African
Cos if you come from Brixton, you are an African
And if you come from Neasden, you are an African
And if you come from Willesden, you are an African
Peter Tosh
We were sitting in the upper tier of a rickety grandstand overlooking a cricket pitch in London’s East End. Below, two teams, mostly Asian with a sprinkling of white and Afro-Caribbean players, made the best of the corrugated wicket and patchy outfield. They reflected the new mix of Britain’s inner cities and a new strand in the warp and woof of the Black Atlantic. Just as their communities have struggled for a place in British society, so the cricketers themselves are struggling for their place in English cricket. In the grandstand we talked about some of the obstacles they faced: the club secretaries who always discovered their fixture list was full up when an Asian team called; the leagues that required clubhouses, dressing rooms and bars; the umpires who muttered about “over-excitable” Asians. Akram, a Londoner in his thirties, was the manager of one of the teams we were watching. As a day job he worked in his family’s business, a halal butchers, but his passion was cricket, and he was a frequent visitor to Pakistan. Soon we were sharing common enthusiasms for the city of Lahore, for the late-swinging yorkers of Waqar Younis, for the hills outside Islamabad and for the high-grade black charas of the Himalayas. Somehow the talk turned to Muhammad Ali and a reverent hush came over our group. With a flickering smile, as if remembering something distant yet intimate, something that could never be taken from him, Akram told us how in 1966 his father, a Punjabi-speaking immigrant, took him to see Ali fight Henry Cooper at the Arsenal in Highbury.
Boxing plays little part in the sporting cultures of South Asia, and Akram’s father had never expressed an interest in it before Ali arrived in London. But he splashed out for the tickets (in those days there were still affordable seats at big-time boxing matches) because Ali was a Muslim, and because he was going to give the Englishman Cooper a thrashing. For the young Akram, however, Ali was from the beginning more than an Islamic hero. He was also an ambassador of black America, the embodiment of the bewitching African-American style, as well as of black political defiance. His relevance to the young black cricketers of today’s East End, who seek entry to the level playing field on their own terms and without abandoning their own identities, was obvious.
Akram’s story is one small example of the way Ali reshaped loyalties and realigned the axes of global sporting partisanship. In banning his fights in America and driving Ali abroad, the authorities inadvertently assisted the complex process that was to turn Ali into a genuinely global champion and thereby provide him with a political leverage deeply resented by the US establishment. Until February 1966, all but two of the post-war heavyweight title bouts had been fought on US territory. Then, in the space of six months, Ali defended his crown in Toronto, twice in London and in Frankfurt.
Ali’s early emphasis on his status as “champion of the whole world” was in itself anomalous among American sports stars. American popular culture in the form of music, movies, fashion, slang and television has traveled and won acolytes everywhere, but American sports have proved to be less successful exports. Baseball has a mass following in Latin America and Japan, and basketball is now a major game in the Mediterranean and growing rapidly in Africa. But even in these sports the American game (and the American market) remains dominant in a way the English game most certainly does not within cricket, soccer or rugby.
Boxing and athletics are the only two mass sports shared across the Black Atlantic. Soccer reigns supreme as the sport of the black masses in Africa and Latin America. Baseball is confined to one side of the Atlantic, and cricket to the axis joining West Indies, England and to a lesser extent South Africa. In London in 1966, Ali enjoyed a brief interaction with this otherwise alien strand of the Black Atlantic when he was taken to Lord’s to see a Test match against the West Indies. “I like cricket. I reckon our baseball must have been based on this game.” He was particularly impressed by the master pace bowler Wes Hall, later a politician and diplomat. “Too slow? I don’t think so. Running up as fast as Wes Hall would be good training for me.” Nevertheless, the champ nodded off as M.J.K. Smith completed a slow century.
The rematch with Cooper was the first heavyweight title contest to be staged in Britain since 1908. When Ali arrived in London on 9 May 1966, the press found him subdued. “I’ve been driven out of my country because of my religious beliefs, yet every other country in the world welcomes me. It’s a strange feeling. All I ask is the same treatment and respect in my country that other boxers and athletes get from Uncle Sam.” While in Britain, he didn’t want to “be bothered with questions about my personal affairs, such as the draft and my divorce. I’m here to defend my title and that old man Henry Cooper had better watch out.” One journalist asked him if he regarded the match as a fight between black and white. Ali shot back, “You look too intelligent to ask a dumb question like that.”
Training at the Territorial Army gym opposite the White City tube station in west London, Ali held daily court with British journalists, who found the champion a bewildering figure but gave him a fairer hearing than their American counterparts. “Those who recall the uncomplicated ballyhoo that marked Cassius Clay’s training for the first Cooper fight have been struck by the differences in the way Muhammad Ali has prepared for this one,” Hugh McIlvanney reported. “Mingling with the predictable callers from the trade … there has been a stream of serious-faced negroes.”
Among them was Michael X, Britain’s most notorious Black Power spokesperson and leader of the militant Racial Adjustment Action Society, whose acronym, RAAS, carried a vernacular insolence unnoticed by most whites. Born in Trinidad as Michael De Freitas, he changed his name after meeting Malcolm X in London in February 1965. The media depicted him as a figure of menace and preacher of hate. In 1967 he became the first person prosecuted for inciting racial hatred under the Race Relations Act of 1965—a law ostensibly designed to protect black people. Later, he was convicted of murder and hanged in Trinidad. Today, some see him as a conman and racketeer, others as a pioneer of black self-assertion in Britain, and others as a mixture of the two. In any case, his encounter with Ali in 1966 was a symbolic moment in the evolution of the Black Atlantic. Together they met with community activists in Notting Hill and visited the local Free School, the creation of white counter-culturalists, and among the first of the self-consciously alternative community institutions which were to proliferate across London in the decade to come. Ali was one of a series of transatlantic visitors who helped infuse the spirit and language of the American black freedom movement into black British communities; he was a participant in the process through which black Britain came to define itself as part of a black diaspora.
In December 1964, stopping in London on his way to Stockholm to collect the Nobel Peace Prize, Martin Luther King met with representatives of the emergent immigrant communities. After the meeting, he told the BBC:
I think it is necessary for the colored population in Great Britain to organize and work through meaningful non-violent direct action approaches to bring these issues to the forefront of the conscience of the nation wherever they exist. You can never get rid of a problem as long as you hide the problem, as long as you complacently adjust yourself to it.
King’s visit helped catalyze the formation of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD), the first in a long line of efforts to forge a united anti-racist movement in Britain. CARD split and collapsed within two years, and the initiative passed to groups strongly influenced by Black Power. Malcolm himself visited Britain several times in the last six months of his life, addressing students and community activists. With a BBC camera crew in tow he visited Smethwick in the West Midlands, which had just witnessed the first attempt by a major British political party to “play the race card.” During the 1964 general election, the Tory candidate’s slogan, “If you want a nigger neighbour, vote Labour,” had drawn nationwide attention; with support from white working-class voters, he won the seat. Although Harold Wilson denounced him, in 1965 Wilson’s government issued a White Paper proposing to restrict immigration from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.
When Ali visited in 1966, the Muslim presence, which was to become so pronounced in later decades, was still an unfamiliar one in London. There were only a few improvised mosques, and halal cooking was hard to come by. As a result, Ali, who always followed the Nation’s dietary rules more rigorously than any of its other prescriptions, took his meals at a kosher restaurant in Whitechapel, surrounded by photographs of the boxing heroes of the old-time Jewish East End. In those days, Ali often referred to his diet as kosher and suggested that Jews might escape the Armageddon awaiting the white race. His easy interaction with the Jewish, Irish and cockney elements of the London boxing scene helped prepare the way for the acceptance of black British fighters. He took an honored place in the East End’s long-established prizefighting tradition, a tradition carried forward today by young Londoners from African, Caribbean and Asian backgrounds.
The mid sixties saw the rise of that distinctively English institution, “Paki-bashing.” In 1965, a Pakistani diplomat reported “a growing mass hysteria against the Pakistanis.” In that context, the presence in Britain of Ali, a battling Muslim, was a solace and a stimulus. Unlike black America, the immigrant communities of the sixties shared no common culture, language, music or religion. Precisely because of that, many of the younger generation looked to black America for political and cultural models. Just as Malcolm’s visit led to the formation of RAAS, so Stokely Carmichael’s brief visit in 1967—he was deported on the order of Home Secretary Roy Jenkins—sparked the formation of the more internationalist Universal Coloured People’s Association. The Black House, a refuge for black youth run by Herman Edwards and Michael X, was inspired by Amiri Baraka’s Spirit House in Newark, New Jersey. In 1968, a new group calling themselves the Black Panthers appeared on the streets of Brixton in south London selling their Freedom News and, like the American originals, excoriating police violence against black people.
However, the impact in Britain of Black Power, and of Muhammad Ali, was never just about blackness or pan-Africanism, as Akram’s experience suggests. I think of my friend Suresh, who adopted the Black Panthers as his role models in facing racism as a young man in Lancashire in the sixties, or my friend Achin, spouting Malcolm-style invective on London’s street corners in the early seventies, before he returned to a life of political activism in India. Or A. Sivanandan, the Sri Lankan Tamil who arrived in Britain in the late fifties and stayed to help foment, guide and analyze several generations of resistance to racism. Black Power, he argued, “was to alter profoundly our very perceptions of what political struggle was, and how it needed to be waged.”
It was the catalyst which showed up the essential unity of the struggles against white power and privilege—whether in the US itself, in Britain, in Southern Africa, or in the former colonies of the Caribbean. Through it, black became a political color with which other Third World activists and radicals could identify—the Dalit Panthers from among the untouchables of India took their name from the Black Panthers of the US.… Black Power is a political metaphor … but also, in the terse, explosive precision of its language, a resounding call to arms.
Sivanandan was among the first to insist that Black Power was more than a parochial, nationalist response to American racism. In Britain, it provided an ideology and rhetoric ready-made for a new generation impatient with what he called “the begging-bowl syndrome” of the older immigrant organizations. Younger blacks no longer saw themselves as supplicants in a foreign land. They demanded the right to live and work in Britain on their own terms, while at the same time identifying themselves as part of a world community of the oppressed. Through its linkage of self-discovery and self-assertion with a call to solidarity beyond national borders, Black Power carried many of its adherents—in America, Britain and across the Third World—on a journey toward a new vision of what Fanon called “the universality inherent in the human condition.” Here Muhammad Ali, the boxer who did not want to represent anything to anyone, was to prove, yet again, an unlikely pioneer of a global movement.
Black Power’s huge overseas resonance was due in part to its transnational ideology and in part to black America’s role as a prototype black political culture, the cutting edge of black self-expression. Manthia Diawara recalls growing up in Mali in the sixties:
You see, for me then, and for many of my friends, to be liberated was to be exposed to more R & B songs and to be au courant of the latest exploits of Muhammad Ali, George Jackson, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. These were becoming an alternative cultural capital for the African youth—imparting to us new structures of feeling and enabling us to subvert the hegemony of francite after independence.
Ali’s expanding influence highlights the centrality of the black American freedom struggle to the social dynamic known as the sixties at home and abroad. It was black Americans who dramatized the contradiction between the promise and the reality of America and of the post-war era America dominated.
It is too often forgotten that the American sixties were merely a single facet of a global phenomenon. Ali was one of those who acted as a transmitter between struggles in America and struggles outside. Through his media appearances in every corner of the planet, Ali played a major role in stimulating the worldwide circulation of ideas and images that lies at the heart of the sixties. He became part of a number of overlapping global conversations and movements, linking sports fans, the Black Atlantic, the Third World and the international opposition to America’s war in Vietnam. Just as the anti-colonial movement inspired the American black freedom struggle, so that struggle inspired others in Africa, Asia and Europe. Television carried scenes not just of carnage from Vietnam, but also of street demonstrations and battles with authority in Paris, Northern Ireland, Prague, Mexico and Japan. Through this global chain reaction the Black American freedom movement fed and was in turn nourished by events elsewhere. During a student demonstration in response to the King assassination in April 1968, German SDS leader Rudi Dutschke was shot at point-blank range, setting off street fighting which resulted in four hundred injuries and thousands of arrests. One of those involved in the Frankfurt protests was Daniel Cohn Bendit, who was to play a leading role in the explosion in France a month later. The civil rights movement which emerged the next year on the streets of Northern Ireland drew inspiration and tactics from its American namesake.
The key to Ali’s story and to the dynamic of the sixties is this meeting and mingling of global currents. Unfortunately, in the historiography of the American sixties, American exceptionalism has prevailed, and as a result the causes, content and consequences of the social movements of the era have been misrepresented. Once liberated from its parochial prison, the sixties seems a lot less about “permissiveness” or “self-indulgence” and a lot more about the growth of a global consciousness from below. For people all over the world, Ali embodied that consciousness. And he in turn was profoundly shaped by his growing awareness of the representative role in which he had been cast. To present him as an American hero acting on an American stage is to miss what made him extraordinary. It was Ali’s transgression of American norms—in an American idiom—that enabled him to build his global constituency.
The anti-war movement in Europe adopted what David Widgery called “the weapons of Americanism—the theatricality, the masks, and it pulled in a lot of non-student cultural dissidents.” Even as they railed against the American war machine, the insurgent forces in Europe cherished rock and roll, John Ford movies and blue jeans. Ali inadvertently tapped into a widespread ambivalence about America. Many who resented its arrogance and power were fascinated by its vibrant popular culture. For the lovers of jazz and blues and R&B, Hollywood fast talk and Marx Brothers surrealism, Ginsberg and Kerouac, Ali was yet another marvellous example of demotic American energy and invention, along with Bob Dylan, who was also visiting Britain that spring. Here, as in America, there were people on the left who were convinced that Dylan’s concerts were sellouts in more ways than one. “Dylan is to me the perfect symbol of the anti-artist in our society,” wrote Ewan MacColl. “He’s against everything—the last resort of someone who doesn’t really want to change the world.” Four days before the Ali–Cooper fight, the legendary concert at Manchester Free Trade Hall was interrupted by a cry of “Judas!,” to which Dylan replied, “I don’t believe you.” In the Scottish gigs, the booing was allegedly organized by the local Communist party. The incomprehension of the more puritanical wing of the left seemed only to spur Dylan and his band (which became The Band a year later) to the creation of an ever more ecstatically intense rock and roll. Shortly after his return from Europe in July, Dylan suffered the motorcycle accident that sent him into seclusion and precipitated yet another revolution in his music.
In the year following Ali’s visit, anti-war sentiment spread rapidly across Europe. In February 1967, Bertrand Russell’s war crimes tribunal began its investigations into American atrocities in Vietnam. Hubert Humphrey was despatched to the capitals of Europe to rally support and was met with angry demonstrations in London, Paris and Bonn. A Gallup Poll later that year showed huge majorities in favor of US withdrawal from Vietnam in Finland, Sweden, Brazil, France, India, Uruguay, Argentina and West Germany. In Britain, the majority was slimmer. The only countries where there was majority support for US policy were Australia and the US itself.
Years later, Ali wrote a letter of thanks to “the people of Great Britain [who] stood with me during the difficult days of my exile from boxing.” Many of the communities which had cheered Paul Robeson when he was being reviled in his native land now embraced Muhammad Ali. Certainly Robeson and Ali remain the only African-Americans ever to have had parades staged in their honor through the streets of Tyneside. Nonetheless, when asked by the British press whether he had any plans to escape the draft by going into exile, Ali answered with mournful clarity, “Regardless of the right or wrong back there, that is where I was born. That is where I’m going to return.”
On 23 August, as a result of Ali’s appeals, a special judicial hearing was held to review his draft status. Ali’s legal team submitted a twenty-one-page statement on his behalf, but the champion also appeared in person to testify in his own words:
It would be no trouble for me to go into the armed services, boxing exhibitions in Vietnam and traveling the country at the expense of the government or living the easy life and not having to get out in the mud and fight and shoot. If it wasn’t against my conscience to do it, I would easily do it. I wouldn’t raise all this court stuff and I wouldn’t go through all of this and lose the millions that I gave up and my image with the American public that I would say is completely dead and ruined because of us in here now.
Much to the dismay of the federal government, and the surprise of mainstream commentators, Judge Lawrence Grauman ruled that Ali was “sincere in his objection on religious grounds to participation in war in any form.” Two days later, L. Mendel Rivers, the right-wing chair of the House Armed Services Committee, denounced Grauman’s ruling to a meeting of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and threatened to raise hell on Capitol Hill if Ali was deferred. The Justice Department, insisting that Ali’s objection to the war was “racial and political,” convinced the Kentucky appeal board to ignore Grauman’s recommendation and uphold the 1-A classification. The case then proceeded to the national Selective Service Appeals Board, where the Justice Department again opposed Ali’s claim, using information obtained by the FBI to show that Ali’s motivations were primarily political.
“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.” It sounds so modest, yet it struck people as terrifyingly outlandish. It could be the plaint of any ordinary soldier-citizen. Just how is it that the ostensible enemies of the nation-state to which one is assigned become one’s personal enemies? This is a magical process which national establishments have managed with great care and ingenuity since the dawn of the modern era. The counter-process through which Ali broke free of its mystic grip, and defined his own loyalties, is an exemplary voyage of the sixties.
The “I” who had no quarrel with the Vietcong was, first, the highly personal “I” of a young man wondering why he was supposed to kill or be killed by people he didn’t know. It was also the “I” of a boxer who wanted to be left alone to be a boxer, a man who had made great efforts to free himself of the burden of representation, a man who only wanted to be an “I.” But because of his conversion to the Nation of Islam, and his travels in Africa, this “I” assumed other, collective attributes: black, Muslim, African. Ultimately, it became the “I” of all those who felt they had no quarrel with the Vietcong—and all those who felt they did have a quarrel with America.
Ironically, Ali’s reclamation of his selfhood had given his “I” new representative burdens. In retrospect, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong” seems a characteristic sixties declaration, highly personal yet charged with political import. In it, the various vectors of the sixties—individualist and collectivist, particularist and universal—intersected.
Muhammad Ali refused complicity in one of the atrocities of the twentieth century. Against this, the fact that he didn’t know Le Duc Tho from Nguyen Kao Ky, Haiphong from Hué, is nothing. After all, there were many bright and well-informed people who could list every strategic hamlet, but who remained blind or indifferent to the welfare of the human beings who occupied those hamlets. Jeremiah Shabazz emphasizes that Ali made up his own mind, without pressure from the Nation of Islam. “He never studied day-to-day current events like the thousands of white kids who opposed the war. But even though he was unsophisticated in his thinking, he knew it was a senseless, unjust war.” In opposing the draft and the war, and paying the price for that opposition, he reached beyond America and “Americanism,” beyond blackness and Islam. Ali’s stand against the draft was one of the most piquant expressions of that broadening of human sympathies that was the best of his era.
When he finally fought Terrell in Houston in early 1967, Ali’s ferocity shocked the pundits. Terrell, a powerful hitter, probably Ali’s most dangerous opponent since Liston, had made the mistake of calling him “Clay” during a pre-fight press conference. “What’s my name?” Ali roared again and again as he pummeled Terrell. “Uncle Tom! What’s my name?” The New York Daily News called the fight “a disgusting exhibition of calculating cruelty, an open defiance of decency, sportsmanship and all the tenets of right versus wrong.” Jimmy Cannon called it “a kind of lynching.” Arthur Daley called Ali “a mean and malicious man whose facade has crumbled as he gets deeper into the Black Muslim movement.” Another veteran boxing correspondent, Milton Gross, confessed: “One almost yearns for the return of Frankie Carbo and his mobster ilk.”
Rarely has the hideous hierarchy of boxing’s values been made so explicit. Ali’s violence in the ring (and within the rules) was declared reprehensible by the very people who condemned him for not engaging in much more deadly violence in Vietnam. Even the violence of organized crime was considered less discrediting to the sport of boxing than Ali’s crime of conscience. As in the Patterson fight, it was argued that somehow Ali had stepped over the ill-defined line demarcating the permissible limits of aggression in the ring. When Mike Tyson bit Evander Holyfield’s ear, he was clearly breaking the rules and making a mockery of a sporting contest. But what exactly was Ali’s offense? That he allowed his anger to become visible? That he was in uncompromising mood? Even one of his admirers has described the Patterson and Terrell fights as the “only times he deliberately inflicted pain” in the ring. Surely Ali, like every other boxer, deliberately inflicted pain every time he stepped into the ring. In both these fights Ali had hyped the symbolic character of the contest; in each one he was fighting more than his opponent. His critics saw these fights through this lens as much as Ali did. It’s hard to resist the conclusion that what really rankled was the spectacle of an uncompromising Ali glorying in his opposition to—and momentary triumph over—“the American way.” Neither Patterson nor Terrell ever complained about Ali’s treatment of them in the ring.
On a rare holiday in the first week of January 1967, Martin Luther King contemplated photographs of napalm-scorched Vietnamese children published in the latest issue of the radical journal Ramparts. Over the last year, he had grown increasingly distressed by American violence in Vietnam, but his sense of responsibility to the civil rights movement had caused him to refrain from outright opposition. Now he resolved to break what he was later to call “the betrayal of my own silences.” On his return from holiday, he informed SCLC colleagues of his determination to make anti-war activity his priority. Some were uneasy with their leader’s new course, and feared it would alienate both the government and white liberal supporters. On 25 February, in a speech in Beverly Hills, King argued that “the promises of the Great Society have been shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.” Yet more controversially, he claimed that US policy in Vietnam “seeks to turn the clock of history back and perpetuate white colonialism.”
On 6 March 1967, the national Selective Service Appeal Board unanimously upheld Muhammad Ali’s 1-A classification. That same day, President Johnson told Congress, “The knowledge that military service must sometimes be born by—and imposed on—free men so their freedom may be preserved is woven deeply into the fabric of the American experience.” On 14 March, Ali received his induction notice. Thanks to the rapid intervention of his lawyers, the call-up was postponed until 28 April so that he could fight Zora Folley at Madison Square Garden on 22 March. In his last appearance in the ring for more than three and a half years, Ali was at his most dazzling and dominant, finishing off the challenger with a knockout in the seventh round. That month’s issue of Ring magazine declined for the first time to designate a fighter of the year because “Cassius Clay,” the obvious candidate for the award, “is most emphatically not to be held up as an example to the youngsters of the United States.” That week saw 274 US deaths in combat, the highest tally since the war began.
On 29 March, a federal judge rejected Ali’s three draft appeals, including his objection to Louisville’s all-white draft board. Induction became inevitable. Only now did Elijah Muhammad come to his disciple’s support in the pages of Muhammad Speaks. All Ali wanted, Muhammad insisted, was to “go his own way … but he is being blown up as one of the greatest criminals in America, a country in which he does not even belong.” More significantly, on that same day, Martin Luther King arrived in Louisville for an SCLC board meeting. Following the meeting, the board issued a statement condemning the “morally and politically unjust” war and the draft which “discriminates against the poor and places Negroes in the front lines in disproportionate numbers and from there to racially segregated cemetery plots in the deep south.”
While in Louisville, King took time out to meet privately with Ali, who was visiting his home town. Afterwards, the two men met the press, and King praised the boxer’s stance against the draft. “As Muhammad Ali has said, we are all victims of the same system of oppression,” King told the newsmen. Ali nodded, gave the older, shorter man’s rounded shoulders an affectionate squeeze and called him “brother.” In private, King’s humor was as irrepressible as Ali’s and the two men seem to have hit it off. More importantly, Ali’s stand gave King a focus for his appeal to young men caught in the draft, and King’s increasingly vocal critique of the war and direct support for Ali reduced the champion’s isolation.
The SCLC had chosen to meet in Louisville, where King’s brother, A.D. King, was a leading pastor, partly in order to support the bitter and protracted open-housing campaign waged by local blacks. Marchers through segregated white residential areas were greeted by white mobs throwing rocks and bottles, while police stood passively to one side. After meeting with King, Ali toured the city’s black neighborhoods. “In your struggle for freedom, justice and equality, I am with you,” he told the protesters. “I came to Louisville because I could not remain silent in Chicago while my own people—many of whom I grew up with, went to school with and some of whom are my blood relatives—were being beaten, stomped and kicked in the streets simply because they want freedom, justice and equality in housing.” It was an extraordinary statement from the man who had told the world he didn’t want to “carry a sign” or live in a white neighborhood, who only three years before had publicly renounced both the integrationist program and political methods of the civil rights movement. Revealingly, hardly anyone seemed to notice the shift; supporters and opponents alike saw Ali’s increasingly political explanation of his attitude to the war as a logical extension of the man’s personality, and in keeping with the changing temper of the times. Both Ali’s turn to the Nation and his support for the integration struggle in Louisville had their roots in his personal identification with a larger constituency. It was his abiding sense of responsibility to that constituency that compelled him to re-define again and again the parameters of the role model, to reconstruct who and what he represented, independently of the powers that be, even as he exploited their media in order to do it.
In Louisville, Ali visited churches and schools and was dogged by reporters. Later that day, he made his most explicitly political statement yet about the war and his refusal to participate in it:
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? No, I am not going ten thousand miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slavemasters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would put my prestige in jeopardy and could cause me to lose millions of dollars which should accrue to me as the champion. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is right here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality.… If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to twenty-two million of my people, they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. But I either have to obey the laws of the land or the laws of Allah. 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.
The confused young fighter who merely wanted to avoid the unpleasantness of military service had matured into a hero of global solidarity. In Louisville, Ali testified to the tranformative power of the experience of struggle, one of the keynotes of the sixties. Circumstances, personal and historical, had locked him in conflict with authority; in the fire of that conflict, new and powerful links between the inner self and a broader community were forged. Undoubtedly, Ali received help in drawing up statements such as the one he issued in Louisville, though probably more from Chauncey Eskridge than from the Nation of Islam. Nonetheless, however shaky his grasp of geography, his understanding of the moral dimension of the choice before him was now deeply informed. Significantly, much of the rhetoric and many of the arguments he deployed derived from Malcolm X, whose shadow, unacknowledged, seems to have hovered over Ali during these years of challenge and change.
The resistance to open housing in Louisville was one of several events in 1966 and 1967 which fed King’s growing pessimism about the prospects for peaceful social change. Returning to Louisville in July, he told a crowd, “The vast majority of white Americans are racists”—he had arrived at a position little different from that held by Malcolm in the last year of his life. Five days after meeting Ali, and exactly one year before his assassination, on 4 April 1967, King delivered his magnificent oration at the Riverside Church in New York. In this speech, his most uncompromising indictment of the war to date, he wove together the themes of racism, war, poverty and America’s global role. Responding to those who pressed him to condemn ghetto rioters, he explained, “I could never raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”—the American government. “Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions,” he declared, “but we must all protest.” Describing himself as “bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism,” he recommended conscientious objection to “all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one.”
Only three years before, when he received the Nobel Peace Prize, King had been fêted by the media and acknowledged as the pre-eminent leader of black Americans. But his militant turn against the Vietnam War infuriated many former allies. Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin all publicly distanced themselves from King, as they had from Robeson twenty years before. “Dr. King has done a grave injury to those who are his natural allies,” lectured the Washington Post. “He has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country and his people.” The New York Times rebuked his “reckless” attacks on America and described his opposition to the war as “wasteful and self-defeating.” Life magazine characterized the Riverside speech as “a demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” Hoover wrote to Johnson: “He is an instrument in the hands of the subversive forces seeking to undermine our nation.” The NAACP board described King’s attempt to link Vietnam and civil rights as “a serious tactical mistake.”
Alarmed at the growth of anti-war sentiment among blacks, the government and the military launched a counter-offensive. General Westmoreland told reporters in Saigon, “I have an intuitive feeling that the Negro servicemen have a better understanding than whites of what the war is about.” Westmoreland also repeated his racial view of the conflict: Orientals valued human lives, including their own, less than Americans, and were therefore harder to beat on the field of battle. Briefed by the military, the New York Times reported, “In Vietnam the Negro for the first time has been given the chance to do his share of fighting for his country” and concluded, “The Negro’s performance in battle is in every way the equal of his white comrades.” But among black youths such assurances rang hollow. At a Senate hearing on the draft, the editor of the Howard University newspaper told the politicians that black people saw little reason to risk their lives. “Those people who benefit most from the society should be those people who will lay down their lives for it.” On 5 April, the day after King’s Riverside speech, an anti-draft caravan toured New York City schools; the Times reported with some bemusement that interest in the caravan’s message was keenest among young blacks and Puerto Ricans. The next day, a draft-card burner was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for refusing to accept a replacement card.
On 11 April, Ali was ordered to report for induction. On 15 April, Manhattan witnessed the largest anti-war demonstration yet staged in the United States. One hundred and twenty-five thousand gathered in Central Park and later heard speeches from King, CORE’s Floyd McKissick and Stokely Carmichael (who described Selective Service as “white people sending black people to make war on yellow people in order to defend land they stole from red people”). A columnist in the New York Times complained that the protesters smelled bad and dismissed them as frustrated misfits, but the unprecedented size of the demonstration made it clear that the misfits were becoming a force in the land.
On 25 April, Ali’s lawyers filed a petition in federal court stating that their client would not agree to induction and requesting exemption on religious grounds. The Justice Department contested the petition; a spokesman argued, “If he wins, all the Muslims will refuse to take the oath, and where will we get the soldiers?” The next day, Johnson intensified the bombing of North Vietnam. His supporters argued that domestic criticism was undermining the war effort and accused dissenters of disloyalty. A letter to Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara from one thousand seminarians urged an extension of the conscientious objection criteria to include moral objection to a particular war, thus “easing the coming confrontation between the demands of law and those whose conscience will not permit them to fight in Vietnam.” Neither the government nor the judiciary was prepared to contemplate such a concession to the anti-war movement. The federal court rejected Ali’s petition and he was ordered to report for induction.
On 28 April, Westmoreland assured a joint session of Congress that the war was just, necessary and winnable. That morning, Ali reported, as ordered, to the Federal Customs House in Houston. Outside, a small group of demonstrators, including SNCC’s notorious Rap Brown, cheered the champion. Students from Texas Southern University appeared with a banner reading “Stay Home Muhammad Ali.” Others held placards urging “Draft Beer—Not Ali.” The heavyweight champion, along with twenty-five others called for induction that day, spent the morning filling out forms and undergoing routine examinations. The induction ceremony took place at 1:05 P.M. Three times the sergeant in charge called the name, “Cassius Marcellus Clay,” and three times Ali refused to step over the yellow line marked on the floor. After being formally advised by a Navy lieutenant that his refusal was a felony offense and made him liable to imprisonment, Ali submitted a written declaration claiming exemption as a minister of Islam. He then issued a four-page statement to the media:
I am proud of the title “World Heavyweight Champion” which I won in the ring in Miami on February 25, 1964. The holder of it should at all times have the courage of his convictions and carry out those convictions, not only in the ring but throughout all phases of his life. It is in light of my own personal convictions that I take my stand in rejecting the call to be inducted into the armed services. I do so with full realization of its implications and possible consequences. I have searched my conscience and I find I cannot be true to my belief in my religion by accepting such a call. My decision is a private and individual one. In taking it I am dependent solely upon Allah as the final judge of these actions brought about by my own conscience.
Although Ali still claimed the right to act and speak as an unrepresentative individual, he also now appealed explicitly to his obligations as a role model, which he had radically re-defined. To the boxing authorities, his use of the heavyweight title as a platform for protest was an intolerable affront. One hour later, before Ali had been charged with any offense, the powerful New York State Athletic Commission suspended his boxing license and stripped him of his title. Within a month, other state commissions had followed suit, as had the WBA, Madison Square Garden, the British Boxing Board of Control (at this time, Harold Wilson’s Labour government was still backing Johnson in Vietnam) and the European Boxing Union. It was the beginning of his three-and-a-half-year exile from the ring.
Boxing promoters welcomed his removal from the scene, and quickly announced plans to stage an elimination contest for the “vacant” title among a wide array of contenders. “There is more money to be made in a tournament among these men than in a continuation of Clay’s one-sided fights,” reported Robert Lipsyte. When asked about the champ who had made him a fortune, Bob Arum, who was promoting the eight-man eliminator, responded jokingly, “Cassius who?”
Ali’s refusal to cross the yellow line was front-page news, not only in America, but around the world. In Guyana, Cheddi Jagan led a picket of the US embassy. In Karachi, a young Pakistani fasted outside the US consulate. There was a demonstration in Cairo. An editorial in the Ghana Pioneer deplored what it called the “concerted efforts” to strip Ali of his championship. During the first major British demonstrations against the war in April 1967, among the host of leaflets handed out in Grosvenor Square was one reading “LBJ Don’t Send Muhammad Ali to War.” Bertrand Russell congratulated Ali on his courage and assured him, “The air will change. I sense it.” Incensed by the hypocrisy of the American government, an Irish boxing fan named Paddy Monaghan, a hod carrier who lived on a council estate in Abingdon, began a long and lonely picket of the US embassy in London. Over the next three years, he would collect more than twenty thousand signatures on a petition calling for the restoration of Muhammad Ali’s heavyweight title.
Lionized abroad, Ali found himself a prisoner in a society increasingly polarized over the issues he stood for. In an editorial entitled “Clay v. the Army,” the New York Times argued that to exempt “Clay” would “chip away the foundation of universally shared obligation on which the Selective Service system rests. Citizens cannot pick and choose which wars they wish to fight any more than they can pick and choose which laws they wish to obey. Moreover, if Cassius Clay and other draft-age objectors believe the war in Vietnam is unjust, they have the option of going to prison on behalf of their beliefs.” The latter argument was one which Ali refused to accept: “If justice prevails, if my constitutional rights are upheld, I will be forced to go neither to the army nor jail.”
Black opinion on Ali remained divided. An editorial in the Amsterdam News, headed “American Tragedy,” linked Ali’s draft defiance to King’s Riverside protest. It noted that Ali’s objections to military service “stem ultimately from our centuries of racial injustices” but was careful not to endorse his stand. A survey of Harlem opinion in the same paper revealed contrasting perceptions. A black Rockefeller aid declared, “It’s a tragedy. It is being blown up out of all proportion. He’s not Ralph Bunche or Roy Wilkins, whose views on foreign policy would carry weight as far as Negro opinion is concerned.” But a community activist in a local youth project disagreed: “It should encourage every black man in the new generation to follow in his footsteps.” In his syndicated column, Jackie Robinson criticized King’s statements on the war and in particular his support for Ali. “I admire this man as a fighting champion and a man who speaks his mind. I can’t help feeling he wants to have his cake and eat it too. I can’t help wondering how he can expect to make millions of dollars in this country and then refuse to fight for it.” He asked King: “What values do you have in mind when you praise him [Ali] and say he has given up so much? I think all he has given up is his citizenship. I think his advisers have given him a bum steer. I think the only persons who will come out well in this situation are his lawyers.”
Robinson’s views, however, no longer carried great weight among younger blacks, and among the most politically conscious it was Ali and not Robinson who now epitomized black aspirations. Those who had placed the burden of symbolic representation on black sports stars now found the tables turned. A writer in The Liberator relished their discomfort:
By refusing to obey, Ali poses a problem of disastrous potential. How can the government overcome? Can “responsible negro leaders” be called upon to quell the redoubtable Muhammad Ali’s influence over black youth? But Messrs Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, A. Philip Randolph, and Ralph Bunche are scorned as paid buffoons of white liberalism! And the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King has defected to the peace movement! In short, Muhammad Ali has become the establishment’s domestic Vietcong: his impact far outweighs his size.
Two days after Ali refused induction, King preached a sermon in his Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. With the atheist Stokely Carmichael sitting ostentatiously in the congregation, King urged “every man in this country who believes that this war is abominable and unjust” to take the path of conscientious objection. And once again he singled out Ali for praise. “He is giving up even fame. He is giving up millions of dollars in order to stand up for what his conscience tells him is right.” The following day, 1 May, Ali’s lawyers moved to politicize his conflict with the government by filing an appeal in federal court on the exclusion of blacks from draft boards. In the two states dealing with Ali’s case, Kentucky and Texas, only 0.2 percent and 1.1 percent of draft board members were black, although blacks made up 7.1 percent and 12.4 percent of their respective populations. On Ali’s behalf, the lawyers asked that all draft boards in Kentucky be restrained from functioning until more blacks were appointed. The appeal was denied.
A week later, a hitherto little-known group of Oakland militants calling themselves the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense burst on to the national scene when they invaded the California state legislature in a protest over what they saw as an attempt to restrict their constitutional right to carry arms. “As the aggression of the racist American government escalates in Vietnam,” their press statement declared, “the police agencies of America escalate the repression of black people throughout the ghettos.” Their analysis was echoed by an increasingly indignant James Baldwin, who argued, “A racist society can’t but fight a racist war—this is the bitter truth. The assumptions acted on at home are the assumptions acted on abroad, and every American negro knows this, for he, after the American Indian, was the first ‘Viet Cong’ victim.”
In Washington, DC, a week after refusing induction, Ali toured the ghetto and spoke to inmates at a federal penitentiary. At Howard University he was welcomed by a huge and enthusiastic crowd comprising the majority of the student body. At the invitation of the newly formed Black Power Committee, Ali spoke from the steps of Frederick Douglass Hall (university officials had denied the committee permission to hold the meeting inside). “We have been brainwashed,” Ali told the crowd. “Even Tarzan, king of the jungle, in black Africa, is white.” When a heckler offered to take his place in the army for $1000, Ali shot back, “Your life is worth more than a thousand dollars, brother.” Unprotected, Ali immersed himself in the throng. According to local newspapers, a “carnival atmosphere” prevailed. Students said they were impressed by Ali’s “lack of arrogance” and his “positively black” presence.
Days later, Ali addressed another student crowd at the University of Chicago’s Stag Field. “I have lost nothing,” he told the students, a mix of black and white. “I have gained the respect of thousands worldwide, I have gained peace of mind.” In a call-and-response routine that was to become a stock-in-trade in the coming years, he bellowed, “Who is the heavyweight champion of the world?” and the packed stadium roared back the indisputable answer, “Ali! Ali! Ali!”
On 8 May 1967 Ali was indicted by a federal grand jury in Houston. Of the twenty-one citizens on the jury, one was black. Ali was photographed, fingerprinted and released on $5000 bail on condition he did not leave the US.
In early June, Herbert Muhammad brought together a number of black sports stars for a private meeting with Ali in Cleveland. Some observers were convinced Herbert wanted the stars to persuade Ali to make a deal with the government. If that was so, Herbert had seriously underestimated his fighter’s determination. The stars, including football players Jim Brown and Willie Davis and basketball heroes Bill Russell and Lew Alcindor (who later converted to the Hanafi brand of Islam and changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), found Ali in a mood of quiet determination. Many left the meeting deeply moved by Ali’s sincerity and courage. “Ali didn’t need our help,” Jabbar recalled, “because as far as the black community was concerned, he already had everybody’s heart. He gave so many people courage to test the system.” For Bill Russell, Ali in 1967 was “a man accepting special responsibilities.” He told Sports Illustrated:
I’m not worried about Muhammad Ali. He is better equipped than anyone I know to withstand the trials in store for him. What I’m worried about is the rest of us.
Years later, Russell told Thomas Hauser, “Philosophically, Ali was a free man. Besides being probably the greatest boxer ever, he was free. And he was free at a time when historically it was very difficult to be free no matter who you were or what you were. Ali was one of the first truly free people in America.” But at this moment this truly free man was facing not only the threat but the likelihood of jail. Gerald Early claims that Ali was no “martyr” because “he never went to jail.” But this is to substitute hindsight for history. In 1967, and for the next three years, Ali had every reason to believe he would end up in prison and never fight again. After all, in those days there were few, if any, precedents for a black person defying federal authority and getting away with it. Robeson and Du Bois had been effectively silenced and forced into exile for merely articulating the ideas that Ali was now acting upon.
In Houston, on 19 June 1967, Ali was tried by an all-white jury. His attorneys raised a host of objections, including a protest against the all-white make-up of the draft board that had classified him, but the Justice Department and the judge insisted the only relevant factor was Ali’s refusal to obey the induction order. The black attorney prosecuting the case for the government argued that if Ali escaped the draft, large numbers of black youths would be encouraged to join the Muslims. He also noted that, in the course of his dealings with the Selective Service, Ali had claimed exemption on a variety of grounds, and that therefore there was reason to suspect that his claim to conscientious objector status was insincere. (Under the law, sincerity was a crucial test for all CO applicants.) The illustrious defendant listened to the arguments in bored silence. After deliberating for twenty minutes, the jury found him guilty. Ali asked the judge to pass sentence quickly. “I’d appreciate it if the court will do it now, give me my sentence now, instead of waiting and stalling for time.” The prosecution told the judge that “Clay” had a record of good conduct but “he got into trouble when he joined the Black Muslims, which are just as much in politics as religion.” For the first time in the proceedings, Ali objected. “My religion isn’t political in no way.”
The judge handed down the maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. The usual sentence in these cases at the time was eighteen months, and even the US attorney seemed surprised at the severity of the judgement. Ali was released on bail pending appeal. His passport was confiscated.
In Washington, on the day of Ali’s conviction, the House passed a bill to extend the draft for another four years. The vote was 337 to 29. The House also passed a law—by 385 to 19—making it a federal crime to “desecrate” the flag. The following week, on 23 June, Ali appeared at his first and only anti-war demonstration. Johnson was scheduled to speak at a $500-a-plate fund-raising dinner at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. In response, local anti-war activists organized a rally at the Cheviot Hill Playground. Twenty thousand turned out for the largest anti-war gathering yet held in southern California. The speakers included Benjamin Spock and Rap Brown. Ali arrived in a Rolls-Royce and mounted a garbage can to address the crowd. “Anything designed for peace and to stop the killing I’m for one hundred percent,” he told them. “I’m not a leader. I’m not here to advise you. But I encourage you to express yourself.” And he launched into his now familiar refrain, “Who’s the champion of the world?” The Los Angeles Times noted suspiciously that the crowd replied with “Clay’s Black Muslim name.” The demonstrators then marched (without Ali) to the hotel, where the Supremes were performing for the president (their boss, Berry Gordy, regarded this as a sound commercial move). Governor Ronald Reagan had placed the National Guard on stand-by. When some of the demonstrators began a non-violent sit-in in front of the hotel, 1200 LAPD officers attacked the crowd with clubs. After an hour of mayhem, fifty demonstrators had been arrested and at least two hundred injured. A shocked (white) demonstrator commented, “I saw Mississippi in Los Angeles last night.” The city council condemned the demonstrators and refused to hear the organizers’ well-documented complaint about police misbehavior. It was to be several years before anti-war activists attempted to stage another mass demonstration in Los Angeles.
The violence outside the Century Plaza may have deterred Ali from future participation in large-scale anti-war protests. Certainly, from that moment on, without in the least diluting his anti-war stand, Ali preferred to speak as an individual, from his own platforms. Not that it made any difference to the forces of law and order. On 25 July, an FBI memorandum recommended intensified surveillance of “Clay,” who, the anonymous author complained, has “utilized his position as a nationally known figure in the sports world to promote through appearances at various gatherings an ideology completely foreign to the basic American ideals of equality and justice for all, love of God and country.”
In August 1967, Ali’s appeal against the confiscation of his passport was heard in Houston. Talking to Hugh McIlvanney before the hearing, Ali was at pains to distinguish himself from other black power figures and to assert his belief in non-violence:
Rap Brown and these boys can say what they like because they’re nobody. Nobody gives a damn. With me it’s different. If I went to a negro district they’d come runnin’. It would just take some young fool to throw something and that would be it. He don’t care anything about race. He wants publicity. He wants to see a nice fire. I want to keep away from that stuff.
Ali’s lawyers presented recordings of Ali’s appearances on television to support their client’s contention that he had said nothing anti-American or inflammatory. Ali himself promised to inform local police chiefs before he visited black areas. But this belated attempt to persuade the courts that Ali really was a role model of the old school came to nought. The judge decided that his presence at the Los Angeles peace rally revealed “a ready willingness to participate in anti-government and anti-war activities.” He told Ali he should consider himself lucky not to be confined to one state or district.
The second half of 1967 witnessed an intensification of domestic anti-war protest, climaxing in the spectacular demonstration outside the Pentagon and militant anti-draft actions in Oakland. Yet as protests swelled, so did the ferocity of the war. By the end of the year, there were half a million US troops in Vietnam, who were, according to the Department of Defense, killing or seriously injuring one thousand non-combatants a week. In early 1968, the CIA launched Operation Phoenix, in the course of which tens of thousands of Vietnamese civilians were kidnapped and tortured. In March, US troops slaughtered 347 civilians in the hamlet of My Lai, an atrocity concealed from the American public until November 1969. The war was costing the US taxpayer some $2 billion a month and leaving some one hundred US troops dead each week. The Pentagon Papers reveal that one of MacNamara’s assistants characterized US war aims at this stage as “70 percent to avoid a humiliating US defeat” and only 10 percent “to permit the people of South Vietnam to enjoy a better, freer way of life.”
A sad old soldier once told me a story
About a battlefield that he was on
He said a man should never fight for glory
He must know what is right and what is wrong
So I’m headin’ for the nearest foreign border
Vancouver may be just my kind of town
Cause they don’t have the kind of law and order
That tends to keep a good man underground
Flying Burrito Brothers, 1968
Of the 350,000 men who received induction notices in 1967, 952 were subsequently convicted under Selective Service legislation, among them Muhammad Ali. Ninety percent of those convicted received jail sentences. In the next three years, this trickle of defiance swelled into a great wave. The number of appeals against 1-A classification multiplied from only four per thousand in 1965 to seventy-nine per thousand in 1968 and one hundred and two per thousand in 1969. In 1970, more than 100,000 applications for conscientious objector status were submitted to local draft boards—more than in all of World War I and World War II combined. By the end of the war, 22,000 men had been indicted for draft law violations. Only 7 percent of them claimed traditional pacifist allegiances. A total of 50,000 sought sanctuary abroad.
The first draft-card burnings took place in late 1964. In October 1965, SDS chapters organized sit-ins outside draft boards (in a punitive response, General Lewis Hershey, director of the Selective Service system, altered the status of some student demonstrators from 2-S to 1-A). In December 1966, the SDS national council called for non-compliance with the draft laws and adopted the slogan “from protest to resistance”—an evolution which Ali himself was undergoing at that time, albeit unwillingly. That month a national anti-draft conference at the University of Chicago attracted five hundred participants. Student-body presidents warned Johnson: “A great many of those faced with the prospect of military duty find it hard to square performance of the duty with concepts of personal integrity and conscience.”
April 1967 witnessed the first mass burning of draft cards. In San Francisco, David Harris (husband of Joan Baez and, after Ali, the most well-known draft resister in America) announced the formation of The Resistance.
There are many ways to avoid the draft, to stay clear of this war. Most of us now have deferments … but all these individual outs have no effect on the draft, the war, or the consciousness of this country. To co-operate with conscription is to perpetuate its existence, without which the government could not wage war. We have chosen to openly defy the draft and confront the government and its war directly.… Our hope is that upon our example every young man in America will realize that he must decide whether to resist or acquiesce to the draft and the war.
During Stop the Draft Week in October 1967, demonstrations were staged across the country. “Before, we talked. Now we must act,” urged an SDS leaflet. “We must stop what we oppose.” In Oakland, thousands of white demonstrators battled with police in a forlorn effort to close down the local induction center. An SDS strategist called the event “a watershed in the course of the anti-draft and white student movement analogous to Watts for the black movement.” Conspiracy charges were brought against seven individuals alleged to have organized the Oakland actions.
In Washington, as demonstrators encircled the Pentagon, Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin and Benjamin Spock tried to return one thousand draft cards to the Justice Department, which refused to accept them. A week later, Daniel Berrigan and colleagues invaded the Baltimore Customs House and poured blood on draft records. In December, during the second Stop the Draft Week, attempts to close induction centers and draft boards (rarely successful) led to hundreds of arrests. A sit-in led by Spock in Whitehall in lower Manhattan was broken up by mounted police. In January 1968, Spock, Coffin and others were arraigned for “conspiracy to counsel, aid and abet” draft evaders.
Despite government reprisals, direct actions against the draft proliferated over the next two years. In May 1968, the Catonsville Nine raided a draft board in a Baltimore suburb. In September, activists in Milwaukee followed their lead. In 1969, the Pasadena Three took 600 1-A files and burned them in a field (an offense for which they received three years in federal prison); the Silver Spring Three threw paint on files and destroyed equipment; the Chicago Fifteen stole files and burned them; and on 4 July, the New York Five shredded 6500 1-A files and damaged the “1” and “A” keys on draft-board typewriters. In October, two activists set fire to draft records in Akron. Records were shredded in Indianapolis, Minneapolis and Boston. That year, student-body presidents sent another letter to the White House. Its explicit call for resistance is a measure of how the mood had changed since their last appeal in 1966:
We must make an agonizing choice: to accept induction into the armed forces, which we feel would be irresponsible to ourselves, our country, and our fellow man; or to refuse induction, which is contrary to our respect for law and involves injury to our personal lives and careers. Left without a third alternative, we will act according to our conscience. Along with thousands of our fellow students, we campus leaders cannot participate in a war which we believe to be immoral and unjust.
Among the numbers who resisted the draft, none was even remotely as famous as Muhammad Ali, and his defiance is surely worth more than the footnote it’s usually assigned in accounts of the growth of the anti-war movement. As the principal public role model for conscientious objectors and draft resisters, he gave courage to thousands of young men, many of them isolated from the organized movement. He made dissent visible, audible and attractive.
In this era of youthful celebrities, it is remarkable how few seemed to have grappled with the dilemma that Ali faced—and how few were prepared to make the choice he made and take the consequences. Although the mass, self-ordained counter-culture was intimately linked, at least in the public’s mind, with protest against the war, the politics of the war and of anti-war activism rarely intruded upon the nebulous celebration of “love and peace.” Popular music provided the counter-culture, and the anti-war-movement, with a unifying ethos, but scarcely any popular musicians took the kind of stand, either in their lyrics or their lives, that Ali did. To the extent that the music of the late sixties referred to Vietnam, it did so mainly in reference to the draft, which directly affected the lives of many in its audience. In spring 1967, Country Joe and the Fish released their “Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die-Rag.” Its morbid sarcasm offended some older peace movement veterans, but delighted teenagers. That year also saw the release of Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” and the Byrds’ “Draft Morning,” in which the sound of bombs and gunfire punctuates the mellow country harmonies:
Today
was the day for action
leave my bed
to kill instead
why should it happen?
As in other songs of the time, the draft here was resented primarily as a personal intrusion. The next year, Creedence Clearwater Revival recorded “Fortunate Son” (a reflection on the class inequities of the draft system); Steppenwolf, the forgettable “Draft Resister,” and the Burritos (including Chris Hillman, who co-wrote “Draft Morning”), the ballad “My Uncle,” the best song by a white group about the draft and one of the few that treats it as a moral choice. In 1969, John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band released “Give Peace a Chance,” a song utterly void of politics but carrying, in the circumstances, a huge political punch. At the November Moratorium march in Washington, Pete Seeger led a million demonstrators in repetitive chorus after chorus. Indeed, as a popular-culture hero, only John Lennon even comes close to rivaling Ali in his forthright opposition to American policy in Vietnam. In 1971, Lennon paid thousands of pounds to Michael X for the bloodied boxing shorts Ali had presented him in 1966, then donated the shorts to an anti-war fund-raiser. Because of his statements on Vietnam, Lennon, like Ali, was targeted by the FBI.
The rise of rock and roll coincided with that of the anti-war movement, and both attracted a vast constituency of white youth. As a result, some radical critics came to see the new music as an instrument of social revolution. The “guitar army,” in John Sinclair’s phrase, would storm the bastions of American power. But there was always a fundamental distinction between rock music, which treated radicalized youth as consumers, and protest politics, which treated rock-loving youth as participants. It was a distinction easily overlooked by many of the media-designated spokespersons for “the younger generation,” though not by record company executives.
Strikingly, Vietnam and the draft largely vanished from white popular music after 1969. An ostensibly revolutionary album like Jefferson Airplane’s (execrable) Volunteers makes no mention of it. On New Year’s Eve 1970, Jimi Hendrix, with his new all-black Band of Gypsies, recorded “Machine Gun” before a live audience. “I’d like to dedicate this one to the draggin’ scene that’s goin’ on,” Hendrix told the crowd, “all the soldiers that are fightin’ in Chicago, Milwaukee and New York … oh yeah, and all the soldiers fightin’ in Vietnam.” The ambiguity of the dedication was matched by the song:
machine gun
tearing my body all apart
evil man make me kill ya
evil man make you kill me
evil man make me kill you
even though we’re only families apart
well I pick up my axe and fight like a bomber
(you know what I mean)
hey and your bullets keep knocking me down
In its fusion of military, sexual and musical metaphors, the Hendrix song exemplified what David E. James called “the ambiguity of the ecstatic energy of destruction which allows rock and the war to become interchangeable metaphors for each other.” Hendrix (who was the same age as Ali) was a black American R&B virtuoso who had recreated himself in mid-sixties England as a prophet of psychedelia. In this context, his blackness became exotic and erotic. At the end of January 1970, the Band of Gypsies played their second concert—at an anti-war fund-raiser in Madison Square Garden. Hendrix’s manager disapproved of the overtly political gig and, some say, slipped the guitarist an overdose of LSD to prevent him appearing on stage. Whatever the truth, during the band’s second song Hendrix stopped and announced, “I’m sorry but we just can’t get it together,” and walked off. It was the last performance of the Band of Gypsies.
Rock music offered emotional cohesion and a sense of cultural mission to the anti-war movement, but it also inculcated quietism and consumerism. The sixties witnessed a momentary intersection between capital and mass resistance in the global media marketplace, an intersection which Ali’s career helped generate. It was discovered that gestures of defiance could be commodified and marketed, and the profits recycled to bolster precisely those forces which were allegedly being defied. “We found out, and it wasn’t years later till we did,” Keith Richards noted, “that all the bread we made for Decca was going into making little black boxes that go into American air force bombers to bomb fucking North Vietnam.”
Popular culture became simultaneously a vehicle of protest and a vehicle of incorporation. The impact of this paradoxical development on the rapidly evolving social movements—especially in America where they lacked roots in organized labor or a socialist tradition—was overwhelmingly deleterious. The radical students of the late sixties found themselves in the same dilemma that had faced America’s black community for generations: the people recognized by the establishment as their representatives were not in any way accountable to the constituency they were alleged to represent. What made Ali different from other popular-culture heroes of the day was his powerful sense of accountability, not to the media he used so skillfully, but to a burgeoning global army of supporters.
In exile, Ali found himself without finance and without organizational support. The white promoters and lawyers had fled from his camp; the Nation of Islam continued to manage his affairs from a distance, but offered no money and little political backup; after Los Angeles, he kept his distance from the organized anti-war and anti-draft movements. He was alone, as he never was during his fighting years, but at the same time he found himself embraced by an international constituency comprising hundreds of millions. Despite the press attacks and the threat of jail, Ali rarely expressed a bitter thought during these years. Reporters found him quietly determined, but ready, as ever, to lighten the mood with jokes, pranks and surreal monologues.
In August 1967, Ali married the seventeen-year-old Belinda Boyd, who had been raised in the Nation of Islam. After his bruising experience with his first wife, Sonji, Ali may have sought someone more compliant, or at least more willing to conform to the Nation’s definition of Muslim femininity. Certainly Belinda was to play a key role in helping Ali manage the more modest lifestyle imposed by his exclusion from the ring—even as she gave birth to four children (including the twins, Jamillah and Rasheeda) in four years. To meet his mounting legal expenses and feed his family, Ali took to the college lecture circuit. In 1968 alone, he spoke at some two hundred campuses. Black or white, Ivy League or A & M, Ali didn’t care. His appearances were festive occasions, his speeches laced with jokes, poetry and political brio. “Talking is a whole lot easier than fighting,” he said, though he did spend time preparing his speeches and even rehearsing routines in front of a mirror. The students found his conservative homilies against drugs, sex, alcohol and intermarriage quaint, but they always responded with one voice to the exhortation with which he finished his talks: “Can my title be taken away without my being whupped?” “No!” “One more time!” “NO!” “Who’s the heavyweight champion of the world?” “You are!”
In his college talks, Ali invoked the classic themes of black nationalism—separatism, black pride and the need for a black homeland—often using analogies and formulations favored in the early sixties by Malcolm X. “When are we going to wake up as black people and end the lie that white is better than black? We’ve been down so long we can’t even imagine having our own country.” Like Malcolm, Ali linked the discovery of racial pride to a new internationalist perspective: “I’m expected to go overseas to help free people in South Vietnam and at the same time my people here are being brutalized and mistreated and this is really the same thing that’s happening over in Vietnam.” Mostly, Ali talked about the call of conscience and his own need to “speak truth to power,” those great underlying themes of the sixties. In the colleges, the draft issue struck close to home, and Ali’s defiance was inspirational, all the more so since he had never been able to shelter under a student deferment.
Damn the money. Damn the heavyweight championship. I will die before I sell out my people for the white man’s money. The wealth of America and the friendship of all the people who support the war would be nothing if I’m not content internally and if I’m not in accord with the will of Allah.
During the years Ali was touring the campuses, a new wave of black student activism washed across the country, fired by Black Power and frequently centering on the demand for black studies. The concerns with black identity and culture that had seemed so extreme and eccentric when articulated by Malcolm in the early sixties had become the common currency of black youth, not least because of the high-profile and highly appealing example of Muhammad Ali, who was, at the same time, a physical presence on the campuses. It was a confrontation between the local Black Students’ Union and the white editor of the college newspaper over a derogatory remark the latter had made about Ali that lit the fuse of the conflict that was to engulf San Francisco State University in 1968 and 1969. Here, the struggle for a black studies department and more minority admissions led to a bitter 134-day student strike, ending with a total police occupation of the campus and year-long jail sentences for the strike leaders.
In the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King in April 1968, black ghettos in more than one hundred and twenty cities across the country erupted. Sixty-five thousand National Guardsmen and federal troops were summoned. Fifteen thousand were arrested and thirty-eight killed, including Bobby Hutton, the seventeen-year-old treasurer of the Black Panther party. In Washington, DC, the Black Anti-War Anti-Draft Union led a march from a local high school to Howard University, where a crowd of one thousand cheered as the US flag was lowered and the black nationalist colors raised in its place.
Ali’s draft case was to play a coincidental but critical role in the historical evaluation of King. The ACLU had filed a plea in Ali’s case challenging the exclusion of blacks from draft boards (an issue it had already raised in the case of SNCC activist Cleveland Sellers). In its submission, the ACLU noted that Ali’s Selective Service file was crammed with letters and newspaper clippings of a prejudicial nature. One item included in the official dossier was a letter from a member of the public saying simply, “Send that nigger away.” In June 1968, the circuit court of appeals confirmed Ali’s conviction. While accepting that there was, as Ali’s lawyers charged, “systematic exclusion of negroes from draft boards,” the court nonetheless upheld the draft board’s decision on Ali’s classification. However, during the course of the hearings, it was revealed that information on Ali’s views had been gleaned from FBI wiretaps of his telephone conversations with Martin Luther King and others. This was the first time any hint of the FBI’s extensive and often illegal surveillance operation against King and the civil rights movement had surfaced in the public domain. Hoover at first denied everything, but on 30 August 1968 the Justice Department acknowledged it had recorded Ali’s conversations with five individuals under surveillance. It was later revealed that the FBI had kept a file on Ali since he was first sighted with Malcolm X. One FBI agent was even detailed to tape-record Ali’s late-night appearances on chat shows. As a result, his encounters with the likes of Johnny Carson appear alongside those with King and Elijah Muhammad in the files.
In response to the revelations, the Supreme Court ordered the district court in Houston to conduct a special hearing to determine if illegal wiretaps had any bearing on Ali’s conviction under the draft laws. At the hearing, an FBI agent testified about the surveillance of King, and the ACLU attorney read into the record the details of four of Ali’s five recorded conversations. The fifth conversation, conducted with an unidentified individual said to be working for “foreign intelligence,” was not disclosed in court but was read in private by the judge, who ruled, in June 1969, that the wiretaps had no impact on Ali’s conviction.
Besides inspiring thousands to resist the draft, Ali ignited a wave of protest among black sports stars. At a Black Power conference held in Newark, New Jersey, in the summer of 1967, a resolution was passed urging black athletes to boycott the 1968 Olympics unless Ali was reinstated as heavyweight champion. During the 1967/68 academic year, black athletes at thirty-seven white-dominated colleges and universities raised demands for more black coaches, facilities, cheerleaders and trainers. Bob Beaman, the future long-jump record-setter, was dropped by his university coach for refusing to compete against Brigham Young University, where the Mormon orthodoxy of white supremacy was still upheld. That year, black sports people came together to form the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR). In its list of demands, the first was “the restoration of Muhammad Ali’s titles.” The second was the removal of the racist Avery Brundage as head of the United States Olympic Committee, and the third was the exclusion of South Africa and Rhodesia from competition. The demands reflected both the internationalism of Black Power and Ali’s symbolic centrality. His exclusion from the ring represented the global exclusion of blacks, and his capacity to challenge and resist that exclusion made him, in the words of Harry Edwards, one of the key organizers of OPHR, “the warrior saint in the revolt of the black athlete in America.”
Initially, OPHR advocated a black boycott of the Olympics, but it proved difficult to mobilize support for this tactic among black competitors for whom the Olympics were the chance of a lifetime. Attention turned, instead, to subverting the event from within. The potent symbolism of the Olympic podium—a celebration of individual excellence at the service of the nation-state—was diametrically opposed to the tenets of black consciousness. The militant athletes wanted to compete, and to win, but no longer on behalf of an America which excluded their brothers and sisters. On 16 October 1968, at Mexico City, a supporter of OPHR, Tommie Smith, the twenty-four-year-old son of a migrant laborer, captured the gold medal in the 200 meters with a world-record-breaking run. In third place was another OPHR supporter, John Carlos, a twenty-three year old from Harlem. On the winners’ podium, before a global audience of hundreds of millions, the two athletes bowed their heads and raised clenched fists during the US national anthem. Smith explained their gesture:
I wore a black right-hand glove and Carlos wore the left-hand glove of the same pair. My raised right hand stood for the power in black America. Carlos’s raised left hand stood for the unity of black America. Together they formed an arch of unity and power. The black scarf around my neck stood for black pride. The black socks with no shoes stood for black poverty in racist America. The totality of our effort was the regaining of black dignity.
The need to overthrow the old role models had driven Smith and Carlos to invent a complex new symbolism. The tropes of individual victory and national glory were replaced by those of racial solidarity. American Olympic success, which in 1960 Ali himself had portrayed as a Cold War triumph, had been turned on its head, reshaped into nothing less than a public repudiation of the United States and all its works. In a counter-gesture, the authorities persuaded George Foreman, the new Olympic heavyweight boxing champion, to wave a small American flag during his medal ceremony. An FBI report claimed that Foreman’s victory over a Soviet fighter and subsequent patriotic display “gave every American an emotional lift.” The FBI also noted the “sharp contrast with the earlier, despicable Black Power black-gloved demonstration of Tommie Smith and John Carlos and the anti-Vietnam stand of Cassius Clay.” After the Olympics, the FBI arranged for Foreman to receive an award from the Freedom Foundation, which was linked with the J. Edgar Hoover Foundation.
Smith and Carlos were ejected from the Olympic village, banned from the Games and vilified at home, as were other black athletes who backed their protest. “Doing my thing made me feel the freest I ever felt in my whole life,” Carlos later recalled, “but I came home to hate.” In the Chicago American, Brent Mussberger railed at the protest:
One gets a little tired of having the United States run down by athletes who are enjoying themselves at the expense of their country. Protesting and working constructively against racism in the United States is one thing, but airing one’s dirty clothing before the entire world during a fun-and-games tournament was no more than a juvenile gesture by a couple of athletes who should have known better.
Smith and Carlos had committed a new variant on the old offense for which Robeson had been hounded. As a result, the careers of both men were truncated. But there was one asset which the authorities could never take from Smith and Carlos. As far as the public was concerned, they remained the world’s number one and number three 200-meters men, just as Ali remained the world heavyweight champion. All three had won these distinctions in fair and open competition. Ali’s support grew not only because the tide of opinion swung against the war, but also because he could appeal to sport’s egalitarian autonomy:
I have the world heavyweight title not because it was given to me, not because of my race or religion, but because I won it in the ring through my own boxing ability. Those who want to take it and hold a series of auction-type bouts not only do me a disservice but actually disgrace themselves. I am certain that the sports fans and the fair-minded people throughout America would never accept such a title holder.
In August 1968, Ali toured Times Square with Adam Clayton Powell, then campaigning for his twelfth consecutive term in the House. Following charges of impropriety, Powell had been barred from taking his seat by a vote of his fellow congressmen. “We’re here to shake hands with the people and show them what the land of the free and the home of the brave has done to two champions,” Powell explained. “I’m not in the Congress and he’s not in the ring.”
When they staged the elimination bouts for his “vacant” title, Ali warned: “Everybody knows I’m the champion. My ghost will haunt all the arenas. I’ll be there, wearing a sheet and whispering, ‘Ali-e-e-e! Ali-e-e-e!’” Protesters did appear outside Madison Square Garden during the bouts (with placards reading “Hell No We Ain’t Goin” and “Fight Racism, Free Muhammad Ali”) but they were dismissed by the boxing moguls, who were happy with the ringside attendance and impressive television ratings. For several years, they remained unaware of how deeply they had compromised their sport when they stripped Ali of his title. Not least among Ali’s growing band of supporters were the sports fans, in America and around the world, who recognized the logical integrity of his claim to the heavyweight championship. Carlos and Smith had been castigated for importing politics into the pure realm of sport. But in Ali’s case, it was the authorities who had imported the politics; they turned Ali into a martyr not just to the anti-war cause, but to the cause of fair play and pristine sport. Ironically, as a result of the authorities’ reaction to his politics, some sports fans—including many in boxing’s huge working-class base—began to give those politics a serious hearing. Ali was able to use the specific injustice inflicted upon him to raise awareness about broader and more contentious questions.
In December 1968, Ali served ten days in Dade County jail, Miami, for driving without a valid license. He seemed to take both the harsh sentence and his first experience of prison life with equanimity. “I’m not scared about going to jail,” he said after his release. “Somebody’s got to do something to knock the fear out of these negroes. Somebody’s got to stand up.”
He was often asked, “Do you miss boxing?” and his usual answer was, “No, boxing misses me.” But when Howard Cosell inquired about his future plans during a television interview in early 1969, Ali said he hoped to fight again—because he needed the money. The casual remark infuriated Elijah Muhammad. On 4 April 1969, Muhammad Speaks carried a statement by the Messenger:
We tell the world we’re not with Muhammad Ali. Muhammad Ali is out of the circle of the brotherhood of the followers of Islam … for one year.… Mr. Muhammad Ali has sporting blood. Mr. Muhammad Ali desires to do that which the holy Qur’an teaches him against.… Mr. Muhammad Ali shall not be recognized with us under the holy name of Muhammad Ali. We will call him Cassius Clay.
Only the year before, Ali had been one of the keynote speakers at the Nation’s annual Savior’s Day convention in Chicago. Now he was to be spurned by the people for whom he had sacrificed so much, at the time when he needed them most; he was even to be stripped of the “original name” over which he had fought so many battles. Backing his father’s verdict, Herbert Muhammad announced he was no longer “at the service of anyone in the sports world.” John Ali, the Nation’s national secretary, remarked that the former champ was short of money because he “did not follow the wise counsel of Messenger Muhammad in saving himself from waste and extravagance.”
What made Elijah Muhammad suddenly re-discover his old prohibition against boxing? Why, of all the weird and wonderful public declarations made by Ali during these years, did the Messenger take such offense at this one? It was hardly in the same league as Malcolm’s crack about JFK. Claude Clegg suggests that “along with the declining tithes and loss of the heavyweight title, the draft controversy probably convinced Muhammad to minimize his losses while he was ahead. In essence, Ali had become a liability for the Nation, which was already feeling the sting of enhanced counter-intelligence operations launched by the FBI in 1967.” By disciplining his organization’s most famous and best-loved member, the old man may also have wished simply to assert his authority. In his last decade, Muhammad governed the Nation of Islam by ostentatiously putting dynamic disciples back in their place while promoting unimaginative henchmen (and in some cases FBI plants).
John Ali was eager to deny reports that the Nation of Islam had bled the fighter dry. However, in early 1970, Muhammad Ali publicly accused Main Bout, the company formed by Bob Arum and the Nation to manage and promote him, of mishandling his finances; as a result, John Ali, one of Elijah’s closest associates, was dismissed from his post as the Nation’s financial director (two years later, he was reinstated). For three years, Muhammad Speaks included not a single reference to the once and future champ.
But the mood of black America, and of large parts of white America, was changing, and at the end of the decade Ali found himself less alone than at any time since he had publicly embraced the Nation of Islam. In late 1969, the National Baptist Convention, the largest black religious organization in the United States and for years a bulwark of anti-Communist conservatism, urged the government to show clemency for Ali in order to “lesson domestic tensions,” even as it was careful to remind militant black youth that “the future of Americans is with America.”
Among the grunts serving America in Vietnam, Ali found new partisans. According to Wallace Terry, whose book Bloods chronicles the black experience in the war, many black soldiers initially believed Ali “had given up being a man” when he refused induction; within a few years, assumptions had been turned upside down. “If you asked black soldiers in 1969 who was his leader in America,” Terry reports, “they’d list the late Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther Party, and then Muhammad Ali.” Newsweek reported that 56 percent of blacks now opposed the war because of its impact on their own communities. To black people, Vietnam was “their own particular incubus—a war that depletes their young manhood and saps the resources available to healing ills at home.” From 1968, battlefield resistance and indiscipline among American troops escalated sharply. By 1971, for every US solider being treated for combat wounds four were being treated for drug abuse.
Disillusionment was rife at home as well. In October 1969, one million marched in Washington and millions more joined local demonstrations across the country. By early 1970, the proportion of the American public disapproving of the original decision to enter combat had risen to 57 percent. In the face of domestic division and economic downturn, big business also began to register dissent. The Wall Street Journal, Fortune and Business Week expressed increasingly sharp criticism of both the handling and objectives of the war. A cover feature in Esquire declared, “Muhammad Ali deserves the right to defend his title.” Among the luminaries assembled in a group photo of Ali supporters were Howard Cosell, Michael Harrington, Roy Lichtenstein, Sidney Lumet, George Plimpton, Budd Schulberg, Jose Torres, Truman Capote and James Earl Jones (at that time enjoying Broadway success in the role of Jack Johnson in The Great White Hope).
The acme of the anti-war movement was its response to the invasion of Cambodia on 30 April 1970. A spontaneous wave of student protests rolled across the country. At Kent State University in Ohio, four white students were shot dead by the National Guard. Within days, 350 universities were on strike and there were demonstrations at 500 others. The entire California State University system was closed. The National Guard was sent to twenty-one campuses. After a 3000-strong protest at Jackson State University in Mississippi, trigger-happy police fired on a small group outside a dormitory, killing two and wounding fourteen. To honor the victims (and contain the new wave of black anger) New York City officials closed the school system for a day. Howard University suspended regular courses and for the remainder of the semester the campus was dedicated to the study of black liberation.
An estimated four million US students (60 percent of total higher education enrollment) took part in the protests of May 1970, which also spread to high schools and junior highs. No corner of the country was unaffected. It was clear that concessions had to be made—or at least to appear to be made—if control was to be retained. By the end of the year, the number of American troops in Vietnam had declined to 280,000, combat fatalities had dropped sharply, and Muhammad Ali had returned to the ring.
For years, the government strove vainly to demarcate the “religious” from the “racial” and “political” in Ali’s resistance to the draft. And Ali himself rarely succeeded in convincing anyone (other than himself) that his refusal to serve in the military was entirely and exclusively religious. The difficulties in disentangling Ali’s motives ought to give pause to those who would, in retrospect, segregate the elements that form the composite moment of the sixties, in an effort to reclaim some and renounce others. Ali’s journey through the decade illustrates the inter-relationship of the early and late sixties, of self-expression and collective action, the cultural and the political, the margins and the mainstream, personal identity and global solidarity. The only interpretations of the sixties that can illuminate the period, and provide guides for the future, are those which can account for these inter-relationships, and for Muhammad Ali.