In the spring of 1967, Muhammad Ali was at the height of his powers.
He had held the heavyweight boxing title for 962 straight days — defeating 8 opponents during that almost three-year span. Ali was, indisputably, the greatest boxer alive and was in the process of laying claim to the title of best fighter ever.
But on this day —May 8 — in 1967, Ali was in a different kind of fight. A legal one. A grand jury in the southern district of Texas indicted Ali for his refusal to submit to the military draft.
Ali said that his faith — he was a prominent member of the Nation of Islam and had changed his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali a few years earlier — didn’t allow him to fight in the Vietnam War. He had applied for conscientious objector status but a judge in Kentucky turned that request down. Ali appealed — and a Justice Department official actually recommended he be granted the conscientious objector status. The Justice Department never forwarded those findings to the Selective Service appeals board. Remarkable.
The May 8 indictment came just days after Ali had refused to be drafted — at a U.S. Armed Forces induction ceremony in Houston, Texas. As Sports Illustrated reported:
Ali refused to step forward three times as his name was called. After receiving a warning and being informed of the consequences, Ali did not acknowledge his name-call one final time.
In a statement released after the induction ceremony, Ali said this:
It is in the light of my consciousness as a Muslim minister and my own personal convictions that I take my stand in rejecting the call to be inducted. … I find I cannot be true to my beliefs in my religion by accepting such a call. I am dependent upon Allah as the final judge of those actions brought about by my own conscience.
Oddly enough, Ali had already been passed over for the draft once — prior to his showdown in Houston. In 1964, he had been excused after failing the draft test due to dyslexia. “I said I was the greatest, not the smartest,” he said of his test score.
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But, as the war raged on, the U.S. military lowered its draft qualifications and, in 1996, Ali was informed that he would, in fact, be drafted. It was after that news that Ali uttered his famous/infamous line: “I ain’t got no quarrel with those Vietcong.”
Following his refusal to be drafted, Ali was immediately stripped of his title belt. “When I fly out of Houston,” Ali wrote in his autobiography of that time, “I’m flying into an exile that will eat up what boxing experts regard as ‘the best years of a fighter’s life.’”
Within 6 weeks of his indictment, on June 20, 1967, Ali was found guilty of refusing to be drafted. The all-white jury was unanimous on that front — voting 11-0. The sentencing judge gave Ali the maximum penalty possible — 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Ali immediately appealed, a process that would play out over the next four years.
He was roundly vilified for his opposition to the war. Hampton Dellinger, in a 1994 essay in the magazine Reconstruction, wrote this of the media reaction to Ali’s decision:
From the start, sports page condemnation of Ali’s stance on the war was almost universal. In Chicago, Tribune sports writers began the call for cancellation of Ali’s scheduled March 1966 title fight in the city. The cry was taken up on the editorial page, which wrote, “We find it deplorable that so many Chicagoans are unwittingly encouraging him by their interest in a fight whose profits go largely to the Black Muslims, upon whom Clay counts to rise up and save him from his duty to his country.” One week after the Tribune began its campaign, the fight was canceled. In May 1967, in a seething editorial, Sports Illustrated declared that “without his gloves on, Ali is just another demagogue and an apologist for his so-called religion, and his views on Vietnam don’t deserve rebuttal.”
And, as sports journalist Dave Zirin noted, on the same day that Ali was convicted, the U.S. House voted 337-29 to extend the draft four more years and 385-19 to make it a federal crime to desecrate the flag. Wrote Zirin: “The sentence was unusually harsh and deeply tied to a Beltway, bipartisan consensus to crush Ali and ensure that he not develop into a symbol of anti-war resistance.”
That move backfired. Since Ali was banned from fighting, he used his celebrity to become a prominent anti-war activist. He spoke on college campuses where anti-war sentiment ran high. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — prior to his murder in April 1968 — praised Ali’s stance.
“I’ve talked with him about it,” King said in a televised interview. “I think he is absolutely sincere. … It is legally justified to be a conscientious objector … I would strongly endorse his actions on the basis of conscience … I would not dare stand in the way of one who has taken a position because of moral conscience.”
The country — and its tolerance for the ongoing war — was also in the midst of an upheaval. Whereas Ali was castigated in 1967 for his refusal to be drafted, within a few years he had become one of the faces of the ever-growing anti-war movement.
Even as Ali was speaking out about his opposition to the war, he was seeking legal remedy for his conviction and his ban from boxing.
On the boxing front, Ali and his lawyers filed suit against the New York State Athletic Commission in late 1969 — insisting that his ban was inconsistent with the NYSA’s past policies of allowing boxers with criminal convictions to fight. (Ali had initially been banned under broad auspices that his refusal to serve in Vietnam was bad for boxing.) He won.
Ali returned to the ring in October 1970 against Jerry Quarry. Famed boxing writer Bert Sugar described the fight as “the greatest collection of black power and black money ever assembled.” Among the attendees were: Diana Ross, Jesse Jackson, Sidney Poitier, Curtis Mayfield, Arthur Ashe and Julian Bond.
Ali stopped Quarry on a technical knockout after the third round — due a cut above Quarry’s left eye.
The following year, Ali won in the legal arena as well — as the Supreme Court ruled that the Department of Justice had erred in not ensuring the Selective Service was aware of the recommendation that Ali be granted conscientious objector status.
But even that decision was filled with drama. Here’s the Washington Post — using reporting done by Bob Woodward — explaining how the justices got to their decision:
According to the book “The Brethren,” by Post reporter Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong, the justices met in a secret conference on Friday, April 23, 1971 — with Justice Thurgood Marshall taking himself out of the case because he had been solicitor general when the case began. The justices decided in a 5-to-3 vote that Ali was not a conscientious objector and made the decision to send him to prison.
Chief Justice Warren Burger had assigned Justice John Harlan to write the majority opinion, according to the book. Harlan’s clerk began drafting the opinion and “was persuaded by another clerk who had read Alex Haley’s ‘Autobiography of Malcolm X’ to reconsider the question of Ali’s opposition to war.”
Harlan’s clerk became convinced that Ali really was opposed to all wars and was indeed a true conscientious objector. The clerk convinced Justice Harlan to reconsider the case.
That night, a reluctant Harlan took home papers and reexamined the case. The next morning, Harlan announced he was convinced the government had painted “Ali as a racist, misinterpreting the doctrine of the Black Muslims despite the Justice Department’s own hearing examiner’s finding that Ali was sincerely opposed to all wars,” according to “The Brethren.”
Harlan found that the Justice Department had committed an error and wrote a memo suggesting the court reverse the conviction. “When his memo suggesting reversal of the conviction was circulated, it exploded in the Court,” according to “The Brethren.” The stakes were high: If the other justices refused, Ali would be heading for prison for draft evasion.
Justice Potter Stewart suggested that the Court simply set Ali free, citing a technical error by the Justice Department. Eventually, all justices, including Chief Justice Burger, agreed to overturn the conviction. The unanimous decision was announced on June 28, 1971.
Less than three years after that verdict, Ali was in Zaire — facing down world heavyweight champion George Foreman in the “Rumble in the Jungle.”
“If you think the world was surprised when Nixon resigned, wait 'til I whup Foreman's behind,” Ali told reporters before the fight. (Nixon had resigned in August 1974; the Rumble was in October of that year.)
It had been seven years since Ali had been stripped of the title. He was 32 — considered old for a boxer — and was seen as the underdog in the fight. (Foreman was 25.) Ali knocked Foreman out in the 8th round.
Later, of the fight, Ali would say: “I wanted to establish a relationship between American blacks and Africans. The fight was about racial problems, Vietnam. All of that.”
Ali would remain champion for more than 1,200 straight days — losing, eventually, to Leon Spinks in October 1978. After the 15-round fight, Spinks won the title in a split decision.
In October of that year, Ali and Spinks fought again. Ali won a 15-round unanimous decision — becoming world heavyweight champion for a third time.
He officially retired from boxing for good in December 1981. Ali died in 2016. Take a few minutes and read this majestic obituary of him in the New York Times.
I vividly remember Ali lighting the Olympic cauldron at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta. The world was kept guessing who would emerge with the flame. When Ali came out I held my breath as he fought the trembling effects of Parkinson’s Disease that had ravaged his body. And when he held the flame high, I had goosebumps (and am getting them again as I relive that moment).
My father, big boxing fan, thought Quarry one of best heavyweights not to be champion. Most of his losses to great fighters. Also, when Ali began comeback after legal fight Quarry only top ten ranked heavyweight who would fight him