Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight (21 page)

A week later he was to take on Zora Folley at Madison Square Garden. The marquee there also referred to the induction controversy swirling around the champ. “Last chance to see Ali before he gets one to three,” it read, referring to the traditional sentence for draft evasion.

In Congress, Representative Robert Michel took to the floor and complained to his colleagues:

I find it interesting, albeit depressing, to note that the illustrious Cassius Clay has scheduled another alleged bout to milk a few more thousand dollars out of dodging the draft. Apparently Cassius will fight anybody but the Vietcong.

The week of the fight (in which Ali would easily dispose of Folley),
Ring
magazine—the sport’s bible—refused to designate a “Fighter of the Year” for the first time in its history. Instead it announced who
wasn’t
getting the honor. “Most emphatically is Cassius Clay of Louisville, Kentucky, not to be held up as an example to the youngsters of the United States,” it declared.

Even Ernie Terrell, who had been humiliated by Ali two months earlier, recognized the hypocrisy of the magazine’s decision.“ It’s illegitimate reasoning, and it’s out of the realm of the
Ring.
This will all be used as a stepping stone for the Muslims to say they achieved something. If Clay did something illegal, put him in jail. But he didn’t. I dislike what Clay stands for, using boxing to further an extremist cause. But it’s not against the law to be a clown.”

Following the Folley fight, Ali returned to his hometown of Louisville for a rest. The scheduled induction was a month away and he wanted to weigh his options.

Ali’s visit coincided with a scheduled board meeting of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference taking place in Louisville, where Dr. King’s brother resided and where tensions had been running high over a divisive open-housing campaign staged by the city’s black community.

Ali had never met the civil rights leader face to face, although they had talked on the phone three years earlier. Elijah Muhammad had repeatedly condemned King’s tactics, as well as the aims of the civil rights movement. He counseled his followers to steer clear of “the white man’s dupe.” Now, King requested a private meeting with the boxer at his hotel. After thirty minutes, in which he thanked the defiant draftee for the “courage of your actions,” the two emerged and were questioned by the local media. King issued a clear signal that he sympathized with Ali’s stand against the draft, telling the
Louisville Defender,
“As Muhammad Ali has said, we are all victims of the same system of oppression.” The two embraced and Ali called King “my brother.”

Later that day, Ali appeared at a local open-housing protest and told the marchers, “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. I know the difference between a fair fight and a foul one—and this fight with cowardly white hoodlums, partly supported by the police, against peaceful black people, who seek only what should be granted to every human being, is a foul one.”

His appearance at the housing rally was all the more remarkable given his speech about integrated housing only three years earlier. On that occasion, he announced, “I don’t believe in forced integration. I know where I belong. I’m not going to force myself into anybody’s house. I’m not joining no forced integration movement, because it don’t work. A man has got to know where he belongs.”

It was clear that his thinking had evolved significantly since then and that he had a clearer understanding of the social forces that powered American society. That afternoon, he made a clear link between his anti-war stand and the plight of his people.“Why should they ask me, another so-called Negro, 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?” he told reporters who questioned him about his impending decision. “I will not disgrace my religion, my people, or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for justice, equality, and freedom. I have been warned that to take such a stand would put my prestige in jeopardy and 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. 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 have to either 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.”

While Ali was lending his unprecedented support to a civil rights protest, King was preparing to undergo his own remarkable political metamorphosis as the SCLC Board convened. That morning, the Pentagon had reported 274 American deaths in Vietnam the week before—the highest casualty figures of the war to date. Now, King and his board were finally ready to respond. After a somewhat divisive debate the SCLC endorsed a document calling the war “morally and politically unjust” and charged that it had “drowned the Negro’s cry for equal rights.” The document emphasized the unfairness of 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.” The author of the landmark document was Muhammad Ali’s lawyer, Charles Morgan Jr.

Three days later, free at last to speak publicly about the issue that had plagued him since 1965, Dr. King appeared at New York’s Riverside Church and gave one of his most eloquent speeches.“Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path,” he began. “Since I am a preacher I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision.”

For almost an hour, he proceeded to outline these reasons, directly linking the goals of the civil rights movement to ending the war. “There is at the outset a very obvious and facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago it seemed there was a real promise of hope for the poor—both black and white—through the Poverty Program. Then came the build-up in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war.… Somehow this madness must cease. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam and the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam.… The choice is ours and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.”

In one of the most controversial passages of his landmark speech, King used language far stronger than anything Muhammad Ali or even Stokely Carmichael had uttered to date, calling the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”

Reaction was swift and fierce, unleashing what King’s lieutenant Andrew Young called “a torrent of hate and venom.” Like Ali when he first spoke out against the war, King was attacked from all sides. The establishment reacted predictably. The
New York Times
called King’s speech “reckless” and accused him of whitewashing Hanoi. But to his surprise, some of the harshest criticism came from the leadership of the black community.

The sixty-member board of the NAACP unanimously passed a resolution declaring, “To attempt to merge the civil rights movement with the peace movement, or to assume that one is dependent on the other, is in our judgment a serious tactical mistake. It will serve the cause neither of civil rights nor of peace.”

Ironically, Julian Bond—who had recently won his fight to be seated in the Georgia legislature after his own anti-war stand—is today the national chairperson of the NAACP. He recalls the attitude of the black establishment: “When Dr. King was marching against segregation, everybody could embrace him. It was almost a motherhood issue for liberals. But when he came out against the war, all of a sudden he was a pariah. This was considered very radical at the time and there were accusations that he was a communist. The black establishment didn’t want to be associated with this controversy. Some of them thought it was unpatriotic, some of them thought it would hurt the civil rights cause. One thing was for sure. It felt pretty good that I wasn’t alone anymore and I’m sure Muhammad Ali felt the same way. It was actually a terribly important milestone in the movement.”

J. Edgar Hoover was incensed by King’s speech, writing President Johnson, “He’s an instrument in the hands of subversive forces seeking to undermine our nation.”

Harry Belafonte believes the attacks on King for his anti-war stand helped create “a climate of hate and distortion” that led to his assassination a year later.

Meanwhile, King’s sentiments were being echoed by a growing minority of vocal black militants and white students, who were turning against the war in increasing numbers. On April 15, two weeks before Ali’s scheduled induction date, the largest anti-Vietnam demonstrations up to that point took place throughout the United States and Europe. In New York’s Central Park, more than one hundred thousand protesters gathered to announce they had no intention of going to war. The protest saw the largest ever mass-burning of draft cards by more than two hundred young men. Martin Luther King Jr. attended the rally and vowed, “This is just the beginning of a massive outpouring of concern and protest activity against this illegal and unjust war.” An increasingly paranoid President Johnson warned that the FBI was “keeping an eye on anti-war activity.”

The same day, outside the U.S. Embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square, a twenty-one-year-old Oxford University student named Bill Clinton joined thousands of British demonstrators protesting American involvement in Vietnam in his first-ever political demonstration. Among the leaflets handed out that day was one reading, “LBJ Don’t Send Muhammad Ali to War.” Thirty years later, Clinton—whose own draft evasion had come back to haunt him—would invite Ali to the White House and praise his “courage and inspiration.”

Two days after the anti-war rallies, the Supreme Court refused to grant Ali’s request for an injunction to block his induction. His lawyers had argued that he had been the victim of discrimination as a Negro by the Kentucky Selective Service system.

Now that his last, best chance to stay out of the Army was thwarted, Ali was asked by reporters if he would refuse induction by not taking the oath.’ “I’m not saying that,” he replied, “but I’ve made my decision and I will give it at that time.You can make your own conclusions when I say I will stand on my religious beliefs and will be ready to face any punishment in following them.”

As King came under attack for his comments about Vietnam, Ali’s induction date loomed ever closer, and he too was feeling the heat from all sides. If it wasn’t the patriots expressing their disgust, it was the students yelling, “Hell no, don’t go! Hell no, don’t go!” or “Stand up to them! Stand up!” every time he showed his face in public. But neither side was going to make his decision for him. Nor were his lawyers and their reminder of the grave consequences if he didn’t report—five years in prison and the loss of his heavyweight title.

If public sentiment and dire warnings didn’t influence Ali, however, there is no doubt that he was listening to his mentor, Elijah Muhammad, with whom he continued to meet regularly at the Nation of Islam’s Chicago headquarters. It was almost exactly twenty-five years since the Messenger had been arrested by the FBI for advising his followers not to register for World War II. Now he reminded Ali to follow his conscience, mindful of the consequences should he counsel Ali to break the law. Ali’s spiritual teacher Jeremiah Shabazz insists that Elijah didn’t tell his most famous follower what to do.

“Nobody put pressure on Ali not to go into the Army,” he said. “The Messenger might have counseled him regarding what to say and not to say, but the final decision was all his own. Now you know and I know that once Ali starts going in a direction, sometimes it’s like a bulldozer with no driver. He just keeps going and going.”

Asked by reporters what he had told Ali about the draft, the Messenger replied, “Every one of my followers is free to make his own choice. I gave him no more advice than I gave the faithful ones who followed me to the penitentiary in 1942.”

As powerful an influence as Elijah Muhammad was, however, there was one person Ali respected even more, his mother Odessa. He knew she was against his decision, and it troubled him. It was against this backdrop of conflicting emotions that he made plans to fly to Houston on April 27 for his fateful encounter.

As he and his lawyer Chauncey Eskridge arrived at O’Hare Airport for the flight to Texas, the boxer was swarmed by journalists wanting to know what he planned to do.

“Will you give up the title?”

“Don’t you think it’s your duty to defend your country?”

“Are you going to take that step?”

The step they referred to was the traditional step forward draftees are required to take when their names are called at the army induction center. For the time being, he was keeping the answer to himself, although it was clear to those around him that he hadn’t changed his mind.

As the plane took off, the captain announced over the intercom, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Heavyweight Champion of the World is your travelling companion. Have a delightful trip.” But even thirty thousand feet in the air, Ali couldn’t escape the explosive impact of his impending decision.

The first hour of the trip proved uneventful as Ali signed autographs for his fellow passengers and chatted with his lawyer about what would happen the next day. Suddenly the plane ran into heavy turbulence, sending trays flying through the cabin. Many passengers panicked.