Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight (25 page)

Two days after the induction refusal, Martin Luther King Jr. took his support for Ali’s draft stand public for the first time. In a sermon from the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, King praised Ali’s courage: “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. No matter what you think of Muhammad Ali’s religion, you have to admire his courage.”

Then, in his most controversial statement about the war to date, King used Ali as an example for others who oppose the war. “Every young man in this country who believes that this war is abominable and unjust should file as a conscientious objector,” said the Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Referring to the accusations of treason against Ali that had filled the media since the day before, he said, “There is a very dangerous development in the nation now to equate dissent with disloyalty. I don’t know about you but I ain’t going to study war no more.”

King’s top lieutenant, Andrew Young, remembers the events of that week.

“Dr. King appreciated his stand and knew how much he had suffered from what he had done,” says Young. “He wasn’t the kind of man to let Ali go through it alone.”

As King spoke, Stokely Carmichael sat in the congregation leading the applause. After the sermon, he called Ali “my hero” and praised his decision to defy the army.

“Here is a black man who can’t live where he wants to live,” Carmichael told reporters afterwards. “And they want to send him to Vietnam. It’s about time we’re going to tell him [the white man], hell no, we won’t go.”

Referring to the athletic commission’s decision to strip the heavyweight crown from Ali, Carmichael said, “A bunch of honkies took the title away from him as if they gave it to him. He beat every white man who got into the ring with him. Tell them boxing officials to get in the ring and get his title.”

The Johnson Administration was so worried about King’s remarks supporting Ali that they commissioned a Gallup poll to determine their impact. The results confirmed what most objective observers had already sensed. J. Edgar Hoover and the White House had completely overestimated the influence of Ali. Most Americans, white
and
black, had no sympathy for Ali’s stand, even with the endorsement of Dr. King. And the antipathy for the reluctant draftee was especially strong in the armed forces.

Clide Brown, a black Marine sergeant serving in Vietnam, told
Time
magazine, “Clay gave up being a man when he decided against getting inducted. And I don’t want him as no Negro either. They’re separatists and there’s nothing separate about this war.”

Many of the black soldiers in Vietnam had marched for civil rights and admired Martin Luther King Jr. before they entered the army. His anti-war statements caused considerable consternation.

“I don’t think any American leader, black or white, can assist the cause of freedom by preaching the cause of sedition,” said Lieutenant Colonel Warren Kynard at the time. “I don’t believe Martin Luther King is qualified enough in international relations to open his mouth on American policy on Vietnam.” These words were especially harsh considering Kynard, who is black, was once engaged to Coretta Scott King and was still a close friend of the couple.

On the battlefields of Vietnam, Ali’s actions were as controversial as they were back home. Wayne Smith was a combat medic in Vietnam for eighteen months. Today he recalls his emotions when Ali refused induction: “I had very mixed feelings. My family raised me to believe that as a black American, I had a duty to convince white Americans that blacks were just as patriotic as they were. But I was very aware of the inequities. I think at first when Ali came out against the war, I disagreed with him.”

Smith, who is now on the board of the National Veterans’ Legal Services Project, recalls that Ali was a hot topic of conversation at the time in Vietnam: “The Viet Cong used to leave propaganda leaflets on the side of the road for us to find saying,
BLACK SOLDIERS: NO VIETNAMESE EVER CALLED YOU NIGGER!
The white soldiers would constantly denigrate him, the conversations would be pretty nasty. After a while, I began to realize that the war was largely a sham. In retrospect, I have greater respect for Ali. It took a lot of courage for him to take that stand.”

In Vietnam in April 1967, there were 380 combat battalions. Only two were headed by blacks. Out of 11,000 officers serving in Southeast Asia, fewer than 600 were black. “White officers,” noted
Time
magazine in an article about blacks in Vietnam, “stubbornly kept Negroes out of top command positions.”

According to Robert Lipsyte, there was a prevailing myth about racial attitudes towards the war at the time Ali took his stand. “A lot of people believe whites supported the war and blacks opposed it at that time,” he says. “In fact, most white
and
black Americans supported the war and opposed Ali in April 1967.”

This seems to be borne out by Wallace Terry, who covered the war for
Time.
“In 1967, only thirty-five percent of Blacks and less than twenty percent of whites opposed the war,” he says. “I did a survey of Blacks in the armed forces and they were still overwhelmingly supportive of the war. That was about to change but at the time Ali took his stand, he didn’t have a whole lot of sympathy from black soldiers.”

Three days after he refused to take the step, Ali’s legal team filed an appeal in federal court, arguing that his draft call was unconstitutional because Blacks were significantly under-represented on draft boards. In Kentucky, where Ali was first drafted, only one of 641 draft board members was black, or 0.16 percent, even though Blacks comprised 7.1 percent of the Kentucky population. Ali’s lawyer, Charles Morgan Jr., had already filed a lawsuit on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union in South Carolina and Georgia—another state where only one black sat on a draft board.

The appeal filed on behalf of Ali charged that his Selective Service file was jammed with “reams of letters and newspaper clippings of a prejudicial nature” that deprived the former champion of a fair process.

“From big cities to small towns across America came the cry ‘Get him,’” the appeal asserted, citing one letter to Ali’s Louisville draft board that said, “You are still cowards, eh? Send that nigger away.”

Ali’s lawyer asked that induction of
all
blacks be halted until the draft system inducting them was integrated.

“These suits were more political than anything else,” admits Morgan today. “They were designed to point out the unfairness of the draft system, where blacks were being sent to Vietnam in disproportionate numbers by white boards.”

In fact, during the war, 31 percent of eligible black males were drafted, but only 18 percent of whites, who were more likely to receive student deferments or be declared ineligible on a technicality—usually arranged by a high-priced lawyer.

On May 8, Ali was indicted as expected by a federal grand jury in Houston—the first step leading to what was assumed would be his conviction and incarceration. Only one of the twenty-one grand jurors was black. A trial date was set for June and he was photographed, fingerprinted, and released on $5,000 bail. If the indicted champion was having second thoughts about his decision, it didn’t show two days later when he addressed a crowd of sixteen hundred students at the University of Chicago stadium.

“My intention is to box to win a clean fight but in war the intention is to kill, kill, kill and continue killing innocent people,” he told the mostly white crowd. “It has been said that I have two alternatives—go to jail or the army. But there is another—justice! If justice prevails, I will neither go to jail or to the army.”

Yet privately, Ali held out little hope for justice. He was already making plans to go to prison and sorting out his financial affairs. His first stop was to Dibble’s Garage in Chicago to store his bus. Then off to close up his long-term room at the 50th-on-the-Lake Motel where he had stayed in Chicago since his apartment was firebombed following the assassination of Malcolm X two years earlier.

“I don’t want to go to jail,” he said as he took care of business, “but I’ve got to live the life my conscience and my God tell me to. What does it profit me to be the wellest-liked man in America who sold out everybody?”

Still, despite the indictment, prison was not an inevitability. The head of the Houston U.S. Attorney’s office, Mort Susman, signaled to Ali’s legal team that it wasn’t too late to work out a deal. Calling together Ali, his lawyers, and selected advisers, Susman arranged a series of meetings at the Houston federal building. “They tried to convince me that we didn’t have a case, that Ali would almost surely win on appeal, and that I should drop the charges against him,” Susman recalls. “That wasn’t going to happen. First of all, this was a high-profile case and we couldn’t just let him get away with refusing induction. That would have sent a very negative signal at the time when the war was heating up. But I had been talking to the Army and the Justice Department and I had been given a very strong assurance that if Ali accepted induction, he would be able to enter Special Services. He could fight exhibitions, that sort of thing. If he went to Vietnam, it would only be to entertain the troops, not to fight. I wouldn’t call it a deal exactly. I wasn’t authorized to promise him anything but they knew what was being offered.

“We met more than once and I can tell you that they were very close to accepting, very close. But in the end, they called and said no. I don’t know what happened exactly, I think he almost changed his mind but his people wanted to make a martyr of him.”

Susman’s assessment of the situation is only partially correct. A deal was almost struck, but it was Ali, not his advisers, who rejected the government’s offer.

A year before, Ali’s original contract with the Louisville Sponsoring Group had expired. Sensing the potential for immense revenues, the Nation of Islam stepped in to fill the void. Elijah Muhammad’s son, Herbert, and John Ali—national secretary of the Nation and its second most powerful official—formed a promotional company called Main Bout, Inc. to market the ancillary rights to Ali’s fights. The two prominent Muslims controlled 50 percent of Main Bout stock; the rest was split among Bob Arum, a former New York City prosecutor; Mike Malitz, son of closed-circuit pioneer Lester Malitz; and football star Jim Brown, who had retired from professional sports in 1965 and had become very close to Ali.

With revenues set to dry up if Ali went to prison, the new firm stood to lose millions of dollars. It was this financial consideration, reveals Brown, that hung over the negotiations to have Ali accept induction.

“I received a call from Herbert Muhammad,” he later recalled. “He said he had reason to believe that the United States government would make a deal with Ali, allow him to enter the Special Services, where he wouldn’t have to go to war, could perhaps retain his title, continue boxing. Herbert wanted me to broach the idea to Ali. But he wanted me to do it without telling Ali who I received my information from….I’ll tell you the truth, Herbert would not have minded Ali going into the Army, because they were starting to make good money together.”

Brown—who admits that he didn’t necessarily oppose the deal—called together ten of the most prominent black athletes in the country to meet Ali and discuss his options. Among the athletes who met with Ali at Brown’s Cleveland office were Bill Russell, the Boston Celtics basketball star; All-American UCLA basketball player Lew Alcindor (who later converted to Islam and changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar); Bobby Mitchell and Jim Shorter of the Washington Redskins; Willie Davis of the Green Bay Packers; John Wooten, Sid Williams, and Walter Beach of the Cleveland Browns; and Curtis McClinton of the Kansas City Chiefs. Some of them tried hard to dissuade Ali from his decision to defy the draft.

Brown already knew their arguments would fail to change the indicted champion’s mind. The night before the meeting, he met privately with Ali and, as promised, broached the subject of the government deal. He recalls his friend’s unequivocal response.