Ali
"But Ali’s appeal was extending far beyond black America. When he refused induction into the United States Army, he stood up to armies everywhere in support of the proposition that, “Unless you have a very good reason to kill, war is wrong.”
Many Americans vehemently condemned Ali’s stand. It came at a time when most people in the United States still supported the war. But as Julian Bond noted, “When Ali refused to take the symbolic step forward, everybody knew about it moments later. You could hear people talking about it on street corners. It was on everyone’s lips.”
“The government didn’t need Ali to fight the war,” Ramsey Clark, then the attorney general of the United States, recalled. “But they would have loved to put him in the service; get his picture in there; maybe give him a couple of stripes on his sleeve, and take him all over the world. Think of the power that would have had in Africa, Asia, and South America.”
Instead, the government got a reaffirmation of Ali’s earlier statement: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.” “And that rang serious alarm bells,” sociologist Noam Chomsky later wrote, “because it raised the question of why poor people in the United States were being forced by rich people in the United States to kill poor people in Vietnam. Putting it simply, that’s what it amounted to. And Ali put it very simply in ways that people could understand.”
By the late 1960s, Ali had become a living embodiment of the proposition that principles matter. His power no longer resided in his fists. It came from his conscience."
- from The Importance of Muhammad Ali, by Thomas Hauser writing on the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History's website.
Ali
"But Ali’s appeal was extending far beyond black America. When he refused induction into the United States Army, he stood up to armies everywhere in support of the proposition that, “Unless you have a very good reason to kill, war is wrong.”
Many Americans vehemently condemned Ali’s stand. It came at a time when most people in the United States still supported the war. But as Julian Bond noted, “When Ali refused to take the symbolic step forward, everybody knew about it moments later. You could hear people talking about it on street corners. It was on everyone’s lips.”
“The government didn’t need Ali to fight the war,” Ramsey Clark, then the attorney general of the United States, recalled. “But they would have loved to put him in the service; get his picture in there; maybe give him a couple of stripes on his sleeve, and take him all over the world. Think of the power that would have had in Africa, Asia, and South America.”
Instead, the government got a reaffirmation of Ali’s earlier statement: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.” “And that rang serious alarm bells,” sociologist Noam Chomsky later wrote, “because it raised the question of why poor people in the United States were being forced by rich people in the United States to kill poor people in Vietnam. Putting it simply, that’s what it amounted to. And Ali put it very simply in ways that people could understand.”
By the late 1960s, Ali had become a living embodiment of the proposition that principles matter. His power no longer resided in his fists. It came from his conscience."
- from The Importance of Muhammad Ali, by Thomas Hauser writing on the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History's website.