Muhammad Ali: The Champion Who Refused to Step Forward
He was at the height of his glory when he refused to take a single step forward. He lost his title and the best years of his boxing, and then won something more lasting.
Editorial board
Houston, 28 April 1967
On the morning of 28 April 1967 a twenty-five-year-old man stood in the induction centre in Houston, among dozens of young men called up for military service. The United States was fighting the Vietnam War, and the draft was compulsory.
He was no ordinary young man. He was the heavyweight boxing champion of the world and the most famous athlete on earth. He had embraced Islam three years earlier and changed his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali.
His name was called for him to take one step forward, the step that means accepting induction. He did not move. His name was called a second and a third time. He did not move. He was taken to a side room, where an officer warned him that he was committing a felony punishable by five years in prison and a ten-thousand-dollar fine. He did not change his position.
That same day the New York State Athletic Commission suspended his licence, and the World Boxing Association stripped him of his title. Commissions in other states followed. In June a federal court convicted him.
He did not go to prison because he appealed. But he was barred from boxing for more than three years, at the peak of his athletic youth. A year earlier he had said the words that became famous, that he had no quarrel with the Viet Cong.
On 28 June 1971 the US Supreme Court overturned his conviction by a unanimous vote of its eight sitting justices.
Source: Clay v. United States, 403 U.S. 698 (1971); archives of the New York State Athletic Commission.
Among the lives of those who pushed back are many who had nothing to lose. Muhammad Ali had everything: the title, the fame, the money and the years of glory ahead. That is what makes his refusal different. A push that costs its maker the most he has carries more weight than one that costs him nothing.
﴿وَتِلْكَ الْأَيَّامُ نُدَاوِلُهَا بَيْنَ النَّاسِ﴾[آل عمران: 140]
“And these days, We alternate them among the people.” (Al ʿImran 3:140)
Conscience as an instrument of pushing back
Muhammad Ali based his refusal on religious grounds: he would not fight in a war he did not consider just, and his faith forbade it. He asked to be treated as a conscientious objector. His request was denied. When the case reached the Supreme Court, the Court did not rule on the soundness of his religious position, but on the fact that the authorities had denied his request without giving a reason. He won, in other words, on procedure rather than principle. This is a subtle face of legal pushing back: great cases are often won through small doors.
The cost that made the meaning
The real effect of his stand was not in the court ruling but in public opinion. In 1967 many Americans supported the war, and many saw Muhammad Ali as a traitor and a draft dodger. By 1971 the war had lost its popularity, and his stand looked to many like courage ahead of its time. Muhammad Ali had not changed; the people around him had. In 1974 he regained the world title in Kinshasa by defeating George Foreman. And these days, We alternate them among the people.
His stand influenced a whole generation of athletes and activists, showing that a sporting hero could hold a moral position and pay its price, rather than be a mere face for advertising.
The limits of the life
In those years Muhammad Ali belonged to the Nation of Islam, a group with separatist and counter-racist ideas whose creed departed from Sunni Islam on major fundamentals. He echoed some of its rhetoric in that period. Then in 1975 he turned to Sunni Islam, abandoned those ideas, and became in later life a symbol of tolerance among religions. He also acknowledged later that he had hurt his rival Joe Frazier with harsh insults outside the ring, and expressed regret for it.
These changes do not weaken his life story; they make it the story of a man who learned and matured. He died in 2016 after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease, and thousands prayed over him at a funeral that brought together many faiths and races.