In 1966, after a hearing officer ruled that Ali’s claim was sincere, the Justice Department sent a letter to the Selective Service Board—which eventually ignored the hearing officer—disputing his finding. In the letter, the Department implied that it had found Ali had failed to satisfy each of the three tests of conscientious objection.
To the requirement that the registrant must be opposed to war in any form, the letter said Ali’s beliefs “do not appear to preclude military service in any form, but rather are limited to military service in the Armed Forces of the United States.”
To the requirement that the registrant’s opposition must be based on religious training and belief, the letter said that Ali’s “claimed objections to participation in war insofar as they are based upon the teachings of the Nation of Islam, rest on grounds which primarily are political and racial.”
To the requirement that a registrant’s opposition to war must be sincere, the letter contained several disparaging paragraphs reciting the timing and circumstances of Ali’s conscientious objector claim and concluded that “the registrant has not shown overt manifestations sufficient to establish his subjective belief where his conscientious-objector claim was not asserted until military service became imminent.”
Stewart pointed out that, in oral arguments before the Court, Solicitor General Griswold himself had conceded that Ali’s beliefs were based upon “religious training and belief.” Presenting the government’s case against Ali, Griswold had been asked by Justice Douglas whether he personally believed Ali had been sincere in his beliefs. He admitted that he believed so, which proved to be a critical legal lapse.
This kind of mistake by an accomplished legal scholar like Griswold—the government’s highest-ranking prosecutor—is unusual. It is possible that, because of the changing political winds since the original conviction and growing public sympathy for Ali, Griswold deliberately decided to give the Court an “out”—an excuse to reverse the conviction and avoid the inevitable outcry that would have resulted from Ali’s imprisonment.
Stewart had found his compromise. “Since the Appeal Board gave no reasons for its denial of the petitioner’s claim,” he wrote to his colleagues, “there is absolutely no way of knowing upon which of the three grounds offered in the Department’s letter it relied. Yet the Government now acknowledges that two of those grounds were not valid and… the Department was simply wrong as a matter of law in stating that the petitioner’s beliefs were not religiously based and were not sincerely held.”
Stewart’s clerks spent all night researching court precedents until they found the 1955 case of Sicurella vs. the United States, which involved a similar error in an advice letter by the Justice Department. In that case, the Court ruled the error was sufficient to overrule a conviction.
This technicality—the Justice Department’s wrong advice to the Appeal Board—was sufficient excuse for every justice except Burger to reverse Ali’s conviction. Even the previously reluctant justices were willing to set Ali free as long as it didn’t give carte blanche for every Black Muslim to evade the draft.
“It’s what Justice Harlan always called a ‘peewee,’” explains his former clerk Krattenmaker. “It was a way of correcting an injustice without setting a precedent and changing the law.”
The only holdout was the Chief Justice. According to Woodward and Armstrong in The Brethren, the compromise left Burger with a problem. If he dissented, his might be interpreted as a racist vote. He decided to join the others and make it unanimous. An eight-to-nothing decision would be a good lift for black people, he concluded somewhat patronizingly.
The Court’s decision was released on June 28, 1971. Gene Dibble was with Ali in Chicago when his newly vindicated friend heard the news. “We were driving in his car and we stopped at a store,” he recalls. “When he stepped out of the car, a guy came running out of the store and said he just heard on the radio that the Court had freed him. For once, Ali didn’t know what to say. I could tell he was happy. I know he thought he was going to prison.”
A swarm of reporters was waiting for the exonerated boxer at his motel, anxious to get his reaction to the news.
“It’s like a man’s been in chains all his life and suddenly the chains are taken off,” he told them. “He don’t realize he’s free until he gets the circulation back in his arms and legs and starts to use his fingers. I don’t really think I’m going to know how that feels until I start to travel, go to foreign countries, see those strange people in the street. Then I’m gonna know I’m free.”
A reporter asked whether he would take legal action to recover damages from those who hounded him into internal exile. His answer displayed the same dignity he had maintained through his seven years as a national pariah.
“No. They only did what they thought was right at the time. I did what I thought was right. That was all. I can’t condemn them for doing what they think was right.”
Ali’s greatest fight was over. Now that American society had begun to catch up to him, now that he had stripped it of some its prejudices and ignorance, he could turn back, rehabilitated, to what had brought him fame in the first place. While his most glorious days as a boxer still lay ahead—his recapturing of the heavyweight crown still to come—as a fighter in the world outside the ring, as a catalyst for change, and as a hero to his people, Muhammad Ali would never have the same impact again.
AFTERWORD
The Legacy
THROUGH THE AFRICAN NIGHT CAME the repeated cries, “Ali Bomaye! Ali Bomaye! (Ali, kill him!).” In the ring below, George Foreman’s supposedly indomitable punching power was being thwarted by Ali’s improvised rope-a-dope strategy, designed to exhaust the powerful champion.
In the weeks leading up to the fight, he had signalled a return of the old Ali, promising the skeptics he was in top form. “I rassled an alligator, I done tassled with a whale/I handcuffed lightening/threw thunder in jail. That’s bad! Only last week, I murdered a rock, injured a stone/I’m so mean, I make medicine sick!”
Behind the tallyhoo, however, was an accute understanding of the significance of the fight and what it meant for so many.
“I’m going to win the fight for the prestige,” he vowed, “not for me but to uplift my brothers who are sleeping on concrete floors today in America, black people on welfare, black people who can’t eat, black people who have no future. I want to win my title so I can walk down the alleys and talk to wineheads, the prostitutes, the dope addicts. I want to help my brothers in Louisville, Kentucky, in Cincinnati, Ohio, and here in Africa regain their dignity. That’s why I have to be a winner, that’s why I’ll beat George Foreman.”
Hardly a pundit in Zaire that night in 1974 believed an aging Ali could overcome the overwhelming odds. But cunning triumphed over clout and in the eighth round Foreman went crashing to the canvas. Muhammad Ali had reclaimed the heavyweight championship, seven years and four months after it was stripped from him. It was a feat that his forbears Jack Johnson and Joe Louis were never able to accomplish.
But it was more than a boxing title he won that night. Suddenly, a nation that reviled him only a few years earlier signaled that all was forgiven. The first sign of the changing attitude came when Ring magazine bestowed on Ali the “Fighter of the Year” designation it had refused him in 1967 because he set a bad example for American youth.
Then, a little more than seven years after he received a letter from President Johnson ordering him to report for induction, Ali received a different kind of White House invitation. Gerald Ford beckoned the redeemed champion to the Oval Office in what was billed as a great gesture of reconciliation after the trauma of Vietnam and Watergate.
It was more likely a cynical Republican ploy to court black voters. Years later, Ford explained to Thomas Hauser why he issued the invitation. “When I took office, we as a nation were pretty much torn apart. There were conflicts between families, in colleges, and on the streets. We’d gone through some serious race problems; the Vietna
m War had heightened differences; and of course there was the heritage of Watergate. And one of the major challenges my administration faced was how we could heal the country. Not that everybody had to agree, but at least we should lower our voices and listen to one another and having Muhammad Ali come to the Oval Office was part of our overall effort… and he was a man of principle. I know there were some who thought he evaded his military responsibility, but I’ve never questioned anybody’s dedication to whatever religion they believe in. I give people the maximum benefit of the doubt when they take a stand predicated on conscience. That’s always been my philosophy, so I never joined the critics who complained about what he did and didn’t do during the Vietnam War. I accepted his decision.”
Ford, who served in Congress during Ali’s exile period, may not have publicly joined the critics who denounced the champion’s induction refusal, but the record shows he never used his influential moral platform to support the boxer’s stand or praise him as “a man of principle.” In the years to come, many people would attempt to jump on the bandwagon of Ali’s growing popularity by retroactively supporting his stand. But despite their historical revisionism, at the time Ali desperately needed these people’s support, only a handful were there.
For Ali, a decade of pariah status had taken its toll and in his typically generous way he welcomed the new acceptance. But some of his supporters were not so forgiving.
“When Ali came back from exile,” recalled Jim Brown, “he became the darling of America, which was good for America because it brought black and white together. But the Ali that America ended up loving was not the Ali I loved most. I didn’t feel the same about him anymore, because the warrior I loved was gone. In a way, he became part of the establishment. And I suppose, in a sense, there’s nothing wrong with that, because if you can come to a point where you make all people feel good, maybe that’s greater than being a fighter for black people, but I didn’t like it.”
But Ali’s longtime defender, columnist Jerry Izenberg, has a different view of the boxer’s new social acceptability. “It wasn’t that Ali changed,” he explains. “He was the same as he always was. It was the rest of America that changed. The country went through Watergate and Vietnam and the turbulence of the ‘60s and it had a profound impact. Ali kept preaching the same message but now America could listen to it without going through convulsions.”
Indeed, as the resurrected boxer continued to rack up victories in the ring—including two magnificent triumphs over Joe Frazier to avenge his first defeat—the money rolled in and Ali vowed to use his earnings to fund his dream of black economic justice. But one thing hadn’t changed.
“After the Foreman fight,” recalls Gene Dibble, “there were millions of dollars pouring in, huge sums of money, more from one fight than Ali had made in his entire career. He was very excited about using the money in the ghettoes for community economic development to eliminate poverty. These lawyers took the money to invest and start a foundation in Chicago. Next thing you knew, the money was gone. It was the same old story.”
When he wasn’t being robbed blind by those around him, says Dibble, he was giving his money away. “I remember one night I got a call from Ali, who was in New York. He had been watching the local news and he saw a report about this Jewish senior citizens’ community center in the Bronx which served Holocaust survivors. They were about to shut down because they owed $100,000. Ali had called them and said he was sending a check over to bail them out. Trouble is that, as usual, he didn’t have two nickels to rub together. He wanted me to figure out where he was going to get the money he had promised them. I called a friend at the Chase Manhattan Bank and arranged a loan against Ali’s next fight purse. The center was saved.”
On February 25, 1975, the association that had brought Ali spiritual meaning and sense at the same time as it caused him terrestrial grief and ostracism came to an end with the death of Elijah Muhammad. The Nation of Islam didn’t disappear with its guiding light and leader, but it did fracture—and Ali chose to follow its most moderate faction. This decision made the boxer that much more palatable to mainstream society.
The Messenger’s son Wallace Muhammad immediately took the movement in a new direction. Wallace, who was at one time a close friend of Malcolm X, had been suspended from the Nation by his father several times for questioning Nation doctrine and had a very different philosophy. His first action was to change the name from the Nation of Islam to the World Community of Al-Islam in the West. He resurrected the memory of Malcolm and stressed his positive contributions. But most significantly, he de-emphasized racial issues and aligned the movement to traditional orthodox Islam, announcing the new organization would accept people of all races for membership.
Many militant members of the Nation were infuriated by the shift in direction. But Ali immediately embraced the changes, declaring on the CBS news show Face the Nation that it was necessary for Elijah Muhammad to speak of white devils because during much of the first half of the twentieth century, black Americans were “castrated; lynched; deprived of freedom, justice, equality; raped.” But as the result of the improved racial conditions in society, “Wallace Muhammad is on time. He’s teaching us it’s not the color of the physical body that makes a man a devil. God looks at our minds and our actions and our deeds.”
In fact, the new philosophy closely reflected what Ali had believed and preached from the beginning, and what Malcolm X espoused during the last year of his life.
But despite Ali’s endorsement, not everybody accepted the new ways. Louis X changed his name to Louis Farrakhan and led a breakaway movement of followers who refused to reject the old teachings.
To this day, Farrakhan’s movement continues to thrive in America’s inner cities, combining Elijah Muhammad’s philosophy of economic self-help and racial pride with a fanatical anti-semitism much stronger than anything heard under the Messenger’s regime. “Hitler was a great man,” Farrakhan said on one occasion, before claiming to have been quoted out of context. On another, he declared: “The Jews are responsible for the majority of wickedness in the world.”
At first, Ali was silent about Farrakhan’s leadership. But after a particularly anti-semitic outburst was reported in the media, Ali declared, “What he teaches is not at all what we believe in. We say he represents the time of our struggle in the dark and a time of confusion in us and we don’t want to be associated with that at all.”
As his boxing skills waned, many of Ali’s friends and supporters urged him to retire while he was on top. But for the vultures and hangers-on, this would have meant the elimination of their cash cow. Each time the aging boxer publicly contemplated retirement, he was convinced to put on the gloves “one more time.”
After losing to a journeyman boxer named Leon Spinks, in 1978 he became the first three-time heavyweight champion by winning the rematch seven months later, insisting Spinks had merely “borrowed” his title. The Spinks defeat wasn’t humiliation enough and, like a parody of the fighter who doesn’t know when to quit, Ali left retirement and returned to the ring twice more to put on ever-sadder spectacles and enrich the parasites in his entourage.
Almost as disturbing to his old friends was his brief political flirtation with Ronald Reagan, the man who did more to set back the cause of civil rights than any other politician. To the chagrin of the black community, Ali endorsed Reagan for President in 1980, citing the right-wing candidate’s promise to restore prayer to public schools. He later blamed this decision on “bad advice.”
In September 1984, Ali checked into the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York for a series of routine diagnostic tests, complaining of slurred speech and trembling hands. A week later, the results were released. Ali was suffering mild symptoms of Parkinson’s Syndrome, an ailment which is not the same as the degenerative, and more serious, Parkinson’s Disease.
Even more significant than what the test diagnosed is what it ruled out. The supervising physician, Dr. Stanley Fahn,
declared, “Ali does not suffer from dementia pugilistica, commonly referred to as ‘punch-drunkenness.’ Ali’s mind is impressively alert and well-oriented.”
This diagnosis is especially significant because, in the ensuing years, the myth that Ali’s condition is related to the punishment he suffered in the ring during his later career has been widely accepted. In public appearances, his trembling hands and slurred speech—which has become more pronounced over the years—has caused the once spell-bindingly articulate and expressive man to be portrayed as a tragic figure, suffering from brain damage—a prisoner inside his own body.
In fact, anybody spending more than a few minutes with him today soon discovers Ali’s mind is completely intact. His quick wit and practical jokes are still there and apparent to anybody who takes the time to listen to his slowed speech, muted to a near whisper. Parkinson’s Syndrome, in fact, can be controlled by medication but Ali is often reluctant to take chemical substances and it is often a losing battle to get him to take his medicine.
Despite the self-righteous tones of those who use Ali’s condition to call for a ban on boxing, significant scientific evidence has emerged in recent years that his Parkinson’s Syndrome was caused not by too many blows in the ring, but by too much exposure to pesticides. During the last decade of his career, Ali trained in a complex at Deer Lake, Pennsylvania. Each of the buildings was made of wood, which neccessitated liberal coatings of a chemical pesticide to keep away termites. A number of medical studies have linked this and other pesticides to Parkinson’s, although there is still an ongoing debate in the scientific community, and boxing certainly hasn’t been ruled out as the cause of his condition.
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