Muhammad Ali’s power was as much in his conscience as it was in his fists. The most enduring image of Ali may be the ‘rumble in the jungle’ in 1974 in Zaire, but his most enduring legacy was his fight for the oppressed both at home and abroad.
It was his uncompromising positions against racism at home (in the US) and imperialism abroad that will arguably be his greatest social legacy.
Ali took on America and refused to be afraid, and that gave people courage – courage not only to swim against the tide, but to believe in themselves.
Ali not only galvanised the civil rights movement in the US at the height of racial oppression in the 1960s, but he formed a bridge between the black liberation movements and the anti-war movement that rejected America’s war in Indochina.
He showed America, and the world, what it meant to stand by your convictions no matter the cost. Perhaps his greatest act was not fighting, but refusing to fight.
When he refused to fight in the war in Vietnam in 1966, he fully understood the consequences of that decision, but he was unequivocal in his denunciation of the war at a time when most Americans supported it.
As a result of refusing the draft, he was stripped of his heavyweight title, arrested, convicted, and sentenced to five years in prison. A year later his conviction was overturned by a unanimous decision of the Supreme Court.
In the end, he had lost three-and-a-half years as a champion boxer at the prime of his career, along with millions of dollars in revenue, but he succeeded in turning his celebrity into a platform for political activism and social justice.
The public statements he made about the war in Vietnam contributed to the transformation of American thinking, and the image of the draft dodger became less one of weakness, but one of principles.
He is still remembered for his famous statement: “Why should they ask me to go 10 000 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?
“No, I am not going 10 000 miles from home to help murder and burn another nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters over the darker people of the world. This is the day when such evils must come to an end.
“The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people, or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality.”
As Noam Chomsky later wrote, Ali made people question why poor people in the United States were being forced by rich people in the US to kill poor people in Vietnam. It was a direct challenge to the establishment and their propaganda, that was being carried largely uncritically by the mainstream media.
In the end, Ali was vindicated as even the architect of the war in Vietnam – Robert McNamara – admitted that the war was wrong.
For Ali the fight was not just about refusing to participate in an imperial war in Vietnam, but it was also resistance to white American hegemony. What Ali made people do was question the wisdom of American foreign policy in the world, and interrogate whether it was in their interests to follow along blindly. His stature provided fuel to anti-war rhetoric and to the movement itself.
Ali’s activism was essentially global, and reached even the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon. In 1974 he visited the camps and declared in Beirut: “The US is the stronghold of Zionism and imperialism. I declare support for the Palestinian struggle to liberate their homeland, and oust the Zionist invaders.” This was a particularly potent message at the time.
In the eulogising of Ali since his passing, his vocal solidarity with the Palestinian cause was conveniently forgotten by the mainstream media.
It was his conversion to Islam which made his revolutionary niche even more unique. His conversion was an act of transnational identification with the oppressed of the world.
By joining the Nation of Islam in 1964, Ali was rebelling against Christianity, which he saw as the religion of the slave holders. He saw Islam as a force for radical protest against western power. It has been argued that Ali helped to transform Islam into a potential tool of anti-imperial, anti-colonial, and anti-western activism. But Ali was not a supporter of the militant Islam which emerged in the 1980s, being a pacifist at heart.
In weighing up Muhammad Ali’s legacy, it is clear that he was a man who belonged not just to America, but to the world.
He will forever remain an iconic hero from whom we will continue to draw inspiration. - Cape Times