Editor’s Pick

david fenton / archive photos / getty images
01 July, 2016

THE BOXING CHAMPION Muhammad Ali marches in a protest in New York City in September of 1970, with members of the Black Panther Party—a radical group seeking to empower black Americans.

Ali, who died early last month, was born in 1942, in Kentucky: a state in the racially-segregated south of the United States. Boxing offered an escape from the deprivation he faced as a young black man. He won an Olympic gold medal at the age of 18, and went on to clinch many more titles in professional boxing, including the world heavyweight championship.

As a fighter, Ali was an especially resonant symbol of black pride during the American civil-rights movement of the 1960s, because activists frequently suffered police brutality while peacefully demonstrating against racial discrimination. As Ali became more political over the course of the movement, he forged ties with Malcolm X, the radical black leader; the Nation of Islam, an organisation of black Muslims; and the Black Panthers. He was particularly influenced by the Panthers’ opposition to the US invasion of Vietnam—which they deemed an imperialist conquest born of a racism similar to the kind black Americans were facing.

In April 1967, Ali announced that, even if conscripted, he would refuse to fight in Vietnam. “They never called me nigger,” he said of the Vietnamese. “They never lynched me. They never put no dogs on me. They never robbed me of my nationality, or raped and killed my mother and father. … How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.”

As a result of his protest, Ali was summarily stripped of his heavyweight championship, suspended from boxing, convicted of draft evasion and sentenced to five years in prison. The verdict was appealed, and he did not serve time. His conviction was reversed in 1971, and three years later he regained the heavyweight title.

Ali’s defiance made him an icon of resistance worldwide. In the United States, he continues to inspire activists such as those in the Black Lives Matter movement, which is demanding an end to racialised police violence.