RECALLING MUHAMMAD ALI'S
VIETNAM WAR RESISTANCE
IN THE AGE OF TRUMP
Les conséquences positives de ce qu’il a fait j’arrive pas a trouver svp ?!!?


When
Then Cassius Clay changed his name to
Muhammad Ali, and when he later refused
the call of the military during the war in Vietnam,
he was not universally cheered. Hardly. Ali was not
prepared to give his life, or kill Vietnamese, on behalf
ofa society that barely valued his life or that of his fellow-
black men and women. Or, as he put it,"Why should they
ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand
miles from home and drop bombs and bullets
on brown people in Vietnam while so-called
Negro people in Louisville are treated like
dogs?... If I thought the war was going to bring
freedom and equality to twenty-two million
of my people, they wouldn't have to draft me.
I'd join tomorrow. [-] I have nothing to lose by
standing up for my beliefs. We've been in jail for four
hundred years."
On April 28, 1967, at the U.S. Armed Forces Examining
and Entrance Station in Houston, Ali, standing beside
twenty-five other nerve-racked young men called to the draft, refused to
respond to the call of "Cassius Clay!". He said no, and was sentenced to five
years in prison and released on bail. Boxing authorities quickly stripped
him of his championship title and suspended his license to box in New York
State. He was twenty-five years old, deprived of his livelihood.
David Remnick, The New Yorker, September 24, 2017