Muhammad Ali

Muhammad Ali   (Click to enlarge: opens in new window)

Muhammad Ali 1942 – 2016

A fighter who inspired millions

World champion boxer Muhammad Ali died on 3 June. As well as his sporting achievements, many will mourn the loss of an activist of the 1960s anti-war and black liberation movements. Here we carry an extract of an article by Hugo Pierre originally published in 2003 in Socialism Today. The full article can be read at socialismtoday.org/72/ali

The development of a mass civil rights movement, beginning in the early 1950s and lasting nearly three decades, brought to the fore some of the most courageous US black leaders. It inspired workers, youth and the oppressed to struggle, not just in the US but around the world.

One of the most celebrated figures linked to this movement is Mohammad Ali, born Cassius Clay in 1942 to a poor working class family in Louisville, Kentucky. He became probably the greatest heavy-weight boxer of all times. Clay took the name Mohammad Ali when he acknowledged his membership of the black nationalist Nation of Islam in 1964.

In the summer of 1955 a 14 year old Detroit schoolboy, Emmett Till, was brutally murdered for whistling to a white woman cashier in a shop. An all-white jury acquitted the murderers. A mood of determination to defeat segregation and the racist Jim Crow laws gripped Southern blacks.

When in 1955 Rosa Parks, a department store worker, refused to give up her seat to a white man, the Montgomery bus boycott began. The boycott started the mass movement across the South to end segregation.

Racism

Influenced by these events and others, the young Cassius Clay attended a number of civil rights demonstrations. Professional sports, and boxing in particular, had at times reflected and impacted on the battle against US racism.

Before it was professionalised, slave owners often used to pit ‘their man’ against another slave owner’s for sport and gambling. When it was professionalised, the white champions would refuse to fight black challengers.

Cassius Clay had been attracted to the Nation of Islam since his school days. The Nation would have remained a sect, had it not been popularised by its radical leader Malcolm X. The Nation vehemently opposed participating in the mass civil rights movement, calling instead for self-containment and separation of blacks from ‘white’ America.

But the mass events taking place had a profound effect on Malcolm X. In 1962 Los Angeles police invaded Mosque 27 and one of its leading members was shot and killed. Malcolm X was prevented by the Nation’s leadership from launching a defence campaign. He also supported a union boycott of a firm in New York that refused to hire black workers, against the wishes of the other Nation leaders.

Malcolm X

Malcolm’s activism, his support for involvement in the mass struggle for black rights and, especially, his increasing concern with economic and class issues, brought him more and more into conflict with the Elijah Muhammad leadership. He was increasingly critical of the idea of black separation and was moving towards a position of solidarity with the white working class.

In the end, the Nation’s leadership organised his assassination, with the collusion of the US law-enforcement agencies. Despite the close friendship that had grown between Malcolm X and Mohammad Ali, the political split within the Nation separated them, with Ali’s political inclinations closer to Elijah.

The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1965 but the struggle for more than just voting rights continued. One key issue was the developing war in Vietnam.

In 1965 a poll showed 84% of blacks opposed the war but disproportionately more blacks were being drafted into the army. The youth involved in the civil rights movement under the leadership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee came out against the war in Vietnam.

In 1966 Ali refused to be conscripted into the army, asserting that he was a conscientious objector on religious grounds. His ringing declaration in response to the draft – “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong” – catapulted him into the forefront of the then infant anti-war movement.

In 1967 Ali was sentenced to five years in jail for refusing to accept the draft, and the World Boxing Association (WBA) stripped him of his title. Eventually, in 1970, the conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court (which upheld his right to be a conscientious objector on religious grounds), and the WBA had to reinstate him.

The pacifist movement for civil rights which had begun in 1954 with a peaceful boycott was developing into a class war. The more far-sighted leaders had started to conclude that the struggle for black liberation was intimately connected to the struggle of the working class.

Symbol

The youth in particular strove for this understanding and the most determined representatives of the movement, the Black Panther Party, adopted some elements of Marxism.

Undoubtedly the US authorities feared the potential impact of a politically active Ali at this time, following the defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal that unseated the disgraced president, Richard Nixon.

Later, governments tried to use Ali for their own purposes. As a powerful political symbol of black defiance, the state has been forced to incorporate his legend into its re-writing of history.

Despite this, however, when blacks in the US are forced into struggle, the youth and the new leaders who will come forward will continue to take inspiration from Ali’s determination. He inspired millions around the world.