The state weaponized the draft to break a Black Muslim dissident’s influence.

Evidence

But there was no more effective symbol of both domestic and international political resistance to US power than Muhammad Ali, whose principled stand against the Vietnam War resulted in the forfeiture of his world heavyweight boxing crown. Ali, a hero to many people of color and leftists around the world, was seen as a fifth column—the enemy inside the walls—by the US government, which sought to blunt his rising popularity by any means available. In this case, the US Army drafted him. In 1966, at the height of the military conflict in Vietnam, Ali proclaimed that he was willing to give up his boxing crown and go to jail rather than be inducted. He said that he was a conscientious objector whose religion prohibited the killing of innocents. Casting the Vietnam War as a racist and immoral conflict, Ali also stated that the US participation was hypocritical: quipping that “no Vietcong ever called me nigger,” Ali pointed out the irony of the United States defending freedom abroad when it still had its own problems with racial equality at home. In 1967, he was convicted of draft evasion and stripped of his boxing title. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 407

Categorization

• SHARE: The state using the draft as a political weapon against Ali — worth flagging for anyone working on conscientious objection or the politicization of military conscription.
• XREF: Mirrors current framing of the frightened subject deciding which Muslims count as ‘real’ — Ali, a convert to a ‘foreign’ religion, becomes the enemy inside.