…immediately following his first victory over Liston, he declared himself a convert to the Nation of Islam (more popularly known as the Black Muslims) and “no longer a Christian.” He repudiated his “slave name” of Cassius Marcellus Clay to become Muhammad Ali. (A name which, incidentally, the New York Times, among other censorious white publications, would not honor through the 1960’s.) Ali became, virtually overnight, a spokesman for black America as no other athlete, certainly not the purposefully reticent Joe Louis, had ever done—“I don’t have to be what you want me to be,” he told white, media-dominated America, “I’m free to be what I want to be.” Two years later, refusing to be inducted into the army to fight in Vietnam, Ali, beleaguered by reporters, uttered one of the great, incendiary remarks of that era: “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.”

How ingloriously white America responded to Ali, how unashamedly racist and punitive: the government retaliated by overruling a judge who had granted Ali the status of conscientious objector, fined him $10,000 and sentenced him to five years in prison; outrageously, he was stripped of his heavyweight title and deprived of his license to box. Eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court would overturn the conviction, and, as the tide of opinion shifted in the country, in the early 1970’s as the Vietnam War wound down, Ali returned triumphantly to boxing again, and regained the heavyweight title not once but twice.

On Boxing, Joyce Carol Oates (via tzedek)