Over time, it eroded his motor skills and ability to speak coherently. His wife Lonnie said even though his speech was impaired, “he sp(oke) to people with his eyes…with his heart, and they connect(ed) with him.”
…
Born Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., he joined the Nation of Islam in 1964, rejected what he called his “slave name.” Muhammad Ali replaced it. In 1975, he converted to Sunni Islam after Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad died.

He refused army induction during the Vietnam war, publicly calling himself a conscientious objector, famously saying “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.”

At his scheduled Houston army induction on April 28, 1967, he refused three times to step forward after his name was called.

Warned he was committing a felony, he stood firm. Arrest followed. The New York State Athletic Commission stripped him of his boxing license and world heavyweight championship title.

Other US boxing commissions followed suit. Ali couldn’t box anywhere for over three years. On June 20, 1967, a jury found him guilty. An appellate court upheld it.

Ali remained free pending the result of his Supreme Court appeal. On June 28, 1971, the High Court unanimously ruled in his favor at a time of nationwide anti-war activism – not based on his claims, because the appellate court gave no reason for denying his right to conscientiously object.

His conviction was reversed. He inspired Martin Luther King to voice public opposition to the war. Famously he called America “(t)he greatest purveyor of violence in the world – my own government. I cannot be silent.”

Ali’s anti-war activism “robbed (him) of his best years, his prime years,” his trainer Angelo Dundee explained.

Perhaps his best remembered quotes were, saying “I am the greatest,” and “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”

He’s less well-known for saying “I know I got it made while other black folks are out there catchin hell, but as long as they ain’t free, I ain’t free.”

Boxing is a violent sport, yet Ali espoused peace and nonviolence, opposed militarism, resisted racial discrimination and injustice.

His star power made his comments resonate. He abhorred the way Washington uses federal tax revenues for war-making, once saying:

“I buy a lot of bullets, at least three jet bombers a year, and pay the salary of 50,000 fighting men with the money they take from me after my fights.”

“Boxing is nothing like going to war with machine guns, bazookas, hand grenades, bomber airplanes. My intention is to box, to win a clean fight. But in war, the intention is to kill, kill, kill, kill, and continue killing innocent people.”

Ali used his fame to fight for justice outside the ring, fearlessly speaking his mind publicly. The world’s most famous pugilist became an anti-war, civil rights, nonviolence champion.

A personal note: In the early 1970s while Ali was still active in the ring, I ran into him in the lobby of my office building. 

He was with several others at the time. We passed like ships in the night. I didn’t intrude to chat. Looking back, I wish I’d have extended my hand in friendship.

One of his greatest gifts was using his talent as a world-renowned fighter to flip the script, a script used by the elite of the time to define poor black and white kids by their deficits. In his speech and actions, Ali taught a generation of young kids that their deficits were actually their strengths, that is, a sense of solidarity, compassion, a merging of the mind and the body, learning and willingness to take risks, embracing passion, connecting knowledge to power, and being attentive to the injuries of others while embracing a sense of social justice. Ali taught us how to talk back to power. Many of us learned early that what Ali was saying was that we had to flip the script in order to survive and we became acutely aware that the alleged strengths of those who oppressed us in the streets, schools, on the job, and in other spaces that our bodies inhabited were actually vicious deficits, extending from their racism to their unbridled arrogance and propensity for violence. Ali provided a language and sense of agency that provided a turning point in our being able to narrate and free ourselves from one of the most sinister forms of ideological domination — what Marie Luise Knott calls “those unexamined prejudices that keep us from thinking.”

Ali was dangerous not just as a deftly skilled boxer but also because he deeply understood that challenge, if not slow process, of unlearning the poisonous sedimented histories minority youth often have to internalize and embody in order to survive. Unlearning meant becoming attentive to the histories, traditions, daily rituals, and social relations that offered both a sense of resistance and allowed people to think beyond the inflicted misery and suffering that marked their neighbourhoods and daily lives. It meant not only learning about resistance in their lost histories but also how to narrate themselves from the perspective of understanding both the toxic cultural capital that shored up racist state power and those modes of knowledge and social relations that allowed us to challenge it. It also meant unlearning those modes of oppression that too many of us had internalized, obvious examples being the rampant sexism and hypermasculinity we had been taught were matters of common sense and reputable badges of identity. But in the end, Ali taught us to believe in and fight for our convictions.

Outside of being the greatest boxer in the world, Ali sacrificed three and a half years of his career for the ideals in which he believed. He was not merely an icon of history, he helped to shape it. Ali had his flaws, and his ridicule of Joe Frazier and his disowning of Malcolm X speak to those shortcomings, but Ali was not a god, he was simply flawed differently. What is most remarkable about him as a fighter for the underdog was his ability to flip the script. It will be hard to find people like Ali in the future now that self-interest and a pathological narcissism have taken over the culture in the age of casino capitalism. I will miss him and only hope his legacy will leave the traces of resistance and courage that will inspire another generation. He was a champ in the most courageous sense who showed generations of working class kids how to resist, struggle, and talk back with dignity and grace.