'I Aint Got No Quarrel With Them Vietcong

'On June 22, 1967, I picked up a copy of the Pacific Stars and Stripes — the official military newspaper — in Saigon to find, there on Page 1, a story about Muhammad Ali, whom a judge had just sentenced to up to five years in prison. He was, at the time, the greatest boxer in the world, even if he’d been stripped of his world heavyweight title months before. His crime? Refusing the draft.

The conviction and sentencing — he got a $10,000 fine as well — had happened two days earlier, but it took that long for the news to travel to us in Vietnam. It wasn’t exactly a shocker: He had first refused induction at the Armed Forces Examining and Entrance Station in Houston that spring, and refused to be inducted into the Army, saying he was a conscientious objector — “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong,” he had told reporters. . .

Ali’s actions were in stark contrast to that of one of his predecessors, during a preceding war. In January 1942, just a month after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Joe Louis, the world’s heavyweight boxing champion, went to Camp Upton on Long Island, N.Y., to enlist as a private in the United States Army. Like Ali, Louis was a black man from the South — Chambers County, Ala., to be precise — and he also used his sports celebrity to talk about race. Asked about his decision to volunteer for our nation’s racially segregated Army, Joe Louis — cherished by Americans of all colors and persuasions as “The Brown Bomber” — replied, “Lots of things wrong with America, but Hitler ain’t going to fix them.”'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/27/opinion/muhammad-ali-vietnam-war.html?