“Afraid of what? Of the Muslims if you don’t do what they told you?”
Ali would not answer. Robinson pressed, but the champ remained silent. When Robinson recalled the story for a writer, he said, “If you ask me, he wasn’t afraid of jail. He was scared of being killed by the Muslims.”
MUHAMMAD ALI WOULD not give boxing exhibitions for the army, nor would he fight the Vietcong. “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?” he asked a reporter from Sports Illustrated. “If I thought going to war would bring freedom and equality to twenty-two million of my people, they wouldn’t have to draft me. I’d join tomorrow. But I either have to obey the laws of the land or the laws of Allah. I have nothing to lose by standing up and following my beliefs. We’ve been in jail for four hundred years.”14
On April 20, 1967, Ali refused induction at the US Armed Forces Examining and Entrance Station in Houston. He proclaimed that he was a conscientious objector, opposing all wars undeclared by Allah. Immediately after he refused induction—before he had been charged with a crime—the New York State Athletic Commission suspended his boxing license and withdrew his heavyweight title for conduct “detrimental to the best interests of boxing.” Athletic commissions across the country followed New York’s lead, forbidding his presence in the ring. On June 20, a federal court convicted him of draft evasion, sentencing him to the maximum five-year imprisonment and ten-thousand-dollar fine. For the next three and a half years, during his appeal and the prime of his boxing career, he was banished from the ring. Although he never went to prison, his fans believed that the government and the boxing authorities that banned him from the ring had already shackled him.15
Without boxing, Ali fell on hard times. In early 1969, during a paid television interview on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, he complained to Howard Cosell that he was nearly broke and that he would return to boxing if the price was right. Infuriated, Elijah Muhammad immediately suspended him for failing to follow his teachings of prudence. In the pages of Muhammad Speaks, the Messenger announced that Ali was barred from all NOI meetings and speaking with its members. The Nation would no longer recognize him as a Muslim. Giving him back his slave name, Elijah declared, “We will call him Cassius Clay.”16
In Elijah’s view, Ali had made a grave mistake, placing “his hopes and trust in the enemy of Allah for survival.” When the twenty-seven-year-old boxer suggested that he would sacrifice his religious principles for “the white man’s money,” Elijah decided to make an example out of him for those “who are weak in the faith.”17
Ali’s experience in the Nation now mirrored Malcolm’s. Like Malcolm, he outwardly worshipped Elijah. When Elijah suspended him, Ali was crushed. He hoped that the Messenger would eventually forgive him and welcome him back into the movement. Yet without boxing, Ali had lost his value. Without the ring, without that world stage, he was just another acolyte. In his weakest moment, when he could not raise money or generate good publicity for the Nation, Elijah disowned him, casting him outside the Nation as he had done to Malcolm before him.
In exile, Ali remained loyal to Muhammad, refusing to blame him or the Nation for his troubles. Dick Schaap, who had known Ali since 1960, never understood his fealty to the Messenger. Often, when the writer asked him why he sided with Muhammad instead of Malcolm, Ali refused to answer. He had no words, no explanation. “His expressive face has turned blank,” Schaap wrote in 1971. “His enthusiasm turned to dullness. Maybe he is embarrassed. He should be.”18
The truth, George Plimpton thought, was that Ali was afraid. He did not dare cross Elijah Muhammad. Once, when Plimpton visited Ali in Chicago, they drove around the South Side. When the writer asked him to see “the leader’s mansion,” Ali agreed, but he drove so fast that Plimpton only got a fleeting look at it. Plimpton urged him to turn around so that he could take another look. Accelerating past the mansion at fifty miles per hour, Ali made another pass, insisting Plimpton slouch out of sight. “He didn’t want to be spotted,” the writer recalled. “I think he understood what they could do. They were intimidating. And because he did fear them, he was malleable.”19