Thread: Muhammad Ali Honored With Liberty Medal

I like Ali. He was the greatest. At this point I don't think he knows what is going on

Id let his daughter kick my junk around.

He is a piece of s*it to me. Dodged the draft and threw his Olympic medals in the river.

It was a sad day to live in philly.

Honoring a draft dodger with the liberty award, lol! Does anyone else see the irony here...

I served during peacetime but I won't fault Ali if this account described in Wiki is correct. Ali didn't run. He didn't serve, but he didn't run. He stated his opposition.

In 1967, three years after Ali had won the World Heavyweight Championship, he was publicly vilified for his refusal to be conscripted into the U.S. military, based on his religious beliefs and opposition to the Vietnam War. Ali stated, "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong... No Viet Cong ever called me nigger" -- one of the more telling remarks of the era.^[6]

Widespread protests against the Vietnam War had not yet begun, but with that one phrase, Ali articulated the reason to oppose the war for a generation of young Americans, and his words served as a touchstone for the racial and antiwarupheavals that would rock the 1960s. Ali's example inspired Martin Luther King, Jr. -- who had been reluctant to alienate the Johnson Administration and its support of the civil rights agenda -- to voice his own opposition to the war for the first time.^[7]

Ali was eventually arrested and found guilty on draft evasion charges; he was stripped of his boxing title, and his boxing license was suspended. He was not imprisoned, but did not fight again for nearly four years while his appeal worked its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it was eventually successful.