1 post tagged “cassius clay”
I think my real political awakening came when on May 4, 1970 the National Guard opened fire on students at Kent State in Ohio who had burned down the ROTC building as part of a protest of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. Four students were killed and nine were wounded. I was deeply shocked that U.S. troops would shoot at U.S. citizens, and the date is one that has really stuck with me. I was just about to graduate from high school that spring, and my interests were starting to shift away from sex, drugs and rock’n’roll to more serious matters. It was a serious time in our nation’s history—why else would our government be sending armed troops to small cities to kill children who didn’t accept the prevailing domino theory of geopolitics?
Because my family was big on sports, I had heard about Muhammad Ali (whom we still called Cassius Clay) refusing to be inducted into the U.S. Army on May 1 in 1967 because of his religious convictions. We knew almost nothing about Islam at that time, though I had learned a bit about it in my class on Western Civilization. But though my knowledge was limited, I was still moved by someone whose beliefs were powerful enough to cause him to give up something for which he had worked so hard, something that had temporal importance, such as a world heavyweight boxing championship.
The protests didn’t end the war right away, but the killings didn’t stop the protests either. A year almost to the day after Kent State, anti-war protesters calling themselves the Mayday Tribe spent four days trying shutting down Washington D.C. (Go to article.)
It wasn’t long after the Kent State incident that public opinion in general began to shift away from supporting that war, even though it would be another half a decade before the Vietnamese civil war ended, when the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon fell to the Viet Cong forces, which occurred on April 30, 1975. (Go to article.)
