|
He knew, just as most of us
have known for as long as we can remember, that fire burns.
So, when a young Cassius Clay won the world heavyweight
boxing title in February 1964 and soon thereafter announced
that he had joined the Nation of Islam and changed his name
to Muhammad Ali, that he would feel the intense heat of
societal backlash.
The Champ made it clear that
he was declaring an emphatic NO to the prevalent mainstream,
popular and white-value system. He refused to perpetuate
demeaning stereotypes or cooperate with unjust structures
that robbed his people of their personhood.
Resistance and the moral
courage to say “I will not” wounds the pride of those in
power and thus brings a retaliative mandatory sentence in
the fiery furnace of oppression, ostracism,
misrepresentation and difficulty.
So just three short years
later, the government turned up and things got very, very
hot.
Ali, now a Black Muslim
minister and a captain of Elijah Muhammad’s elite guard,
refused induction into the U.S. army based upon his
professed conscientious objector status. The white draft
board had denied the claim and Ali’s lawyers had exhausted
all appeals up to the Supreme Court. He was therefore
swiftly indicted, convicted and sentenced to five years in
prison and had his titles stripped by the boxing
authorities.
However, Ali would never
serve time in prison. The black community and the African
diaspora throughout the world, according to biographer
Stewart Burns, “felt the assault on their hero as an assault
on them all.” The Supreme Court overturned his conviction
for draft refusal and Ali would subsequently become the only
three-time world heavyweight champion in history.
The Champ would also become
an esteemed minister and sage, speaking out widely against
the Viet Nam war and other injustices and would gain
extraordinary notoriety as an ambassador and humanitarian.
He was The Greatest, a title he had given himself before he
even knew he would be exactly what he had proclaimed.
Ali’s legacy?
Muhammad Ali is a testimony
to the “blessedness of resistance.” His life is a political
manifesto that teaches us that “no person who cannot stand
in the face of injustice and human callousness and, with
moral courage, say ‘I will not bow’ - will do his or her
part in the day to day struggles in life.”
Ali showed us how to fight
injustice, social insults and politicized retaliatory
humiliation without being transformed into the very evil we
are fighting. Too often, we are either passive in the face
of evil or we become the very thing we hate.
Yet, we can, in the words of
Walter Wink, “find a way by which evil can be opposed
without being mirrored, the oppressor resisted without being
emulated, and the enemy neutralized without being
destroyed.”
Ali’s guiding principle
seemed to be “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil
with good.” And that is what made him not only great, but
blessed.
Only when we refuse to let
evil dictate the terms of our opposition, can we turn
persecution into blessing.
Only then, can we come safely
through the fire of oppression – an experience that not only
generates personal praise and testimony, but also enables us
to witness the praise of the same individuals and structures
that sought to shame, denigrate and destroy us.
Only then, can we discover
that God works in mysterious ways; that God can cause us to
come out of the fire stronger, wiser, better, more free and
more liberated – than we were before we went in.
Contact Rev. Donald Perryman, D.Min, at
drdlperryman@centerofhopebaptist.org
|
