Why Ali dodged the draft

Editor's note: In his eye-opening new book, "Sucker Punch: The Hard Left Hook That Dazed Ali and Killed King's Dream," Jack Cashill un-tells what may be the most mis-told story of the late 20th century – the heroic rise of boxer Muhammad Ali. This re-telling sheds bright new light on some slighted boxing greats like Joe Louis, Joe Frazier and George Foreman, and reveals the surprising role that Christianity has played in the sports culture. Today, we cover part 2 in this special 10-part series.

Much has been made about the rather adventurous creation myths that Nation of Islam founder, Wallace Fard, shared with his successor and Ali's mentor, Elijah Muhammad. These were the tales of a big-headed black scientist named Yakub who had grafted the white race from the black thousands of years ago in a gene-manipulation experiment.

But it was not Fard's cosmology that attracted the FBI in the 1930s. It was the company he kept.

As early as 1933, the prescient Fard was predicting a war between the United States and Japan. He was soon elaborating that a hovering "Mother Plane" would launch smaller planes, which would drop poison bombs and eliminate white America. That plane was to have been designed and built in Japan.

In that same year, 1933, to avoid legal complications, Fard changed the name of his organization to the Nation of Islam, the name by which it is still known. He also created the Fruit of Islam, a paramilitary group not unlike the SA of Adolph Hitler, who had assumed power that same year in Germany. By this time too, Fard had granted his now loyal acolyte the name Elijah Muhammad and appointed him Supreme Minister.

Fard and Muhammad did more than talk about their "Asiatic brothers." They conspired with them. They got in particularly deep with Japanese agent Satohata Takahashi, who had burrowed into a variety of black nationalist organizations, and his protegee, Ashima Takis. In a 1933 rally transcribed by the FBI, Takis told his black audience, "You are the most oppressed people on earth. If you join the Japanese and other colored races, you will be in command of the whites." As Karl Evanzz notes in his courageous book on Elijah Muhammad, "The Messenger," "This ideological confluence marked the beginning of the federal government's monitoring of Muslims in America."

After Fard disappeared one step ahead of the law, Muhammad assumed control of the Nation of Islam, claiming that Fard had appointed him as his successor. Throughout the decade, Muhammad peppered nearly every speech with boasts of Japanese superiority.

"The Japanese will slaughter the white man," Muhammad promised repeatedly. To prop up Muhammad's leadership and encourage a little treason, Takahashi promised each Nation of Islam follower a single-family detached home in Hawaii. All they had to do was to support Japan in a war against America. By decade's end, Fard's war prophecy was looking more and more inspired. The feds certainly thought so. They listed Muhammad as a "threat to national security" and arrested Takahashi for immigration violations.

Were he still a drinker, Muhammad would have been popping champagne corks on Dec. 7, 1941. That was the day, of course, that "Allah's Asiatic Army" bombed Pearl Harbor. In the weeks that followed, as Evanzz relates, "Muhammad and his followers reveled in newspaper accounts of Japan's exploits."

As it happened, Congress had extended the draft age to 44 a year earlier. A generation later, it would lower the passing percentile on intelligent test from 30 to 15. In each case, neither intentional, the change just barely netted a prominent member of the Nation of Islam. In each case, that member refused to register. Muhammad's refusal set the precedent for Ali's. Not knowing Muhammad's history, and not particularly caring, Vietnam-era resisters would see Ali's resistance as moral and principled as they imagined their own to be. That is one of the many drawbacks of not knowing history.

To say the least, Elijah Muhammad lacked Muhammad Ali's resources to fight the draft. On Sept. 20, 1942, federal agents found The Messenger hiding ingloriously under a bed in a Washington, D.C., house. A week later, Ashima Takis pled guilty to forging a money order and turned state's evidence against the Nation of Islam. Three weeks later, a grand jury indicted Muhammad for conspiracy to commit sedition.

Among the evidence presented against Muhammad in his subsequent trial was a lecture he had delivered at the Chicago temple in August 1942. "You shouldn't fear the devil when he tells you that you must go and fight in this war. You should refuse to fight," he told his followers. "The newspapers are lying when they say that the Japanese are losing. We are going to win."

As history records, "we" – the Japanese-Nazi-Nation of Islam axis – did not exactly win the war. Nor did Muhammad win his legal battles. After three years in a federal hoosegow, he was released to what he regarded as a larger prison, the "wilderness of North America," one year and one week after World War II came to its terrifying end.

"Sucker Punch: The Hard Left Hook That Dazed Ali and Killed King's Dream" is the latest work of hard-hitting author and WND contributor Jack Cashill, and is the first comprehensive, pull-no-punches account of America's least likely icon.
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