While everyone today is celebrating the life of Muhammad Ali, who passed away last Friday, such was clearly not the case back in the 1960s, when Ali took on the vast and powerful U.S. national-security establishment with his steadfast refusal to be conscripted to "serve" in the U.S. Army, which would have sent him to Vietnam to fight and die for "freedom."

As Ali put it so succinctly, "Man, I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong." That was 1966, three years after the assassination of President Kennedy, when his successor Lyndon Johnson was ramping up U.S. involvement in Vietnam's civil war.

Ali didn't let it go at that. He also stated:

Why should me and other so-called "negroes" go 10,000 miles away from home, here in America, to drop bombs and bullets on other innocent brown people who's never bothered us and I will say directly: No, I will not go.

Here was the clincher:

Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No, I'm not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over.