On This Day in 1968, Muhammad Ali is Stripped of His Heavyweight Championship After Refusing Vietnam War Draft

You don’t necessarily need to have opened a textbook to recognize just how tumultuous the late 1960s were for America.

With the Vietnam War continuing to rage with no clear end in sight, millions of American youths find themselves suddenly drafted into a conflict most citizens wanted no part of.

While most were unable to fight the draft, boxing champ Muhammad Ali used his public presence to publicly refuse to be drafted into the American military, costing him his world title in one of the most controversial moments of modern sports history.

Rising to the forefront of the boxing industry throughout the 1960s, Ali (known under his birth name Cassius Clay until 1964) went on to defeat then champion Sonny Liston in a major upset on February 25, 1964.

Holding the title for the next three years, Ali went on to gain renewed media attention for his opposition to the Vietnam War and the ongoing military draft in general. Ali cited both his religious convictions and moral disdain for the conflict as the primary reasons for his lack of participation in the draft, famously saying, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong” by way of explanation.

As a result of his publicized opposition to the war and its related draft, the U.S. government charged him with draft evasion, leading to Ali being stripped of his boxing titles. To prevent going to prison, Ali appealed his decision to the Supreme Court, prompting a lengthy legal battle (Clay v. United States) that helped overturn his conviction by 1971.

While Ali did not fight for another four years, his public stance on the Vietnam War helped make him an icon of the growing counterculture movement sweeping across the United States. On October 20, 1970, he eventually returned to the ring, picking up a victory against Jerry Quarry and eventually regaining the title from George Foreman at the famous 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle.”