Overview

The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 1971 decision in Cassius Marsellus Clay, Jr. also known as Muhammad Ali v. United States, commonly known as Clay v. United States, unanimously overturned professional boxing champion Muhammad Ali ’s 1967 conviction for refusing induction into the armed services. Specifically, the Court concluded that the Kentucky Selective Service Appeal Board had received erroneous advice from the Department of Justice in rejecting Ali’s application for conscientious objector status. Having converted to Islam in 1964, Ali—born Cassius Clay, Jr.—claimed that serving as a member of the U.S. Army in Vietnam violated his religious principles. In a now-famous quote on his reasons for refusing military service, Ali stated: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.”

Americans were baffled by Ali: Always flamboyant, undeniably brash, and some might say downright smug, he referred to himself as both “the prettiest” and “the Greatest,” belittled his boxing opponents with disparaging rhymes, and was alternately viewed as a scoundrel and a hero by a nation embroiled in social and political turmoil. Ali’s rejection of the draft sparked considerable controversy, prompting some observers to label him a draft dodger. However, his case gradually took on more significance culturally than it did legally, as it foreshadowed a growing antiwar movement in the United States. As the heavyweight champion of the world, Ali risked all claims to his title and his future in professional sports by not complying with the military’s induction orders. During the ordeal, he was banned from fighting and lost an estimated $4 million in potential earnings. He also gambled with his popularity: The Vietnam War era was a tension-filled time in the United States, and the Nation of Islam was viewed by many as a divisive force that was motivated more by political than religious principles.

Following a three-and-a-half-year suspension from boxing, Ali’s conviction of “willful refusal to submit to induction” was reversed by the 1971 Supreme Court decision in Clay v. United States. Even before that final decision was made, however, various boxing commissions were mulling over the possibility of allowing Ali to fight again. Because the state of Georgia had no boxing commission, Ali was able to resume his boxing career in the fall of 1970 in a match held in Atlanta. He beat his opponent, Jerry Quarry, in just three rounds, setting the stage for a dramatic comeback.

The invalidation of Ali’s conviction cleared away any remaining obstacles to his relicensing by state boxing commissions and to his reclaiming the titles that had been stripped from him nearly four years earlier. But because the Court failed to address the controversial merits of Ali’s claim to “selective” conscientious objector status, the decision holds little value as legal precedent.

Context

The Supreme Court decided Ali’s conscientious objector case against the backdrop of a country increasingly divided over the civil war in Vietnam and the use of the draft to select the American soldiers needed to continue the conflict. By 1970, the year before the Court’s decision in Clay v. United States, the debate had become almost ubiquitous within American public institutions—except the Supreme Court. Indeed, the Court repeatedly resisted attempts by legislators, draftees, and even states to have it pronounce on the underlying legality of the war in Vietnam, resting on strained notions of judicial restraint to avoid taking sides. However, there was one class of Vietnam-related cases the Court did try routinely: those based on claims to exemptions and deferments from conscription, particularly claims of conscientious objector status. Under section 6(j) of the Military Selective Service Act, individuals could not be subjected to “combatant training and service in the armed forces” if, “by reason of religious training and belief,” they were “conscientiously opposed to participation in war in any form.”

One of the questions that invariably arose in such cases was whether conscientious objection to a particular war, rather than objection to war as such, qualified the objector for such an exemption. Thus the question became, Does the statute support the idea of “selective” conscientious objection? Three months before it decided Ali’s case, the Supreme Court answered that question in the negative in Gillette v. United States, with Justice Thurgood Marshall—best known for arguing the landmark school desegregation case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka—writing for an eight-to-one majority. As Marshall explained, “However the statutory clause be parsed, it remains that conscientious objection must run to war in any form.” For Ali, one of the more visible members of the Nation of Islam, the war in Vietnam was an unjust one fought by nonbelievers. Indeed, contemporary news stories and even some judicial opinions often repeat an inflammatory quote that may well have been misattributed to Ali—that “no Vietnamese ever called me a nigger.” Ali’s case therefore raised a question the Court had yet to answer: whether a religiously grounded but nonpacifistic belief was a legally protected basis for objecting to military service.

A separate but equally important element in Ali’s case was the issue of race. Well into the mid-1960s, African Americans were heavily underrepresented on local draft boards, leading to claims that the boards routinely acted in a manner that was racially discriminatory. In 1967 only 0.2 percent of 641 local board members in Kentucky were black, even though African Americans constituted 7.1 percent of the state’s total population. In Texas, only 1.1 percent of the local board members were black, as compared with 12.4 percent of the total population. Many of these concerns were bolstered by the 1967 report of the National Advisory Commission on Selective Service, which recommended a number of reforms that were not adopted—at least not initially. Instead, inductees turned to the courts and to arguments that such underrepresentation on the local draft boards violated constitutional principles of equal protection.

Ali’s case therefore became a lightning rod for some of the most heated religious, racial, social, and political conflicts of the day. In such an atmosphere, it is perhaps unsurprising that the Supreme Court ultimately rested its decision on what may fairly be described as a legal technicality, avoiding the harder and more divisive questions that the case raised.

To fully understand Ali’s case, it is worth reviewing the U.S. method of filling its military ranks in the 1960s. Between 1948 and 1973, the United States utilized a conscription system rather than an all-volunteer military. Whether America was engaged in a war or not, young men were required to register for the Selective Service, the agency charged with implementing a military draft. Vacancies in the armed forces were filled from this pool of eligible men when the number of volunteer soldiers in the U.S. military fell short. In 1960, when Ali (then still going by his birth name, Cassius Clay) registered for the Selective Service, men between the ages of eighteen and a half and twenty-five were eligible for the draft.

Early in 1966, after Local Board 47 in Louisville, Kentucky, had classified Clay I-A, meaning that he was fully qualified for induction into the military, he filed a Special Form for Conscientious Objector, seeking a religious exemption from combatant training and service in the armed forces. He based his claim for exclusion from military service on his adherence to the tenets of the Nation of Islam. Ali’s application for conscientious objector status, or, alternatively, classification as a Muslim minister, was rejected both by Local Board 47 and by the Kentucky Appeal Board, which then referred the matter to the U.S. Department of Justice. Following an extensive investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a Justice Department hearing officer concluded on August 23, 1966, that Ali was sincere in his beliefs and recommended that Ali’s request for conscientious objector status be granted. Despite that conclusion, in a letter dated three months later, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel formally recommended to the Kentucky Appeal Board that Ali’s request be denied. Specifically, the letter asserted that Ali failed to meet the three basic tests that the Supreme Court had established for conscientious objector status: that he objected to all forms of war, that his objection was grounded in religious training and belief rather than in politics, and that his objection was sincere. Pivotal to the future of the case was the fact that the Justice Department failed to specify which of the three tests Ali had failed to meet.

Following the Justice Department’s recommendation, the Kentucky Appeal Board formally denied Ali’s request for conscientious objector status. Although Ali proceeded to file a series of lawsuits seeking to block his induction, all of them were dismissed. Ali reported for induction into the U.S. military on April 28, 1967, in Houston, Texas (since he resided in Texas at the time), as ordered, but he declined to step forward when his name was called. Ten days later, he was indicted by a federal grand jury in Houston for knowingly and willfully refusing induction into the armed services—a criminal offense punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. After a two-day trial in June 1967, he was convicted by a jury and given that maximum sentence. The jury, composed of six white men and six white women, reportedly deliberated for just twenty-one minutes.

Ali appealed his conviction to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on several different points. In addition to claiming that his request for both conscientious objector status and ministerial exemption had been wrongly denied, he argued that the composition of the Selective Service draft boards was racially disproportionate (with blacks heavily underrepresented), and so the boards were themselves unconstitutional. But in a unanimous ruling handed down on May 8, 1968, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit rejected each of Ali’s claims. The Court of Appeals sidestepped Ali’s challenge to the racial composition of the local Selective Service boards, noting first that, even if the claim were factually accurate, that would not automatically void the decisions in the case and also emphasizing the de novo, or in-depth, review by the racially diverse National Appeal Board, which, in the court’s view, necessarily removed any hint of racial prejudice from Ali’s case. As to Ali’s claims that he was entitled either to a ministerial exemption or to conscientious objector status, the Fifth Circuit further noted that the denial of those claims had some “basis in fact”; the court concluded that the National Appeal Board had properly resolved Ali’s case and that his conviction was therefore valid.

Ali’s last hope for a reversal of his conviction was a hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court. His case, Clay v. United States, was argued before the Court—with Justice Thurgood Marshall not participating—on April 19, 1971, and the Court handed down its unanimous decision ten weeks later.

About the Author

The Supreme Court’s opinion in Ali’s case was per curiam, or “for the Court,” meaning that the identity of its actual author was not made public. All of the members of the Court other than Justice Thurgood Marshall (who excluded himself for unstated reasons) participated in the decision in Ali’s case, including Chief Justice Warren Burger and associate justices Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, John Marshall Harlan II, William J. Brennan, Jr., Potter Stewart, Byron White, and Harry A. Blackmun—the latter being the most recent addition to the Court in June 1970. Ali’s was among the last of the cases heard by Justices Black and Harlan prior to their retirement from the Supreme Court later in 1971.

Indeed, the Supreme Court that decided Ali’s case was a Court in transition. President Richard Nixon had appointed Warren Burger to replace Earl Warren as chief justice in 1969, thereby signaling the end to one of the most progressive—if not radical—eras in the Court’s history. During Warren’s sixteen years in the Court’s center seat, the justices moved self-consciously and decidedly to the left, rigorously endorsing sweeping federal regulatory power in the civil rights sphere while adopting similarly robust views of the limits that the federal Constitution placed on state and local governments, especially where racial discrimination or the rights of criminal defendants were at issue. This was the Court that had decided Brown v. Board of Education (1954), holding that race-based segregation in public schools violated the equal protection clause; Mapp v. Ohio (1961), holding that evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment must generally be excluded from admission at trial; Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), holding that the Sixth Amendment right to counsel requires that states provide attorneys to indigent defendants; Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), holding that the U.S. Constitution protects a right to privacy; Miranda v. Arizona (1966), requiring that defendants be notified of their right to speak to a lawyer and holding that statements obtained in the absence of such notification were inadmissible in court; and a host of other lesser-known but no-less-important precedents. Together with Justices Black, Douglas, and Brennan, Warren formed a liberal bloc that controlled much of the Court’s agenda throughout the 1960s—especially from 1962 through Warren’s departure, thanks to the additions of Arthur Goldberg, as succeeded by Abe Fortas in 1965, and Thurgood Marshall. Even the more “conservative” justices on the Warren Court—Harlan, Stewart, and White—were, by modern-day standards, moderates who routinely joined their more liberal brethren.

Nixon’s victory in the 1968 presidential election—after a campaign that was highly critical of the Court and vowed to restore “law and order”—spelled the beginning of the end for this coalition. Within three years of taking office, Nixon was able to make four appointments to the Court—replacing Warren with Burger, Fortas with Harry Blackmun, Black with Lewis F. Powell, Jr., and Harlan with William H. Rehnquist. Each of these appointments moved the Court further to the right. In that sense, the decision in Clay proved to be a relic of a soon-to-be forgotten era, in which unanimous decisions invalidating criminal convictions such as Ali’s were commonplace.

Time Line

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The Supreme Court’s decision in Clay v. United States is surprisingly brief. In Part I of the majority opinion, which runs a little over one page, the Court provides a condensed overview of the facts of the case. Then, in two short paragraphs, Part II rehashes the “basis in fact” standard, which the government urged was sufficient to affirm the decision. The “basis in fact” standard was articulated by the Court in Estep v. United States (1946). Under this standard,

Congress codified this rule through the Military Selective Service Act of 1967. The government’s central argument before the Supreme Court in Clay was that the Fifth Circuit properly applied this standard in affirming Ali’s conviction and that it should therefore be affirmed. The Court, however, concludes Part II with a key statement regarding the question of whether Ali opposed all wars or just certain wars: “Even if the Government’s position on this question is correct, the conviction before us must still be set aside for another quite independent reason.”

Part III of the opinion—its analytical core—identifies that “independent reason” as the incorrect advice that the Justice Department had provided to the Kentucky Appeal Board. Apparently, the Justice Department had questioned Ali’s convictions on the basis “of the circumstances and timing” of his claim, noting that he did not file for conscientious objector status until the possibility of his being drafted became a certainty. The Supreme Court states that its review revealed no reason to question the sincerity of Ali’s beliefs and asserts that these beliefs were indeed “founded on tenets of the Muslim religion as he understands them.”

As such, the government conceded that two of the three grounds offered by the Justice Department for rejecting Ali’s claim were no longer valid. Only one basic test for establishing conscientious objector status remained, and that was whether Ali objected to war in a universal or selective sense. Because the Appeal Board failed to specify which of the three grounds it used as the basis for its denial of a conscientious objector exemption for Ali, the conviction could not be allowed to stand. The precedent for this opinion was the 1955 case of Sicurella v. United States. Thus, without tackling the merits of whether Ali should or should not have received conscientious objector status, the Court was able to invalidate his conviction in light of the errors that pervaded the Justice Department’s advice to the Kentucky Appeal Board. Although the Court’s decision is significant in establishing that Ali’s beliefs were in fact “religious,” rather than “political and racial,” it does not address the underlying question of whether Ali condoned war under certain circumstances.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of the decision is the concurring opinion authored by Justice William O. Douglas, who offers his own view on the merits of the sole remaining ground upon which Ali’s application for conscientious objector status could legally be denied: that Ali did not oppose participating in war “in any form” but rather specifically opposed the conflict in Vietnam. Douglas had been the lone voice of dissent just two months earlier, when the Supreme Court made its ruling in Gillette v. United States, another conscientious objector suit. In that case, the Court ruled against objections to “specific” wars as grounds for conscientious objection. The Gillette case turned on the distinction between “just” and “unjust” wars, with the majority opinion holding that conscientious objector status be granted only to those who oppose war “in any form.” Douglas disagreed with the decision in Gillette, and his difference of opinion carried over to Clay v. United States: Whereas one of two defendants in Gillette was Catholic and the other a self-described “humanist,” Ali’s visible adherence to Islam, and his membership in the Nation of Islam in particular, led Douglas to draw analogies between the religious practices.

Specifically, Douglas devotes virtually all of his concurrence in Ali to a careful examination of both Ali’s statements and the teachings of the Koran. In his words:

In essence, Douglas supported the ultimate outcome in Ali’s case but disagreed with the reasoning used by the Court to arrive at that decision. He expresses clear support for religiously grounded opposition to participation in wars that are inconsistent with that particular religion, even if the religion itself is not pacifistic. If the First Amendment protects the right to worship by any religion, Douglas reasons, it necessarily protects the right to be a selective, rather than categorical, conscientious objector and to support only those wars that are consistent with one’s faith.

The opinion in Clay v. United States concludes with a separate concurrence by Justice John Marshall Harlan II, noting his narrow agreement with the proposition that reversal was “required under Sicurella.” It was unclear, he writes, whether and to what extent the Kentucky Appeal Board had relied upon the Justice Department’s advice, but he asserts that it was clearly wrong for the Justice Department to question the sincerity of Ali’s beliefs.

Audience

Although the Clay v. United States litigation was watched closely by Ali supporters, antiwar protesters, and other interest groups, it is unlikely that the opinion handed down by the Court had much of an intended audience outside legal circles. The decision hinged on a technicality that cleared Ali’s record but left intact the government’s view of selective conscientious objector claims stated two months earlier in Gillette. Similarly, it is hard to imagine that Justice Harlan’s one-paragraph concurrence—one of the last opinions of his distinguished judicial career—was itself intended to be widely read.

Justice Douglas’s concurrence, however, devotes a significant amount of attention to the distinction between “just” and “unjust” wars under Islamic doctrine. Given the racial and religious fervor that had, at times, marked the dispute over Ali’s conduct, Douglas’s opinion may well have represented an attempt on the part of the Court’s most liberal member to educate the public—to identify important similarities between Catholicism (one of the religions at issue in Gillette) and Islam, at least insofar as selective conscientious objection was concerned.

Impact

Relying, as it did, on a technicality established by an earlier precedent, the Court’s decision itself has had little precedential value. Even Justice Douglas’s more useful concurrence, which offered thought-provoking ideas on the true implications of religious freedom in the context of selective conscientious objection to military service, has largely been lost to time, cited only rarely and often for unrelated—or at least tangential—points. If anything, the Court’s decision in Clay may best be understood as a reflection of its Vietnam-era legacy—avoiding decisive rulings on the most divisive controversial questions and finding ways to reach what it believed to be appropriate results through other means.

Douglas’s specific argument about the First Amendment and religiously grounded selective conscientious objection was never put to the test. By the time of the Court’s decision, the U.S. government had already begun moving toward an all-volunteer army, and so the hard questions that the Court had not yet answered about the extent to which the Constitution protected religiously based selective conscientious objection remain unanswered today. And although Ali went on to complete a remarkable career that culminated with his selection by Sports Illustrated as the “sportsman of the century,” his controversial position on the war in Vietnam, and the litigation arising out of his refusal to be inducted, have remained an inescapable part of his enigmatic legacy.

In the decades since the Supreme Court decision in the case of Clay v. United States, numerous critics have analyzed Ali’s impact on American culture. In a Sports Illustrated “Flashback,” William Nack stated that “he not only came to personify the turbulent ’60s but also became one of the decade’s most hated figures.” Thirty years later, though, Ali managed to “navigat[e] the sweet land of liberty and religious freedom” and, according to Nack, was “as loved and embraced as he once was scorned and despised.” Clearly, the fighter’s antidraft stance sparked a heated debate about the depth of his patriotism, but as John C. Walter pointed out, his performance at the 1960 Olympics in Rome, Italy, revealed not only his athletic prowess but also a deeply rooted devotion to his country: A Soviet reporter had brought up the issue of segregation in the United States, and the then-eighteen-year-old gold medalist responded, “The U.S.A. is still the best country in the world, including yours.”

Between 1967 and 1971—the years separating Ali’s conviction and his ultimate victory in the Supreme Court—U.S. support for the Vietnam War eroded. At the same time, Ali’s popularity grew. No longer dismissed as a draft evader, he came to symbolize the antiwar, pro–civil rights movement in America. He had weathered a public firestorm with unwavering courage, given up his heavyweight title and more than three years of boxing in the prime of his career, and maintained his beliefs in the process.

Ali was able to resume his boxing career at the end of 1970, when the state of Georgia, which did not have a boxing commission, allowed him to fight. His match in Atlanta against Jerry Quarry was over in the third round: “The Greatest” had returned to the ring. On March 8, 1971, three months before the Court’s final decision in Clay v. United States, Ali took on Joe Frazier in the Fight of the Century. Like Ali, Frazier—who had been named boxing’s heavyweight champion after Ali was stripped of the title—had never lost a fight. Frazier retained his title, beating Ali by a unanimous decision after fifteen grueling rounds. Ali put up such a fight that his loss in the final round was characterized as courageous, and even heroic, by the media.

In 1973 George Foreman became the world’s reigning heavyweight champion by defeating Frazier. Ali was able to regain the heavyweight title that same year, knocking out Foreman in the eighth round of their legendary fight in Zaire known as the Rumble in the Jungle. Nearly a year after defeating Foreman, Ali and Frazier met again in a stunning rematch in the Philippines. The so-called Thrilla in Manila was among the most brutal boxing matches ever fought. Ali withstood more than four hundred punishing blows from Frazier before being declared the winner in the fourteenth round.

Ali’s passion in the ring solidified his claim to the title of “the Greatest.” He retired from boxing in 1981. Three years later he went public with his Parkinson’s disease diagnosis—a direct result, doctors say, of repeated trauma to the head. The ravaging effects of the disease have taken their toll on Ali, but he has established himself as a tireless philanthropist, raising funds for a variety of charities, most notably the Muhammad Ali Parkinson Center at Barrow Neurological Institute. In an interesting footnote to a complex life story, Ali went to Vietnam in 1994 in a show of support for families of American soldiers still missing in action.

Questions for Further Study

Further Reading