This Day in Black History: Muhammad Ali sentenced to five years in prison and fined $10,000

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Some Exhibits to Come – One Hundred Years of Jim Crow

Bibliography – One Hundred Years Of Jim Crow

Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

Freedom’s Heroes During Jim Crow: Flossie Bailey and the Deeters

Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

An Iconic Lynching in the North

Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two

Ancient manuscripts about mathematics and astronomy from Timbuktu, Mali

Some Exhibits to Come – African Peoples Before Captivity

Shackles for Adults & Children from the Henrietta Marie

Some Exhibits to Come – The Middle Passage

What I Saw Aboard a Slave Ship in 1829

Life After Hate: A Former White Power Leader Redeems Himself

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June 20, 2012

Muhammad Ali refused to be drafted to the U.S. Army during the Vietnam war.

Before he became known for “The Fight of the Century” with undefeated champion Joe Frazier and his “Rumble in the Jumble” with George Foreman, Muhammad Ali, née Cassius Clay, had already made headlines: He was convicted and sentenced on June 20, 1967, to five years in prison and fined $10,000 for violating Selective Service laws for refusing to be drafted into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. Lawyers for the world heavyweight champion, then 25 years old, who had become a Muslim in 1967, argued that as a minister of his faith he was exempt.

The all-white jury of six men and six women took only 20 minutes to deliberate and no one was surprised by their verdict, The New York Times reported at the time. Clay appealed the felony conviction, which the U.S. Supreme Court overturned in 1971 by a vote of 8-0, with the court’s only African-American, Justice Thurgood Marshall, abstaining.

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Many know Ali for his boxing successes.

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