He told you in the sixties he wasn’t going to Vietnam to help the white man continue to oppress people of color around the world. You saw where that led. The United States killed a million people in Southeast Asia and maimed more than that and lost fifty-seven thousand American lives. For what? Martin Luther King offered him his strongest support. They shot Martin and he thought they’d shoot him, too. There he was, a big pretty black man saying he was the greatest, going all over the world and beating up other boxers, and let’s be honest, handling his white opponents with ease. Don’t forget, or maybe you didn’t know: whites used to scream he was an arrogant you know what and should get his traitorous commie ass kicked all the way to jail. That didn’t happen, and when he did get whupped once in a while he became mortal and attracted far more fans whose adulation he craved, but he stayed too long. In his final years, trembling in silence, he liked to watch films from the great days when the man on the screen was an incomparable star.