Gone With the Wind Turned Upside-Down: Muhammad Ali and the Politics of Vietnam, Race, and Boxing in Atlanta

Muhammad Ali was, for many, still the real heavyweight champion in 1970, even though he had been stripped of the title after refusing his draft notice to serve in the army during the Vietnam War. Though his legal troubles over his refusal had not abated, many by that year had begun to speculate about his return to the ring and where that might be. Many surprisingly looked to the South as a possibility for his next fight, largely because those states didn’t have boxing commissions and therefore would more easily be able to license him. The controversy over Ali’s return to the ring demonstrated the racial divide in American foreign policy even as it demonstrated the fraught racial compromises taking place. That night in 1970 generated “the greatest collection of black money and black power ever assembled until that time...Gone With the Wind turned upside-down.”

Muhammad Ali and Joseph Wayas: A Reassessment of the 1980 Moscow Olympics Boycott Mission to Nigeria

In 1980, the United States initiated a massive boycott of the Moscow Olympics to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. President Jimmy Carter, seeking to leverage Muhammad Ali’s immense popularity in Africa, assigned the legendary boxer to lead a boycott mission to five strategic countries on the continent, including Nigeria. While scholars regard the mission as a failure—none of the targeted nations reversed their stance on the boycott—this study shifts focus from the mission's impact on the Olympics to its implications for Nigerian-US political relations. When the mission visited Nigeria in February 1980, Senate President Joseph Wayas, a close friend of Muhammad Ali, played a pivotal role in shaping the visit’s outcome. Although opposition party members eventually curbed Wayas’ influence, the episode strained the budding relationship between Nigeria and the United States, highlighting the interplay between personal relationships and international diplomacy.

Ali, Foreman, & Animalian Angst: Shadows of Canine Violence in the Civil Rights & Anti-Imperial Era

When George Foreman arrived in Kinshasa just before the famed ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ bout versus Muhammad Ali, he was accompanied by a dog that the local population received with unintended ominous overtones. His pet German Shepherd reminded onlookers of the recent Belgian imperial era, in which attack dogs regularly enforced the extractive external state, turning many into new Ali supporters. Separately, in his Civil Rights activism, Ali regularly referred to the excessive force of dogs used against protesters in the United States, with context and awareness of the much longer history of attack dogs in the era of slavery. This paper will examine how this well-known boxing match was an illuminative and coalescing moment for aspects of canine violence that haunted the modern world.

(chair of the panel)