Memory Lane Is Bittersweet in Hometown of the Champ (Ali)
LOUISVILLE, Ky., Feb. 21 — Forty years after a draft board here rejected his bid for conscientious objector status, Muhammad Ali plans to return to live in the city where he was born and where resentment engendered by his refusal to be drafted into the Vietnam War has not entirely died away.
“He’s nothing more than a draft-dodger to me, and I’d say that’s the consensus around here,” said Wayne Love, 61, who tends bar here at the Veterans of Foreign War post in a mostly white neighborhood where racial tensions flared recently over a proposal to rename a city street for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Ali, 65, the former three-time world heavyweight champion boxer, has changed in 40 years. His fiery language about racial injustice has been replaced by a quieter message about peace, and Parkinson’s disease has slowed his once-graceful gait.
But some here who welcome his return say the city itself has changed much less markedly. They point to police shootings involving white officers and unarmed black citizens in the last few years, and Louisville’s often segregated housing patterns, in which the mostly black neighborhoods are also among the city’s most distressed.
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“He’s nothing more than a draft-dodger to me, and I’d say that’s the consensus around here,” said Wayne Love, 61, who tends bar here at the Veterans of Foreign War post in a mostly white neighborhood where racial tensions flared recently over a proposal to rename a city street for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Ali, 65, the former three-time world heavyweight champion boxer, has changed in 40 years. His fiery language about racial injustice has been replaced by a quieter message about peace, and Parkinson’s disease has slowed his once-graceful gait.
But some here who welcome his return say the city itself has changed much less markedly. They point to police shootings involving white officers and unarmed black citizens in the last few years, and Louisville’s often segregated housing patterns, in which the mostly black neighborhoods are also among the city’s most distressed.