Still in the War Years

Thanks to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz for reminding me that Muhammad Ali was stripped of his heavyweight boxing championship title and imprisoned for five years (instead of the normal eighteen months) for refusing to report for induction into the army for religious reasons. I had forgotten the weight of his sacrifice.

And for this note on shameful President Andrew Jackson:"....the slave-owning, Indian killer general/president had become an early American success story. Penniless at twenty, Jackson saved his money and bought one slave, and struck out over the Cumberland Mountains for Tennessee. He squatted illegally in Cherokee Territory, and because he couldn't afford to buy more than one African slave, he bought a fifteen-year-old girl and sired his own slave laborers."

from OUTLAW WOMAN, A Memoir of the War Years 1960-1975, City Lights Books, San Francisco 2001.

Seems to me like we're still in the war years.