The question left hanging, then, by Kram and the other dissenters is: Does one need to know policy in order to become an agent of political change? At the time, another pop culture poet of the '60s was nasally crooning that "you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"; somehow, Ali sensed something, and he navigated swirling cultural winds to end up inspiring millions by coming to symbolize political truths even he, a simple boxer, might not have fully grasped.

Like so many of those who opposed the Vietnam War, Ali's motives were, at first, personal. As Kram shows, he didn't want to die at war and he didn't trust that the Army would use him only as a kind of goodwill ambassador, the way it did with Joe Louis during World War II, keeping him far from harm's way.

America's presence in Vietnam was still popular in February 1966, when the then heavyweight champion was reclassified 1-A, fit for combat, by the Louisville draft board. In Miami, Ali was baffled. "Why me? I don't understand it," he said. The New York Times' Robert Lipsyte spent the day with a disoriented Ali and chronicled how Ali finally blurted out what would live on as perhaps the most pithy of all antiwar expressions, at a time when few dared oppose the conflict: "Man, I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong."

Lipsyte presents the statement as off the cuff, a visceral reaction from a confused young man. Kram maintains that the line was "slyly dropped into his presentation by Leon X, an early Muslim watchdog and headbanger." Whether impromptu or coached (are speeches written by speechwriters automatically inauthentic?) it was the beginning of Ali's political awakening, one that would grow to take on internationalist proportions by the time the Supreme Court ruled in his favor in 1971.

But it was a gradual process. Ali was still confused and troubled in the late summer of 1966, when photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks accompanied him through the Miami ghetto for a September issue of Life magazine. He was clearly basking in his newfound inner-city populism, a feeling that would inform his burgeoning radicalism. On the street, fans flocked to him, shouting their support. "These people like me around when they got trouble," he told Parks. "Joe Louis and Sammy Davis and other Negro bigwigs don't do that. Too busy cocktailin' with the whites. I don't need bodyguards. You don't need protection from people who love you."

Shortly thereafter, Ali's global worldview expanded when, in Great Britain to fight Henry Cooper, he befriended Michael X, Britain's torchbearer for black power. Michael X was widely portrayed in the British press as a hatemonger, but that didn't stop Ali from accompanying him to meetings with community activists. It was a stunning alliance, made all the more stark the next year, when Michael X was first prosecuted for inciting racial hatred and then hanged in Trinidad for murder.

Back in the States, Ali was convicted in June 1967 by an all-white jury for draft evasion, which carried a five-year sentence. By now, the antiwar movement was picking up steam -- though polls showed most Americans still supported the war -- and Ali spoke to his first and only antiwar demonstration in Los Angeles. "Anything designed for peace and to stop the killing I'm for 100 percent," he said. "I'm not a leader. I'm not here to advise you. But I encourage you to express yourself."

By the late '60s, many black athletes followed Ali and spoke out, including football's Jim Brown, basketball's Bill Russell and track and field's Tommie Smith and John Carlos. But Ali continued to lead the sports world in radicalism. When Esquire gave him five pages to do with what he would, he crafted (or, as Kram would suggest, had crafted for him) a political manifesto: Black athletes should "take all this fame the white man gave to us because we fought for his entertainment, and we can turn it around," he wrote. "Instead of beating up each other ... we will use our fame for freedom." He went on to make the case for reparations, long before the term ever entered the Zeitgeist, suggesting we take $25 billion earmarked for the war and instead build homes in Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama. "Each black man who needs it is going to be given a home," he wrote. "Now, black people, we're not repaying you. We ain't giving you nothing. We're guilty. We owe it to you."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"