First and foremost, thank you for not burning me alive 😉 I really hesitated before hitting "send" as I was afraid that a foreigner's point of view on a sensitive moment of American history may not be very well received.
This is an homage to Ali, so I am not going to derail this thread by conjuring historical facts ad nauseam. However, in times such as these, I have to voice my disagreement: no, terrorism is never, and I mean never the solution. While I can understand the hate a black person may feel, it is no justification for assaulting people, setting bombs, destroying property, etc... No, the Nation of Islam, while undoubtedly supported by a part of the African-American community, was not the sole organization fighting for equality. The Catholic Church, most protestant organizations (Martin Luther King Jr being its most prominent minister), Hollywood (Charlton Eston, Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman, so many...), foremost politicians, magistrates, policemen, soldiers, entrepreneurs, etc... in all layers of society were vocal in their defense of equal rights. They were white, black, latinos, asians, and all contributed to the end of segregation. I have read Malcolm X, as well as more recent proponents of the supremacy of the Black Race as they call it; it is more or less the same wacko ideas that were defended by the proponents of the superiority of the Aryan Race, mixed with enough neo-marxist garbage to get funding from Moscow. Oh and the same Islamic fundamentalism that sent two planes crashing into the World Trade Center. I cannot condone such an ideology, no matter how just the cause may seem. I simply cannot.
That does not mean one should not fight for one's rights. In a way, Ali embodied that fight, because he was there, fighting in the most literal sense of the term. His rhetoric gave people a sense that he was not just fighting against his opponents; he was fighting a system, with his fists, sort of. Hence his appeal, and beyond the race issue. My father was as white as one could be, but he admired the way that this American man was standing by his beliefs, accepting his ban like a man for dodging the draft. He also admired his modest origins, and like you said, his sense of humor.
But racism... if anything, responding to racism with racism is a godsend to the proponents of separation, the ones that defend, on either side of the fence, that blacks and whites cannot live together. Everybody remembers "I have a dream", but a lot of people seem to forget the rest of the sentence: "I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood." In other words, Martin Luther King Jr was calling for coexistence, at the same table, while Malcolm X was all for burning the white people's table down so that he could set a bigger one upon the ashes for his black family. Shame a great guy like Ali supported him, although once again you are right when you say the contest was extreme, and the oppression suffered by the blacks was an every day, bitter reality.
Finally, it pains me to say that I think you are dead wrong about Viêt-Nam. The USA were fighting the exact same totalitarian oppression that they had fought in Europe and in Korea. It is the genius of the Viêt propaganda machine to have turned the American public opinion against itself, and apparently it still has lasting effects. The goal of the 1944 landing in Europe was not to as much to defeat Hitler (Stalin had done 80% of the job already) as it was to protect the Western European nations (mine, especially), from the Red Army. Without the US army, Stalin would have swept across the whole of Europe instead of half of it, and America may not have won the Cold War in the end. Same in Korea. Same in Viêt-Nam. Same in Latin America. Prevent the enemy to expand its influence to the detriment of the USA's.
