[The Urban Sombrero]

As to your opening statement, I was there, you weren't. All you have to contribute relative to what people were saying privately and in the media on the matter, is whatever you read. There is a big difference between actually experiencing something and just reading about it. That fact does not seem to give you pause though, as the guy who got all of his information secondhand, doggedly insists on lecturing those who saw and heard with their own senses.

1- As I said, you're wrong. Ali took incoming from every quarter for his so-called stand, and that certainly included the black community. Any argument which states that Ali was held in heroic context "then" is, is, revisionist, in it's purest form. I will concede that he is considered heroic "now". And that further, such is proof positive of the effectiveness of the revisionist reinventions of the very history many of us actually lived through.

2- I have posted extensively on both subjects and I'm not dusting those arguments off again for the sake of helping you to create a dust storm sufficient enough to provide cover for a graceful exit from this discussion. I heard JFK tell the entire citizenry of this nation to be self sufficient. A scant few years later I heard LBJ initiate the Great Society programs, which BTW, constituted a slap in the face of Kennedy's now timeless inaugural remarks. So, I know when the goody switch was thrown, I was there. LBJ, ever the quintessential liberal, was fairly bursting each day with flowing oratory detailing the great promises that the state was outright guaranteeing the black community.

It only takes two stats to prove just how abysmally the liberal failed to deliver on those guarantees. Stat - At the time of LBJ's Great Society Initiative, the number of blacks born into homes without fathers was a near invisible 7%. Today that number has exploded to a mind numbing 73%. Stat - In 1964 there were again, a near invisible 336,000 total recipients receiving food stamps across the entire breadth of the land. Under W. that percentage had gone up to 23 million. By 2012 the number was 47 million, and now it is a staggering 55 million, more than doubling on the Obama watch. If it isn't about the freebies you could have fooled me.

3) Get real. There are any number of books out there on the subject. And I can assure you I didn't author the Wiki article cited. Most people prefer to be decent about the matter but, the facts are what they are. And as usual, the liberal finger points to call out Republicans for the very thing they are so very guilty of. The Dems were the segregationist crowd, not the Republicans. Heck, your girl San Fran Nan is at it again as we speak. Zika control funding is attached to a bill cutting funding to the baby slayers there at Planned Parenthood, and so the Dems are blocking passage. But what does ol Nancy say about it? Why it's the obstructionist Republicans at work again of course.

4) Polls are tightening. And sadly, the liberal has been successful in robbing many Americans of the true sense of their own heritage. Too many are therefore, gravitating to the Dems and the poisonous and deceitful universe of misinformation which is of course, their stock-in-trade. I do not at this point accept the media version as to the inevitable outcome of this election season. I hold out hope that my gut is right, and far more Americans are voting for Trump than the media will admit this side of the vote tally.

Actually, several documentaries are just full of all manner of "real time" interviews of all manner of people at the time.

You and I mostly agree on "something for nothing" welfare programs that end up doing little or nothing to break cycles of generational poverty. However, "goodies" do not explain the overwhelming preference African Americans show for the Democratic Party.

Republicans still use "the southern strategy." Both parties, TRT, appeal to the base, and, often, not in the most virtuous of ways. The desire to win and truthfulness and integrity are often at odds.

I personally view Ali as heroic in his conscientious objecting to the Viet Nam War from his perspective. Nothing we've exchanged here has changed your mind or mine. That isn't always the purpose of debate. In this case, it certainly wasn't mine. I leave the Ali debate remembering that you use "Cassius Clay" as a taunt, and with the Ali directed "loud mouth coward" phrase echoing in my head. The "Big Tent" is shrinking.