Before the "Black Lives Matter" movement appeared and before Colin Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem before his NFL team's — the San Francisco 49ers — games in 2016, fifty years ago, two young Olympic track athletes and the Australian who joined them on the medal stand at the 1968 Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City kept faith with Frederick Douglass who wondered how a slave should act on the 4th of July when he wrote his essay in 1852, And irony doesn't end there. Smith and Carlos were confronted by Avery Brundage, the President of the International Olympic Committee (1952 to 1972) and the NFL players, along with Colin Kaepernick, have been confronted for their protest by the current occupant of the Oval Office. Both Brundage and the current occupant alike shared an admiration of Nazi Germany and racist attitudes toward African Americans. If this is is (fair & balanced) evidence that this national argument about race continues, so be its.
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Why Two Black Athletes Raised Their Fists During The Anthem
By Edward (Ted) L. Widmer
TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing
A few hours earlier, it was far from certain that Tommie Smith and John Carlos would be on the medal stand at all. Smith, the favorite to win gold in the 200 meters at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, had strained his adductor muscle in a heat and was unsure he could run at full speed. Carlos, his friend and fellow American, had nearly been disqualified when he left his lane in a heat of his own. But the umpire missed it, and he too survived. When the final was run, it turned out to be the race of their lives. Smith smashed the world record, in 19.83 seconds, and Carlos came in third, a whisker behind Peter Norman, an Australian who came out of nowhere to take silver. No one would run under 20 seconds in the Olympics again until Carl Lewis in 1984.
As they approached the medal stand, Smith and Carlos were holding their running shoes, wearing black socks, as if they had been awakened from a midafternoon nap. All three medalists, including Norman, wore large buttons that read, “Olympic Project for Human Rights.” That may have been hard to read on the TV screen, but the next scene was not. As the tinny sound of “The Star-Spangled Banner” began to fill the Estadio Olímpico, Smith and Carlos looked at the ground, and raised their right and left arms, respectively, in the air. Each was wearing a single black glove, covering a clenched fist: the black power salute.
Snapchat was still decades away, but the athletes instantly created one of the iconic images of the 1960s, to be endlessly reproduced in retrospectives on a decade that continues to inform (and misinform) our politics. Yet the gesture was so misunderstood at the time, on all sides, that it is worth slowing down to review, like a slow-motion replay of the race itself.
For Smith and Carlos, the anger had been building for a long time. They grew up on opposite coasts, in families that knew all too well that black and white America were “separate but unequal,” in the words of the Kerner Commission report of 1968. Separately, they made their way to San Jose State University, a track powerhouse, where a lively conversation was taking place on a campus that was roiled, like so many others, over America’s divisions. Hastily improvised classes on black studies were attracting hundreds of auditors; “workshops” often spilled out from classrooms into large, spontaneous gatherings. Nearly every aspect of college life (including all-white fraternities) was held up to scrutiny as these young Americans tried to understand a country that seemed to be better at promising justice than delivering it. Smith and Carlos were growing quickly; stimulated by a sociology instructor, Harry Edwards, they were asking hard questions of their peers and of themselves.
As much as they loved running, they felt ambivalent about their role in the commercialization of sports, at a time when huge amounts were spent on TV advertising but anti-poverty programs were foundering. In the months that followed the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Poor People’s Campaign that limped along after his death, they wanted to run for something more inclusive than an individual medal.
Many leading black athletes were speaking out against racism and poverty that year, including Bill Russell, Jim Brown and Muhammad Ali, who threw his 1960 Olympic medal into the Ohio River after being refused service in a whites-only restaurant in his hometown, Louisville, KY. Would it not restore some balance if these rising track stars could win medals of their own and at the same time give voice to the voiceless? African-Americans were almost entirely invisible in the televised version of America that was beamed out over the networks. Who else could speak for them, if not the athletes whose talents earned a few precious moments before a global audience?
By even appearing at the Olympics, the athletes had avoided a mini-crisis of the year before, when a boycott had seriously been discussed as a protest against the way that black Americans were marginalized. In fact, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then Lew Alcindor) sat out the 1968 Olympics (the men’s basketball team won gold anyway). Carlos and Smith decided to run, but one reason they had black gloves ready is they wanted to avoid shaking hands with Avery Brundage, the chairman of the International Olympic Committee.
Brundage, a white American, was a former Olympian who had run alongside Jim Thorpe in 1912 and steadily made his way upward in a career in high-level sports administration. But he was dogged by rumors of racism and anti-Semitism: In 1936, the year of the Berlin Olympics, he had shown a notable enthusiasm for the Nazis, and in the years that followed, pursued extensive business interests with them. As war clouds gathered over Europe, he prominently supported the America First movement that opposed United States intervention in World War II. He had led the Olympic committee since 1952 and personified the Old World cluelessness that troubled the young athletes. If they wanted to hear nuanced discussions of poverty, they would have to look elsewhere.
At the same time, Brundage had put all of his weight behind the brave decision to bring the Olympics to Mexico, an important step forward for the games. That in turn had attracted a significant number of new African nations, competing for the first time, and Brundage should get some credit for recognizing, in his way, that a new world was coming into existence. Mexico showed backbone when it refused to receive athletes from the apartheid regime of South Africa. These were to be the “Peaceful Games,” and displays of political tension were unwelcome. Or so the planners hoped.
But that slogan became instantly obsolete with a horrific act of violence as the games were beginning. Youthful rebellions had rattled many nations in 1968 — France was still recovering from the student protests of the spring, and a parallel movement in Czechoslovakia had ended in August when Soviet tanks rolled in. Naturally, Mexican students were keenly aware of these developments, and they too wanted to stand up for democracy in a country where it was hardly an established fact. When young people began organizing mass rallies in Mexico City, just in advance of the Olympics, nervous officials overreacted and sent armed troops after them. On October 2, only two weeks before the 200-meter race, hundreds of students were killed at a rally.
That mindless violence did not quite derail the Olympics, but it added to the urgency of an act of conscience, on behalf of the young and disenfranchised. A huge TV audience in the United States was quick to rejoice when a courageous Czech gymnast, Vera Caslavska, turned her head away while the Soviet anthem played. They were far less excited when Tommie Smith and John Carlos acted out their own ritual of protest.
If anyone could be counted upon to make a confusing situation worse, it was Avery Brundage. The same figure, so untroubled by Nazi salutes in 1936, was outraged by the clenched fists of his fellow Americans. By coincidence, clenched fists were historically linked to anti-fascism, but any sense of historical context was quickly lost as everyone got angry at everyone else. Brundage denounced Smith and Carlos for their “warped mentalities” and complained loudly about the “nasty demonstration against the American flag by Negroes,” as if “Negroes” were not fully American. That was exactly the point Smith and Carlos were trying to make. But they were quickly booted out of the Olympic Village and sent packing.
The hysteria that followed was fanned by the media. The sports commentator Brent Musberger was particularly adenoidal, comparing Smith and Carlos to “dark-skinned storm-troopers” as if they, and not Brundage, had Nazi skeletons in their closet. All points of subtlety were quickly overwhelmed by the tidal wave of racialized anger that swept over the country.
But in fact, Smith and Carlos were more moderate than their gesture suggested. They were trying to raise awareness of suffering; they were not Black Panthers or separatists. They had no weapons stockpiled or manifestoes. Their hugely watched act was, in fact, mostly improvised. In his autobiography, Smith explained that he sought to make a “human rights salute,” not a black power salute. “We were concerned about the lack of black assistant coaches,” he said. “About how Muhammad Ali got stripped of his title. About the lack of access to good housing and our kids not being able to attend the top colleges.” They didn’t want to race in meets hosted by all-white track clubs.
That was not exactly the stuff of revolution. But they were important causes in a country that seemed to have forgotten how to take care of the poor, particularly the black urban poor as the War on Poverty unraveled. Smith was completing his fourth year of ROTC at San Jose State and expected to graduate as a lieutenant in the Army. As he later explained, the protest was about mainly about “black dignity.” A direct line might be traced from that medal stand to Frederick Douglass and his essay “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,”now acknowledged as one of the great protest documents of American history. At the end of the essay, Douglass, after venting his spleen, expressed pride in the United States and wrote, “I do not despair of this country.” Similarly, Tommie Smith demanded that his protest be done well, “because the national anthem is sacred to me, and this can’t be sloppy.” Great nations can survive this kind of respectful protest.
It should also be remembered that the protest came from three athletes, not two. Peter Norman stood on that medal stand, too, wearing his button, adding his perspective to a problem that was hardly unique to America. Australia had a long and vexed history of its own, as Norman knew well — he had grown up in a family strongly affected by the Salvation Army and its mission to the poor. The decision of this apprentice butcher to stand tall, in his own way, greatly broadened the meaning of the moment. In fact, it was his idea that Smith and Carlos each wear a single glove (Carlos had forgotten his pair). It would be difficult to find a more poignant example of the Olympic ideal that Brundage had spent decades promoting. These athletes were standing together for something larger than simply winning. Smith later described the scene on the medal stand as an “arch of unity.”
All three suffered in different ways for their role in forming that arch, but with the passage of time, they were welcomed back into the Olympic fold, and into the larger embrace of history. When Norman died in 2006, still unfairly neglected, Smith and Carlos stood up one more time, as his pallbearers.
Fifty years later, some of the details have shifted, but the gestures of athletes continue to reverberate in a nation that remains divided in most of the ways it was then. Future disputes over protests will surely get many of the details wrong in the heat of the moment, as so many extremists did in 1968. But taking the long view helps to restore a measure of calm inside an argument that shows no signs of ending soon. ###
[Edward (Ted) Widmer is a distinguished lecturer at the Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. He also served as a speechwriter in the Clinton White House (1997-2001). In 2001, he was named the inaugural director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience and associate professor of history at Washington College (MD). He left that position to become the Director and Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library of Brown University (RI). In 2012, he served as a senior advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Widmer received an AB (history) and a PhD (history) from Harvard University (MA).]
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