1968

STATUE OF TOMMIE SMITH AND JOHN CARLOS

In November 2005 San Jose State University unveiled this 22-foot-high statue featuring two of its former students, Olympic medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos. The statue, and the photo on which it is based, not only freeze a moment in time but wordlessly crystallize the complicated problems that exist at the intersection of race, sports, and society. Those problems have not been resolved; only the details have changed. That is why the moment has retained its power. The photo has become one of the most iconic moments of Olympic history, indeed of twentieth-century American history.

In broad terms, this silent gesture was the end result of a lifetime of racial insult. More narrowly, it was the culmination of about a year of activism among a wide range of black American male athletes.

In late 1967 San Jose State professor Harry Edwards founded the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR).¹ The group had some local successes, forcing a number of universities to take black grievances seriously and disrupting what would have been the New York Athletic Club’s 100th-anniversary celebrations, when many of the best black athletes (and a good many white ones) refused to compete at the all-white, all-Christian club. But the OPHR’s Olympic goals—the resignation of leader Avery Brundage and the banning of South Africa and Rhodesia, in particular—seemed destined to fail. In February 1968, after a five-year absence, South Africa was readmitted to the Games. That decision reinforced the idea that black Americans should boycott the Mexico City Olympics in October,² not only in protest against apartheid South Africa, but also against racial inequities at home.

The idea was controversial, not only among Brundage and the Olympic establishment, but also among the black athletes themselves. When South Africa was banned again in April, much of the momentum went out of the boycott movement.³ Most of the male African American athletes surveyed wanted to compete.⁴ Interestingly, black women were not even asked for their opinion; Wyomia Tyus (see the 1952 entry on the Tigerbelles) was more than a little ticked, saying later that she was “appalled . . . that the men simply took us for granted,” assuming that the women would do “whatever we were told.”⁵ The point became moot. In the end, even the leaders of OPHR, such as John Carlos, Lee Evans, and Tommie Smith, went to Mexico City to compete.

But while the boycott had imploded, the idea of using the Olympics as a platform had not. Carlos and Smith decided that after the 200-meter race—they were confident that they would both medal—they would make the podium “a festival of visual symbols to express our feelings.”⁶ When the race started, Carlos took the lead, but near the bend, Smith turned on what had become known as the “Tommie jets” and surged past him. Australian Peter Norman nipped Carlos with a few meters left to take second. Smith set a world record 19.83 seconds that lasted for more than a decade.

Exhilarated and relieved, the two men changed into their warm-up suits, then prepared themselves. They each put on one black glove and took off their shoes; Smith wore a scarf and Carlos some beads. Norman, in solidarity with the two sprinters, whom he had come to like and respect, wore an OPHR button.⁷ The three stepped up to their respective places, and when the “Star Spangled Banner” began to play, Smith, an army reserve officer, straightened his back and raised his black-gloved right arm straight up while he bent his head.⁸ Carlos, in a more relaxed pose, raised his left arm. In stillness, they listened to the anthem of a nation to which they were profoundly connected but from which they were also deeply detached.⁹ The crowd, too, was still, or in Carlos’s memorable phrase, “you honestly could have heard a frog piss on cotton.” Then came the boos, as well as a scattering of cheers. The two were hustled out of the stadium.

Shortly afterward Smith explained the symbolism of their act. His raised right hand was for the power of black America; Carlos’s left was for the unity of black America. The black scarf was for black pride; the black beads represented the history of lynching¹⁰ and the black socks and no shoes the prevalence of poverty. “The totality of our effort,” Smith concluded, “was the regaining of black dignity.”¹¹

Avery Brundage did not see it that way. One of the most consequential Olympic figures of the twentieth century, he is also the most controversial. On almost any subject of substance, he could be relied on to do the wrong thing, in the wrong way. This was one of those times.

The members of the US Olympic Committee (USOC), while not happy with the protest, were inclined to do nothing about it.¹² As far as they were concerned, it was over. Brundage and the International Olympic Committee, however, were enraged. The protest violated the “universally accepted principle,” the IOC stated, that politics “play no part whatsoever” in the Olympics.¹³

Perhaps this is the place to spike the idea that politics and sports don’t mix. They do, and in the case of the Olympics, they always have. Greece agreed to host the first modern games in 1896, for example, in part to bolster the standing of its not-very-robust monarchy.¹⁴ The IOC dealt only with national committees, the Games began with the parade of nations, athletes performed as members of national teams, and victors heard their national anthems.¹⁵ Somehow, none of that counted as political.

The USOC was ordered to expel the two from the Olympic Village and the American team,¹⁶ or the whole US track team would be kicked out.¹⁷ The US officials complied and also offered an apology. For Carlos and Smith, the sanctions were meaningless; they were already moving out of the Village, and they had no more events.¹⁸ They were not stripped of their medals. The ban from international competition hurt, however. Smith’s athletic career ended on that podium. As New York Times sports columnist Red Smith (no relation) would later note, the IOC’s heavy-handed reaction turned a simple gesture that might have been forgotten into an international incident.¹⁹

Carlos and Smith were not the only ones to bring protest politics to the podium in 1968. There was also Vera Čáslavská. The great Czech gymnast had been an outspoken advocate of the Prague Spring, the effort to diminish Soviet influence and liberalize the country. After the Soviet invasion in 1968, she fled to the mountains, where she trained by lifting sacks of potatoes and swinging from trees.²⁰ At the last minute, she was allowed to go to Mexico City, where she won six medals, including a tie for gold in the floor exercise with a Soviet athlete. When the Soviet anthem played, Čáslavská turned her head down and away, a subtle, sad Cold War Pietà.²¹ The IOC imposed no punishment for her unmistakable gesture. Perhaps it knew it wouldn’t have to. On her return to Czechoslovakia, Čáslavská was essentially banned from sports and public life for the next 17 years.²² Nor did anyone in the Olympic movement see fit to protest the treatment of Emil Zátopek, a triple gold winner in the 1952 Olympics. Also a supporter of the Prague Spring, Zátopek was expelled from the Communist Party; fired from his job; stripped of his military rank; and required to work as a garbage collector, street sweeper, and miner.²³

And that was not even the worst of it for poor Czechoslovakia when it came to the dangerous intersection of sports and politics. That low moment came in March 1950, when the secret police convicted all but one member of the country’s ice hockey team²⁴ on charges including treason, espionage, and slander. Their real crime was that the authorities thought some of them were considering defection. After months of brutal treatment,²⁵ the players were sentenced to terms ranging from 1 to 15 years in prison. Most were amnestied in 1955, having spent years as forced laborers, some of them down uranium mines. The IOC had nothing to say about this, either, though many of the players had competed on the 1948 silver-medal Olympic team.

These are examples of individuals and governments taking action, but in terms of things over which the IOC has sole authority, politics are still ubiquitous. In 1908, for example, Finland was allowed to have its own team, but not to show its flag. Serbia, which was then part of the Austria-Hungary empire, had its own two-man team in 1912, a privilege accorded to none of the other bits and pieces that made up that empire. The decision not to invite Germany and its World War I allies (Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, Turkey) to the 1920 Games in Antwerp was clearly political; nor was Germany welcome in 1924, 1948, or 1952. The winner of the 1936 marathon, Sohn Kee-chung, ran under the Japanese flag and under a Japanese name, Son Kitei. Sohn was, in fact, Korean, which was an unhappy colony of Japan and not allowed to compete in its own right.²⁶ After the war the highly political question of how many Germanies to allow, and under what flag and banner, was not settled until 1972. And that was comparatively simple compared to the endless wrangling over what to call Taiwan, once the People’s Republic of China decided to reenter the Olympic arena at the 1980 Winter Olympics.²⁷ Puerto Ricans are American citizens, but not when it comes to the Olympics; they compete independently. In the 1992 Winter Olympics, there was still a Yugoslavia, but also a Slovenia and Croatia, which had not yet been recognized by the United Nations at that point.

In this context, then, the outrage directed at Tommy Smith and John Carlos appears both ridiculous and hypocritical. Sending an Olympic team down the uranium mines is met with indifferent silence, but when two black Americans make a peaceful, purposeful, and dignified gesture, the outrage is instant.

Sometimes, though, the arc of the universe does indeed bend toward justice, or at least vindication. Over the last couple of decades, Carlos and Smith have put their critics behind them. Rather than the misspelled and frightening death threats they endured for years, now their mail is more often made up of speaking invitations. Most Americans, white and black, appear to accept their stand on the podium for what Smith says it was: “a cry for freedom, not a cry for hate.”²⁸

To an extent that might have astonished their younger selves, Carlos and Smith have even been embraced by the Olympic establishment: a poster of them in their most famous moment features prominently on the walls of the US Olympic Training Center.²⁹