It’s ESPN. Owned by Disney. An empire of its own. And they are flying me to Mexico City. They want to film Tommie Smith and me as we return to the infamous site of what they call “the fists of freedom.” They had already given us an award at their awards show. The Arthur Ashe Courage Award, it was called. People stood and clapped for us. I just can’t believe it. I’m no star, no hero. I’m a guidance counselor at Palm Springs High School in California. As recently as three years ago, I was lonelier than a raindrop in the Sahara. No one wanted to talk to me. No one wanted to say my name. Some young reporter found me in my office in California and asked if after all these years I felt embraced. “I don’t feel embraced, I feel like a survivor, like I survived cancer,” I told him. “It’s like if you are sick and no one wants to be around you, and when you’re well, everyone who thought you would go down for good doesn’t even want to make eye contact. It was almost like we were on a deserted island. That’s where Tommy Smith and John Carlos were. But we survived.”
Then I was just a survivor and I was simply alone.
Now I’m waiting to get on this plane and go to Mexico City because people want to hear what I think. A man of African descent is about to walk into the Oval Office, and the cameras want to record a story about the progress made by black people and how far we’ve come. If they want to hear that story, they’re talking to the wrong man. I have a story. You better believe I have a story. But it’s not that story.
It starts by understanding what is happening to me right now. No, not getting on this plane to Mexico City. Right now, a young man is staring at me, smiling. He comes up to me, a little scruff of beard on his chin, a twinkle in his eye and a half smile. No hello. No how are you. I know what’s coming next because it happens too many times to count. He throws his fist in the air, bows his head, and says, “I just had to do that.” Then he scampers off. No autograph request. No “Hello, Mr. Carlos.” No goodbyes. My friend asks me if that happens often. I try—and fail—to look annoyed, but I can’t hide the crinkle at the corners of my mouth. I say, “Every damn day”—and at that moment—for just a second—my knee doesn’t feel like someone took a sledgehammer to it, courtesy of a Philadelphia Eagles training camp many years ago (I’ll get to that part of the story later). My eyes don’t sting with infections. My kidneys don’t feel like I just went fifteen rounds with Rocky Balboa. I am twenty-two again. And I feel a joyous sense of a life well lived.
Because here is the secret: I still feel the fire. It’s been forty years, but if I shut my eyes, I can still feel the fire from those days, and if I open my eyes, I still see the fires all around me. I didn’t like the way the world was, and I believe that there needs to be some changes about the way the world is. I’m still feeling the fire about the way history can take these sacred moments of struggle and sell them back to us by the pound. I feel the fire about the way my heroes Malcolm X and Paul Robeson have become postage stamps. I feel the fire that Muhammad Ali has become a walking postage stamp, a man without a voice. I feel the fire that Dr. King is a commemorative cup at McDonald’s. I’m angry that all our political teeth have been subjected to a pop culture root canal.
Let’s start with that phrase defining who we were: “The Revolt of the Black Athlete.” You can take that to the cleaners right now. It’s a way of keeping us on the playing field, safe, sweet, and sellable. I don’t think of it as the revolt of the black athlete at all. It was the revolt of the black man. Athletics was my occupation. I didn’t do what I did as an athlete. I raised my voice in protest as a man. I was fortunate to grow up in the era of Dr. King and Paul Robeson, of baseball players like Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella. Roy used to come into my dad’s shoe-repair shop on 142nd Street and Lenox in Harlem. I could see how they were treated as black athletes. I would ask myself, “Why is this happening?” Racism meant that none of us could truly have our day in the sun. Without education, housing, and employment, we were going down the drain—from “family hood” to “neighborhood” to just “the hood.” If you can’t give your wife or son or daughter what they need to live, after a while you try to escape who you are. That’s why people turn to drugs and why our communities have been destroyed. And that’s why there was a revolt. That’s also why I wrote this book. Not to tear anyone or anything down, but to rebuild.