Okay, this time period that we’re talking about, the late ’60s, is a time period in America that somebody classified as the athletic revolution. In regards to the black athlete, why did things have to change during that time period?
During the middle to late 1960s, the events of American society impinged on the consciousness of many black athletes in a way that had not happened before. One thinks of an earlier epoch, for instance, in 1936, when Jesse Owens made his famous run in the Olympics with Hitler in the stands. The opposing elements were clear: white supremacy on the one hand, black athletic genius in the service of democratic ideals on the other. But racial events didn’t come to a head the same way they did in the 1960s, including the ongoing civil rights movement, the enormous upheaval of the antiwar movement, the peace movement, the social presence of the so-called hippies and yippies, and the death of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Many black athletes became more aware of their roles and responsibilities, not only as athletes but also as African American athletes.
Moreover, the rise to prominence of figures like Jim Brown and Muhammad Ali conscientized the white athlete as never before. So these forces together conspired to make black athletes much more on point, much more socially and politically conscious, and much more conscientious about being representatives of something deeper and larger than just sports. They became awakened to issues beyond hitting a ball, running a pigskin, or racing in a track and field event. They realized that they were carrying symbolic weight beyond their own athletic contests, and that they were carrying the interests of the entire race. Many of them for the first time understood that they bore what James Baldwin termed the burden of representation.
So there was a representation where their responsibility came with a high profile?
Yes. The more high profile these athletes were, the more responsibility people attached to them. Any black athlete who gains a certain level of prominence in America has attached to him, whether fair or not, the desires of his people. Folks emulate these athletes just because they’re athletes. They want to make the basket catch like Willie Mays or, more recently, they want to “be like Mike.” In the 1960s, such identification with black athletes was even more intense and important because they were ambassadors for black culture. Like entertainers Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong from an earlier era, these athletes carried the burden and responsibility of a message to white America: “We are intelligent, we are athletic, we are capable, we are not here to burn your town down or to be offensive, but we are here to exercise our craft. Furthermore, we’re bearing the responsibility for all of those millions of other black people who will never get a chance to come to your television or be seen on your large screen, or on your local gridiron.” The more high profile they were, the more demands they faced.
I’m sorry to use the race issue in and of itself, but it was also the first time where sports had really come under the microscope. There was a new surge in black awareness that took in black athletes as well, right?
In the 1960s there was a convergence of rising racial awareness and cultural reflection on the role that sport plays in our society. Well before the 1960s, sports had a prominent function in the culture, especially baseball, which was crowned “America’s favorite pastime” and enjoyed unparalleled supremacy in capturing the national imagination. The boys of summer ruled from the ’20s through the early ’60s. But in the late ’60s, baseball got a serious challenge from within and outside its borders. If baseball was seen as the quintessential American sport, the unique articulation of American identity, its face changed as integration and immigration brought black and brown ballplayers into the fold. Then too, football began to give baseball a run for its money, and much later basketball supplanted baseball as the nation’s most popular sport. And with the heightened visibility of the female athlete, spurred in part by the feminist movement, things were in upheaval in the sports arena and beyond.
If sport was not immune to social change, neither was it immune to the fetish of commodity, as baseball, football, and later basketball became big business. Sport was now a vigorously contested terrain where the meanings of national identity competed alongside athletes for recognition and reward. There was a transition from the realm of “pure” sports (although sport had always been infected by commercial interests, just not to the degree it suffered after the ’60s) to the notion that sport was now fatally intertwined with the bottom line. Sport lost its virginity in the ’60s, so to speak, as critics and others began to debate what sport meant, how athletes should be responsible, how they should behaves and the like.
And the project of human rights. What ultimately was the message? What did people mean here?
Well, I think that the project of human rights spearheaded by people like professor Harry Edwards had a simple message: We are human beings who deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. It was the message of blacks in America who sought to be treated with justice and equality, a message these athletes now adopted for the sports arena. They simply wanted to be fairly treated and to not be exploited. I think Tommy Smith and John Carlos said in essence, “We’re not animals, we’re human beings. We can be celebrated on the gridiron, we can be celebrated on the track and field, we can be celebrated when we’re carrying a football or shooting a ball through a pair of nets, but we can’t be treated as equal human beings when we are away from the field of play.” Smith, Carlos, and the others understood the need to demand equality of opportunity in the sports arena and beyond.
I guess in its simplest form there was a clear difference, an awareness in these athletes that, hey, we may be good and we are all the best players here in the world, but we still can’t get an apartment. It came down to those simple things.
Absolutely. These athletes realized that despite their extraordinary achievements on the field, off the field they were just another black person. It brings to mind that famous query from Malcolm X, in his autobiography, when he asks, “What do you call a black person with a PhD? Nigger.” So what do you call an athlete who is able to win the 100-yard dash, or the 200, or the 440, or the 110 hurdles? You call him a nigger when he’s not running, a realization that was painful to these athletes. And it gnawed at their conscience. In a real sense, the human rights project the athletes undertook made them the kind of critical social actors and agents they hadn’t been before. Some of them had a fragmented awareness of what was wrong, but I think this particular issue called together a group of men who were outraged by the limits that were artificially imposed on them. As a result, they grew in their understanding of what it meant to be a representative of one’s group, to not just run for the sake of running. That was the extra burden that black athletes bore.
Harry Edwards, at the very least, seemed difficult to miss. I mean, he was an imposing guy . . .
Yes.
. . . a brilliant, likable guy. He had a lot of interesting attributes that clearly made him rise above others. He also agitated a lot of people, didn’t he?
Sure. Harry Edwards is an extraordinary figure in the history of black athletics over the last thirty years. He was at the time a smart sociologist well versed in the field’s theories and jargon about race who also understood the internal dynamics of sport. So he was a perfect bridge figure between those athletes and the wider society. He was a young man himself, not even twentyfive years old, and served as an instructor in sociology at San Jose State with these barely eighteen- and nineteen-year-old kids. So he was able to get closer to them than other older, more estimable figures in the black community. He understood their worldviews. And yet at the same time he had his own charisma, his own authority that derived from his considerable knowledge and education. As a result, he was able to spur their consciousness, and of course he agitated people as well. But remember, Martin Luther King Jr. was also viewed as an agitator by many whites and a fair number of blacks. So in the late ’60s, Harry Edwards was an extraordinary, difficult, and flamboyant figure. Now he’s on the sidelines of the San Francisco 49ers and working with other mainstream groups helping them manage their athletes. So times change and so does our understanding of the figures that helped to change them.
How much of this, though, in the way Harry projected himself publicly was shtick, and how much of that shtick was really necessary?
All great orators and educators, especially those in minority American traditions, learn sooner or later that you better put some entertainment in your education. I suppose it’s what the legendary hip-hop artist KRS-One calls “edutainment.” There’s no question that Harry Edwards was a severe taskmaster who capably deployed shtick and performance. After all, he’s dealing with performers. He’s got to perform himself. What’s his niche? It’s partly that “I can talk that talk.” Harry Edwards had to publicize the athletes’ case; he had to dramatize their beliefs. Again, if we look at the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. knew that an old bigot like Bull Connors was tempted to beat up on black people and wash them against the walls with firefighting water hoses. But King wanted that; he wanted to dramatize the unjust, assaulted condition of African American people. Harry Edwards wanted to similarly dramatize the condition of African American athletes. He knew how to shake the rafters and rouse the rabble. He knew how to exaggerate for ethical ends, how to deploy hyperbole for an ultimately good purpose, which was to show that African American athletes were first-class athletes but second-class citizens. He wanted the nation to get that point, and he made it with gusto and verve.
Harry could do things, but he had a difficult task at hand. He was dealing with a group of athletes who were on the same path as he was. And yet he was having to deal with a certainly far from monolithic group of athletes, all teenagers, all from across the country . . . so he did exercise control. The main thing is how do you make these athletes believe in that?
Edwards did indeed face an enormously difficult task, namely, how do you bring together and solidify young black men from different parts of the country with different views about how best to attack the problem. Some wanted to be explicit in their resistance to what they considered unfair tactics. They wanted to raise their fists, to wear certain clothing, to stylize and literally fashion their resistance. Others wanted to be subtler, more implicit, and more covert. Of course, these are alternatives that black people have always faced, going all the way back to slavery. Some slaves were quite explicit about their rebellion, including figures like Nat Turner and Gabriel Prosser. They ended up getting hounded, harassed, and sometimes hanged, but they spurred the action of their fellow slaves. Other slaves were subtler. They sang songs that signaled knowing blacks about the route to freedom. They hid their liberating intent behind haunting harmonies.
So black people have always understood that you can’t always come out and say what you mean, since it might undercut your purposes. There’s been an enormous dispute around this issue within black culture that continues to this day. Do you expose your hand and therefore make it more likely that you will be put down before you’re able to be successful? Or do you somehow signify your intent to rebel by doing it very, very smoothly? Many blacks said, “We’ve got to take it to the mat, we just have to come out and say that we will take it no longer.” There’s a constant tension in African American culture about what’s the best route to racial uplift, and those things were present in Harry Edwards’s group of athletes.
I clearly think it would be foolish to think that all those guys would have thought the same way. And you have guys going through what would have been their last Olympics.
Right.
Charlie Scott, from the University of North Carolina, the first black basketball player to play at a major school, was sort of the Jackie Robinson of college basketball. And you had Larry James who was going to a conservative white institution like Villanova. All these guys were now listening to Harry Edwards, and they probably perceived him in the way some white American might have viewed him.
Sure. Harry Edwards probably came off like Malcolm X to many of these black athletes who were not used to black people being that flamboyant, that articulate, that explicit. We can think about it now in terms of, say, the first time you heard Snoop Doggy Dogg or Ice Cube or some gangsta rapper who was cussing, and you repeated his words and said, “Oh, my God, my mama can’t hear me saying those words in public.” Well, we can liken the effect of hearing Harry Edwards to Malcolm X or gangsta rap. He was bold and defiant, making these rhetorical gestures of resistance, telling those athletes that they had to rebel, that they had to be principled. And many other blacks who were part of the group, whether it was Charlie Scott, or whether it was Ralph Boston, or whether it was Brother James at Villanova, were used to a much more sophisticated variety of resistance, perhaps even going along to get along. We must not forget, after all, that O.J. Simpson was just emerging as a national figure in 1968. He was one of the figures to whom Tommy Smith and John Carlos were compared. O.J. Simpson was an exemplary figure to the white world who would go on to win the Heisman Trophy. He was the kind of black man whom whites like and desire to promote, a depoliticized icon of racial amnesia. Of course, in the aftermath of his radical fall from grace, we might question what model of black manhood was ultimately redemptive for the black male athlete.
It’s difficult to put a title on any of this, but it is apparent to those in the mass media or the general populace that there was a rumble in the order of things, and there was the passing of a “good” generation of black athletes. They weren’t dealing with Rafer Johnson or Willie Mays when they confronted the athletes of the 1968 Olympics. They are usually categorized as the “angry black athlete.”
There’s no question that in the 1968 Olympics, this was a different athlete. One of the most remarkable exchanges that marked the difference occurred when Jesse Owens, on behalf of the USOC, went to meet with the black athletes, some twenty-five in all. It was enormously tense because Jesse Owens, of course, represented a different aesthetic, a different approach, a different racial weltanschauung. He represented an era when athletic prowess alone was a symbolic gesture and a political act. When he performed with Hitler in the stands and he ran for America, he was racing for democracy against the scourge of Nazism, for America against Germany. But now Owens is the odd man out, and a new generation has risen up to say, “we want to tell our story differently.” And Jesse Owens is there trying to convince them to do something much more restrained. A white athlete, I think it was Hal Connelly, said, “Look, why doesn’t the ISOC get mad when America refuses to dip its flag in acknowledgment of this country [Rome].” America’s refusal to dip its flag in respectful acknowledgment of the host country for the Olympics, Connelly argued, dated back to 1908 when America didn’t want to dip its flag to the king of England.
So Jesse Owens says to Connelly, “Shut up, I’m not even interested in what you are saying anyway. Plus, who invited you here? I’m just talking to my brothers.” Here is the great irony. Jesse Owens is trying to get these black men to acknowledge their Americanness, and yet they’ve already done that by inviting a white athlete in their midst. When they tried to include him as part of their group, Jesse Owens, the great inclusionist, all of a sudden becomes a separatist and says, “I just want to talk to black people.” That’s a remarkable moment, and then what do these black athletes do? They say, “We invited this man here to be part of our process, and what he’s saying, Jesse, what you don’t understand, is that not dipping your flag as an American is a political act. Why then jump on us blacks who hold our fists high or engage in some other form of political activity? That’s political too.” That’s an extraordinary moment in the history of the 1968 Olympics and the protest by the black athletes that is not often told. But I think it is representative of the contentious times in which they lived, and the different quality of rebellion that those black athletes were willing to engage in.
For the most part they felt like he was there to kind of tame them at that point.
Right. Jesse Owens was the Tom for them. He was the handkerchief-head Negro, to put it in the blunt terms that were then popular. Jesse Owens represented to these black athletes the attempt of the USOC to contain them by sending the black emissary to represent it and to knock the African American interests that Jesse Owens should have been concerned about. So there’s no question that there was an enormous generational tension between Jesse Owens and Tommy Smith and John Carlos and Larry James and Lee Evans and so on. These people were more than willing to put it on the line, to use their own position as athletes to advance a political cause, whereas Jesse Owens was from a generation when the sheer fact of your black athletic superstardom was virtually enough to guarantee political implications.
How was that and why and when did that change? Was it a natural result of some of the violence and some of the failures that some people might have looked upon in some of the civil rights legislation? When did all that kind of happen?
There was an enormous shift in sensibilities from older athletes like Jesse Owens (or for that matter, Jackie Robinson) to newer, younger athletes like many of these 1968 track and field Olympic team members. Part of the shift can be explained by the tensions and ideological conflicts in black communities themselves. What’s the best route to racial redemption? Should we follow Martin or Malcolm, nonviolence or armed self-defense? Malcolm was rooted in the noble articulation of how black people were suffering; he was about specifying the nature of the hell blacks endured. His method would surely have rocked Jesse Owens and company. Martin Luther King Jr. would have been upsetting to the USOC and Olympic community because he believed in civil disobedience, and what these black athletes were engaging in, if you will, is a form of athletic civil disobedience. The racial conflicts in black communities encouraged these black athletes to speak out and to make political gestures. It would not have been conceivable thirty years earlier.
But the racial hostilities that ordinary blacks confronted gave these athletes the courage to speak up. After all, what Tommy Smith and John Carlos and Larry James and others confronted in the Olympic Village was a précis of black affliction; it was a microcosm of the forces the larger black community confronted. They dealt with the same questions that all blacks dealt with: How do we get along with white Americans? How do we talk to them? How do we express our rage and our anger about the limits imposed on our lives, and at the same time try to further progress by integrating these communities? How can we deal with people who fundamentally don’t want to be with us and at the same time explore our own abilities and interests? Think, for instance, of those returning black soldiers from World War II. They had guarded German soldiers in our own prisoner of war camps and had fought for American democracy, but they came home and couldn’t get into the same bars that white Germans could frequent. It was an enormous contradiction to the freedom for which they fought. Well, these blacks were in many ways fighting the same battle as athletes. It was John Carlos, I think, who said, “When we race, we’re considered Americans, but if something bad happens to us, we are those Negro athletes.” These black athletes understood those contradictions and they were trying to deal with them the best they could.
So is “angry black athlete” a fair term, or is that a mischaracterization?
Well, it’s an ambiguous, multievidential term. On the one hand, these black athletes are absolutely angry. But when such a term tumbles out of the mouths of many white Americans, it means something altogether different. It’s often an attempt to demonize black people, to label them as somehow peculiarly possessed of an unwarranted ungratefulness for what our country offers. Thus it is in some ways a species of un-Americanness. The subtext is that such angry people are not accepting of the American way, that they’re not going to stand up as George Foreman did at the 1968 Olympics and hold a flag and wave it and be proud. Angry black man, angry black athlete: Those terms work in the most precise, objective sense of the phrase, shorn of its ideological overtones. These athletes are angry about racism, they’re angry about the unfair treatment they are receiving, they are angry about the poverty that their black brothers and sisters confront. That’s why they pulled their shoes off with their white soles to show their black socks. And they raised their black fists into the air as a profound gesture of solidarity with those black folk who will never get to where they are. So they are unapologetic about their anger, and they are convinced that their anger is quite legitimate, in the same way that disgruntled citizens were legitimately angry when they were subject by their government to taxation without representation. Is it fair to call Thomas Jefferson an angry white man? Yes, it is. But obvious differences in stature and function aside, Jefferson doesn’t receive the negative label that is attached to Tommy Smith or to John Carlos.
The summer of ’68 was extremely volatile, hot, and disruptive. The time period between April and June, between King’s murder and Bobby Kennedy’s death, was harrowing. Talk about that time period with regards to perhaps the crystallization of the ideas and beliefs of some of these athletes who may not have at first quite understood what was at stake. You might describe some of them as initially sitting on the fence.
There’s little doubt that ten months prior to the 1968 Olympics, many black athletes had not yet signed on or agreed to a boycott. They were, if not fence sitting, at least on the net of the volleyball court, but they were energized and galvanized by the seismic shifts in race relations in 1968. The events of that smoldering, sweltering summer propelled them into a political consciousness that they had not previously enjoyed. The death of Martin Luther King Jr. was extraordinarily catalytic. It really made the athletes think hard and sharp about the consequences of race in American society. And the death of Bobby Kennedy later on only sealed their conviction that something was wrong here. If these men could die for the principles of American democracy, and in the case of King, for the ability of black people to enjoy the fruits of an American democracy for which we fought, then they could at least, through their own small gesture as an athlete, make their contribution to this cause. There were a number of athletes who were fence sitters unsure about what route they should take. They were convinced that the best thing they could do was to compete valiantly on the field of contest and therefore represent the highest, noblest ideals of American sportsmanship.
But they began to understand that although those ideals were constantly appealed to, nothing changed. Therefore, many athletes believed that they had to invest their sportsmanship with an added element, and that added element was a realization that they had the world’s attention, if only for a few minutes, in a way that many black people would never have it. So they seized the opportunity to become part of this global connection of black people, forging solidarity with other people who struggled against oppression. The Cubans, for instance, sent all their medals to Harry Edwards, so there was a kind of solidarity, a kind of simpatico, that was generated as a result of their gesture. These athletes understood that they had the world’s attention. The question was, How should they best use it for the advancement of African American people, and how could they move beyond being self-centered, selfish athletes, and for once in their lives be part of the larger movement for the reconciliation of the races and the struggle for radical racial justice?
What was that three- or four-month period in the summer like that it fatefully shaped the lives of these young men and even made it possible for someone like myself to totally be aware of the impact of losing those two leaders? And how do we think about whatever hope there might have been for social change and for these particular athletes as well?
For millions of Americans, the death of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy was the death of hope. There was also the death of social imagination about what we could do to make sure that America wouldn’t explode. In the immediate aftermath of King’s death, many cities were consumed by riots. They burned night in and night out with the smoldering fires of racial discontent. Martin Luther King Jr. had already warned America that a riot is the language of those who are unheard, those who are socially neglected. And now with his death, black people felt that if this is what they do to Martin Luther King Jr., who never harmed anybody, who never hurt anyone, who never intended anything but good will toward Americans of every caste and color, what are they trying to tell us? Many black athletes were both angrier and more willing to use their athletic glory to make a humanitarian gesture. After Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy died, they were willing to make a sacrifice themselves. I’m not arguing that they were somehow deluded in the belief that they were acting with the same level of sacrifice as either King or Kennedy. But at least they would do what they could do to make sure that the ideals for which these men nobly died would not go into the ground with them. And so you can imagine what those few months were like. Burning fires, the death of inspiration for black people, and the feeling that with the death of the best spokesman for our issues came the death of our unquestioned investment in nonviolence. As a result, a more militant and aggressive racial politics gained prominence in black circles, and a more “in your face” ethic prevailed. As a result, perhaps, many black athletes who had ignored Harry Edwards just seven or eight months earlier were now willing to listen to him.
The fact that the athletes spent all summer together really meant a great deal to their boycott efforts.
Absolutely. Many of these athletes didn’t know each other well. They only knew each other through their rhetoric, through their respective stances. When they went to retreat for the three or four months that they trained together, they formed a much stronger, more purposeful bond that gave the Olympic games in Mexico City that much more meaning. The best statement they could make was to show up in Mexico City in force, en masse, and make a unified gesture of political resistance, even if they didn’t quite know what form it would take. So it was important for them to spend time together and to talk to each other. It was crucial that Ralph Boston speak to Larry James, that James speak to Tommy Smith, that Smith speak with Bubba Hines, and so on, even though they knew that they believed different things about race. But by training together, they at least began to understand more where each was coming from, and for those who were marginal, or those who were, if you will, fence sitting, they began to be persuaded by the logic of Tommy Smith. They saw that he wasn’t a fire-breathing radical. He wasn’t some behemoth of ideology ranting against white people. He was simply saying, “Look, I want to be treated like a man; I want to be treated like a human being.”
In one sense they were the athletic counterparts to the men who protested in Memphis, Tennessee, right before Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. Those black garbage men were holding signs that read, “I am a man.” They didn’t only ask for better wages, they also demanded to be treated like human beings, like men. These athletes were better able to understand one another by talking in an environment free of the enormous tensions that would come later in the Olympic Village. Although they didn’t decide until they got to the Olympic Village on what course of action to follow, the time they spent together in retreat, in training, was critical to the process of knowing and learning to trust each other.
Do you think that some of the smaller, let’s say more militant communities of San Jose, or other parts of California, and perhaps in some pockets in the East Coast, that there was a degree of expectation within the black community that when these athletes went to Mexico City, people were waiting for something to happen other than pure athletics?
With these athletes going to Mexico City in 1968, the time was certainly pregnant for just the sort of symbolic gesture that they ended up making. And it’s reasonable to believe that there was enormous pressure on them from segments of the black community to represent their racial aspirations to some degree, particularly in light of the social upheaval of the previous months. And it didn’t necessarily have to be direct. Just “the temper of the times,” as Eric Hoffer put it, was enough to suggest such a line of response. Of course, it’s almost unfair for eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds who were vastly inexperienced in politics to represent the interests of African Americans, but such a burden was part of the unavoidable representation that athletes began to feel. Coming from San Jose, from where some of the athletes hailed, and from pockets in Oakland and along the West Coast, and from some East Coast addresses, many of which were hotbeds of radical insurgence, made it likely that these athletes felt the pressure in the most generic sense of the term.
And remember, Oakland was the base of the Black Panthers, so there’s no question that their proximity influenced the athlete’s paraphernalia of resistance—the black gloves, the black beads, the black socks—so that their aesthetic reflected black political insurgence and black power. All of this undoubtedly affected Tommy Smith and John Carlos and Lee Evans and Larry James and many others. Harry Edwards, of course, was a major catalyst who conjured the spirit of both racial romance and resistance, factors that made the athletes likely to want to respond to what was going on in the world around them, to introduce it into the athletic arena.
How much of what had happened athletically was overshadowed by the protest? This is an extraordinary team, mainly made up of African Americans that just put on an unbelievable show.
The extraordinary athletic achievements of these young men and women at the 1968 Olympics have been dwarfed by a focus on fists over cleats. Some of the records they amassed didn’t fall for another fifteen to twenty years. Obviously, their achievements were overlooked because of the bold actions of Smith and Carlos. I don’t think they quite calculated it that way. They knew that this gesture would be powerful, but I don’t think they anticipated that it would overwhelm the news to such a degree that their achievements would be dwarfed. And I think this is one of the real tensions in athletics, as athletes calculate just how harmful their political actions will be on their future, on their careers. Did Muhammad Ali, for instance, a few years later know that by refusing to enter the draft, he would have his title snatched away from him for three years and would never fight again as the same man, having arguably sacrificed his greatest athletic achievements in the ring to politics? Did Paul Robeson, one of the nation’s first professional football players and later a lawyer, linguist, and world-class performer, know that being involved in politics would cost him millions of dollars and his career?
I don’t think Smith and Carlos and others fully understood (and who could have, at that time?) that their symbolic political gesture would not only dwarf their athletic achievement and the supreme confidence that they displayed on the field, but that it would also cost them their careers? Tommy Smith, and I believe John Carlos as well, also played college football, and their prospects for pro ball immediately fell flat. In fact, Jim Brown, who would soon gain a reputation himself for political defiance, sought the immediate repayment of a loan of $2,000 to Smith because he felt the track star was not likely to play professional ball and be able to pay him back. Carlos went back to school and was kicked out of the ROTC. So they paid an enormous cost, one they shouldn’t have had to pay and one they couldn’t possibly imagine would be so damaging. They lost their athletic reputations and their prospects of a profitable livelihood from their sport. If we think about it in today’s terms, the shoe companies didn’t want to associate with them. Some of the athletes lost other contracts and endorsements. And some even paid with disturbed marriages and otherwise interrupted domestic lives. It was a price they didn’t and couldn’t anticipate. Sure, they might have believed that people would be upset, but I don’t know if they really understood that the world would shudder in disbelief and turn their backs on them, as un-American, as unpatriotic, as unforgivable. Such a vicious, vengeful response would cause many of them for years afterward to wonder if they had done the right thing and to be more self-critical and conscious about what they did.
From Jesse Owens through Jackie Robinson to Rafer Johnson, black individual athletes had distinguished themselves tremendously. The year 1968, though, was the first time that the team was highlighted. I mean, it was almost like a coming-out party that seemed to be connected at the hip, in a lot of ways, to James Brown’s, “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,” and the “black is beautiful” and black power movements. There seemed to be sort of a convergence there where they got the stage and athletically they performed on it. I mean, is it fair to say that it was sort of a coming out party in some respects?
I suppose you could say that the 1968 Olympics was a coming-out party of sorts for these black athletes. After all, the sentiments of the “new breed” Negro as they were being called—and later they demanded to be called “black”—were very much in the air. James Brown’s new-breed aesthetic was crucial to the invention of soul and later funk music. The Temptations at Motown were becoming more politicized. I can still remember the lyrics to one of their songs: “No matter how hard you try/You can’t stop me now, Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud,” reflecting not only the James Brown sentiment but the racial pride that was then blossoming. Black pop music was beginning to catch on and to sum up the African American desire for social and political freedom.
In a sense, the black athletes of 1968 in Mexico City were critical actors in the coming-out party of black pride and solidarity among sports figures. As you noted, individual heroism was well established, from Joe Louis to Jackie Robinson. And the achievements of individual champions like Jesse Owens and Rafer Johnson were well known. But with the 1968 Olympics figures, it was more of a group effort, and the group identity was key. That was a new phenomenon, ushered in by the times and by the self-conscious efforts of the athletes themselves to present a united front. Their solidarity, although not perfect or untroubled, sent a powerful message that these athletes could not be easily dismissed. If it had been just one athlete’s political resistance at stake, he or she might have been viewed as the “exceptional,” lone, angry athlete. But their unity deflected such claims. The goal to which they aspired—and when we look back on it, we can note how modest yet basic it was: to be treated fairly as a human being—was viewed as something that not just one of them desired, but that all of them wanted.
They were truly concerned with how they could best represent their community, a laudable, even noble goal, given the self-centered, self-regarding, utterly narcissistic character of even most black athletes now. That’s why their sense of style was so dramatic. The flair and flamboyance they exhibited were not simply ostentatious but were subordinated to substantive political ends. When they took their shoes off to show black socks to represent their solidarity with poor people, or when they wore black beads or raised their black-gloved fists, one on the left hand, one on the right hand of Smith and Carlos to symbolize their unity, it was simple but profound. They stylized black rage, resistance, response, and rebellion, and they fully engaged the politics of representation. Black style was enlivened at the intersection of the personal and the political, while the particular meanings of the black aesthetic in sport found universal application, not only for other blacks but also for all oppressed people who identified with these athletes.
From a sheerly athletic point of view, the image of Evans, James, and Freeman, one, two, and three in the 400 yards, and I just remember the image of them walking, three black Americans, and this was America. I mean, whether people liked it or not. I mean, all our great athletes now winning all these great medals were African American runners.
When Evans, James, and Freeman finished one, two, and three, it was an enormously important moment in the history of American sport. The myth of black singularity was overcome by the substitute image of black solidarity. Isolated blackness was displaced by cumulative blackness. The lone black athlete striving against the odds—whether Jackie Robinson in baseball, Jesse Owens in track and field, Bill Russell in basketball, Joe Louis in boxing, and so on—was offset by the image of blacks collectively running the field and representing not just themselves or their political interests but America! Of course, running the field here signifies in a number of directions, not all of which are consoling to white America, since it implies that they are running things, they are now taking over, so there’s fear attached to the idea of black men running things. We know that had nothing to do with the business end of things, where the real power lies, but it had to do with the representational warfare over image, which is still a big deal.
Plus, that image froze in the collective national imagination the belief that all the athletes are black, and that all the Americans are black, since national identity on that stage was constituted and articulated through athletic achievement. That was both heartening and jarring, I’m sure. What’s also important about this moment is that the artificial opposition, the suspect binarism with which black folk are constantly faced—namely, are you black first or an American?—was resolved on the track and field. These black men displayed black pride, athletic achievement, and American identity in one fell swoop. So they addressed issues of racial, vocational, and national importance in one monumentally signifying event. Truth for these black warriors was not serial or successive, as if they could be first black, then American, and then athletes, at that moment. They were all three at the same time. Truth was simultaneous for them, just as it is for any group that maintains multiple identities, loyalties, allegiances, and kinship groups. The real problem for many onlookers may have been the fact that these athletes were helping to redefine American identity, to shift our perception of national interest, and to repoliticize our comprehension of athletic contest.
It must have caused cognitive dissonance in some observers to know that even though these black men and women were disappointed with their second-class treatment and disgruntled with American apartheid, they nevertheless competed excellently and represented America at its best. Their best was America’s best. They were the best America could produce, a disturbing thought that was turned on its head by disgruntled critics who lamented, “is this the best that we can do?” Furthermore, the athletic field was the one domain where sheer ability could win the day. There was no segregation or Jim Crow. When blacks were finally able to compete against the field, the only question for a contestant was, what can you do? Can you go out there and run the race? Can you best the person next to you? And so athletics expressed the desire of blacks to be judged on their own merit.
What was equally incredible about the 1968 Olympics, besides the political significations, is the notion that when you allow black folk to compete openly in a fair contest, they have the potential to do well, really, to dominate. That was an omen-filled observation, especially to biased critics interested in keeping sports segregated, and hence artificially dominated, by whites. The real threat was the recognition that black dominance needed nothing more than opportunity to assert itself, where white dominance had to be arranged and scripted through the unnatural restriction of competition.
And I think that another important aspect is, at least the feeling that I got from a lot of these guys, is that it was less about intimidation and “I told you so” than it was joyous for them.
Oh sure. Many people have a misconception about the purposes of rebellion and resistance. Most of the folk who engage in acts of civil disobedience and the like don’t do it out of hatred for America and its principles. On the contrary, it is to invite the nation to live up to its vaunted ideals, to close the gap between what it preaches and what it practices. In the end, they do it because they love America in the strongest possible sense of that word, a demanding, engaging, critical love that issues forth as cooperation with the nation’s best impulses by critiquing its worst. They just want the country to act right, to behave humanely, or, as Martin Luther King Jr. said the night before he died, they want the country’s leaders to “be true to what you said on paper.”
And so the black athletes performed with real zest because they were excited about their own potential. They were excited about testing themselves against the best athletes in the world. They didn’t lay that aside. That was enormously important to them because without the raison d’être of sports, they wouldn’t even have the opportunity to display their pride and outrage. So the first order of business was to win. That’s why, when Tommy Smith and John Carlos, even after they were kicked out of the Olympic Village, went to Lee Evans and said, look, you win first, and then you do the protest, because if you don’t win, no press follows. So the reality is, you’ve got to compete, you’ve got to succeed, to make anything else possible. They were still Americans and athletes. They still sought to represent the best of their people and national tradition.
It’s not about hatred; it’s about joy, it’s about celebration, and in this case about protest as well. But a protest for more, not less, celebration of all peoples, races, and nations. The best traditions of black protest are about making America understand that we are part and parcel of this nation. We engage in resistance in America so that the best of America can flourish. We don’t do it strictly out of resentment or rage, but also out of the zeal to be the best we can. All these athletes were asking, in the place of millions of black Americans, is for the artificial barriers of race to be taken down. They seemed to be saying that “if we can do our part to destroy these boundaries and eradicate these impediments,” our people, and the nation, will be the better for it. They were unquestionably happy to win, but to their credit, they weren’t so shortsighted that their personal victories would in any way substitute for demanding the justice and equality that they and their brothers and sisters were denied.
Still, they had a joie de vivre, an unspeakable feeling of elation and satisfaction that few others beyond world-class athletes probably ever experience. It is the kind of feeling that comes to those who are capable of doing something great that few others can ever achieve, a fact that doesn’t keep billions around the globe from fantasizing that they also can achieve. That’s why sports are so charged and permanently appealing. They and the athletes who engage them are unavoidably representative: we dream we can be like them or we live vicariously through them. In the case of the 1968 Olympics black athletes, the hopes and moral aspirations of millions of oppressed people, in America and around the globe, found fit expression in the raised fists of world champions who refused to lower them for convention, tradition, or fear. Because they raised their fists, a lot of us back home raised our heads in pride and fought even more aggressively and passionately for the things we believed in. That’s not simply the sign of a champion, that’s the mark of a hero.
Interview by George Roy
New York, New York, 1999