ED: Today on the show, we're celebrating the grand finale of the World Cup, with a look back at the history of the United States competing on the world stage. We’re going to turn now to one of the most iconic images from that history. It’s from the summer Olympics of 1968 held in Mexico City. American runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos had just won the gold and bronze medals in the 200-meter race.
As they stood on the victory stand and received their medals, they bowed their heads and each held one of their fists, sheathed in a black glove, up to the sky in what would, at the time, have been recognized as the symbol for black power. It was a moment of silent, but powerful, protest.
BRIAN: The symbolism didn’t stop there. Smith and Carlos came to the victory stand shoeless to represent the poverty afflicting black people in America. Smith wore a black scarf to represent black pride and Carlos unzipped his tracksuit, revealing a necklace of beads that memorialized victims of lynching. And both men, as well as the white medalist from Australia, wore buttons for an organization called the Olympic Project for Human Rights.
ED: The organization had formed the previous Fall, and they had originally favored an Olympic boycott by athletes. Their demands were that South Africa and Rhodesia would be uninvited from the games, that the heavyweight title that had been stripped from Muhammad Ali for refusing military service, be restored. That the longtime president of the International Olympic Committee step down, and that more African-Americans be hired as assistant coaches.
BRIAN: Harry Edwards had been a scholarship athlete with Tommie Smith at San Jose State. He returned there to teach in 1968, and he spearheaded the Olympic Project for Human Rights. I sat down with Edwards in 2014 and asked him about Smith and Carlos’ famous act of protest on the victory stand.
HARRY EDWARDS: Well the immediate result was tremendous booing, catcalls– there were a lot of United States citizens at the games in Mexico City, an easily accessible Olympic Games. And they took tremendous exception at the gesture by Tommie Smith and John Carlos.
They were banned from the Olympic Village and then shipped out of Mexico a day and a half later by the United States Olympic Committee. Once they got here, the death threats and so forth began to roll in. I mean, it is very, very difficult to understand the kind of courage that it took for these two men to do what they did.
And there was even some confusion in the African-American community about the appropriateness and so forth of what they did. Many African-Americans assumed that sport was this citadel of interracial harmony and brotherhood. And so when Smith and Carlos began to demonstrate and to protest, not just what was going on in society but in sport itself, many black Americans did not understand.
Of course, over the years, as more and more discussion and so forth came on about how black athletes were often used and exploited to project and present one image while black people in this country were living another type of experience, more and more black people came to understand that not only was the gesture that Smith and Carlos did from the Olympic podium appropriate, it was absolutely necessary.
BRIAN: I’m curious to know whether what Smith and Carlos did in ’68 differed in any way from what other athletes had done before them.
HARRY EDWARDS: I think we have to understand that every generation of athletes protests within the context of their circumstances. At the turn of the 20th century, African-American athletes receive virtually no coverage, much less adulation and applause for their athletic prowess in this country.
They were in a constant struggle for legitimacy. And so it was the international arena that this legitimacy typically was demonstrated, and that was a profound form of protest. Whether it was Jesse Owens winning four gold medals in the ’36 Olympics, Joe Lewis winning the heavyweight championship, and the immediate post-World War II era, the struggle was for access. Fighting for desegregation, becoming involved in a struggle for access.
And, of course, you saw Jackie Robinson at the Brooklyn Dodgers being, really, the face of that struggle for access. By the 1960s, the struggle was for dignity, and respect, and equity of outcomes beyond the sports arena.
So every generation’s struggle is different and it’s within the context of the circumstances that they are confronted with.
BRIAN: You know, there are prominent athletes today who say we shouldn’t be mixing sports and political protests and we definitely shouldn’t be mixing them in huge venues like the World Cup or the Olympics. In light of your own history, what would you say to those people?
HARRY EDWARDS: We thought the Olympics were a– not just an appropriate, but a preferable form. Because it is the second-most political forum outside of the United Nations itself in the international arena. Also, the Olympics had long been political. Not just going back to the Nazi Olympics of 1936, but going back to the racial Olympics in St. Louis in 1904 when there was an effort to demonstrate white superiority over the non-white peoples of the world by literally cataloging, scientifically, the outcomes of races and so forth involving whites who competed against non-white people. So the games have long been political.
George Foreman, who was the heavyweight boxing champion of the 1968 Olympics, walked around the ring waving an American flag, which was a totally political gesture. No one in the United States Olympic Committee, or in the International Olympic movement accused him of engaging in politics when it was crystal clear that that gesture was in response to Smith and Carlos.
BRIAN: So celebratory politics is just fine, it’s only the oppositional politics that draws the kind of attention and criticism that Smith and Carlos did.
HARRY EDWARDS: Absolutely. I mean this notion that somebody told me, well Dr. Edwards, I understand what you are trying to do. But we shouldn’t expose our dirty laundry to the world. Well, every time someone was lynched, it was on the front pages of newspapers all over the world. When Dr. King was shot, it was on the front pages of newspapers all over the world. That was airing our dirty laundry.
And we weren’t protesting America. We were protesting racism and discrimination in America and demonstrating that we have the freedom and the right to protest our right, which is what America was supposed to be about. They should have been proud to have that on the front pages of newspapers around the world as opposed to the deaths of three civil rights workers trying to register black people to vote in Mississippi. Or the pictures of a church that had been bombed where four little black girls were killed while they were praying.
They should have been proud to have Smith and Carlos on the front pages instead of that. That was the airing of our dirty laundry as a nation and as a society.
BRIAN: Harry Edwards is an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of California-Berkeley. He’s a consultant for the San Francisco 49ers, and he’s written numerous books about African-American athletes, including "The Revolt of the Black Athlete."