IT HAS been forty years since a migrant worker’s son named Tommie Smith and Harlem’s John Carlos took the medal stand at the 1968 Olympics and created what is arguably the most enduring image in sports history, their black-gloved fists extended to the sky. Smith and Carlos’s stunning gesture of revolt and resistance was not the result of some spontaneous urge to get face time on the evening news, but the result of several years of organizing.

In the fall of 1967, amateur Black athletes formed the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) to organize an African American boycott of the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. OPHR, its lead organizer Dr. Harry Edwards, and its primary athletic spokespeople 200-meter star Smith and 400-meter sprinter Lee Evans were very influenced by the Black Freedom struggle. Their goal was nothing less than to expose how the U.S. used Black athletes to project a lie both at home and internationally. But it started on much humbler terms. As Lee Evans said to me, “I was aware, but I didn’t really speak out until the fall of 1967 when no one would rent us housing close to the university. At that time the only Black males on the campus were athletes: basketball, football, or track. Harry Edwards was working on his doctorate and he was around. He got wind about our complaints and called a meeting. This is how it started. We started the Olympic Project for Human Rights. And all this came out of us not finding housing close enough to the university.”¹

For Smith, it started through what he was learning in his classes at San José State. “It really started last semester,” he said in 1968. “I took a class in black leadership. It started me thinking: What the hell is going on in the U.S.? I’m a human. What kind of rights do I have? What kind of rights don’t I have? Why can’t I get these rights?”²

In the founding statement of OPHR, they wrote:

We must no longer allow this country to use … a few “Negroes” to point out to the world how much progress she has made in solving her racial problems when the oppression of Afro-Americans is greater than it ever was. We must no longer allow the Sports World to pat itself on the back as a citadel of racial justice when the racial injustices of the sports industry are infamously legendary.... [A]ny black person who allows himself to be used in the above matter…. is a traitor to his country because he allows racist whites the luxury of resting assured that those black people in the ghettos are there because that is where they want to be…. So we ask why should we run in Mexico only to crawl home?³

The roots of the boycott reached back to 1964, when Black activist/comedian Dick Gregory (also once upon a time a fine college athlete in his own right) called for an international boycott of the ’64 games alongside Olympic veteran Mal Whitfield, who said in a 1963 Ebony magazine article, “it is time for American Negro athletes to join the civil rights fight—a fight that is far from won.”⁴

Roots of Kareem
One of the first to get on board with OPHR was Lew Alcindor. Later known as Kareem Abdul­–Jabbar, Alcindor was at the time the most prominent college athlete in the United States. Alcindor dominated the basketball world as the center for John Wooden’s dynastic UCLA Bruins teams. Alcindor told Sports Illustrated why he was joining the revolt:

I got more and more lonely and more and more hurt by all the prejudice and finally I made a decision:… I pushed to the back of my mind all the normalcies of college life and dug down deep into my black studies and religious studies. I withdrew to find myself. I made no attempt to integrate. I was consumed and obsessed by my interest in the black man, in Black Power, black pride, black courage. That, for me, would suffice. I was full of serious ideas. I could see the whole transition of the black man and his history. And I developed my first interest in Islam.⁵

At the founding conference for OPHR, the soft-spoken Alcindor made a speech that put the crowd on its feet. He said:

I’m the big basketball star, the weekend hero, everybody’s All-American. Well, last summer I was almost killed by a racist cop shooting at a black cat in Harlem. He was shooting on the street—where masses of people were standing around or just taking a walk. But he didn’t care. After all we were just niggers. I found out last summer that we don’t catch hell because we aren’t basketball stars or because we don’t have money. We catch hell because we are black. Somewhere each of us have got to make a stand against this kind of thing. This is how I take my stand—using what I have. And I take my stand here.⁶

The struggle was on
OPHR had five central demands:

• Restore Muhammad Ali’s title. Ali had been stripped of his title in June 1967 for his refusal to fight in Vietnam.
• Remove Avery Brundage as head of the United States Olympic Committee. Brundage was a notorious white supremacist best remembered today for sealing the deal on Hitler hosting the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. He once praised Hitler’s regime at a rally in Madison Square Garden. As head of the International Olympic Committee, he also opposed the entry of women as competitors.
• Disinvite South Africa and Rhodesia. This was a conscious effort to express internationalism with the black liberation struggles occurring in these two apartheid states.
• Boycott the New York Athletic Club.
• Hire More Black Coaches^.7

Tommie Smith took the boycott case public in a piece titled, “Why Negroes Should Boycott,” for the March 1968 issue of Sport. He wrote:

We learn through observation and education. I know more now than I did when I was a boy. I know now, for instance, that Negroes do not have equality in the United States and do not have all of the rights supposedly granted to them by the Constitution of the United States. What is right is right. What is wrong is wrong. I recognize wrongs and I am willing to fight for right. I am not a militant. I am an extremist only where a fight for my rights as a human being are concerned. I recognize that Negroes have had greater opportunities in sports in general and the Olympics in particular than they have in any other field…. To emphasize my point, I have said I would give up my right arm to win a gold medal in the Olympics, but I would not give up my personal dignity. I am not entirely sure of my actions. No one could be. But I have searched my conscience and I am acting as I believe I should act. I am concerned that I may have harmed my “image” and thus damaged the future I hope to make for my family. I would be a fool not to be concerned. But I would be less than a man if I did not act for what I believe.⁸

Gene Johnson, a world-class high jumper, concurred:

I would like to pose this as a question: what would be the fate of a Ralph Boston were he not a 27-foot broad jumper? Or of a Charlie Greene if he were not a 9.2 sprinter? They would be ‘faceless’ black men caught in the same system of racial discrimination as many other black citizens…. I am proud to see that those proposing the boycott have enough social awareness to realize that this struggle of the man in Fillmore, Watts and Harlem is their struggle also. The efforts of Negroes in athletics have benefited only the athlete involved. The Civil Rights Movement or struggle requires the aid and contributions of all black men regardless of station in life. Negro athletes should not be exempt, nor should they divorce themselves from this struggle. The fact that a great sacrifice is involved such as foregoing an opportunity to participate in the Olympics points to the urgency.⁹

The boycott became a national debate. California Governor Ronald Reagan had harsh words for the plan: “I disapprove greatly of what Edwards is trying to accomplish. Edwards is contributing nothing toward harmony between the races.” (Reagan’s statement was indirectly profoundly offensive to people like Smith, Evans, and Alcindor, who resented being represented as Edwards’ puppet.) Edwards responded to Reagan by calling him “a petrified pig, unfit to govern.”¹⁰

It would be wrong though to think that resistance to the boycotters came only from the “petrified pig” section of the establishment. Just as Roy Wilkins and the 1950s Civil Rights activists had spoken against Muhammad Ali, there was a similar backlash against the boycotters. Black press sportswriting icon Doc Young wrote in the Chicago Tribune:

If Tommie Smith... believes “I’m nothing but a nigger” when he isn’t performing on the track, then he is “nothing but a nigger.” When one considers that millions of American Negroes have withstood the worst of Southern bigotry without ever being reduced to the acceptance of the state, what is Tommie Smith crying so much about? I have nothing but contempt for people who complain because we don’t have enough heroes but who spend their time trying to destroy the showcases for which heroes are produced and displayed. The charge that “America is as racist as South Africa” is the most extravagant lie in our times.¹¹

But the boycott received support from none other than Jackie Robinson, who said, “I do support the individuals who decided to make the sacrifice by giving up the chance to win an Olympic medal. I respect their courage. We need to understand the reason and frustration behind these protests... it was different in my day, perhaps we lacked courage.”¹²

The boycott also received solidarity and support from Dr. King in the months before his death. His spokesman Andrew Young said:

Dr. King applauds this new sensitivity among Negro athletes and public figures and he feels that this should be encouraged. Dr. King told me this represents a new spirit of concern on the part of successful Negroes for those who remain impoverished. Negro athletes may be treated with adulation during their Olympic careers, but many will face later the same slights experienced by other Negroes.¹³

Later, speaking for himself alongside Edwards, King gave the boycott

Absolute support... This is a protest and a struggle against racism and injustice and that is what we are working to eliminate in our organization and in our total struggle. No one looking at these… demands can ignore the truth of them…. Freedom always demands sacrifice and... they have the courage to say “We’re going to be men and the United States of America have deprived us of our manhood, of our dignity and our native worth, and consequently we’re going to stand up and make the sacrifices.”¹⁴

Momentum built throughout the year. The assassination of Dr. King in April shook some of the stalwart anti-boycott athletes. Ralph Boston, the most prominent track and field star, said, “For the first time since the talks about the boycott began, I feel that I have a valid reason to boycott.” He went on to explain how he came to this realization:

I sat and thought about it and I see that if I go to Mexico City and represent the United States I would be representing people like the one that killed Dr. King. And there are more people like that. On the other hand, I feel if I don’t go and someone else wins the medal and it goes to another country, I haven’t accomplished anything either. It is disturbing when a guy cannot even talk to people and he is shot for that. It makes you think that Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown are right. All my life I felt that violence wasn’t the way to deal with the problem. How do you keep feeling this way when things like that keep coming? How?¹⁵

Throughout the year, more and more athletes were asking the same question. Historian Douglas Hartmann writes in his book Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete:

Nine track-and-field stars (including future gold medalist long jumper Bob Beamon) at the University of Texas at El Paso were kicked off the team by coach Wayne Vanderburge after they refused to compete in a meet with BYU in protest for the Mormon Church’s treatment of Blacks… (Every edition of the Track and Field News that spring contained at least a couple of snippets regarding incidents of protest or discontent among top-flight black trackmen.) In July, twenty-three of the twenty-five Black athletes at Iowa State announced their withdrawal from school effective August 1 because the athletic council rejected some of their eight demands—including one that called for the hiring of Negro coaches in all sports.¹⁶

A boycott looked like a possibility, but it was not to be. The wind went out of its sails for myriad reasons. Some felt threatened by Brundage’s stern warning, “If these boys are serious, they’re making a very bad mistake. If they’re not serious and they’re using the Olympic Games for publicity purposes, we don’t like it.”¹⁷ Others felt that just raising the issues was enough. But most centrally the insoluble problem was that athletes who had trained their whole lives for their Olympic moment quite understandably didn’t want to give it up.

Track legend Rafer Johnson, in his autobiography The Best That I Can Be, reflected the conflicting feelings some Black athletes had in the 1960s toward the boycott and the movement itself. It is a rather clear exposition of the double consciousness of Black athletes who carry both a taste of privilege and a taste of pain. “What you have to ask yourself is, ‘What good is it going to do? Is it going to help housing? Is it going to help education? Is it going to help job opportunities?’ I don’t see how a boycott of the Olympics is relevant at all to these problems.” He also wrote about the movement as a whole: “The militant tactics of Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Angela Davis, and Malcolm X seemed divisive and destructive. Still, I was glad they were around. They dared to utter truths that others could not, and their fervor accelerated the process of social change. The larger society might have never awakened if those fierce, threatening voices had not been raised.”¹⁸

John Carlos expressed to me years later his frustration about this mindset. “A lot of the athletes thought that winning medals would supersede or protect them from racism. But even if you won the medal it ain’t going to save your momma. It ain’t going to save your sister or children. It might give you fifteen minutes of fame, but what about the rest of your life?”¹⁹

But it accomplished its goal of raising a broader awareness. As Evans said:

Harry was media savvy. He said all year that we were going to take a vote at the Olympic trials and all year there was commentary in all the newspapers. Some editors made fools of themselves. They would write, “Look at these narrow, stupid Black guys. They don’t know what they’re doing.” They just said things that exposed themselves to who they really were. The athletes of course voted down the boycott. I was hoping it was going to be voted down because I wanted to run in the Olympics. I knew that this would happen, that the proposal was a way for us to get leverage. Tom and I had talked about it and I said let’s say we’re going to boycott so we can get some things done but we all knew that we were going to run in Mexico. Push comes to shove we were going to be there.²⁰

One person who was not there, it must be noted, was Lew Alcindor, who staged his own one-person boycott and stayed home.

Then, on October 2, ten days before the Games opened, the Mexican security forces massacred hundreds of students in Mexico City. Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell issued this statement on Mexico and the Olympic Games:

The Mexican government has behaved with a barbarity comparable only to the massacres carried out by occupying Nazi troops in Europe or by napalming American planes in Vietnam. Throughout the world people have been aroused to passionate anger and alarm. We express our profound solidarity with the heroic Mexican students. We ask people, organizations and nations to boycott the Olympic games… Almost immediately after this ambush-massacre occurred, the Mexican Government met with the Olympic Committee and said: “The intervention of the forces of order have assured calm and there will be no trouble to prevent the Olympics from taking place.” The same day the United States State Department declared: “The disturbances in Mexico City affected only a small part of the population and order is now restored.” There is a clear complicity between the United States and Mexican Governments to meet popular resistance with massacre. If the Olympic Committee agrees to hold the games in Mexico, it stands guilty of complicity in this crime.²¹

Although the harassment and intimidation of the OPHR athletes can’t be compared to the massacre of the students and their supporters, the intention was the same: to stifle protest. This effort to silence them came in different forms—even in the form of track legend Jesse Owens, whom Brundage sent to discredit the Olympic rebels. As Douglas Hartmann writes:

In Owens’s view, the boycott was nothing but “political aggrandizement,” which he condemned on the grounds that “there is no place in the athletic world for politics.” Instead, Owens claimed, “The Olympics help bridge the gap of misunderstanding of people in this country,” thus promoting “the way of American life.” In a follow-up statement published under the title “Olympics a Bastion of Non-Discrimination,” the legendary figure added that athletic scholarships help youngsters to attend the colleges of their choice.²²

Owens wasn’t the only Black athletic legend to come down on OPHR. His “other half” from the 1930s had something to say as well. As the Washington Afro–American reported: “Joe Louis says colored athletes should consider themselves Americans first and colored Americans second and disagrees with those pushing for a boycott. ‘Whenever you have a chance to do something for your country you should do it,’ Louis said.”²³

In Mexico City, Brundage sent Owens to talk to the track team to try and discourage them from any protest on the track. Brundage’s ear was notoriously tin. He could not have picked a worse representative. As Lee Evans tells the story:

Jesse was confused as far as I’m concerned. The USOC dogged him and he knew they dogged him. Treating him badly after his exploits in the Olympic games, when he ran [winning four gold medals in Berlin]. He came back, didn’t have a job, racing horses for money. We were really annoyed with him because he knew what we were going through yet he pretended that it didn’t exist and that just blew our mind when he called a meeting with us in Mexico City. I thought he called this meeting because Avery Brundage sent him there. Jesse Owens was sitting on the fifty-yard line with all the important people of the world, the royalties, the Avery Brundages. They have a special section where they sit in the games right at the fifty-yard line and Jesse, that’s where he was sitting. He thought he was one of them. He had forgot that he was once an athlete struggling like we were. So he came and talked to us like he was Avery Brundage or the King of England or somebody and really talking stupid to us and we just shouted him out of the room. I still admire him to this day, that’s why I say he was confused coming to talk to us like that because we knew that he was being victimized. He was a victim and we felt sorry for him actually. ²⁴

(After the events of 1968, Owens said to Smith and Carlos, “The Black fist is a meaningless symbol. When you open it, you have nothing but fingers—weak, empty fingers. The only time the Black fist has significance is when there’s money inside. There’s where the power lies.”²⁵)

It was on the second day that Smith and Carlos took their stand. First Smith set a world record in winning the 200-meter gold and Carlos won the bronze. Smith then took out the black gloves. When the silver medalist, a runner from Australia named Peter Norman, saw what was happening, he affixed an OPHR button to his chest to show his solidarity on the medal stand.  As the U.S. flag began rising up the flagpole and the anthem played, Smith and Carlos bowed their heads and raised their fists in a Black power salute. But there was more to their protest than the gloves. The two men also wore no shoes to protest Black poverty and beads to protest lynching. Within hours, Smith and Carlos were expelled from the Olympic Village. Avery Brundage justified this by saying, “They violated one of the basic principles of the Olympic games: that politics play no part whatsoever in them.”²⁶

Ironically, it was Brundage’s reaction that really spurred the protest into the limelight. As Red Smith, wrote, “By throwing a fit over the incident, suspending the young men and ordering them out of Mexico, the badgers multiplied the impact of the protest a hundred fold.”²⁷ In his unpublished autobiography, Brundage was still muttering about Smith and Carlos, writing, “Warped mentalities and cracked personalities seem to be everywhere and impossible to eliminate.”²⁸

But Brundage was not alone in his furious reaction. The Los Angeles Times accused Smith and Carlos of a “Nazi-like salute.” On the Olympic logo, in place of the motto “Faster, Higher, Stronger,” Time magazine blared “Angrier, Nastier, Uglier.” The Chicago Tribune called the act “an embarrassment visited upon the country,” an “act contemptuous of the United States,” and “an insult to their countrymen.” Smith and Carlos were “renegades” who would come home to be “greeted as heroes by fellow extremists.”²⁹

But the coup de grâce came from a young reporter for the Chicago American named Brent Musberger, who wrote:

One gets a little tired of having the United States run down by athletes who are enjoying themselves at the expense of their country. Protesting and working constructively against racism in the United States is one thing, but airing one’s dirty clothing before the entire world during a fun-and-games tournament was no more than a juvenile gesture by a couple of athletes who should have known better.

He then described Smith and Carlos as “a pair of dark-skinned storm troopers.”³⁰

But for Smith and Carlos there were no regrets. Carlos was clear on why he had to act.

I was with Dr. King ten days before he died. He told me he was sent a bullet in the mail with his name on it. I remember looking in his eyes to see if there was any fear, and there was none. He didn’t have any fear. He had love and that in itself changed my life in terms of how I would go into battle. I would never have fear for my opponent, but love for the people I was fighting for. That’s why if you look at the picture [of the raised fist] Tommie has his jacket zipped up, and Peter Norman has his jacket zipped up, but mine was open. I was representing shift workers, blue-collar people, and the underdogs. That’s why my shirt was open. Those are the people whose contributions to society are so important but don’t get recognized.³¹

Upon returning home, there was support for Smith and Carlos in the Black community, but not the entire Black community. Carlos explains: “There was pride but only from the less fortunate. What could they do but show their pride? But we had Black businessmen, we had Black political caucuses, and they never embraced Tommie Smith or John Carlos. When my wife took her life in 1977 they never said, let me help.”³²

Carlos believes to this day that the lack of support led to his wife’s suicide. “We were under tremendous economic stress,” he told me. “I took any job I could find. I wasn’t too proud. Menial jobs, security jobs, gardener, caretaker, whatever I could do to try to make ends meet. We had four children, and some nights I would have to chop up our furniture and make a fire in the middle of our room just to stay warm…. I was the bad guy, the two-headed dragon spitting fire. It meant we were alone.”³³

But if Smith and Carlos were being attacked from all corners, they received immediate solidarity from their track and field allies. As Evans said, “I was very distraught. I wanted to go home. I said I wasn’t going to run. But Tommy and John—they came to me and said I better run and I better win. They came to my room and that freed my mind up to go run because I was confused, but when they told me that I should run that really freed me up.”³⁴

Evans made his own statement when he and his fellow medal winners wore Black berets on the medal stand. When the media asked him why, he said sarcastically, that it was because it was raining. The reality was quite different. As Evans recalled:

We knew that the Black beret was a symbol of the Black Panther Party.... I thought they were pretty brave guys but I wouldn’t do what they were doing. They were having a shoot out with the police almost every day. So my job [protesting at the Olympics] was easy. This is one of the things I learned from Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Everybody can play a part but everyone has to do something. I used to say to guys I was trying to get to come to meetings. I said, “It’s going to be easy for us. We’re just going to be in the Olympic games. I know some guys in Oakland shooting out with the police. So what we’re doing is nothing compared to those guys. We’re not putting our life on the line.” But as it turned out we did put our lives on the line because I had maybe 20 death threats on my life in Mexico City. You have mailboxes in the Olympics. I had the KKK, the NRA, saying “Yeah we’re going to shoot you niggers.” They even tell you what time they’re going to shoot you.³⁵

Evans also remembers criticism from his people back home. “I had a tough time too because the Blacks thought that I didn’t do enough and the whites were just mad. I got it from both sides. The Black people thought I should have done nothing less than dynamite the victory stand. That’s the only thing that would have satisfied them because after Tommie and John, what else could I do?”³⁶

Smith and Carlos also received support from unlikely sources. The Olympic crew team, all white and entirely from Harvard, issued the following statement: “We—as individuals—have been concerned about the place of the Black man in American society in their struggle for equal rights. As members of the U.S. Olympic team, each of us has come to feel a moral commitment to support our Black teammates in their efforts to dramatize the injustices and inequities which permeate our society.”³⁷

Not every athlete showed them love. Boxer George Foreman, in what was seen as a direct rebuke of Smith and Carlos, waved a small American flag to all four corners of the ring after winning the heavyweight gold. This endeared him to the corporate media but not to others. As Foreman said in 2003, “Most people thought it was great, but then something happened that caused me more pain than I ever felt as an individual. I was a happy 19-year-old boy, and some people came up to me in the Fifth Ward and said, ‘How can you do that when the brothers [Smith and Carlos] are trying to do their thing?’ They thought I betrayed them. That people would think that caused great pain.” ³⁸ (Foreman, unlike the track team, was given and accepted an invitation to the Nixon White House.)

OPHR and the actions of Smith and Carlos were a terrific rebuke to the hypocrisy at the heart of the Olympics. However, present was one deep flaw that was mirrored in other aspects of the New Left and Black Power movement: Women were largely shut out. Many of OPHR’s calls to action had statements about “reclaiming manhood,” as if African-American women weren’t victims of racism or were incapable of being a strong voice. The foolishness of this move was quickly seen when many women athletes became, after the fact, major voices of solidarity. The anchor of the women’s gold medal–winning 4x100 team, Wyomia Tyus, said, “I’d like to say that we dedicate our relay win to John Carlos and Tommie Smith.” Tyus commented years later, “It appalled me that the men simply took us for granted. They assumed we had no minds of our own and that we’d do whatever we were told.”³⁹

The criticisms are valid, but Smith and Carlos’ efforts are immortal as a moment when the privileges of athletic glory were proudly trashed for a greater goal. About the effect of the protest on how people remember the 1968 Olympics, Mexico City 100-meter goal medalist Jimmy Hines said, “I’ve done maybe a thousand speaking engagements and after each I’ve had the question: ‘Were you the ones… ? The ones who… ?’ I guess that’s forever.”⁴⁰

1. Dave Zirin, What’s My Name Fool? (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), 79.
2. Douglas Hartmann, Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete: The 1968 Olympic Protests and Their Aftermath (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 39.
3. Harry Edwards. The Revolt of the Black Athlete (New York: Free Press, 1970), 190–91.
4. Arthur Ashe, A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African American Athlete, 1619–1918, Vol. 1 (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1993), 188.
5. Hartmann, 52.
6. Ibid., 56.
7. Zirin, 74.
8. Tommie Smith, “Why Negroes Should Boycott,” Sport, March 1968, quoted in David Wiggins and Patrick Miller, The Unlevel Playing Field: A Documentary History of the African American Experience in Sport (Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 290.
9. Hartmann, 84–85.
10. Ibid., 70.
11. Ibid., 65-66.
12. Arnold Rampersad, Jackie Robinson: A Biography (New York: Ballantine Books, 1998), 422.
13. Ibid., 69.
14. Ibid., 96.
15. Ibid., 130.
16. Ibid., 112.
17. Ibid., 64.
18. Quoted in Wiggins and Miller, 347.
19. Zirin, 86.
20. Ibid., 80.
21. Los Angeles Free Press, November 1, 1968.
22. Hartmann, 64.
23. Washington Afro-American, April 6, 1968, 26.
24. Zirin, 82.
25. Quoted at jesseowens.com, http://www.jesseowens.com/quotes/.
26. Zirin, 76.
27. Ibid, 157.
28. Allen Guttmann, The Games Must Go on: Avery Brundage and the Olympic Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 243.
29. Hartmann, 11.
30. Ibid.
31. Zirin, 88.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 83–84.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. The statement of the Harvard crew team is documented by Ivy League Sports, http://www.ivyleaguesports.com/documents...
38. Zirin, 95.
39. Hartmann, 125.
40. Ibid., 8.