Black Power Salute

Ed Ayers: I want to finish today’s show by looking at one of the most iconic images in American sports history. It’s one that’s been in the news as part of the debate surrounding former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s silent protest during the National Anthem.

Ed Ayers: I’m sure you’ve seen it. The photo is from 1968 and the Summer Olympics held in Mexico City. It features American runners Tommy Smith and John Carlos, who had just won the gold and bronze medals in the 200-meter race. They’re on the victory stand, their medals around their necks, their heads down, and their fists, sheathed in black gloves, held up high to the sky.

Ed Ayers: It was what many recognized at the time as the symbol for Black Power. It was a silent yet powerful protest.

Ed Ayers: The symbolism didn’t stop there. Perched on the victory stand in their stocking feet, Smith and Carlos had abandoned their shoes to represent the poverty afflicting black Americans. Smith donned a black scarf as a nod to black pride, while Carlos unzipped his USA tracksuit revealing a necklace of beads that memorialized victims of lynching. Both men, as well as their fellow medal winner from Australia, wore buttons for an organization called the Olympic Project For Human Rights.

Ed Ayers: Brian spoke to Harry Edwards, who had been a scholarship athlete with Tommy Smith at San Jose State. Edwards returned there to teach in 1968 and he spearheaded the Olympic Project For Human Rights. Here he is talking about Smith and Carlos’s famous act of protest on the victory stand.

Harry Edwards: Well, the immediate result was a tremendous buoying cat calls. There were a lot of a United States citizens at the Games in Mexico City, an easily accessible Olympic Games, and they took tremendous exception at the gesture by Thomas Smith and John Carlos.

Harry Edwards: 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.

Harry Edwards: I mean, it’s 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.

Harry Edwards: 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 Balogh: 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 a context of their circumstances.

Harry Edwards: At the turn of the 20th century, African-American athletes received 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.

Harry Edwards: In 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.

Harry Edwards: 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 [inaudible 00:22:35]

Brian Balogh: You know, the 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 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 where 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.

Harry Edwards: 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, and 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 Balogh: So celebratory politics is just fine. It’s only the oppositional politics that draws a 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 were trying to do, but we shouldn’t expose our dirty laundry to the world.”

Harry Edwards: 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 for right, which is what America was supposed to be about.

Harry Edwards: 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.

Ed Ayers: That was Brian speaking with Harry Edwards in 2014. Edwards is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He’s written numerous books about African-American athletes, including The Revolt Of The Black Athlete.

Ed Ayers: That’ll do it for us today. Thanks for joining me on this dip into the BackStory archive. There are hundreds of other shows available at our website, BackStoryRadio.org.

Ed Ayers: And you can keep conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. Send us an email to BackStory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Ed Ayers: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, The National Endowment For The Humanities, The Joseph And Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, The Johns Hopkins University, and The Arthur Vining Davis Foundation. Additional support is provided by The Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts and humanities and the environment.

Announcer: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University.

Announcer: BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.