Academic Article

Black Power and the 1968 Olympic Games

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Black Power and the 1968 Olympic Games Author: Dexter L. Blackman Editors: Omari L. Dyson , Judson L. Jeffries , and Kevin L. Brooks Date: 2020 From: African American Culture: An Encyclopedia of People, Traditions, and Customs(Vol. 1. ) Publisher: ABC-Clio Document Type: Topic overview Pages: 6 Content Level: (Level 5)

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Black Power and the 1968 Olympic Games On October 16, 1968, at the Olympic games in Mexico City, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, two sprinters on the U.S. Olympic team, finished first and third, respectively, in the 200-meter dash, one of the games' premier events. The two received their medals at a traditional Olympic ceremony that evening and as the “Star-Spangled

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Banner” played to acknowledge their accomplishments and to indicate the nation they represented, Smith and Carlos each thrust closed fists in the air to protest racial and class discrimination in the United States. The two athletes did not invent this gesture. It was used by Ron Karenga's group, US, in the aftermath of the 1965 Watts Rebellion as well as by members of Huey Newton's Black Panther Party, formed in Oakland, California, in 1966. Surely, Smith and Carlos popularizedit. The gesture was quickly adopted as a symbol of protest against white supremacy and corporate power worldwide. A number of African, black, and Third World athletes in Section 22 of the Olympic stadium immediately flashed closed fists in return to Smith and Carlos. Within weeks, students protesting racial discrimination and in loco parentis at universities in the United States used the gesture to disrupt campus events. Workers on strike at factories in South America also adopted the gesture as a symbol of solidarity. Years later, blacks in West Africa and Algeria found that the fist earned them discounted rides with native cabbies. The Black Power fist, as it became known, continues to stand for power and pride in black communities and defiance of white supremacy.

American sprinters Tommie Smith (center) and John Carlos give the Black Power salute at the Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City, Mexico, on October 16, 1968. American sprinters Tommie Smith (center) and John Carlos give the Black Power salute at the Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City, Mexico, on October 16, 1968. (Popperfoto via Getty Images) (Popperfoto via Getty Images)

Although the Smith and Carlos protest lasted less than a minute, it was a year in the making and a product of the larger Black Power Movement. Smith and Carlos were members of the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), a group of Black Power, black student, and athletic activists who campaigned for a black boycott of the Olympics as a means of raising awareness of institutionalized racism, the poverty and structural and cultural racism that continued to denigrate the quality of life in black communities. As late as 1964, despite considerable gains in income since World War II, black workers on average earned approximately only 56 percent of white workers' earnings, and unemployment among blacks remained almost twice that of the national average. Beginning in the summer of 1964, frustration with unrelenting poverty and acts of police brutality led blacks to riot against ghetto conditions in places like Philadelphia and Harlem and Bedford Stuyvesant in New

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York City. Over the next five summers, more than 250 civil disorders of varying intensity occurred in cities nationwide.

In response to institutionalized racism and the socioeconomic desperation of black communities, in July 1967, nationalists and other activists met at the National Black Power Conference to propose solutions. The conference passed several resolutions advocating the socioeconomic and political self- determination of black communities and alliances with Third World liberation movements. Attendees also passed a resolution urging that blacks boycott the Olympics in protest of government persecution of Muhammad Ali, who had been stripped of his heavyweight boxing titles by various boxing associations and of his boxing licenses by various state athletic commissions for refusing to enter the military as a draftee and for publicly condemning U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam. The former Cassius Clay had already shaken the establishment by announcing his membership in the Nation of Islam in 1964 and changing his name. He made the political dimension of his new faith prominent on the national stage by refusing to be drafted on the grounds that he was a Muslim minister and, in effect, could not fight in a secular war. Because Ali made no attempt to escape the country to avoid punishment for violation of the conscription laws, he became a hero for many as a man of principle who was willing to sacrifice a highly successful career because of his beliefs. He was naturally an inspiration to other black athletes, many of whom feeling an obligation to emulate him. There was no greater symbol for the radicalization of the black American athlete than Ali.

In September, after his successful organization of a black student movement at San Jose State (CA) College (SJS), Harry Edwards, a part-time sociology instructor and a former student-athlete, began organizing a black Olympic boycott as a protest against institutionalized racism. Smith, who was a student at SJS, and Carlos, who arrived in San Jose in January 1968, were among the first Olympic- caliber athletes to support the OPHR.

Despite the OPHR's efforts to link the campaign to the black struggle against institutionalized racism, the majority of the mainstream media labeled the proposed boycott unpatriotic, unnecessarily militant, and in a few quarters, a communist plot. Vice-president and Democratic Party presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey condemned the OPHR, and leaders of the NAACP and Urban League also distanced their organizations from the proposal. Edwards and the OPHR struggled against the mainstream's perception to attract support to the campaign.

The OPHR, however, obtained endorsements from a wide variety of civil rights and black activists, including liberals, nationalists, and progressives. The most notable was Martin Luther King Jr., who joined Edwards at a New York City press conference in December 1967 to endorse the campaign. King noted that the campaign's emphasis on eliminating institutionalized racism was representative of the next phase of the black freedom struggle. Many liberal black newspapers and former Brooklyn Dodger great and baseball Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson also endorsed the OPHR for similar reasons. Nationalists, including the Nation of Islam and H. Rap Brown, and socialists, including The Daily Worker and William Patterson, unsurprisingly, also endorsed the campaign, if only because even a partially successful boycott would embarrass the United States.

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The international antiapartheid movement also provided another significant endorsement to the OPHR. On February 15, 1968, the International Olympic Committee extended an invitation to South Africa to participate in the games. The governing Afrikaner Nationalist Party enforced a rigid system of racial apartheid in South Africa that denied citizenship and human rights to the nation's majority African population. Within days, all thirty-six in de pendent nations of black Africa pledged to boycott the games if South Africa participated. The Soviet Union also intimated withdrawal. The African bloc and leading antiapartheid advocates in the United States endorsed the OPHR as part of the campaign to bar South Africa from the Olympics. The assassination of King on April 4, 1968, also radicalized a number of blacks into supporting the OPHR. The threat of a combined Third World and black boycott or protests disrupting the games forced the IOC to issue a decision in late April to bar South Africa from the upcoming Olympics.

The expulsion tempered support for the OPHR in several quarters, but Edwards, the chief strategist of the OPHR, managed to keep the campaign newsworthy by capitalizing on the media's fascination with black militants and speaking on college campuses across the country. On the advice of mentor and television reporter Louis Lomax, Edwards transformed himself into a stereo typical militant. He adopted the Black Panther Party's black leather jacket and beret, publicly associated with other black militants, and made outrageous statements that drew the attention of the press. For example, in February 1968, he held a press conference with H. Rap Brown, who suggested that the alternative to protesting a track meet sponsored by an athletic club that did not permit membership to blacks would be to blow up the meet's venue. In April 1968, following the assassination of King, Edwards stated that as a show of good faith to blacks, the federal government needed to kill all white supremacists with a dull ax. He also attacked several of his black critics, including former Olympian and anti-Nazi symbol of the 1936 Berlin Games Jesse Owens and baseball stalwart Willie Mays, as Uncle Toms and establishment Negroes, although their criticism of the boycott had a greater effect than many promoting the boycott imagined at the time.

By late August 1968, however, the inability of the San Jose–based OPHR to communicate effectively with several black likely Olympians across the country and mainstream pressure and state harassment made the boycott unlikely. From the start of the campaign in late 1967, the federal government's domestic counterintelligence programs (COINTELPRO) harassed Edwards, Smith, and several participating athletes. Beginning in 1967, the government targeted militant and leftist activists whose causes might increase the United States' susceptibility to a communist takeover. By the end of 1969, COINTELPRO activity was complicit in the deaths of at least ten Black Panthers and the arrest of hundreds of other black and antiwar activists. COINTELPRO files accessed later demonstrate that Edwards and Smith were under constant surveillance during the period of the campaign. Other athletes and their spouses lost jobs and scholarships. Smith, Carlos, and Lee Evans, also a student- athlete associated with the OPHR, suggested that sports officials attempted to keep them off the Olympic team by cheating them out of victories during the summer races that determined eligibility for the Olympic team. The harassment and the OPHR's inability to contact several athletes led to discord and confusion

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among several black athletes. In particular, Edwards failed to obtain an audience with the black women Olympians, thus alienating a group whose participation was critical to the campaign's access. But the major reason for the failure of the boycott was simply that the vast majority of the athletes being asked to participate could not understand what would be gained by such a sacrifice on their part, when the window for high-level, prestigious international competition is open only for a short time for most of them. Ali at least had a religious reason for his opposition to the draft, and presumably a spiritual reward awaited him in the great by and by. But what was their reason for a boycott—to protest what, exactly—and what would be their reward, spiritual or otherwise? Beleaguered, but buoyed by the attention he attracted to issues of poverty, in early September 1968, Edwards announced that there would be no boycott.

The black athletes, however, continued to meet among themselves. In September 1968, after Avery Brundage, the chairman of the IOC and an American, declared there would be swift punishment for any athlete involved in political demonstrations at the games, several offended black athletes, including Smith, Carlos, and Evans, decided that each athlete should act on their own conscience with approved individual demonstrations at the games. Smith and Carlos's demonstration was the most visible and compelling of the several protests and is primarily noted because it accompanied the performance of the U.S. national anthem. The following day, the U.S. Olympic Committee banned Smith and Carlos from the Olympic Village, further angering blacks and their allies and prompting more protests at the games.

As the black fist came to represent power, pride, and protest over the next few decades, Smith and Carlos's lives suffered in comparison to other champion athletes. Both remained pariahs in mainstream sports circles for more thirty years after the demonstration, and it affected their economic and social livelihoods. Smith played sparingly for the NFL's Cincinnati Bengals for three years. After retiring, he slept on friends' couches until he found steady work as a track coach in the 1980s and 1990s. Carlos also played in the NFL for a few seasons, before working several odd jobs over the next decade. In 1977, his ex-wife committed suicide, which Carlos believes was induced by the FBI's continual harassment of his family. Edwards completed a doctorate in sociology and is noted for conceiving the academic subfield of sports sociology. He retired as professor emeritus from the University of California at Berkeley and has worked as a counselor for several Bay Area sports franchises.

Smith and Carlos's demonstration stood for black pride and resistance; but it has proved pliable and came to be used by workers, other minorities, and leftists to signal their struggles against in equality and solidarity with black pride. By the early 1970s, the widespread adoption of the black fist as a symbol of resistance and pride had led to its commoditization. Most common were Afro “picks” with a black fist handle, T-shirts emblazoned with a black fist, and black fist medallions. The persistent advertisement of these products in black-oriented publications like the mainstream Ebony and the Nation of Islam's Muhammad Speaks and during broadcasts of the popular television dance program Soul Train, as well as the presence of Smith-Carlos posters in dorm rooms and barbershops, ensured that for more than three decades after their demonstration in Mexico City, the moment continued to

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personify the spectacular ways that Black Power activists and campaigns made themselves heard in American and international discourses.

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Dexter L. Blackman

See also: Black Power Movement ; Social Activists ; Sports, African American Protests in ; Sports in the Twentieth Century

Further Reading Bass, Amy. 2004. Not the Triumph but the Struggle: 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Carlos, John, and Dave Zirin. 2013. The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Edwards, Harry. 1969. Revolt of the Black Athlete. New York: Free Press.

Owens, Jesse. 1970. Blackthink: My Life as Black Man and White Man. New York: William Morrow.

Smith, Tommie. 2007. Silent Gesture: The Autobiography of Tommie Smith. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2020 ABC-CLIO, LLC Source Citation (MLA 9th Edition)    Blackman, Dexter L. "Black Power and the 1968 Olympic Games." African American Culture: An Encyclopedia of People, Traditions, and Customs, edited by Omari L. Dyson, et al., vol. 1, Greenwood, 2020, pp. 132-137. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX8056200046/GVRL? u=modestojc_main&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=7e1c9804. Accessed 12 Apr. 2023.

Gale Document Number: GALE|CX8056200046