The Price to Take a Stand

I did not start in 2017 with Colin Kaepernick. 

During the 1968 Mexico City Summer Olympic games, American track stars Tommie Smith and John Carlos — who’d had just won gold and bronze medals respectively in the 200-meter sprint — raised black-gloved fists as the Star Spangle Banner played during the medal ceremony. Their silent but very public protest became one of the most iconic sports images of the 20th century, its effects still today reverberating 50 years later. The black gloved fist they each thrust into the Mexican night became a lightning rod within America’s combustible mix of sports and politics.

Smith and Carlos’ stance in Mexico City signified to their contemporaries’ black purpose. Their image on the winner’s stand was a light in the dark to other black athletes, then, now and for all time. The world had no choice but to take notice, could not ignore the rawness of their stance. It was a singular symbolic gesture that exploded and dwarfed previous years of less graphic mundane protests expressed by black athletes.

The event  had been carefully choreographed by Carlos and Smith. While walking to the medal stand, the San Jose State teammates took off their shoes to protest poverty. To call attention to the 100-year history of the unpunished lynching of black American citizens, both wore beads and a scarf. Carlos had brought one pair of black gloves to the ceremony. Smith wore the right glove; Carlos the left. 

When the Star-Spangled Banner began to play over the stadium’s loud speaker - and in full view of a world-wide audience - Smith and Carlos lowered their heads in defiance and raised their gloved fists in a Black Power salute. Their actions outraged a majority White Middle America. For the two, it was a moment of truth that would bring down a torrent of wide spread condemnation on to both. By protesting, both lost everything. The two were immediately kicked out of the Olympic Village, removed from the USA team and sent home early in disgrace.

Upon arrival back in the United States they were met with death threats. A life time banishment from the US Olympic team and AAU sanctioned competition meant their athletic careers were over. They were summarily and permanently expelled from San Jose State University as ungrateful traitors to America, vilified and shunned to a life sentence of insignificant obscurity - or so the establishment of the time thought. Forty-three years later, San Jose State University erected a monumental on- campus statue of both posed as they had in 1968 - on the medal stand with heads bowed and black fists raised in defiance.

Smith began life as the son of a Texas sharecropper, born on D-Day, June 6, 1944. "Daddy (was) a quiet person," Smith once said. "Piercing eyes and a scowl. He looks through you. He was self-taught. He learned to read from studying the Bible. When I was little, I went through the fields behind my father. I remember the muscles of the horses, and the earth dividing before the plow, the sound of the grass tearing, the smell of the wet earth. I followed them for hours, picking up worms."

At the age of five, Smith and his family rode four days and nights packed in with other black migrant laborers to a new life in California. Smith started school that fall.

"School was integrated,” Smith recalled, “and it was my first look at white folks in any number. I remember the most amazing thing. One day my mother gave me a nickel. And I bought an ice-cream cone. And this white kid, Wesley, knocked it out of my hand and said, 'Niggers don't eat ice cream.' I didn't know what to do. I went home and pondered it in my heart. Three years later, when I was going to Central Union School in Lemoore, this kid transferred in. Walking home, I said, 'I know you?'

" 'I went to Stratford....'

" 'Wesley!'

"They had to pull me off him. I beat him. Then I made him fetch our cows for a week."

A touching moment played out with no witnesses told Smith he had made the right decision, one validated by the man he could never quite satisfy. Smith and his father had never been close, never communicated feelings well. "I went to visit my father," after the Olympics, says Smith. "He looked right through me, stone silent as usual. Then, for the first time in my life, he reached for my hand. 'I don't really know what happened,' he said, 'but what you did was right.’ I melted. From this severe man I'd tried to please all my life, that was worth a lot of suffering."

In 2011, Carlos wrote in his autobiography, The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World, “I looked at my feet in my high socks and thought about all the black poverty I’d seen from Harlem to East Texas. I fingered my beads and thought about the pictures I’d seen of the ‘strange fruit’ swinging from the poplar trees of the South.” In defiance of Olympic protocol, both left their warm up jackets unzipped, to support of “all the working-class people — black and white — in Harlem who had to struggle and work with their hands all day.”

Carlos, while on the medal stand, said he intentionally covered up the “USA” logo on the front of his uniform with a black T-shirt to “reflect the shame I felt that my country was traveling at a snail’s pace toward something that should be obvious to all people of good will. Then the anthem started and we raised our fists into the air.”

“As the anthem began and the crowd saw us raise our fists, the stadium became eerily quiet,” Carlos wrote. “For a few seconds, you honestly could have heard a frog piss on cotton. There’s something awful about hearing fifty thousand people go silent, like being in the eye of a hurricane.”

"Of course, I'm going to be a whipping post the rest of my days," Carlos said in 1991. "The '68 Olympics are alive. The juice, the fire of '68, that scared a lot of people. All of us were such strong personalities, and that scared people. It scared government and business, everybody. It still scares them."

When freedom beckoned, Carlos once said, he and Smith stood up. Today, a half a century past, they still stand, immortalized in a statue replica of their now iconic black fist salute on the very campus they were once banned from.