The most enduring image in sports history?
[AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi
With some form of Olympic Games now happening every two years with saturation media coverage on TV and the internets, it's no surprise that spectacle often wins out over substance. For example, who's talking about homeless people being evicted in pre-Games Vancouver? There are, however, examples of courageous stances taken on the global sports stage.
"We were trying to wake the country up"
Sportswriter Dave Zirin calls it, "arguably the most enduring image in sports history," but hastens to add, "the image has stood the test of time, the politics that led to that moment has been cast aside by capitalism's commitment to political amnesia; its political teeth extracted."
"I didn't do what I did as an athlete; I raised my voice in protest as a man," John Carlos declared. The protest voiced by Carlos and Smith provoked a firestorm as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) not only forced the U.S. Olympic Committee to withdraw the two world class sprinters from the upcoming relays, the IOC had them expelled from the U.S. Olympic team. "We didn't come up there with any bombs," says Carlos. "We were trying to wake the country up and wake the world up too."
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Teammates at San Jose State College, Carlos and Smith had both been involved in a planned Olympic boycott by amateur black athletes organized as the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR). The OPHR founding statement read, in part:
We must no longer allow this country to use a few so-called 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 world are infamously legendary... any black person who allows himself to be used in the above matter is a traitor 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?
OPHR Demands and the IOC Response
The IOC made the gesture of conceding on the third demand—a move that cleverly blunted the threat of a boycott. Carlos and Smith were far from satisfied. Thus, on the second day of the Games, when Smith set a world record in the 200 meters and Carlos placed third, they had a stage on which to stand barefoot.
"We wanted the world to know that in Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, South Central Los Angeles, Chicago, that people were still walking back and forth in poverty without even the necessary clothes to live," says Carlos. "We have kids that don't have shoes even today. It's not like the powers that be can't provide these things. They can send a space ship to the moon, or send a probe to Mars, yet they can't give shoes? They can't give health care? I'm just not naive enough to accept that." The beads around their necks for "those individuals that were lynched, or killed that no one said a prayer for, that were hung tarred. It was for those thrown off the side of the boats in the Middle Passage." The American flag began its ascent up the flagpole and the opening notes of the "Star Spangled Banner" played, Carlos and Smith stood barefoot with heads bowed and fists raised in a black power salute. Fallout The photographs of that moment rival any pre-staged Iwo Jima flag-raising. The fallout—both positive and negative—was instantaneous. "They violated one of the basic principles of the Olympic Games: that politics play no part whatsoever in them," Brundage declared. The Los Angeles Times called the raised fists a "Nazi-like salute." Wyomia Tyus, anchor of the women's gold medal winning 4x100 team, dedicated her team's gold medal to Carlos and Smith, while the all white crew team issued a public statement announcing their "moral commitment to support our black teammates in their efforts to dramatize the injustices and inequities which permeate out society." "It was a watershed moment of resistance," writes Zirin. "But Carlos and Smith are not merely creatures of nostalgia. As we build resistance today theirs is a living history we should celebrate." Raise Your Green Fists
