Protesting at the 1968 Olympics

When Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists on the podium of the 1968 Olympic Games, it reverberated across both the political and sports worlds. Matt Andrews delves into the unrest that led black athletes to take a stand at the Olympics, including the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Oh, lessons from the world's top professors anytime, any place,
world history examined and science explained. This is one day
university Welcome. Then we're back on the untold history of

(00:28):
sports in America. I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli. Last time
we discussed the greatest Mohammed Ali. Today we shift our
focus to the expansion of civil rights protests by athletes
onto the Olympic stage. In Black American athletes exercise their
right to protest, some by boycotting and some by attending

(00:49):
and making another kind of statement. Here's Matt with more So,
Muhammad Ali was the catalyst for the revolt of the
black athletes, and the big year of this revolt was
the eight. The nineteen sixties were a tumultuous decade, and

(01:10):
in that tumultuous decade, Night was the most tumultuous year
of all. Ninety eight was a year of national unrest.
It was the year of the Revolt of the Black Athlete,
or as I like to call it, it was the
year of Black Fists. Here's a quick rundown nineteen sixty eight.

(01:30):
It began with the tet Offensive in Vietnam, when Vietnamese
Communist forces briefly overran the American military in South Vietnam.
And this was the moment when Americans back home began
to seriously distrust their political leaders. When it came to Vietnam,
Americans were being told that they were easily winning this war,

(01:50):
the victory was in sight, and the shock of the
tet offensive demonstrated this was not true. You know. Suddenly
in early nineteen sixty eight, more Americans were against the
war than were for the war. And this was the
first time in American street that had ever happened. There
were political assassinations at home. In April, the civil rights

(02:12):
figure Martin Luther King Jr. He was shot and killed
in Memphis. More on this at a moment. In June,
the Democratic presidential candidate Robert Kennedy. He was gunned down
in Los Angeles on the night of his victory in
the California Democratic primary. Kennedy was the candidate who was
talking about the problem of black poverty in this nation,

(02:32):
and now he was gone. Then, in the late summer,
at the Democratic convention in Chicago, youthful protesters converged in
the city to protest the war in Vietnam, and the
Chicago police moved in on them and beat the protesters
day and night. Chicago was a war zone. Americans were
angry and defiant. This defiance reared its head in the

(02:57):
world of sports, particularly among black athletes and American universities.
Just a few quick examples. In nine at the University
of California at Berkeley, black football players revolted against their coach,
who demanded that they trimmed their beards and afros. That
the black athletes refused to play, and their revolt eventually

(03:19):
led to the dismissal of both the coach and the
athletic director. At the University of Kansas, black football players
boycotted practice until the cheerleading squad was integrated. Black athletes
in Western colleges protested the fact that their university's scheduled
games and meets against Brigham Young University b y U

(03:41):
is a Mormon school, and at that time, Mormon Church
doctrine explicitly denied blacks full membership. African Americans were prohibited
from the priesthood, and black athletes they took a stand,
and they protested, and then they were punished. Eight members
of the Texas Western track team they announced they would

(04:02):
boycott their upcoming meet against b y U, and their
coach immediately dismissed all eight of them, including their star
long jumper Bob Beamon, who will do something very remarkable
at the Summer Olympics. In just a moment, fourteen members
of the University of Wyoming football team they were not
going to boycott their upcoming game against b y U.

(04:24):
They just told their coach, We're going to wear black
arm bands in protest of Mormon doctrine. Their coach said,
not only will you not wear those arm bands, you
are no longer on the team known as the Black fourteen.
These fourteen players had revolted, and there was swift retribution.
Let me briefly point out something here. In three, the

(04:49):
n ci A changed one of its rules. Before seventy three,
college athletes were always given four year athletics scholarships. Now
these scholarships would be on a one year, year to
year basis. Why do you think this change happened. This
policy was changed so coaches and administrators could control their athletes.

(05:13):
They wanted the power to threaten players and kick them
out of the university for speaking about issues of civil
rights or or protesting the war In Vietnam, so in
nineteen sixty eight, athletes were part of the rebellion of
the era. They were insisting that they'd be heard. They
were saying that sports would no longer be divorced from

(05:34):
the political issues of the times. But the big bang
of these nineteen sixty eight protests was the proposed boycott
among black athletes of the Summer Olympics in Mexico City.
The idea of black Americans boycotting the Olympics had first
been proposed four years earlier, in nineteen sixty four. Mal

(05:57):
Whitfield was a former Olympic medallist. He had won gold
in the eight hundred meters back in London in ninety eight,
and in nineteen sixty four, Matt Whitfield wrote an article
for Ebony magazine and the title was Let's boycott the Olympics.
He was referring to the nineteen sixty four Olympic Games
in Tokyo. Whitfield had been one of those athletes we

(06:19):
talked about last time, who in the nineteen fifties had
toured the world espousing the wonderfulness of the United States.
But by nineteen sixty four he was disenchanted with the
slow pace of change in this country, and he wanted
white Americans to know his displeasure. The best way to
get the attention of white Americans, Whitfield believed, was to

(06:40):
refuse to represent them in the Olympics. You want to
win the medal count against the Soviet Union, well, good
luck without us. Whitfield suggestion actually brought little response in
nineteen sixty four, but four years later, amid all the
unrest of nineteen sixty eight and the more general revolt
of the black athletes, the idea was resurrected for the

(07:04):
Summer Olympics in Mexico City, and this time the proposal
came from a sociology professor at San Jose State College,
Dr Harry Edwards. Harry Edwards had been a collegiate discus
thrower and a basketball player at San Jose State, but
instead of pursuing an athletic career, he pursued a PhD

(07:25):
in sociology. He studied and wrote about race, and Edwards
is the one who most passionately came to articulate the
idea that black athletes were being used. Specifically, he said
that they were wrongly being held up by American propagandists
as proof that all black Americans could succeed in American life.

(07:49):
In other words, he argued that the success of black athletes,
these successes were being used to cover up a problematic
racist system. And Harry Edwards is the guy who said
no more, No longer will black athletes be held up
as proof that the system is working, because the system
is not working. Here is exactly how Edwards put it.

(08:11):
Here's a quote. We must no longer allow this country
to use black athletes to rationalize its treatment of the
black masses, to use a few negroes to point out
to the world how much progress has been made solving
racial problems. We must no longer allow the sports world
to pat itself on the back as a citadel of

(08:33):
racial justice when the racial injustices of the sports industry
are legendary. Any black person who allows himself to be
used in the above manner is not only a chump,
but he is a traitor to his race because he
allows racist whites the luxury of resting assured that those

(08:53):
black people in the ghettos are there because that is
where they belong or want to be. So, as you
see here, Edwards is not only saying that the American
sport its world as racist. He is calling out every
single black athlete in America and saying you are either
with us and speaking out against this problem, or you

(09:14):
are the problem. You either stand with us and speak out,
or you are a traitor to the race. Definite, hard
battle lines are being drawn here. It was Dr Edwards
who came up with the phrase the revolt of the
Black athlete, and Edwards was very strategic. He very consciously

(09:34):
played with the idea that this was a revolt, that
this was a political rebellion. In fact, he himself he
adopted the uniform of the of the militaristic Black American.
And he admitted why he did it. He said, you know,
when he wore his tweed blazer and spectacles, nobody paid
attention to him. But when he donned his black beret

(09:57):
and sunglasses, his his black leather jacket. You know, when
he donned the uniform of the rebel, suddenly Pete Bill
paid attention. Suddenly they listened. Harry Edwards was reviled among
the white press, who saw him as an instigator, a troublemaker.

(10:19):
The hate mail Harry Edwards received it made those threatening
messages sent to Jackie Robinson look like love letters. Here's
how much some people hated Harry Edwards. Someone broke into
his apartment in San Jose, took a decorative machete that
he had on his wall, and they butchered his two
Cocker Spaniels. To give organizational bite to this revolt, Harry

(10:47):
Edwards formed an organization, the Olympic Project for Human Rights.
So let's say it again, the Olympic Project for Human
Rights the o p h R. The o p HR
consisted of Edwards and elite black athletes, and they held
a press conference in which they outlined their demands and
if these demands were not met, Edwards said that black

(11:10):
athletes would refuse to represent the United States at the
Summer Games. And here's what they wanted. First, they demanded
the restoration of Muhammad Ali's boxing title and his boxing license.
That was their very first demand, and I think that
gives us a sense of how meaningful Ali was to
this generation. They wanted the dismissal of Avery Brundage, who

(11:35):
was the American who ran the International Olympic Committee. Avery
Brundage was was famously anti Semitic, and he showed a
general disdain for the concerns of black American athletes. In fact,
Harry Edwards called him slavery Brundage, and the o p HR.
They wanted him to step down. They demanded that the

(11:57):
US Olympic team have more black coaches, and they demanded
that the International Olympic Committee banned the all white Olympic
Big teams from South Africa and Rhodesia. These were two
African nations that practiced apartheid and whose governments they're they're
all white governments. They refused to let black African athletes

(12:17):
compete under their flags. So their demands were not just
about racial injustice in the United States. They had a
global or pan African agenda. In April nineteen sixty, black
Americans were jolted when Martin Luther King Jr. Was assassinated

(12:38):
in Memphis, Tennessee. And King's assassin was James Earl Ray,
who quickly escaped the United States and went to Rhodesia,
that white controlled African nation I just told you about
that did not allow black athletes to compete under their flag.
And it was the murder of Dr King that really
led many black athletes to seriously considered the boycott, and

(13:01):
someone who decided in the wake of King's assassination that
he was going to boy cut was lu al Cinder
of U c l A, the greatest college basketball player
ever and someone soon to change his name to Kareem
Abdul Jabbar. It was in the wake of King's assassination
that Lou al Cinder said, I cannot represent this country

(13:21):
at the Olympic Games. After the break, Tommy Smith and
John Carlos raised their fists at the Olympic medal ceremony.

(13:44):
In the end, the athletes who did boycott these games
were basketball players, and I'm not downplaying their decision, but
I do want to point out that basketball players had
the NBA ahead of them. There was still another level
for them, the professional level. But for most of the
black athletes, the Olympics was their ultimate goal. You know.
There was no professional track and field career waiting for them.

(14:08):
So a massive or or general boycott never happened, and
the plan instead became let's think about ways of using
the Olympic Games as a stage for protests, and track
and field seemed to be the best venue for the
protest and and members of the Olympic Project for human rights.
These black athletes, they came up with some very interesting ideas.

(14:33):
For example, someone suggested that after the starting gun sounded,
black athletes should drop to their knees and crawl, symbolizing
how black Americans have been hobbled by racism at home.
Others said, no, no, no, we want to compete. So
what if we run as hard as we can and
then we'll stop and we'll sit down right before we

(14:53):
reached the finish line, a symbolic suggestion that black Americans
have yet to cross the finish line back at home.
I think about how dramatic either of those moments would
have been. Ultimately, these ideas were dismissed. It was unclear
if anything would happen at all. At the Mexico City

(15:17):
Summer Olympics. The United States had one of its strongest
Olympic teams ever. In fact, after years of losing to
the Soviets in the metal count in the United States
was back on top, and the US was especially strong
in track and field. And here are a few of
the highlights for the Americans. There was the high jumper

(15:38):
Dick Fosbury, who unleashed a brand new style of jumping
in these Games. Previously, high jumpers leapt over the bar
with a face down technique with their with their chest
facing the ground. This was a technique known as the straddle.
But Fassbury just never felt comfortable doing the straddle, and

(16:00):
in a in a moment of desperation, had a track
meet one year earlier. He had just done something radical.
He had gone over the bar with his back to
the ground and his face into the sky. It became
known as the Fausbury flop. And in these Olympic Games
Dick Fosbury a different type of athletic rebel. He flopped

(16:21):
his way to the gold medal. There was Wyoming Attias.
Tias was the latest of the blazing fast Tennessee State
Tiger Bells, that school that gave us Wilma Rudolph. At
these games, Wyoming Attias won gold in the one and
she had done the same thing four years earlier in

(16:43):
so Wyoming Attias is the first athlete male or female
to win the one MS in two consecutive Olympics. And
then there was the long jumper Bob Beamon, who made
an incomprehensible leap. If you doubt that man can fly,
I give you Bob Beeman in the thin air of

(17:04):
Mexico City. When Beamon took off down the runway, the
Olympic record in the long jump was twenty seven feet
four inches. Beamon jumped, he soared, he landed, and the
officials started to measure his jump, but their measuring tape
wasn't long enough. They had to find a second tape.

(17:27):
It took them nearly thirty minutes before they were satisfied
with their measurement. Twenty nine feet two inches. Beamon had
obliterated the world record by almost two feet relative to
the existing record. It's got to be the most remarkable
performance in Olympic history. So amazing feats all of them.

(17:49):
But if you say nine Olympics, what most people think
of is the protest. The men's two sprint featured two
African Americans, Tommy Smith and John Carlos. They were from
San Jose State College, where ha Edwards taught. In this event,
Tommy Smith won gold, John Carlos one bronze, and Peter

(18:12):
Norman and Australian He finished right in between them in
second place. At the metal ceremony, all three stood on
the podium. They received their medals and when the star
spangled banner began to play. American sport history changed forever.
I'm sure you've seen photographs of this moment. Tommy Smith

(18:33):
and John Carlos, they raised their arms and clenched their fists.
They were wearing black gloves. This, they said, stood for
the power in the unity of Black America. They were
not wearing shoes, they had removed them and were standing
in their socks. This symbolized the material poverty of Black America.

(18:55):
John Carlos wore beads around his neck. He said this
signified the black Americans who had been lynched in American history.
And they were both bow their heads. This was a
remembrance of Malcolm X and Dr King. King had been
assassinated just a few months earlier. All three of the athletes,

(19:16):
including the white athlete Peter Norman of Australia, the silver medalist,
all three war buttons that said Olympic Project for Human Rights.
Let's talk about the reaction to this moment. When the
anthem stopped, the booze from the crowd, which was heavily American.

(19:36):
The booze poured out and as they walked off the track.
People who were there they reported that the n word
was yelled multiple times, and Smith and Carlos looked into
the crowd and they raised their fists once again as
they walk off the track. Tommy Smith was immediately asked
by reporters what it meant, and he called it a

(19:58):
gesture of frustration. He was frustrated with the persistence of
racism in the United States. Sports writers tried to figure
out what it all meant. Robert Lipsite was a fairly
liberal sports writer for the New York Times. He wasn't
sure what he had just witnessed. He wrote, after all,

(20:18):
we'd come through this year and this is it. This
is the mildest, most civil demonstration of the year. What
does it even mean? Now? I'm not sure what Lipsite
was expecting. I suppose they could have burned the metal
stand to the ground Jimmy Hendrick style, but that's what
he wrote. Other sports writers thought they knew exactly what

(20:40):
it meant. Jim Graham of the Denver Post called the
gesture a deliberate, calculated insult to the white people of
the United States. A reporter for the Los Angeles Times
called it a Nazi like salute. There was a young
sportswriter named Brent Musburger. Now he announced his college football games,

(21:01):
and he was covering the Olympics for a Chicago newspaper,
and he also aid reference to the Nazis. He called
Tommy Smith and John Carlos a pair of dark skinned stormtroopers,
in other words, black Nazis, and then he wrote this
one gets a little tired of having the United States

(21:21):
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. The

(21:45):
man who was most angry of all was Avery Brundage,
the head of the IOC, and he gave the United
States Olympic Committee an ultimatum. Avery Brundage said that Tommy
Smith and John Carlos had deliberately violated the spirit of
the Games by bringing politics onto the metal stand. So
Brundage said that Smith and Carlos had to go. Either

(22:08):
send Smith and Carlos back to the United States or
the entire US team would be barred from further competition,
and so Smith and Carlos were removed from the Olympic village,
put on a plane, and sent back to the United States.
The United States Olympic Committee they went into crisis mode.
They quickly met with all the black athletes and they

(22:31):
begged them, please don't make any more metal stand gestures.
And there was a very interesting collision between past and
present here. The United States Olympic Committee brought in Jesse Owens,
the hero from n to speak with the present day
black athletes. Jesse Owens implored the Black Olympians to cool it.

(22:54):
He begged them not to embarrass their country. He made
some weird promise that they would all be taken care
of after the Olympics, and the athletes just laughed at him.
They said, well, we to be taken care of just
like you were taken care of, Jesse. Will we get
to run against horses for a living too. The athletes
called Jesse Owens a traitor, they called him an uncle Tom,

(23:16):
and they told him to get out of their face.
It's a tough moment that illuminates the stark, unflinching generational
divide in this era. Here was Jesse Owens, the man
who had raced against Hitler and paved the way in
some ways for these black athletes, but now here he
was telling them to just keep quiet and run, and

(23:39):
in their mind, now he was part of the problem.
In their mind, Jesse Owens was an apologist for the
status quo. The divisions of the nineteen sixties, they ran deep.
I'm not sure if there was a moment that illuminates
those divisions, a moment that illuminates the political passions and

(24:01):
the divisions of the entire decade more than the reaction
to Tommy Smith and John Carlos raising their fist on
the metal stand. For almost a quarter century, ever since
Jackie Robinson desegregated Major League Baseball, sports had been celebrated
as being the venue where racial progress was most evident.

(24:23):
And now these two black American athletes were saying, in
front of the whole world, it's not true. It's a lie.
That's all for now. Next time on the Untold History
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