It is 35 years since the Olympic protest of Tommie Smith and John Carlos. Both later paid for it, writes Steve Dilbeck in Los Angeles.
Evening is still coming as Tommie Smith sits on a wooden bench and looks over the Santa Monica College track, his young charges heading off for the day while the football team continues to work out.
He gives them all a long look, smiles a peaceful smile.
“None of these kids know who I am,” Smith said. “They don’t have the slightest idea. To them I’m just ‘coach’.”
In the late afternoon, John Carlos is trying to talk on the phone from Palm Springs High, but he has to keep barking out instructions to students.
Carlos, too, found few knew who he was when he arrived on campus.
“When I came here 17 years ago, they didn’t particularly know,” Carlos said. “A few years later a textbook came out and they happened to see my picture and name in the history book.”
The defining moment that elevated Smith and Carlos beyond American sports figures and into history books happened 35 years ago yesterday in Mexico City.
It was during the 200 metres victory ceremony at the 1968 Olympics. Smith had won in world-record time; Carlos had captured the bronze.
As they stood on the victory platform and the US anthem began, they bowed their heads, and, each wearing a black glove, raised a clenched fist in a black power salute. Australia’s Peter Norman, who won silver, wore an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge in support of the pair.
It remains one of the most vivid Olympic images – a picture once seen, never forgotten. It was a courageous, non-violent protest, benign but impassioned dissent. They meant to bring further attention to civil rights issues, to give pride to African-Americans, and they succeeded.
But the reaction was as swift as it was negative. In the US there was outrage from many white Americans. People saw heads bowed as disrespectful towards the American flag. They mistakenly saw the clenched fists as supportive of the Black Panthers.
The Associated Press report described them “in a Nazi-like salute”. Chicago columnist Brent Musburger called them “black-skinned storm troopers”.
The outspoken Carlos made the kind of comments that only inflamed the establishment. After the ceremony he said: “We’re sort of show horses out there for the white people. They give us peanuts, pat us on the back and say, ‘Boy, you did fine.’ ”
The International Olympic Committee demanded the US Olympic Committee ban them from the Games, but it refused. The next day the IOC said if the sprinters were not banned, the entire US track and field team would be barred from further competition. The USOC caved in.
Smith and Carlos were withdrawn from the relays and expelled from the Olympic Village. When they returned home, Smith and Carlos were ostracised. Jobs became scarce. They received death threats and their homes were attacked.
“One rock came through our front window into our living room, where we had the crib,” Smith said. “It seemed like everybody hated me. I had no food. My baby was hungry. My wife had no dresses.”
Even today, there are those who remain angry and full of hatred.
“There are still threats,” Carlos said. “I was never concerned about those punks. I just let them know it will be remembered, that life doesn’t stop when you leave this planet.”
After graduating, Smith was given an honourable discharge from army service for “un-American activities” That probably did him a huge favour, since the Vietnam war was raging and the body count growing.
“I was going to ‘Nam,” Smith said. “I could see myself in rice paddies. I believe there’s a God. Sixty-eight had its downfall, but it had its protection for me. I might not be alive.”
Carlos had two brothers serving, but after his protest both were immediately discharged.
Smith borrowed money to complete his education and get his teaching qualification. He tried gridiron for a few years with the Cincinnati Bengals, then finally got a job as a track coach in Ohio. In 1978 he moved to Santa Monica College, where he has been a social science and health teacher, and coaches track and field.
Carlos had an even more trying time, working as a security guard and bouncer, among other jobs.
“I’d get minimum wage and then go to Vegas and roll the dice to get it up to something to feed my family,” he said. “We had to chop up furniture, the kids’ beds, to stay warm.”
Looking back, the first thing that comes to him is basic.
“That I survived,” he said. “That I still have any sanity.
“My first wife is deceased as a result. She took her life because she couldn’t deal with the pressure from the results of Mexico.”
Smith, one of 12 children, was born in 1944 in Clarksville, Texas, where his father was a “dirt farmer”.
After the family moved to California, Smith would help in the fields for up to 10 hours a day,
even as he began to excel athletically in high school. His talent won him a scholarship at San Jose State and he was soon a world-class sprinter.
When he returned from Mexico, he went to visit his father, still working the fields. His father could not read but had heard people were angry at his son.
“He kind of looked at me, looked up and down, and said in his southern drawl: ‘You know, I’ve been hearing a lot of things about you. Everybody been telling me you did something wrong. You stuck a hand up or hit somebody or something.’
“I said that’s not truthful. He said: ‘Well, you’re telling me that and I’m going to believe you. You’re my son.’ First time I shook hands with him in my life.” Carlos is from Harlem, where his father was a cobbler and his mother a nurses’ aide.
“My mom and dad never saw me run a single race,” Carlos said. “They were always working every weekend. They were just trying to raise us.”
One of five children, Carlos lived with his family in an apartment behind his father’s shoe store and across from the Savoy Ballroom, where the best big bands and jazz groups of the day played.
Carlos and his friends would help people out of cabs or sing and dance outside the club. “We were out there hustling,” he said.
Then he would retreat to his apartment, where he could hear Duke Ellington lead his band or Frank Sinatra sing.
Like Smith, Carlos was a multisport star, who ultimately wound up at San Jose State.
People often assume the pair were great friends
but, in truth, they were never close. They never competed at the same time at San Jose State. They never forged some great plan should they both make the podium. At best, they are cordial to each other.
“I don’t think John Carlos likes me, even now,” Smith said. “I don’t think Carlos likes very many people. That’s just his demeanour. I’m more of a human person. I will not sit and talk to him. I talk to him on the phone.”
Smith lives near Los Angeles, Carlos in Palm Springs, but they have never been to each other’s home. And to this day, they disagree on exactly what happened in Mexico, whose idea the protest was.
Harry Edwards, another former San Jose State athlete, had formed the Olympic Project for Human Rights and wanted black athletes to boycott the Games. Before the team flew to Mexico, OPHR members decided to compete and protest individually.
In the 200m, Carlos – who had beaten Smith in world-record time at the trials – led early before Smith closed to win in 19.83, still a world-class time.
But a stunned Smith said he heard Carlos claim he allowed him to win because the gold was more important to him. Smith said his wife later confronted Carlos and he said it was true.
Carlos said: “Tommie can say whatever he wants. All I can say is, I respect Tommie Smith as one of the greatest sprinters in Olympic history.”
The two also disagree on whose idea the podium protest was.
After the race, the two and Norman had to wait two hours in a tunnel before the ceremony. Smith said he had the gloves and was trying to determine exactly what to do with them.
“The thought process was of power or strength, and I didn’t know how to do it except just hold my hands up like in church,” Smith said. “I’ve been religious all my life. Praise God with your hands up in church, with your head bowed. I thought this would be a good thing for me to do.
“So I told John: ‘This is what I’m going to do. I have another glove if you want it. You are welcomed to do, and you do what you think is necessary.’ I said if you want to do it, just watch me and follow my lead.”
Carlos tells it differently: “He had the gloves, I had the idea.”
While Smith said his head was bowed in prayer, Carlos said his was in reflection.
“I reflected on my father, who had fought in the the First World War. I reflected on when I was seven or eight and my mother would be working a lot of nights and away from her family. I reflected on the ignorant-ass teachers sent into the urban parts of the city who had no business being there. There was much to reflect upon.”
What both agree on is, despite everything, they have no regrets.
These two supposed radicals, combative outsiders, have spent their lives teaching the young. Both remain very religious.
“They wanted to build us to be arrogant, militant, unruly African-Americans,” Carlos said. “Anything but individuals serious about life, serious about their country, and its responsibilities to its citizens.
“People looked at us like we were subversive. We were like birds busting out of a cage.”
Smith said: “I was always an advocate of equal rights. Not that I wanted to whup the white man, or get whupped by the white man, because I saw that happened to my father. I wanted to be equal to the man doing the whupping. Give me equality.”
Yesterday both were due at San Jose State, where a ceremony was planned to honour their protest. The school hopes to raise funds to erect a statue next year.
“What’s so surprising about it is, on a positive note, it’s the brainchild of a 23-year-old white student,” Smith said.
Thirty-five years have passed since two sprinters made a stand, made a difference, made history.
“We still have a way to go,” Carlos said, “but we can see some distance for where we were.”
Los Angeles Daily News posted with permission
