Ironically one of the most outspoken critics of Tommie Smith and John Carlos was Jesse Owens, who strongly discouraged Black athletes from engaging in any kind of protest.
To be sure it was a moment, made for this era; you could easily imagine millions of Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and Instagram posts of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, and their iconic Black Power fists up in the air at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. For their gesture in support of Black liberation, Smith and Carlos were stripped of their medals and sent home. That the duo remain frozen in time as inspirations for generations of athletes and activists, in some ways obscures the complexities of a moment that was much larger than their powerful symbolism.
Years before I didn’t know anything about the protests of Black athletes at the 1968 Summer Olympics; the connection between sports and politics was framed for me through Cold War relations between The United States and then Soviet Union. The United States boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics in response to the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan the year before. For my then 15-year-old self, the opportunities denied American athletes, including a young sprinter and long jumper named Carl Lewis, seemed unfair. Four years later when Lewis won four Gold medals at the Los Angeles Summer Olympics (which the Soviets boycotted), he became a national symbol of Cold War-era American patriotism, albeit with a hi-top fade.
Watching Lewis run around the Los Angeles Coliseum with the American flag seemed out of sync with what I was witnessing as a Black teen growing up in New York City. 1984 was the year I was politicized in the context of Jesse Jackson’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, with Nation of Islam leader Min. Louis Farrakhan, for a time serving as a surrogate, and the rise of Ronald Reagan-styled conservatism.
And then there was the boom of Hip-hop which altered the sonic landscape of everywhere, America with the sound of Black joy, rage and resistance. Indeed, for that first cohort of the Hip-Hop generation, especially those of us who were college students at the time, those images of Smith and Carlos — which adorned our dorm rooms as posters, along with those of Malcolm X, a still incarcerated Nelson Mandela and Angela Davis — were reflective of the kind of dramatic political impact that we hoped to have.
Because of his achievements in 1984, Lewis was most often compared to sprinter Jesse Owens, who first achieved four Gold medals in Track & Field at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. But the two were also linked because like Lewis, Owens was paraded as a symbol of American Democracy in the face of the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s in which the 1936 Summer Olympics served as a coronation for the “pure” Aryan nation.
It would be years still that I would find out that Owens was denied an audience with President Franklin D. Roosevelt — an opportunity extended to all of the White Olympians — because he was Black and the President, who was held in high regard by Black Americans, didn’t want to upset the social order in the United States. In this case, the American President’s stance resembled that of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, who did not congratulate Owens after his victories (Hitler met and shook hands with all the German gold medalists.).
Owens, with pressure from the NAACP, was among the athletes that supported an American boycott prior to the 1936 Olympics. The boycott was squashed largely by the influence of American Olympic Committee head Avery Brundage, who by 1968 was the President of The International Olympic Committee (IOC) — still the only American to hold the position. In 1936 Brundage famously argued that politics had no role in amateur athletics, and it was in that context that he largely turned a blind eye to what was happening in Nazi Germany.
In his role as IOC President, it was largely Brundage who was responsible for stripping Smith and Carlos of their medals and sending them home. That Brundage was largely silent in the face of Hitler’s rise and later was a strong advocate for the apartheid state South Africa’s participation in the 1968 Olympics, speaks to the contradictions of his position. In Brundage’s mind, the anti-White Supremacist protest of Black athletes was more egregious, than actual White Supremacist countries.
White journalist Len Lear was one of the outliers among those who condemned Smith and Carlos, writing in the Philadelphia Tribune (11/5/68) that “Brundage Swallowed Hitler; Choked on Smith and Carlos.” As Lear wrote at the time, “the expulsion of Smith and Carlos made it quite clear, if the treatment of Muhammed Ali hadn’t already done so, that America demands from its Black athletes total silence. It’s okay to run faster, punch harder…but it’s not okay to act as if you have a brain in your head.” Lear’s comments could have been written about any number of athletes in the past few years, notably the women of the WNBA, who have expressed strong opinions about social justice in America.
Ironically one of the most outspoken critics of Smith and Carlos was Jesse Owens, who prior to their protest had strongly discouraged Black athletes from engaging in any kind of protest. As Dr. Harry Edwards recalled on the podcast Off the Ball in 2016, “one of the things that [Owens] said was ‘If you guys demonstrate or do anything that would tend to be perceived as embarrassing the United States or the United States Olympic team, you won’t be able to get a job when you get back home’ and I think it was Carlos who stood up and said ‘Jesse, what are you talking about? I can’t get a job now.’” One significant Black athlete, who wasn’t there to respond to Owens was UCLA basketball player Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), who in the spirit of Owens in 1936, already had chosen to boycott the 1968 Olympics because of political conditions in the United States.
While we’re apt to remember Smith and Carlos, if only because of the sheer regality that their image cut, they were not alone in Mexico City. African American men swept the top three spots in the 400-yard sprint, and led by Lee Evans, Jr., wore Black berets — the signature headgear of the Black Panther Party, as a form of protest. In a show of solidarity, the Cuban 4×100 Relay Team offered their Silver Medals to Smith and Carlos. The American Women’s 4×100 team, anchored by Wyomia Tyus, dedicated their Gold Medal win to Smith and Carlos.
Tyus, who also won the 100-yard dash, is also remembered for the most subtle of protests, breaking out into the “Tighten Up”, the popular dance inspired by Archie Bell and the Drells hit song of the same title, as she approached the starting blocks. The gesture, a hat-tip to her Houston hometown (where the Drells were from also, as they announce in the song’s intro), foreshadowed Serena Williams’ “crip walk” after winning the Gold medal at the 2012 Olympic Games in London.
The protests of the 1968 Olympics have not been lost on this generation of Black athletes, who despite attaining a level of collective wealth that was fundamentally unimaginable to athletes in the late 1960s, find themselves still being asked to “play” and “shut up.” Writing for the now defunct Philadelphia Bulletin, journalist Sandy Grady surmised in 1968, that the “guys in the black gloves will only be a curious footnote.” How wrong he was.
Mark Anthony Neal is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African American Studies and Professor of English and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University. The author of several books including Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities and Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive, both from NYU Press. His next book Save a Seat for Me: Meditations on Black Masculinity and Fatherhood will be published by Simon & Schuster.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author’s permission. Read more of Mark Anthony Neal’s work on Medium.
