1968 Olympic Black Power Salute's Influence

The time in Mexico, 2 a.m. In Britain, it's 9 a.m. Good morning to you. Tommy Smith and John Carlos, the two great American Negro sprinters, give the Black Power salute as they receive their medals after the 200 metres final. On the 16th of October 1968, Tommy Smith and John Carlos' controversial demonstration stunned the world. Yet it wasn't the only black protest on the victory rostrum, and nor was it spontaneous. Tommy and John putting their fist in the air was something that Americans really connected to because everyone was in some type of descent in America to something. But I have to say that it is one of those symbols that will be with me all of my life. It is one of the most definitive expressions of manhood, of service. The world in which we live cries out for heroes. We need heroes now as much as we ever did. I hope that if the occasion ever arose that I could show even a fraction of the kind of courage that those guys showed. This is the untold story of the people and the organization behind the stands and of the man who tried to stop them. They should support the Olympic movement. Tommy Smith and John Carlos were members of a political group which started at San Jose State College in the fall of 1967. The college was a magnet for black activism. We saw the kinds of conditions in this community that helped to radicalize us. And there was the attraction of Harry Edwards. Like most black San Jose State students, Harry Edwards and Ken Noel enrolled on sports scholarships. They arrived angry at the second class education accorded to blacks like them. I brought with me a lot of the distrust of institutions that had really been inculcated during the three years that I spent at East St. Louis Senior High School. So when I saw any degree of racism, discrimination, a flag went up and I automatically begin to raise questions, raise issues. In my freshman year I I remember asking the head basketball coach, how can these guys? be on this team with me and belong to fraternities which have clauses in their charter saying no negroes need apply and his response was you know i never needed a fraternity and i said that's not what i asked you harry would influence and inspire tommy and fellow country boy lee evans who grew up in california's fertile farming belt I did farm labor when I was 17 years old, like 10, 12 hours a day. I am sure that I saw Lee Evans when I was a kid in one of those cotton fields. We weeded cotton, we picked grapes, grapes that they make raisins out of. That's why I said running was easy because I'd been on my feet for 10, 12 hours. Sharecropping reinforced the second-class citizenship felt by Tommy and Lee. It sowed in them the seeds of revolt. Coming through the fields, I was subjected to being morbidly thought of as less than. I didn't like how my parents sort of cowed down to white people, you know, because they were the boss, you know. As I grew, I began to see the world as a boiling point of differences. Tommy enrolled at San Jose State on a basketball scholarship. in the fall of 1963. A year later, Lee came to run on the track team, just as Harry graduated and left to pursue a PhD. Tommy also decided to focus on track, if the team's world-renowned coach would have him. the Bud Winter and he turned red and I could almost see little things in his head, flipping around 100, 200, 400 relays, long jump, high jump, I could do all of them. He took me out on the track and it's history from there on. Tommy and Lee provided the foundation for what would soon become the world famous speed city team I knew that he had very successful sprinters but plus he was recruiting me to you know yeah he'd know he they sent me letters and he sent Tommy to talk to me Well, Bud Winter had always been, from anybody who was around the scene, the number one sprint coach in the world. But it was not until Tommy came and then sprinters began to come afterwards that the Speed City aspect developed, where there was a sort of avalanche of the top sprinters in the country and the world there. Smith begins to pour it on and forges to the front. He literally flies toward the tape, winning in near-record time, just three-tenths of a second off his world record. By 1965, Tommy was arguably the fastest man on Earth. As his reputation flourished, fellow athlete Linda Huey became more than a fan. We started seeing each other and it lasted for about a year. He was very secretive. He didn't want anybody to know that we were involved, we were dating, we saw each other behind closed doors either. at my apartment or at his apartment. Tommy had good cause to be secretive. Interracial marriage was still outlawed in many states. Besides, many young blacks were rejecting whites and multiracial ideals, and a militant school of black human rights activism was now challenging the dominance of the civil rights movement. We're nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us. But we are not non-violent with anyone who is violent with us. Malcolm X altered the mindset of many young blacks. I am the greatest. Most notably, a charismatic young boxer whom he... persuaded to join the separatist Nation of Islam. Why do you insist on being called Muhammad Ali now? That's the name given to me by my leading teacher, the Honourable Elijah Muhammad. That's my original name, that's a black man name. Cash and Slave is my slave name. I'm no longer a slave. On the 21st of February, 1965, Ali's mentor was gunned down in Harlem, martyred for the struggle. He was a hero to me. He stood out among all black people. He showed the white man where it was at. And the goal of black progress was also being threatened by events overseas. This was also a time when we were all aware that our peers were being sent 12,000 miles away to Vietnam to fight in Vietnam when they couldn't go to school in Alabama or Mississippi. This angered us. This made us... willing to do whatever we could to transform America. Tommy served his country by enlisting in the Reserve Officer Training Corps. By contrast, in April 1967, outspoken world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali was drafted into the U.S. military. Mr. Muhammad Ali. Ali has just refused to be inducted into the United States Armed Forces. Notification of his refusal is being made to the United States Attorney. Muhammad Ali was the godfather of this generation. I don't see why me and other so-called Negroes go 10,000 miles to drop bombs and bullets on other innocent brown people who's never bothered us. What made Muhammad Ali so important? to African-American athletes in the late 1960s was the same reason why Bob Dylan was so important to white activists in the late 1960s. It was that they seemed to have done it already. You know, they were ahead of the curve. Ali's principled stand inspired militant black students at San Jose State. It also galvanized newly appointed sociology of sport professor Harry Edwards, who, after gaining his doctorate, returned to teach there in 1967. What I was doing in the classes was pointing out that sport inevitably recapitulates society. You can't have a racist society and not have a racist sports institution, and here's the evidence of it. He was my instructor at a course called Racial Minorities, and when he offered it the first time I took that course, and there were like 300 to 400 students in an auditorium, most of them white, and he would come in there dressed in military Vietnamese. Jungle cover outfit with matches in his pocket like burn it down and wearing his black beret and at 6'8", 200 pounds he just walked down the aisle and scared everybody and it was kind of like cool, scare us Harry, cool. Harry's classes radicalized Tommy, yet it was a casual remark Tommy made at the World University Games in Tokyo in November 1967 that precipitated the events which would trigger the black protests at the Olympics a year later. Boycott is possible and it's probable. The reasoning is why should we participate for a country and 100% effort and come back to our homes and are denied some of the rights that should be given us. I didn't say yes there would be. I didn't say... No, there won't be. I said, between the lines, there's work for all of us to do. Let's wait and see. And a major part of it was the media focusing back on us as a consequence of Tommy's statements in Japan. And Tommy's statements in Japan came directly out of some of the courses, some of the discussions, debate and so forth that were taking place on this campus. I think it was almost accidental. I don't it wasn't. scripted, it wasn't rehearsed, it wasn't planned. It was in response to a question, you get an honest answer, and a controversy comes out of that answer that all of a sudden allows people like Harry Edwards and Tommy Smith to see they were in the middle of something, something was possible. In the fall of 1967, Harry and Ken became militant. They challenged the college authorities to reverse its racist policy towards black athletic scholars and more. And while we're at it, let's look at the housing, let's look at the academic... academic opportunities. Let's look at the whole situation with the fraternities and the sororities. Let's look at the whole issue with the hiring. Where are the Negro professors? Where are the Negro coaches? They're taking our football from us, but if we wanted a job here, we couldn't work here. Well, it was disbelief. Who are these guys? There's no problem. You guys are creating a problem. Everything is fine. Well, the only thing I recall was the list of demands that Harry made, and I remember looking at those and going, ooh, they aren't going to be able to meet those. That's not going to work. But I had also been very involved in some of those demands because I had gone and rented apartments for some of these guys and then turned the key over to them. Harry and Ken organized a student demonstration. It changed nothing. By contrast... Their threat to boycott the college's lucrative season-opening football match against Brigham Young University reaped rewards. Success inspired them to act on Tommy's proposal for a black Olympic boycott. In November 1967, Harry won unanimous support for the idea at the Los Angeles Black Youth Conference. His victory would put him on a collision course with international Olympic supremo Avery Brundage, who was adamant that sports should be a politics-free zone. And he wasn't alone. We were in a situation where not all of the athletes were either accessible or likely to participate in anything close to a bar cut. Two such athletes were long jumpers Bob Beeman and Olympic gold medalist Ralph Boston. As a guy who was nearing the end of his Olympic career, my first reaction was, you know, I don't want to do this. You know, I want to go. I need to go ahead and do this. This is going to be my ticket to earning a good living for my family and so on. So I didn't. I wasn't very interested at the time. We've been doing this here half of our lives and then suddenly we want to give it up now for whatever he was trying to say. Harry's proposed Black Olympic boycott was anathema to Avery Brundage, the all-powerful head of the International Olympic Committee. In Olympic circles, the word boycott is not used. That's a political word. But if they withdraw for political reasons, it's a sign that they do not understand the Olympic philosophy of no discrimination because of race, religion, or religion. religion or political affiliations. The Olympic Project for Human Rights, or OPHR, became the vehicle for the proposed Black Olympic boycott. Remarkably, the fledgling group was backed by Dr. Martin Luther King, who signed up as an advisor when he met Harry at the group's press launch in New York City. Dr. King was about 5 foot 9 inches tall with his hat on, and you know, about 165 pounds, so I'm standing there 6'8", about 270 pounds at that point. And he said, well, I see why these folks so scared of you. You huge. We laughed about it, but he understood that this was merely an overlay onto athletics. of the pattern and paradigm that he had established. Uniquely, OPHR also won huge support from the militant human rights wing of the Black Liberation Struggle. Harry courted activists including Stokely Carmichael. We want black power! We want black power! And HRAP Brown. The rebellions that we see are merely dress rehearsals for the revolution that's to come. OPHR backed up its call for a black Olympic boycott. With a list of incendiary demands, their primary objective called for the dismissal of their arch enemy, Avery Brundage. Who we found owned a country club in Santa Barbara, which had no Negroes and no Jews need apply in its charter. And this guy's the head of the International Olympic Committee. Avery Brundage had form. He'd been instrumental in winning the 1936 Berlin Olympics for Adolf Hitler. Two years later, Hitler reciprocated by contracting Brundage's construction firm to build the German embassy in America. You're talking about somebody who was kicked out of the America First Committee in 1940, which was this horrible Nazi solidarity group in the United States trying to keep the U.S. out of World War II. He was expelled from them for being too pro-Hitler. It was embarrassing to them. So he was asked to leave. You know, this is who Avery Brundage was. And he made sure that the International Olympic Committee, I mean, contained more fascists than the Nuremberg trials. Another OPHR demand concerned the movement's warrior saint, Muhammad Ali. He had been stripped of his world title and banned from boxing for refusing to fight in Vietnam. OPHR insisted the decision be reversed. Mr. Clay. Muhammad Ali, sir. Mr. Clay or Mr. Muhammad Ali, either one. Ali is important because he's probably one of the first athletes who begins to publicly articulate this relationship between sport, race and politics, and crucially begins to do so in a global context. A third, OPHR demand, concerned disinviting the all-white teams of southern Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa to the 1968 Olympics. Like the group's call for his sacking, It was bound to invoke the ire of Avery Brundage. Well, in the first place, we have not invited South Africa. We don't deal with nations. We've invited a multiracial team, a mixed team from South Africa chosen by a multiracial committee according to Olympic regulations. Whether we're talking about disinviting apartheid South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, restoring Muhammad Ali's title, or the reign of Avery Brundage. where he ran the International Olympic Committee really like a racist fiefdom. You're talking about three points in which the people of the Olympic Project for Human Rights were proven correct by history. It became very clear that there was a direct network of connections between what we were experiencing here at San Jose State and what was being experienced on the national level. in the Olympic movement by African-Americans and what was happening in places like South Africa and Southern Rhodesia on the international level. These were all the same people. It was the same power structure. OPHR's demands were so outrageous that news headlines were guaranteed. However, Harry was forced to reinvent himself to keep them in the media spotlight. Don't forget, just about 30 miles from San Jose was Oakland, California. The Black Panther Party was born there. So we started attending some Black Panther Party meetings in Oakland. And they said we were militant. We wasn't fighting anybody. But they called you militant because you wasn't agreeing with the status quo, I guess. The Black Panther Party set a new bar in terms of what was. accessible. It's pigs, pigs, pigs. There's another pig at his campaign headquarters right up there. Right on. Right on. Those suit-wearing days were over with. You didn't have to be polite. In point of fact, the thing now was to get in their face. It's all one big penitentiary. It's all run by pigs. It was an aesthetic that, I mean, just was on the absolute edge of cool. and it marked you as somebody who was not going to do it the old civil rights way. And that was something that Edwards adopted, I think, far more than he adopted the actual politics of the Panthers. In February 1968, OPHR took direct action on one of their demands, the desegregation of the New York Athletic Club. They staged a mass boycott of the club's showpiece centennial meet. The New York Athletic Club was notorious for not allowing Jews or blacks to come use the facilities. When their track meet comes around, they want the black athletes to come and help. bring audiences there and bring some money to their doors. Well, that was one of the first things that Harry targeted. If we're good enough to get in and make $15,000, $20,000, $30,000 on one track meet for the New York Athletic Club, then we should be good enough to do anything that the New York Athletic Club has to offer. I called some of my friends, the guys that I knew. I said, hey, you know, don't go to the New York AC meet. To have Igor come from Moscow and be whined and dined, let's say, at the Athletic Club and... And I have never seen the inside, and I'm an American citizen, and I'm competing in their meat. That didn't sit very well with me. The boycott made national news, yet OPHR's credibility was undermined by its inability to present a united black front. Long jumper Bob Beeman was one of a handful of athletes who crossed its picket line. I felt in between. I just hate it for politics to... and human right issues to seep into sports. I was disappointed that he went to the New York AC meet because only three or four blacks showed. Bob was lucky that somebody didn't beat him down there in New York because some Black Panthers, they said any Black people that went there was going to beat them down. We understood what we were asking, but it was necessary in order to move this thing ahead. I think that was one of the high points of the movement. That was the closest thing to a boycott success. Despite Bob's participation, OPHR members had bigger issues. Not least, unwelcome attention which threatened their goal of a black Olympic boycott. It started as soon as we joined the proposed boycott. We're gonna kill you niggas Friday at 2. It happened on a daily basis almost. Because Tommy gave me a copy and said, hey man, look at this. I said, you haven't seen anything, look at these. So I had a whole box of hate mail. Harry Edwards had his dogs cut up, killed and slaughtered and cut up in pieces and left on his doorstep. He did in fact relate to Ken Noel, here's the kind of leadership you need to... you know, to provide if I'm not going to be around to complete this. It got to the place that I would not go to a restaurant, a sit-down restaurant where you order food from a menu and eat. I wouldn't go to any restaurant except the smorgasbord, where they have all the food laid out and you pay a certain amount at the front when you come in, then you eat as much as you want, because if they didn't know I was coming, they couldn't poison me. Racist rednecks were the least of Harry's problems. His position as OPHR's mouthpiece had made him a target for the federal authorities. There were so many instances where we would go someplace and the guys would be out there. We go in two cars. He's in front. I'm behind. I fall out to a side street and wait. And you see people coming by, tailing us. Right on to wherever we're going. With Harry and co. up against it, Brundage looked set for victory. OPHR desperately needed a boost, and in April 1968, it came in the form of John Carlos, a world-class sprinter-cum-activist from Harlem who became a student at San Jose State. Lee Evans and Art Simber brought Carlos, and Lee Evans spoke very highly of him, and I remember him saying, this is a guy that gets it. He understands what happened at San Jose State because we've talked about it. These are things that were very dear to his heart. These were not bulletins to him. I mean, to some people, you know, these are things that, you know, it was a real awakening for people. It was not awakening for him. I mean, it was tremendous reinforcement of things that he knew. John was the most militant of every one of those track athletes. He was the most vocal and the most militant. And he would take a stand in anybody's face and say anything to anybody. So, yes, he was number one. militant man on campus. When John Carlos, you have somebody who I think much more than maybe other historians give him credit for, I think was very responsible for giving what happened in 1968 a certain edge and a certain timelessness that pushed it from being a symbol of civil rights into a symbol of black power. For all their athletic prowess and political zeal, Tommy Lee and John alone couldn't keep a live media interest in OPHR's proposed Olympic boycott. Once again, Brundage was poised to silence the upstart Negroes until OPHR got a fillip from a most unlikely source, the Harvard eight-man rowing crew. The way that all developed, I think, was in the context of as we were working to make the Olympic team and as we were training through that summer before the Olympic trials, there were a number of articles about not only what was referred to as the revolt of the black athlete. But I think where it was starting to focus was on the notion that there could be a boycott of the Olympics to highlight these issues. For them to step up when they did was a crucial thing to keeping, if not the possibility of a boycott alive, the idea of racial justice really in the public eye. What we agreed to do and what we did in fact do was as each member of the Olympic team was selected in any sport, we wrote them a letter. We sent them a copy of our original statement and we basically invited everybody. To make an effort to try to understand the plight of black athletes and of black people in America, what was remarkable was how little response there was. It was very much like sort of dropping the rock in the well and not hearing the splash. Although timely, the Harvard-Rower support couldn't generate media interest forever. By August, Harry had a difficult decision to take. We knew from the outset that we were not... going to be able to pull together a boycott for all of the reasons that I've discussed. But that didn't mean that we would not be able to make a statement. So the headline that came out in the paper after the press conference was, there are many ways to boycott. Everybody is free to do what they feel their commitment permits them to do. I think he really thought it was over. It was like, you know, it was like his eulogy for the movement, and he didn't get it. He'd really set something in motion that wasn't only just not winding down, but it was, in fact, looking to its high point. In October, watch the Summer Olympic Games, exclusively live and in color from Mexico City on ABC. We're at Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, scene of the United States Olympic men's track and field trials. When the Olympic trials were staged in September, OPHR was in disarray. Harry didn't attend, and the members who did were down and lacking direction. Here in the Piney Woods, we're ready to go now. Even so, the group welcomed a former dissenter into its ranks. When the meetings first began in California, I started getting hate mail, and I was nowhere even near that. It made sense to me that if I'm going to get hate mail, if I'm going to get killed... I might as well get killed, and the threat was there. I might as well get killed for being a part of something rather than to stand out on this island alone. World record, 44-5, held by Tommy Smith. Everything now rested on winning Olympic qualification, not hearts and minds. Then, an unprovoked intervention by Brundage gave impetus to renewed militancy among the angry black athletes. We went to South Lake Tahoe, and there was no meetings. There was... We didn't talk about it, but Avery Brundage, the idiot that he is, it was a newspaper article, said Avery Brundage makes a statement, he said those boys, if they come to the Olympics and they make trouble, we know what to do with them, and he threatened us. We started having meetings again. It's a new world record. In that meeting, Ralph Boston was a moderator of this meeting. It was brought to front, the letter that was sent to us by the IOC. via the USOC that if any athlete stepped out of line, that he would be immediately kicked off the Olympic team and sent home. It was pretty much a foregone conclusion there that we're going to go. We are definitely going to go, but we've got to decide how to handle this thing we've got our hands around. I wonder if I could ask you, first of all, is the boycott itself dead now? Is that finished? I would say the boycott is off. Now what about other things that might happen in Mexico City? Well, actually, Jim, I couldn't give you no concrete evidence or any concrete answers on what will happen at Mexico City. All I can say is you can expect almost anything. The Mexico City games opened with a colorful display of global togetherness. With the world watching on, the stage was set for Tommy, John and Lee to make a powerful statement. But what? Harry wasn't there and his OPHR our disciples had no concrete plan. It looked as if Brundage would enjoy the Olympics without political scandal. Indeed, behind the scenes, Brundage's minions, like American official Bob Paul, were trying to neutralize potential troublemakers. There were a series of remarkable incidents. Once we got to Mexico City, Pete Axton, the sports editor of Newsweek, was initially denied credentials. He arrived and came into the Olympic Stadium and the same Bob Paul walked up to him and said, oh, I see you got in. I hope you got something better to write about the niggers. I mean, this is the head of public relations for the Olympic Committee. It was just breathtaking stuff. The world record holder, Tommy Smith, of America, 6'3 and 40 sterns. Any thoughts Tommy had about representing OPHR's cause entailed making it to the victory rostrum. However, a moment of high drama during his semi-final raised serious doubts about his future involvement at the Games. I just watched Tommy Smith go from this stage. And he's really tough. The Tommy Jet, they call it. When I crossed the finish, I turned the left leg a little too much. And again, very close to world record. A disaster for Tommy Smith. And it only took a half a stride, and I felt it. I said, oh, I've been shot. Because all the hate mail I had gotten. That could be the difference between the gold medal and nothing at all. You know what I said to myself, of course? Oh. It's just a pull muscle. Now where do those words come from? You idiot. Pull muscle means that you there's a possibility probably a greater possibility that you will not compete. I managed to get through some barriers pass some guards somehow pull something to get over to the area where they're you know they're in a tent and they're actually froze the groin area where the injury had happened and you'll see his first few steps it's going to be very obvious that he wasn't going to be able to explode off the blocks if he you know were able to run in the final. After they I iced it. And Bud went and said, Tom, Tom, let's go out on the practice track and try it out. I said, OK, coach. It was a tense time. I said, coach, I think I'm OK. He said, OK, a few minutes, they're going to call for the final call for the 200 meters. Be ready. I said, OK. But when it came to the final, he was there. And of course, in great competition with his fellow American, John Carlos. This was the final of the 200 meters for men. It's all or nothing now. The proposed boycott. All the training, lost my job, wife need clothes, Kevin needs milk, cotton fields, all this was here. Complete marks. That's it. Silence. Nothing I heard but silence. I'm in trouble. Mid-turn, coming out of the turn, because I was in third off with place. About 80 meters, because it was just out of the turn. I made a surge. And when I made the surge, I could almost feel myself. And I knew that the only way I was going to catch anybody in front of me was a... a burst of speed. That smile just before crossing the tape was a smile of genuine elation that it is over. I have done what. I am here to do. The time inside 19.8, the new world record. I had decided to have Mrs. Smith bring me gloves, but I didn't know what I was going to do with them. When they were getting ready to go out for the awards ceremony, it was clear something was up. They had black gloves on, they had black socks. I had the left glove. I told John, John, this is what I'm going to do. I said, you want the left glove? You can have it. The fellow who won the silver medal was an Australian named Peter Norman. He said, mate, I believe in what you believe in and I want to help. White boy, you're Australian. I mean, come on, go get your medal. This was in my mind, so I said no. And on the way out, Paul Hoffman was hanging over the banister. I was wearing my Olympic Project for Human Rights button, and he looked up at me and said, hey, mate. You've got another one of those. And so here's this white Australian with two black Americans about to go out on an award ceremony. He wants to wear an Olympic Project for Human Rights button. And I'm damned if I'm going to be the one that says he can't. So I said, are you going to wear it? And he said, yes. And I took mine off and handed it to him. We were really excited and thrilled and kind of not really expecting much from these guys. Maybe from Carlos, because he was the more militant, but not from Tommy. This was the... Cher Cropper's son from Lemoore who picked cotton. This was the quiet child. There were more than 200 of us watching the actual event. We knew something was going to happen. Star Spangled Banner, when they did what they did, was absolute eternity. See, I did not throw a rock and hide my hand. What I did... It's held my hand up in a cry for freedom. We were electrified when they raised their fist. None of us knew that was coming. And when it happened, it was so right. People call it black power. Of course, I'm black. Of course, we represented power. But it was a cry for freedom. Here, notice me. I'm in need. What are you in need of? Justice. We were like in awe that we were silent. We just stood there. Nobody said a word. Through the whole national anthem, we just sat there and looked at each other and looked back at the TV and looked at each other and looked back at the TV. It was quite a moment. I mean, you know, you're sitting there and saying it's a long time for somebody to just take out a gun and shoot them. You're doing this in the same year where Martin Luther King and a Kennedy are assassinated. I think there was a great deal of shock. I mean, and people were sort of awestruck. By what they're looking at, I don't think until after it was over you heard a huge murmur afterwards, you know, trying to kind of, what did all this mean? And Tommy, can you tell us the significance of the black glove on the right hand and the black socks that you've been wearing? The black glove represents black America and it's sort of the black socks. I'm proud to be a black man and all my people back home know that it's very significant. Well, the iconography is absolutely fascinating. So you have... the leading arm of Tommy Smith, his right arm raised, and you have the left arm of John Carlos, and it forms that nice arc showing the unity of black America. So it becomes an aesthetic moment. They're not wearing shoes as a way to say something about poverty in black America. You know, they're wearing beads around their necks to symbolize the lynchings that had occurred in the history of black America. John Carlos, his jacket is unzipped, which is a tremendous breach protocol. As he said to me, he kept the jacket unzipped. because he wanted it to be a tribute to blue-collar workers, black and white. Peter Norman disrupts that simple narrative of it only being about black nationalist politics, and it broadens it out. I think that's one of the reasons why the image has been so powerful, is that you can read into it so many different stories. It blows your mind that this isn't just a black thing. This is a moment of resistance. This is about people who've had enough, and people who want to stand up and be counted. And finally, it gives the lie to the idea that... Anti-racism is about taking things away from white people, about the advance of black people, and that there is a place for white people, there has to be a place for white people in that struggle. An American team spokesman said today that United States Olympic officials were not expected to take any action against American Negroes Tommy Smith and John Carlos, who raised their arms in a black power salute during the ceremony in which they received their Olympic medals. The officials knew that Smith and Carlos planned to do it before the ceremony. the runners had told their coach, Peyton Jordan, who notified Olympic officials, said the spokesman, they said they did it to show black people are united. Yet Avery Brundage wouldn't let it lie. He dispatched Jesse Owens to prevent any repetition of Tommy and John's demonstration. Jesse did Brundage's bidding, despite his master stripping him of his amateur status in a fit of pique after the 1936 Olympics, a decision. which had reduced the great Olympian to racing against horses to make money. And Avery Brundage, in all of his, you know, mutton-headed idiocy, decides that, well, Jesse Owens must be a black icon to these young men because he's black and famous. Therefore, I will send Jesse Owens in, in all his well-spoken Ohio State four-gold medal grandeur, and Jesse Owens will calm all of this down. And these guys, they didn't want to hear from Jesse Owens for ten seconds. As soon as they saw Jesse Owens and knew he was sent there by Brundage, that was it. To me, politics has no part to play on the field of strife of competition. I've never believed it. He came in there to the meeting and told us, oh, we shouldn't wear black socks. He gave us some stupid reason why we shouldn't wear black socks. Then he said, oh, it's going to be hard for us to find a job. When we get back to America, we do these type of things. I said, we can't find a job now. Tommy and John couldn't find a job before they stuck their fist up in the air. So what's the damn difference? And he cried. There were some athletes said that, you know, you had to do what you did because you're Tom. We chased him out. It's a great Jesse Orange, man. We looked at him as a big Uncle Tom. And what really hurt me was that he... was not even allowed a position on the United States Olympic Committee until after we demanded that a black person be put on the United States Olympic Committee and they put him on. And he still came out and attacked us saying, that's not the way you get things done. Although Brundage failed to bring the uppity black boys back into line, he had a personal stake in ensuring Tommy and John were punished for their stand. Good morning to you. The Olympic Games are one week old today, and yesterday, the sixth day, was the most dramatic so far. It started with the news that the Black Power disciples Tommy Smith and John Carlos, the Olympic 200 meters gold and bronze medalists, had been suspended by the United States Olympic Committee and given 48 hours to leave Mexico. I had said that if there were any demonstrations at the Olympic Games by anyone, the participants would be sent home. That demonstration, I think, aroused resentment among all who saw it. There's no place for such things, and the boys involved were promptly sent home. I heard in their expulsion the hand of Avery Brundage, and if you don't do anything, I am going to ban the entire American Olympic team. Oh, yes. Brundage couldn't let it go, and for him it was both a matter of the personal attacks that he had been subjected to. A.B. Grinage is a racist, and I'm very surprised that they re-elected A.B. Grinage. As a matter of fact, I was rather hurt about it because I see there's no improvements going. Everything is still standing at the same weight. The gesture, people, you know, some people saw it and were impacted by it, but it didn't really get big and didn't really offend millions of Americans until the IOC insisted that Smith and Carlos... were removed from the Olympic Village. Do you think the Olympic Games are the right place to do this kind of thing? That you ought to use this as a kind of world stage? David, since we are athletes, although I am a teacher but I'm not a politician, we use this so the whole world could see the poverty of the black man in America. At the same time, cynics might say that you've got it all. You've got publicity, you've got medals, you've got martyrdom as well. What are you going to say to that? I can't eat dead. And the kids around my block that grew up with me, they can't eat it. And the kids that's going to grow up after them, they can't eat publicity. They can't eat gold medals, as Tommy Smith said. All we ask for is equal chance to be a human being. And as far as I see now, we're five steps below the ladder. And every time we try and touch the ladder, they put their foot on our hands and don't want us to climb up. As Tommy and John received their marching orders, Paul Hoffman became a target for a United States Olympic Committee disciplinary panel. He'd been seen handing his OPHR badge to Peter Norman. He was to answer a conspiracy charge. If found guilty, Paul would forfeit his place in his crew's rowing final the next day. After a long sort of discussion of really not much, they sent me down the room to their hospitality lounge. And then after about an hour or so, somebody came down and said, oh, congratulations, you're going to be able to race tomorrow. And I had to sort of pretend that somehow I should say thank you. And I heard later part of the discussion was many of these men had met my father, who was a judge in the Virgin Islands and former track guy, staying in the same hotel, and they said, well, you know, this... His father's a judge, he should be a good guy, and you know, that kind of completely irrational, irrelevant argument. Whatever it was, however, it got to the result I wanted, which was to row the next day. Two days after Tommy and John's black power salutes made headline news around the globe, a black teammate did likewise, with a breathtaking example of athleticism. On the long jump runway, Bobby Beeman of the United States, the man most... feared by every competitor in this competition. And I stood there for a minute and I said, you know, I feel good. I feel like I'm going to do something very special. Here he goes for his opening leap. He comes zipping down the runner. And I'm very loose. And he hits the first jump. And he's that far from the end of the takeoff. Notice that I was up there five minutes, ten minutes, twenty-five minutes, an hour, suddenly I landed. Oh, it's an enormous one! And when he hits the pit, there's a roar. Roar! My goodness me, it's an enormous one! I had a sense of people in the stands giving, hey, hey. Ralph Boston there, congratulate him. They have to find a measuring tape because the sight device would only go to 8 meters 60. They finally roll out the number. Which was in meters and I said, hmm, I had no idea. And he came to me and he said, how far is that Ralph? And I'm, that's 29 feet. He said, no. I said, no, that's more than 29 feet. Good gracious me. He's looking around at the judge. My goodness, he's leaping about. Remember, this man's done 27 before. You know, I was like, are we crazy? But then he walked around a little bit, and he walked up to Charlie Mays and myself. And then he started to collapse. And that's the picture that I've seen ever. We were trying to pick him up. Bob's astonishing leap of 29 feet, two and a half inches, claimed the gold medal. Ralph won bronze, although they weren't finished. yet. In my mind, we had come this far and you got to make some sort of statement. Bob was probably angry when they kicked Tommy and John off the team. A lot of people who were not involved got involved because they were angry. You know my protest was my barefoot, my pants rolled up, my whatever you want to call it, defiant looks and so forth was in support of John and Tommy. He took his shoes off. And I raised my socks. It could have been interpreted as the same as John and Tommy in a sense. The 400-meter final. There was great expectation as Lee lined up for the final, which was delayed by Bob's wonder jump. As the world's top 400-meter runner and a leading member of OPHR, the pressure was on to win. And to protest. When a guy says sit, I smog him on my face. The last to rise there was the Ethiopian, Lee Evans, went up very fast in lane six. They shot the gun, and I was flying, you know. Closing up in lane two all the time, and there goes Evans now on the offside. I decided to lay it all out. I went up to 100% effort from 200 meters to the finish. Lee Evans! And the two Americans on the inside. And the rest is history. I broke the world record 43-86. It's just for 20 years. It's going to be an American 1-2-3. And Lee Evans signing up. He could get beat. Lee Evans could get beat. No, he wins it. Evans wins. James second. Ron Freeman third. Another gold medal for America. Lee had been so very important to everyone's consciousness changing before Mexico City. Lee had been more militant than Tommy. Lee had been more conscious than John. And once Tommy and John thrust their fist into the air, we just couldn't wait for Lee's event. And they have made their podium. They're all wearing small black berets. When we saw him approaching the podium with the beret, we knew that the sky was... in the victory stand. So I figured it'd be hard to shoot a guy with a big smile on his face. I had my biggest smile because I was scared to death. The American Olympic Committee on record this morning yet again is saying that any more demonstrations or gestures would result in the athletes being sent home. And if the Americans were true to their word, they've just lost their 4x400 relay team. There was a sense among the black athletes that Lee had let them down. It's like, these two guys got thrown out. Take your own risk and... get thrown out. Don't be just protecting your own butt so you can get another gold medal. Especially when he took the beret off when the national anthem was playing. There was a visible sense of disappointment in the crowd that was watching in the dormitory. Lee was told he was gutless. That's a tough thing. What he did wasn't good enough for African Americans whom he was interacting with. Definitely it was too much for many white folks, so he was very much caught in between there. He was somebody who really did the dirty work when it came to building the Olympic Project for Human Rights. I mean, he was the person... Who advocated for it, who spoke to other athletes, who in Europe spoke to European athletes about how they fused politics and sport. That was hard for me to handle because I had no second thoughts about my militancy. And so then when it was questioned, I became angry and disappointed. In retrospect, Lee was under even more pressure than any of us could imagine. But in our youthful zeal. We wanted him to do something that was impossible. What could you do beyond what Tommy and John had done? The Mexico City Olympics were over. Despite the controversies, they witnessed America's best ever track and field team. The Black Victory Stand protests had given the light at Brundage's assertion that politics and sports shouldn't mix. Now, all that remained was for Tommy, John, and Lee to return to San Jose State to complete their studies and face the consequences of their actions. Tommy and John were never pariahs with us. When they came back from Mexico City, they were celebrated. We paraded them around on campus. We couldn't get enough of Tommy and John when they came back. It was a life-changing experience. And I saw from directly after Mexico City, I saw students around, African American students around the country, beginning to do things. Tommy Smith! Tommy Smith! It gave confidence to people even outside of America that they were part of a broader movement. This is why we need to situate that moment alongside the iconography of people like Pele and Eusebio, the emergence of the West Indies cricket team which begins to take place in the 60s as a kind of dominant force. Where blacks celebrated Tommy and John, whites were generally hostile. Carlos' dog was slaughtered and thrown on his front porch. His wife committed suicide. I don't know where the daughter is now. Tommy Smith, the fastest man in the world, has ended up here in the northern industrial town of Wakefield. Bring it around, bring it all the way around. I travel anywhere I could travel to pay the rent and buy food. This is how far he has fallen in just four years. Four years in which he's been thrown out of the U.S. athletics team, his marriage has broken up, he's been spat at in the streets, and has received more than 50 threats on his life. Had I been a good boy in Mexico, I could have probably been monetarily richer, and I would have probably been a bigger figure than I am right now. But yet and still, I would have to fight myself from the inside. Lee's fortunes also went into a steep nosedive. There was some backlash on Lee when he came back to San Jose. I've always felt that was probably why he went off to Africa and coached for 20, 30 years, however long he was gone, because he was not welcomed home as a hero like John and Tommy were by the rest of the black community. Harry Edwards, the architect of the Olympic protests, also suffered. It bothered me that he wasn't at Mexico City. First of all, there's the question, might he even have survived there, is one question. None of them, for example, had to deal with the FBI. and other kinds of pressures. The surveillance of my home, in my classes, or at the places that I worked. I was fired from here at San Jose State right after the Olympic protest. So they didn't have to deal with that. After spending the 70s in the wilderness, Tommy and John were suddenly brought in from the cold. There was an attempt to tell a new story about race and sports in the United States. It started in the 80s and really came together with the 1984 Olympic Games. American optimism is one of its greatest renewable resources and you know America's lost innocence is one of these amazing things that they keep losing it and then they find it again just in time to be surprised once more. So they're reincorporation to the official story. really chimes with kind of how America deals with its past. The story went from a period of exclusion to the successes of Jesse Owens, right up through Tommy Smith and John Carlos' stand in Mexico City. And that set in motion a transformation, was it made Smith and Carlos heroes of the civil rights movement rather than villains of the black power phase. Tommy and John's readmission into respectable society was completed in October 2005, when a statue of their iconic protest was unveiled at San Jose State University, the place it all began. Dr. Harry Edwards came and, you know, all the athletes came and I just grabbed Harry and cried. People said, well, why are you crying, hugging that man, you know? It wasn't the man I was grabbing, it was history I was holding on to. He's certainly history. To see that event in Mexico is to see the product of Harry's genius, and it really was genius. Single-handedly, he helped to move individuals who had no real understanding of the complexity of these matters to form a judgment about what they could do if they were given the chance. It's not accidental that Smith and Carlos and Evans took courses. For me, here at San Jose State, the struggle in sports not only made sense, it became the obligation of a generation. One can measure tremendous progress from that day to this on the things that they were demonstrating about. The treatment of, frankly, black people generally in America, and particularly suffer athletes. Tommy Smith and John Carlos were correct. And that's the thing that I think... Drives a lot of people crazy about this moment because it can't be erased from our collective consciousness because they were correct. Those guys did more to change this country than I think we would ever realize. And I'm glad they're my friends.

On the 16th of October 1968, Tommy Smith and John Carlos' controversial demonstration stunned the world. Yet it wasn't the only black protest on the victory rostrum, and nor was it spontaneous. Tommy and John putting their fist in the air was something that Americans really connected to because everyone was in some type of descent in America to something.

But I have to say that it is one of those symbols that will be with me all of my life. It is one of the most definitive expressions of manhood, of service. The world in which we live cries out for heroes. We need heroes now as much as we ever did. I hope that if the occasion ever arose that I could show even a fraction of the kind of courage that those guys showed.

This is the untold story of the people and the organization behind the stands and of the man who tried to stop them. They should support the Olympic movement. Tommy Smith and John Carlos were members of a political group which started at San Jose State College in the fall of 1967. The college was a magnet for black activism. We saw the kinds of conditions in this community that helped to radicalize us. And there was the attraction of Harry Edwards.

Like most black San Jose State students, Harry Edwards and Ken Noel enrolled on sports scholarships. They arrived angry at the second class education accorded to blacks like them. I brought with me a lot of the distrust of institutions that had really been inculcated during the three years that I spent at East St. Louis Senior High School. So when I saw any degree of racism, discrimination, a flag went up and I automatically begin to raise questions, raise issues.

In my freshman year I I remember asking the head basketball coach, how can these guys? be on this team with me and belong to fraternities which have clauses in their charter saying no negroes need apply and his response was you know i never needed a fraternity and i said that's not what i asked you harry would influence and inspire tommy and fellow country boy lee evans who grew up in california's fertile farming belt I did farm labor when I was 17 years old, like 10, 12 hours a day. I am sure that I saw Lee Evans when I was a kid in one of those cotton fields.

We weeded cotton, we picked grapes, grapes that they make raisins out of. That's why I said running was easy because I'd been on my feet for 10, 12 hours. Sharecropping reinforced the second-class citizenship felt by Tommy and Lee.

It sowed in them the seeds of revolt. Coming through the fields, I was subjected to being morbidly thought of as less than. I didn't like how my parents sort of cowed down to white people, you know, because they were the boss, you know. As I grew, I began to see the world as a boiling point of differences. Tommy enrolled at San Jose State on a basketball scholarship.

in the fall of 1963. A year later, Lee came to run on the track team, just as Harry graduated and left to pursue a PhD. Tommy also decided to focus on track, if the team's world-renowned coach would have him. the Bud Winter and he turned red and I could almost see little things in his head, flipping around 100, 200, 400 relays, long jump, high jump, I could do all of them.

He took me out on the track and it's history from there on. Tommy and Lee provided the foundation for what would soon become the world famous speed city team I knew that he had very successful sprinters but plus he was recruiting me to you know yeah he'd know he they sent me letters and he sent Tommy to talk to me Well, Bud Winter had always been, from anybody who was around the scene, the number one sprint coach in the world. But it was not until Tommy came and then sprinters began to come afterwards that the Speed City aspect developed, where there was a sort of avalanche of the top sprinters in the country and the world there.

Smith begins to pour it on and forges to the front. He literally flies toward the tape, winning in near-record time, just three-tenths of a second off his world record. By 1965, Tommy was arguably the fastest man on Earth. As his reputation flourished, fellow athlete Linda Huey became more than a fan. We started seeing each other and it lasted for about a year.

He was very secretive. He didn't want anybody to know that we were involved, we were dating, we saw each other behind closed doors either. at my apartment or at his apartment.

Tommy had good cause to be secretive. Interracial marriage was still outlawed in many states. Besides, many young blacks were rejecting whites and multiracial ideals, and a militant school of black human rights activism was now challenging the dominance of the civil rights movement.

We're nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us. But we are not non-violent with anyone who is violent with us. Malcolm X altered the mindset of many young blacks. I am the greatest. Most notably, a charismatic young boxer whom he...

persuaded to join the separatist Nation of Islam. Why do you insist on being called Muhammad Ali now? That's the name given to me by my leading teacher, the Honourable Elijah Muhammad. That's my original name, that's a black man name. Cash and Slave is my slave name.

I'm no longer a slave. On the 21st of February, 1965, Ali's mentor was gunned down in Harlem, martyred for the struggle. He was a hero to me.

He stood out among all black people. He showed the white man where it was at. And the goal of black progress was also being threatened by events overseas.

This was also a time when we were all aware that our peers were being sent 12,000 miles away to Vietnam to fight in Vietnam when they couldn't go to school in Alabama or Mississippi. This angered us. This made us...

willing to do whatever we could to transform America. Tommy served his country by enlisting in the Reserve Officer Training Corps. By contrast, in April 1967, outspoken world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali was drafted into the U.S. military.

Mr. Muhammad Ali. Ali has just refused to be inducted into the United States Armed Forces. Notification of his refusal is being made to the United States Attorney.

Muhammad Ali was the godfather of this generation. I don't see why me and other so-called Negroes go 10,000 miles to drop bombs and bullets on other innocent brown people who's never bothered us. What made Muhammad Ali so important? to African-American athletes in the late 1960s was the same reason why Bob Dylan was so important to white activists in the late 1960s.

It was that they seemed to have done it already. You know, they were ahead of the curve. Ali's principled stand inspired militant black students at San Jose State. It also galvanized newly appointed sociology of sport professor Harry Edwards, who, after gaining his doctorate, returned to teach there in 1967. What I was doing in the classes was pointing out that sport inevitably recapitulates society. You can't have a racist society and not have a racist sports institution, and here's the evidence of it.

He was my instructor at a course called Racial Minorities, and when he offered it the first time I took that course, and there were like 300 to 400 students in an auditorium, most of them white, and he would come in there dressed in military Vietnamese. Jungle cover outfit with matches in his pocket like burn it down and wearing his black beret and at 6'8", 200 pounds he just walked down the aisle and scared everybody and it was kind of like cool, scare us Harry, cool. Harry's classes radicalized Tommy, yet it was a casual remark Tommy made at the World University Games in Tokyo in November 1967 that precipitated the events which would trigger the black protests at the Olympics a year later. Boycott is possible and it's probable. The reasoning is why should we participate for a country and 100% effort and come back to our homes and are denied some of the rights that should be given us. I didn't say yes there would be. I didn't say... No, there won't be. I said, between the lines, there's work for all of us to do. Let's wait and see. And a major part of it was the media focusing back on us as a consequence of Tommy's statements in Japan. And Tommy's statements in Japan came directly out of some of the courses, some of the discussions, debate and so forth that were taking place on this campus. I think it was almost accidental. I don't it wasn't. scripted, it wasn't rehearsed, it wasn't planned. It was in response to a question, you get an honest answer, and a controversy comes out of that answer that all of a sudden allows people like Harry Edwards and Tommy Smith to see they were in the middle of something, something was possible. In the fall of 1967, Harry and Ken became militant. They challenged the college authorities to reverse its racist policy towards black athletic scholars and more. And while we're at it, let's look at the housing, let's look at the academic... academic opportunities. Let's look at the whole situation with the fraternities and the sororities. Let's look at the whole issue with the hiring. Where are the Negro professors? Where are the Negro coaches? They're taking our football from us, but if we wanted a job here, we couldn't work here. Well, it was disbelief. Who are these guys? There's no problem. You guys are creating a problem. Everything is fine. Well, the only thing I recall was the list of demands that Harry made, and I remember looking at those and going, ooh, they aren't going to be able to meet those. That's not going to work. But I had also been very involved in some of those demands because I had gone and rented apartments for some of these guys and then turned the key over to them. Harry and Ken organized a student demonstration. It changed nothing. By contrast... Their threat to boycott the college's lucrative season-opening football match against Brigham Young University reaped rewards. Success inspired them to act on Tommy's proposal for a black Olympic boycott. In November 1967, Harry won unanimous support for the idea at the Los Angeles Black Youth Conference. His victory would put him on a collision course with international Olympic supremo Avery Brundage, who was adamant that sports should be a politics-free zone. And he wasn't alone. We were in a situation where not all of the athletes were either accessible or likely to participate in anything close to a bar cut. Two such athletes were long jumpers Bob Beeman and Olympic gold medalist Ralph Boston. As a guy who was nearing the end of his Olympic career, my first reaction was, you know, I don't want to do this. You know, I want to go. I need to go ahead and do this. This is going to be my ticket to earning a good living for my family and so on. So I didn't. I wasn't very interested at the time. We've been doing this here half of our lives and then suddenly we want to give it up now for whatever he was trying to say. Harry's proposed Black Olympic boycott was anathema to Avery Brundage, the all-powerful head of the International Olympic Committee. In Olympic circles, the word boycott is not used. That's a political word. But if they withdraw for political reasons, it's a sign that they do not understand the Olympic philosophy of no discrimination because of race, religion, or religion. religion or political affiliations. The Olympic Project for Human Rights, or OPHR, became the vehicle for the proposed Black Olympic boycott. Remarkably, the fledgling group was backed by Dr. Martin Luther King, who signed up as an advisor when he met Harry at the group's press launch in New York City. Dr. King was about 5 foot 9 inches tall with his hat on, and you know, about 165 pounds, so I'm standing there 6'8", about 270 pounds at that point. And he said, well, I see why these folks so scared of you. You huge. We laughed about it, but he understood that this was merely an overlay onto athletics.

of the pattern and paradigm that he had established. Uniquely, OPHR also won huge support from the militant human rights wing of the Black Liberation Struggle. Harry courted activists including Stokely Carmichael.

We want black power! We want black power! And HRAP Brown.

The rebellions that we see are merely dress rehearsals for the revolution that's to come. OPHR backed up its call for a black Olympic boycott. With a list of incendiary demands, their primary objective called for the dismissal of their arch enemy, Avery Brundage. Who we found owned a country club in Santa Barbara, which had no Negroes and no Jews need apply in its charter.

And this guy's the head of the International Olympic Committee. Avery Brundage had form. He'd been instrumental in winning the 1936 Berlin Olympics for Adolf Hitler. Two years later, Hitler reciprocated by contracting Brundage's construction firm to build the German embassy in America. You're talking about somebody who was kicked out of the America First Committee in 1940, which was this horrible Nazi solidarity group in the United States trying to keep the U.S. out of World War II.

He was expelled from them for being too pro-Hitler. It was embarrassing to them. So he was asked to leave.

You know, this is who Avery Brundage was. And he made sure that the International Olympic Committee, I mean, contained more fascists than the Nuremberg trials. Another OPHR demand concerned the movement's warrior saint, Muhammad Ali. He had been stripped of his world title and banned from boxing for refusing to fight in Vietnam. OPHR insisted the decision be reversed.

Mr. Clay. Muhammad Ali, sir. Mr. Clay or Mr. Muhammad Ali, either one.

Ali is important because he's probably one of the first athletes who begins to publicly articulate this relationship between sport, race and politics, and crucially begins to do so in a global context. A third, OPHR demand, concerned disinviting the all-white teams of southern Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa to the 1968 Olympics. Like the group's call for his sacking, It was bound to invoke the ire of Avery Brundage.

Well, in the first place, we have not invited South Africa. We don't deal with nations. We've invited a multiracial team, a mixed team from South Africa chosen by a multiracial committee according to Olympic regulations.

Whether we're talking about disinviting apartheid South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, restoring Muhammad Ali's title, or the reign of Avery Brundage. where he ran the International Olympic Committee really like a racist fiefdom. You're talking about three points in which the people of the Olympic Project for Human Rights were proven correct by history.

It became very clear that there was a direct network of connections between what we were experiencing here at San Jose State and what was being experienced on the national level. in the Olympic movement by African-Americans and what was happening in places like South Africa and Southern Rhodesia on the international level. These were all the same people.

It was the same power structure. OPHR's demands were so outrageous that news headlines were guaranteed. However, Harry was forced to reinvent himself to keep them in the media spotlight. Don't forget, just about 30 miles from San Jose was Oakland, California. The Black Panther Party was born there.

So we started attending some Black Panther Party meetings in Oakland. And they said we were militant. We wasn't fighting anybody. But they called you militant because you wasn't agreeing with the status quo, I guess. The Black Panther Party set a new bar in terms of what was.

accessible. It's pigs, pigs, pigs. There's another pig at his campaign headquarters right up there. Right on. Right on.

Those suit-wearing days were over with. You didn't have to be polite. In point of fact, the thing now was to get in their face.

It's all one big penitentiary. It's all run by pigs. It was an aesthetic that, I mean, just was on the absolute edge of cool.

and it marked you as somebody who was not going to do it the old civil rights way. And that was something that Edwards adopted, I think, far more than he adopted the actual politics of the Panthers. In February 1968, OPHR took direct action on one of their demands, the desegregation of the New York Athletic Club.

They staged a mass boycott of the club's showpiece centennial meet. The New York Athletic Club was notorious for not allowing Jews or blacks to come use the facilities. When their track meet comes around, they want the black athletes to come and help.

bring audiences there and bring some money to their doors. Well, that was one of the first things that Harry targeted. If we're good enough to get in and make $15,000, $20,000, $30,000 on one track meet for the New York Athletic Club, then we should be good enough to do anything that the New York Athletic Club has to offer. I called some of my friends, the guys that I knew.

I said, hey, you know, don't go to the New York AC meet. To have Igor come from Moscow and be whined and dined, let's say, at the Athletic Club and... And I have never seen the inside, and I'm an American citizen, and I'm competing in their meat.

That didn't sit very well with me. The boycott made national news, yet OPHR's credibility was undermined by its inability to present a united black front. Long jumper Bob Beeman was one of a handful of athletes who crossed its picket line. I felt in between. I just hate it for politics to...

and human right issues to seep into sports. I was disappointed that he went to the New York AC meet because only three or four blacks showed. Bob was lucky that somebody didn't beat him down there in New York because some Black Panthers, they said any Black people that went there was going to beat them down. We understood what we were asking, but it was necessary in order to move this thing ahead.

I think that was one of the high points of the movement. That was the closest thing to a boycott success. Despite Bob's participation, OPHR members had bigger issues. Not least, unwelcome attention which threatened their goal of a black Olympic boycott.

It started as soon as we joined the proposed boycott. We're gonna kill you niggas Friday at 2. It happened on a daily basis almost. Because Tommy gave me a copy and said, hey man, look at this.

I said, you haven't seen anything, look at these. So I had a whole box of hate mail. Harry Edwards had his dogs cut up, killed and slaughtered and cut up in pieces and left on his doorstep. He did in fact relate to Ken Noel, here's the kind of leadership you need to... you know, to provide if I'm not going to be around to complete this.

It got to the place that I would not go to a restaurant, a sit-down restaurant where you order food from a menu and eat. I wouldn't go to any restaurant except the smorgasbord, where they have all the food laid out and you pay a certain amount at the front when you come in, then you eat as much as you want, because if they didn't know I was coming, they couldn't poison me. Racist rednecks were the least of Harry's problems. His position as OPHR's mouthpiece had made him a target for the federal authorities.

There were so many instances where we would go someplace and the guys would be out there. We go in two cars. He's in front.

I'm behind. I fall out to a side street and wait. And you see people coming by, tailing us.

Right on to wherever we're going. With Harry and co. up against it, Brundage looked set for victory. OPHR desperately needed a boost, and in April 1968, it came in the form of John Carlos, a world-class sprinter-cum-activist from Harlem who became a student at San Jose State.

Lee Evans and Art Simber brought Carlos, and Lee Evans spoke very highly of him, and I remember him saying, this is a guy that gets it. He understands what happened at San Jose State because we've talked about it. These are things that were very dear to his heart.

These were not bulletins to him. I mean, to some people, you know, these are things that, you know, it was a real awakening for people. It was not awakening for him.

I mean, it was tremendous reinforcement of things that he knew. John was the most militant of every one of those track athletes. He was the most vocal and the most militant. And he would take a stand in anybody's face and say anything to anybody. So, yes, he was number one.

militant man on campus. When John Carlos, you have somebody who I think much more than maybe other historians give him credit for, I think was very responsible for giving what happened in 1968 a certain edge and a certain timelessness that pushed it from being a symbol of civil rights into a symbol of black power. For all their athletic prowess and political zeal, Tommy Lee and John alone couldn't keep a live media interest in OPHR's proposed Olympic boycott. Once again, Brundage was poised to silence the upstart Negroes until OPHR got a fillip from a most unlikely source, the Harvard eight-man rowing crew.

The way that all developed, I think, was in the context of as we were working to make the Olympic team and as we were training through that summer before the Olympic trials, there were a number of articles about not only what was referred to as the revolt of the black athlete. But I think where it was starting to focus was on the notion that there could be a boycott of the Olympics to highlight these issues. For them to step up when they did was a crucial thing to keeping, if not the possibility of a boycott alive, the idea of racial justice really in the public eye. What we agreed to do and what we did in fact do was as each member of the Olympic team was selected in any sport, we wrote them a letter. We sent them a copy of our original statement and we basically invited everybody.

To make an effort to try to understand the plight of black athletes and of black people in America, what was remarkable was how little response there was. It was very much like sort of dropping the rock in the well and not hearing the splash. Although timely, the Harvard-Rower support couldn't generate media interest forever.

By August, Harry had a difficult decision to take. We knew from the outset that we were not... going to be able to pull together a boycott for all of the reasons that I've discussed. But that didn't mean that we would not be able to make a statement. So the headline that came out in the paper after the press conference was, there are many ways to boycott.

Everybody is free to do what they feel their commitment permits them to do. I think he really thought it was over. It was like, you know, it was like his eulogy for the movement, and he didn't get it. He'd really set something in motion that wasn't only just not winding down, but it was, in fact, looking to its high point. In October, watch the Summer Olympic Games, exclusively live and in color from Mexico City on ABC.

We're at Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, scene of the United States Olympic men's track and field trials. When the Olympic trials were staged in September, OPHR was in disarray. Harry didn't attend, and the members who did were down and lacking direction. Here in the Piney Woods, we're ready to go now. Even so, the group welcomed a former dissenter into its ranks.

When the meetings first began in California, I started getting hate mail, and I was nowhere even near that. It made sense to me that if I'm going to get hate mail, if I'm going to get killed... I might as well get killed, and the threat was there.

I might as well get killed for being a part of something rather than to stand out on this island alone. World record, 44-5, held by Tommy Smith. Everything now rested on winning Olympic qualification, not hearts and minds. Then, an unprovoked intervention by Brundage gave impetus to renewed militancy among the angry black athletes.

We went to South Lake Tahoe, and there was no meetings. There was... We didn't talk about it, but Avery Brundage, the idiot that he is, it was a newspaper article, said Avery Brundage makes a statement, he said those boys, if they come to the Olympics and they make trouble, we know what to do with them, and he threatened us.

We started having meetings again. It's a new world record. In that meeting, Ralph Boston was a moderator of this meeting. It was brought to front, the letter that was sent to us by the IOC. via the USOC that if any athlete stepped out of line, that he would be immediately kicked off the Olympic team and sent home.

It was pretty much a foregone conclusion there that we're going to go. We are definitely going to go, but we've got to decide how to handle this thing we've got our hands around. I wonder if I could ask you, first of all, is the boycott itself dead now? Is that finished?

I would say the boycott is off. Now what about other things that might happen in Mexico City? Well, actually, Jim, I couldn't give you no concrete evidence or any concrete answers on what will happen at Mexico City. All I can say is you can expect almost anything. The Mexico City games opened with a colorful display of global togetherness.

With the world watching on, the stage was set for Tommy, John and Lee to make a powerful statement. But what? Harry wasn't there and his OPHR our disciples had no concrete plan. It looked as if Brundage would enjoy the Olympics without political scandal. Indeed, behind the scenes, Brundage's minions, like American official Bob Paul, were trying to neutralize potential troublemakers.

There were a series of remarkable incidents. Once we got to Mexico City, Pete Axton, the sports editor of Newsweek, was initially denied credentials. He arrived and came into the Olympic Stadium and the same Bob Paul walked up to him and said, oh, I see you got in.

I hope you got something better to write about the niggers. I mean, this is the head of public relations for the Olympic Committee. It was just breathtaking stuff. The world record holder, Tommy Smith, of America, 6'3 and 40 sterns. Any thoughts Tommy had about representing OPHR's cause entailed making it to the victory rostrum.

However, a moment of high drama during his semi-final raised serious doubts about his future involvement at the Games. I just watched Tommy Smith go from this stage. And he's really tough.

The Tommy Jet, they call it. When I crossed the finish, I turned the left leg a little too much. And again, very close to world record.

A disaster for Tommy Smith. And it only took a half a stride, and I felt it. I said, oh, I've been shot. Because all the hate mail I had gotten.

That could be the difference between the gold medal and nothing at all. You know what I said to myself, of course? Oh.

It's just a pull muscle. Now where do those words come from? You idiot.

Pull muscle means that you there's a possibility probably a greater possibility that you will not compete. I managed to get through some barriers pass some guards somehow pull something to get over to the area where they're you know they're in a tent and they're actually froze the groin area where the injury had happened and you'll see his first few steps it's going to be very obvious that he wasn't going to be able to explode off the blocks if he you know were able to run in the final. After they I iced it.

And Bud went and said, Tom, Tom, let's go out on the practice track and try it out. I said, OK, coach. It was a tense time. I said, coach, I think I'm OK.

He said, OK, a few minutes, they're going to call for the final call for the 200 meters. Be ready. I said, OK.

But when it came to the final, he was there. And of course, in great competition with his fellow American, John Carlos. This was the final of the 200 meters for men.

It's all or nothing now. The proposed boycott. All the training, lost my job, wife need clothes, Kevin needs milk, cotton fields, all this was here.

Complete marks. That's it. Silence. Nothing I heard but silence.

I'm in trouble. Mid-turn, coming out of the turn, because I was in third off with place. About 80 meters, because it was just out of the turn. I made a surge.

And when I made the surge, I could almost feel myself. And I knew that the only way I was going to catch anybody in front of me was a... a burst of speed. That smile just before crossing the tape was a smile of genuine elation that it is over.

I have done what. I am here to do. The time inside 19.8, the new world record. I had decided to have Mrs. Smith bring me gloves, but I didn't know what I was going to do with them. When they were getting ready to go out for the awards ceremony, it was clear something was up.

They had black gloves on, they had black socks. I had the left glove. I told John, John, this is what I'm going to do. I said, you want the left glove? You can have it.

The fellow who won the silver medal was an Australian named Peter Norman. He said, mate, I believe in what you believe in and I want to help. White boy, you're Australian. I mean, come on, go get your medal. This was in my mind, so I said no.

And on the way out, Paul Hoffman was hanging over the banister. I was wearing my Olympic Project for Human Rights button, and he looked up at me and said, hey, mate. You've got another one of those.

And so here's this white Australian with two black Americans about to go out on an award ceremony. He wants to wear an Olympic Project for Human Rights button. And I'm damned if I'm going to be the one that says he can't. So I said, are you going to wear it?

And he said, yes. And I took mine off and handed it to him. We were really excited and thrilled and kind of not really expecting much from these guys. Maybe from Carlos, because he was the more militant, but not from Tommy.

This was the... Cher Cropper's son from Lemoore who picked cotton. This was the quiet child. There were more than 200 of us watching the actual event.

We knew something was going to happen. Star Spangled Banner, when they did what they did, was absolute eternity. See, I did not throw a rock and hide my hand.

What I did... It's held my hand up in a cry for freedom. We were electrified when they raised their fist. None of us knew that was coming. And when it happened, it was so right.

People call it black power. Of course, I'm black. Of course, we represented power. But it was a cry for freedom. Here, notice me.

I'm in need. What are you in need of? Justice. We were like in awe that we were silent.

We just stood there. Nobody said a word. Through the whole national anthem, we just sat there and looked at each other and looked back at the TV and looked at each other and looked back at the TV.

It was quite a moment. I mean, you know, you're sitting there and saying it's a long time for somebody to just take out a gun and shoot them. You're doing this in the same year where Martin Luther King and a Kennedy are assassinated. I think there was a great deal of shock.

I mean, and people were sort of awestruck. By what they're looking at, I don't think until after it was over you heard a huge murmur afterwards, you know, trying to kind of, what did all this mean? And Tommy, can you tell us the significance of the black glove on the right hand and the black socks that you've been wearing? The black glove represents black America and it's sort of the black socks.

I'm proud to be a black man and all my people back home know that it's very significant. Well, the iconography is absolutely fascinating. So you have... the leading arm of Tommy Smith, his right arm raised, and you have the left arm of John Carlos, and it forms that nice arc showing the unity of black America. So it becomes an aesthetic moment.

They're not wearing shoes as a way to say something about poverty in black America. You know, they're wearing beads around their necks to symbolize the lynchings that had occurred in the history of black America. John Carlos, his jacket is unzipped, which is a tremendous breach protocol.

As he said to me, he kept the jacket unzipped. because he wanted it to be a tribute to blue-collar workers, black and white. Peter Norman disrupts that simple narrative of it only being about black nationalist politics, and it broadens it out.

I think that's one of the reasons why the image has been so powerful, is that you can read into it so many different stories. It blows your mind that this isn't just a black thing. This is a moment of resistance.

This is about people who've had enough, and people who want to stand up and be counted. And finally, it gives the lie to the idea that... Anti-racism is about taking things away from white people, about the advance of black people, and that there is a place for white people, there has to be a place for white people in that struggle. An American team spokesman said today that United States Olympic officials were not expected to take any action against American Negroes Tommy Smith and John Carlos, who raised their arms in a black power salute during the ceremony in which they received their Olympic medals. The officials knew that Smith and Carlos planned to do it before the ceremony.

the runners had told their coach, Peyton Jordan, who notified Olympic officials, said the spokesman, they said they did it to show black people are united. Yet Avery Brundage wouldn't let it lie. He dispatched Jesse Owens to prevent any repetition of Tommy and John's demonstration. Jesse did Brundage's bidding, despite his master stripping him of his amateur status in a fit of pique after the 1936 Olympics, a decision. which had reduced the great Olympian to racing against horses to make money.

And Avery Brundage, in all of his, you know, mutton-headed idiocy, decides that, well, Jesse Owens must be a black icon to these young men because he's black and famous. Therefore, I will send Jesse Owens in, in all his well-spoken Ohio State four-gold medal grandeur, and Jesse Owens will calm all of this down. And these guys, they didn't want to hear from Jesse Owens for ten seconds.

As soon as they saw Jesse Owens and knew he was sent there by Brundage, that was it. To me, politics has no part to play on the field of strife of competition. I've never believed it. He came in there to the meeting and told us, oh, we shouldn't wear black socks.

He gave us some stupid reason why we shouldn't wear black socks. Then he said, oh, it's going to be hard for us to find a job. When we get back to America, we do these type of things. I said, we can't find a job now. Tommy and John couldn't find a job before they stuck their fist up in the air.

So what's the damn difference? And he cried. There were some athletes said that, you know, you had to do what you did because you're Tom. We chased him out.

It's a great Jesse Orange, man. We looked at him as a big Uncle Tom. And what really hurt me was that he...

was not even allowed a position on the United States Olympic Committee until after we demanded that a black person be put on the United States Olympic Committee and they put him on. And he still came out and attacked us saying, that's not the way you get things done. Although Brundage failed to bring the uppity black boys back into line, he had a personal stake in ensuring Tommy and John were punished for their stand. Good morning to you. The Olympic Games are one week old today, and yesterday, the sixth day, was the most dramatic so far.

It started with the news that the Black Power disciples Tommy Smith and John Carlos, the Olympic 200 meters gold and bronze medalists, had been suspended by the United States Olympic Committee and given 48 hours to leave Mexico. I had said that if there were any demonstrations at the Olympic Games by anyone, the participants would be sent home. That demonstration, I think, aroused resentment among all who saw it.

There's no place for such things, and the boys involved were promptly sent home. I heard in their expulsion the hand of Avery Brundage, and if you don't do anything, I am going to ban the entire American Olympic team. Oh, yes. Brundage couldn't let it go, and for him it was both a matter of the personal attacks that he had been subjected to.

A.B. Grinage is a racist, and I'm very surprised that they re-elected A.B. Grinage.

As a matter of fact, I was rather hurt about it because I see there's no improvements going. Everything is still standing at the same weight. The gesture, people, you know, some people saw it and were impacted by it, but it didn't really get big and didn't really offend millions of Americans until the IOC insisted that Smith and Carlos... were removed from the Olympic Village.

Do you think the Olympic Games are the right place to do this kind of thing? That you ought to use this as a kind of world stage? David, since we are athletes, although I am a teacher but I'm not a politician, we use this so the whole world could see the poverty of the black man in America.

At the same time, cynics might say that you've got it all. You've got publicity, you've got medals, you've got martyrdom as well. What are you going to say to that?

I can't eat dead. And the kids around my block that grew up with me, they can't eat it. And the kids that's going to grow up after them, they can't eat publicity. They can't eat gold medals, as Tommy Smith said. All we ask for is equal chance to be a human being.

And as far as I see now, we're five steps below the ladder. And every time we try and touch the ladder, they put their foot on our hands and don't want us to climb up. As Tommy and John received their marching orders, Paul Hoffman became a target for a United States Olympic Committee disciplinary panel. He'd been seen handing his OPHR badge to Peter Norman. He was to answer a conspiracy charge.

If found guilty, Paul would forfeit his place in his crew's rowing final the next day. After a long sort of discussion of really not much, they sent me down the room to their hospitality lounge. And then after about an hour or so, somebody came down and said, oh, congratulations, you're going to be able to race tomorrow. And I had to sort of pretend that somehow I should say thank you. And I heard later part of the discussion was many of these men had met my father, who was a judge in the Virgin Islands and former track guy, staying in the same hotel, and they said, well, you know, this...

His father's a judge, he should be a good guy, and you know, that kind of completely irrational, irrelevant argument. Whatever it was, however, it got to the result I wanted, which was to row the next day. Two days after Tommy and John's black power salutes made headline news around the globe, a black teammate did likewise, with a breathtaking example of athleticism.

On the long jump runway, Bobby Beeman of the United States, the man most... feared by every competitor in this competition. And I stood there for a minute and I said, you know, I feel good. I feel like I'm going to do something very special. Here he goes for his opening leap.

He comes zipping down the runner. And I'm very loose. And he hits the first jump.

And he's that far from the end of the takeoff. Notice that I was up there five minutes, ten minutes, twenty-five minutes, an hour, suddenly I landed. Oh, it's an enormous one!

And when he hits the pit, there's a roar. Roar! My goodness me, it's an enormous one! I had a sense of people in the stands giving, hey, hey. Ralph Boston there, congratulate him.

They have to find a measuring tape because the sight device would only go to 8 meters 60. They finally roll out the number. Which was in meters and I said, hmm, I had no idea. And he came to me and he said, how far is that Ralph? And I'm, that's 29 feet. He said, no.

I said, no, that's more than 29 feet. Good gracious me. He's looking around at the judge. My goodness, he's leaping about. Remember, this man's done 27 before.

You know, I was like, are we crazy? But then he walked around a little bit, and he walked up to Charlie Mays and myself. And then he started to collapse. And that's the picture that I've seen ever.

We were trying to pick him up. Bob's astonishing leap of 29 feet, two and a half inches, claimed the gold medal. Ralph won bronze, although they weren't finished. yet. In my mind, we had come this far and you got to make some sort of statement.

Bob was probably angry when they kicked Tommy and John off the team. A lot of people who were not involved got involved because they were angry. You know my protest was my barefoot, my pants rolled up, my whatever you want to call it, defiant looks and so forth was in support of John and Tommy.

He took his shoes off. And I raised my socks. It could have been interpreted as the same as John and Tommy in a sense. The 400-meter final.

There was great expectation as Lee lined up for the final, which was delayed by Bob's wonder jump. As the world's top 400-meter runner and a leading member of OPHR, the pressure was on to win. And to protest.

When a guy says sit, I smog him on my face. The last to rise there was the Ethiopian, Lee Evans, went up very fast in lane six. They shot the gun, and I was flying, you know. Closing up in lane two all the time, and there goes Evans now on the offside.

I decided to lay it all out. I went up to 100% effort from 200 meters to the finish. Lee Evans!

And the two Americans on the inside. And the rest is history. I broke the world record 43-86.

It's just for 20 years. It's going to be an American 1-2-3. And Lee Evans signing up. He could get beat. Lee Evans could get beat.

No, he wins it. Evans wins. James second. Ron Freeman third.

Another gold medal for America. Lee had been so very important to everyone's consciousness changing before Mexico City. Lee had been more militant than Tommy. Lee had been more conscious than John. And once Tommy and John thrust their fist into the air, we just couldn't wait for Lee's event.

And they have made their podium. They're all wearing small black berets. When we saw him approaching the podium with the beret, we knew that the sky was...

in the victory stand. So I figured it'd be hard to shoot a guy with a big smile on his face. I had my biggest smile because I was scared to death.

The American Olympic Committee on record this morning yet again is saying that any more demonstrations or gestures would result in the athletes being sent home. And if the Americans were true to their word, they've just lost their 4x400 relay team. There was a sense among the black athletes that Lee had let them down. It's like, these two guys got thrown out. Take your own risk and...

get thrown out. Don't be just protecting your own butt so you can get another gold medal. Especially when he took the beret off when the national anthem was playing.

There was a visible sense of disappointment in the crowd that was watching in the dormitory. Lee was told he was gutless. That's a tough thing.

What he did wasn't good enough for African Americans whom he was interacting with. Definitely it was too much for many white folks, so he was very much caught in between there. He was somebody who really did the dirty work when it came to building the Olympic Project for Human Rights.

I mean, he was the person... Who advocated for it, who spoke to other athletes, who in Europe spoke to European athletes about how they fused politics and sport. That was hard for me to handle because I had no second thoughts about my militancy. And so then when it was questioned, I became angry and disappointed.

In retrospect, Lee was under even more pressure than any of us could imagine. But in our youthful zeal. We wanted him to do something that was impossible.

What could you do beyond what Tommy and John had done? The Mexico City Olympics were over. Despite the controversies, they witnessed America's best ever track and field team.

The Black Victory Stand protests had given the light at Brundage's assertion that politics and sports shouldn't mix. Now, all that remained was for Tommy, John, and Lee to return to San Jose State to complete their studies and face the consequences of their actions. Tommy and John were never pariahs with us.

When they came back from Mexico City, they were celebrated. We paraded them around on campus. We couldn't get enough of Tommy and John when they came back. It was a life-changing experience.

And I saw from directly after Mexico City, I saw students around, African American students around the country, beginning to do things. Tommy Smith! Tommy Smith! It gave confidence to people even outside of America that they were part of a broader movement.

This is why we need to situate that moment alongside the iconography of people like Pele and Eusebio, the emergence of the West Indies cricket team which begins to take place in the 60s as a kind of dominant force. Where blacks celebrated Tommy and John, whites were generally hostile. Carlos' dog was slaughtered and thrown on his front porch.

His wife committed suicide. I don't know where the daughter is now. Tommy Smith, the fastest man in the world, has ended up here in the northern industrial town of Wakefield.

Bring it around, bring it all the way around. I travel anywhere I could travel to pay the rent and buy food. This is how far he has fallen in just four years. Four years in which he's been thrown out of the U.S. athletics team, his marriage has broken up, he's been spat at in the streets, and has received more than 50 threats on his life.

Had I been a good boy in Mexico, I could have probably been monetarily richer, and I would have probably been a bigger figure than I am right now. But yet and still, I would have to fight myself from the inside. Lee's fortunes also went into a steep nosedive. There was some backlash on Lee when he came back to San Jose.

I've always felt that was probably why he went off to Africa and coached for 20, 30 years, however long he was gone, because he was not welcomed home as a hero like John and Tommy were by the rest of the black community. Harry Edwards, the architect of the Olympic protests, also suffered. It bothered me that he wasn't at Mexico City.

First of all, there's the question, might he even have survived there, is one question. None of them, for example, had to deal with the FBI. and other kinds of pressures.

The surveillance of my home, in my classes, or at the places that I worked. I was fired from here at San Jose State right after the Olympic protest. So they didn't have to deal with that.

After spending the 70s in the wilderness, Tommy and John were suddenly brought in from the cold. There was an attempt to tell a new story about race and sports in the United States. It started in the 80s and really came together with the 1984 Olympic Games.

American optimism is one of its greatest renewable resources and you know America's lost innocence is one of these amazing things that they keep losing it and then they find it again just in time to be surprised once more. So they're reincorporation to the official story. really chimes with kind of how America deals with its past. The story went from a period of exclusion to the successes of Jesse Owens, right up through Tommy Smith and John Carlos' stand in Mexico City.

And that set in motion a transformation, was it made Smith and Carlos heroes of the civil rights movement rather than villains of the black power phase. Tommy and John's readmission into respectable society was completed in October 2005, when a statue of their iconic protest was unveiled at San Jose State University, the place it all began. Dr. Harry Edwards came and, you know, all the athletes came and I just grabbed Harry and cried.

People said, well, why are you crying, hugging that man, you know? It wasn't the man I was grabbing, it was history I was holding on to. He's certainly history.

To see that event in Mexico is to see the product of Harry's genius, and it really was genius. Single-handedly, he helped to move individuals who had no real understanding of the complexity of these matters to form a judgment about what they could do if they were given the chance. It's not accidental that Smith and Carlos and Evans took courses. For me, here at San Jose State, the struggle in sports not only made sense, it became the obligation of a generation. One can measure tremendous progress from that day to this on the things that they were demonstrating about.

The treatment of, frankly, black people generally in America, and particularly suffer athletes. Tommy Smith and John Carlos were correct. And that's the thing that I think...

Drives a lot of people crazy about this moment because it can't be erased from our collective consciousness because they were correct. Those guys did more to change this country than I think we would ever realize. And I'm glad they're my friends.

Transcript for:1968 Olympic Black Power Salute's Influence

Transcript for:
1968 Olympic Black Power Salute's Influence