It instantly became an iconic image: the two young black American athletes, John Carlos and Tommie Smith, standing shoeless on the victory platform for the medal ceremony at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, gloved fists raised in a black power salute as the Star Spangled Banner played, protesting apartheid and the racist practices of the International Olympic Committee: not for the glory or the attention, but because it was the right thing to do.
Peter Norman, the Australian sprinter who took the silver after Smith, stood bravely with them.
Carlos and Smith were thrown out of the relays and banished from the Olympic Village. Their medals remained in Mexico and they returned to America to ostracism and unemployment.
Sports writer Dave Zirin is calling for an apology from Brent Musburger, whose slander of Carlos and Smith remains especially repulsive:
After 44 Years, It’s Time Brent Musburger Apologized to
John Carlos and Tommie Smith
By Guest Blogger Dave Zirin of The Nation
(L-R) Tommie Smith and John Carlos accept the Arthur Ashe Award for Courage as they were given the award for their black-gloved fist salute at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics onstage at the 2008 ESPY Awards held at NOKIA Theatre L.A. LIVE on July 16, 2008 in Los Angeles, California.
Great heroes. We should all eulate them. dennis
Eventually right action and courage are recognized. Think of what it took for those guys to defy all the heavy authority in the sports world, like Muhammed Ali did too. In their case track is a less popular sport and very dependant on Olympic authorities so they really sacrificed everything. So did Peter Norman, who was similarly banished and maligned in Australia, another racist society at the time. Reading Musberger’s sanctimonious BS now is enough to make your blood boil but it is a good reminder of how really small minds think. . . . Zirin is a fine sports writer on the other hand. . . . It was people like Musberger back in those days who always and probably intentionally missed the essential point . . . that in addition to being about black liberation first of all, and as an expression of God’s will most of all, all the civil rights protests, and especially really courageous ones like Carlos’s and Smith’s where they jeopardized their careers, were exactly about doing it for this country! It was all done to strengthen this country and to get things right! Especially in the face of selfish individuals like Musberger (and all the other establishment apologists at the time) who really only cared for their little country club version of America in which they held sway. Those statues of Smith and Carlos are terrific, I never saw them before. I have heard them speak. They have the deep satisfaction of having done exactly what they were supposed to do, what God told them to do, and the country is indebted to them for their courage. A guy like Musberger will probably never reconsider his words at the time, mainly because he lacks the simple imagination to do so. It is indicative of this all-too-familiar superficial mind that he thought they did what they did for personal reasons. But it is good to have those words around to reconsider, never mind an apology. I would put them up there by those statues as an ironic reminder of the small mindedness that always plagues the world, but which must always lose out to real virtues like honesty, self-sacrifice, and doing the right thing. Those athletes did just what the Chinese and Arab dissidents are doing today, risking their lives protesting for human rights. Hypocritically our media so often criticizes abuses in foreign lands while glossing over the identical abuses here at home, unable to begin to comprehend the grandeur of defiant actions like Smith’s and Carlos’s that day.
So true, Pete…”the camel never sees his own hump but those of others are always before his eyes”
THANKS MY SISTER ANITA JONES for reminding us of where we have BEEN. I remenber Painfully well this moment at the olympics. I HAD BEEN THERE AND DONE THAT ALSO.
Be blessed and Well my Sister Jones.
Charles Jones FREEDOM RIDER , VOTER RIGHTS ALBANY GA ORGANIZER, 30 days on the CHAIN GANG ROCK HILL YOUK COUNTY SC FRIENDSHIP 9 1961. WHAT A BLESSING