Sidelined (19 page)

Facing Brundage's threats, the USOC board released a statement that condemned the actions of Smith and Carlos and removed them from the Olympic team and the competitors' village. The statement of October 17, 1968, read,

The United States Olympic Committee expresses its profound regrets to International Olympic Committee, to the Mexican Organizing Committee and to the people of Mexico for the discourtesy displayed by the two members of its team in departing from tradition during a victory ceremony at the Olympic Stadium on October 16th. The untypical exhibitionism of these athletes also violates the basic standards of good manners and sportsmanship in the United States and therefore the two men involved are suspended forthwith from the team and ordered to remove themselves from the Olympic village. This action is taken in the belief that such immature behavior is an isolated incident. However, if further investigations or subsequent events do not bear out this view, the entire matter will be re-evaluated. A repetition of such incidents by other members of the United States team can only be considered a willful disregard of Olympic principles that would warrant the imposition of the severest penalties at the disposal of the United States Olympic Committee.
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The wording of the USOC statement reveals the desire to neutralize the impact of Smith and Carlos's gesture. Neither man is mentioned by name nor are details given of the nature of their protest. The “untypical exhibitionism” comment presents the case that this was an isolated incident
and distances the athletes involved from the rest of the team. There is no mention of the racial and political context of the action or the activities of the OPHR before the Olympic Games; sporting traditions and “good manners” are defended, but the issue of human rights is ignored. Here we again see a desire by U.S. authorities to ensure that their political agenda was not hijacked.

Brundage's belief that politics should not be part of the Olympic Games was at the forefront of his stance; however, the fact that he himself was a U.S. citizen made him particularly sensitive to the actions of Smith and Carlos. In his response to the many correspondents who expressed both criticism of and praise for his decision to send Smith and Carlos home, Brundage continually expressed that politics had no place in sport. The head of the IOC repeatedly used the phrase “good manners and sportsmanship should take precedence over athletic ability in the Olympics Games.”
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He defended the ideal of sports purity against the pernicious influence of political forces. Brundage also, however, showed that as an American he was particularly angered by the actions of Smith and Carlos. He argued that “people of that kind should not have been on the Olympic team at all.”
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In a vociferous reply to a supportive correspondent Brundage stated, “The actions of these two negroes was an insult to the Mexican hosts and a disgrace to the United States.”
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Although evidently some members of the USOC board were not prepared to expel Smith and Carlos immediately after the podium protest, it is clear that Brundage had no hesitation in insisting that they should be sent home. Furthermore, the words of Roby in his correspondence with Brundage prior to the Olympics suggest that he was personally in favor of the decision to punish Smith and Carlos severely. The desire to stop racial politics from intruding upon sports clearly dominated the response of U.S. administrators.

Opinion of the Smith and Carlos protest in the U.S. press was varied. The
Los Angeles Sentinel,
an African American publication, argued on its sports page that the protest was out of place and that the Olympics were no arena for such acts. Columnists elsewhere in the paper praised the heroic effort of Smith and Carlos. The
Los Angeles Times
referred to the podium gesture as a “Hitler-type salute.”
Time
magazine changed the Olympic motto of “faster, higher, stronger” to “angrier, nastier, uglier”
when describing the “public display of petulance” by Smith and Carlos.
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The
Pittsburgh Courier
provided coverage from an African American perspective that praised the black sprinters and criticized the racism of the IOC. The
Courier
ran a cartoon of a giant black-gloved fist rising above the Olympic stadium with the caption “pride prevails.”
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In a balanced piece,
Newsweek
reported, “Judged against some of the alternatives that black militants had considered, the silent tableau seemed fairly mild.”
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The
Chicago Defender,
another African American paper, offered positive views of the actions of Smith and Carlos. Jackie Robinson, who had supported the idea of a boycott of the Olympics, said that he “admired the pride in their blackness” shown by the two sprinters.
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In a particularly sarcastic piece carried by the paper, the USOC and the attitude of white America was lampooned:

The American constituency has spent five years not hearing the Negroes, who in their way, keep telling us something is wrong and I see no reason why we should start hearing it now in Mexico City. The Olympic Committee came to the rescue, however. They kicked the two boys out of Olympic City because they were rude, which is not an American trait despite what anyone says about the whites in Milwaukee who throw stones. Perhaps they can go one step further and take the record away from Tommie Smith and give it to someone more deserving, some nice white fellow.
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It is clear that much of the differing opinions both then and now stems from the enigmatic nature of the podium salute. As a symbolic gesture it encapsulated so many facets of the racial struggle in America in the late 1960s that it was open to a myriad of interpretations. Many such interpretations, in fact, mixed competing or contradictory messages of the civil rights agenda. For example, a piece reporting the podium salute in the
Pittsburgh Courier
focused on the black pride inherent in the raised fist, a potent symbol of “Black Power.” The same article, however, asserted that “Smith's and Carlos' stand was a visual expression of the theme song ‘we shall overcome.'”
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In the same article in an African American publication, therefore, the podium protest was linked to the mainstream civil rights anthem and the more militant Black Power agenda, two different strands of the racial struggle of the 1960s. Indeed, the ideological father of the Black Power Movement, Malcolm X, had famously mocked the singing of that anthem as contradictory to a black revolution.

In his TV interview after the podium salute Smith articulated a message that conveyed the protest as solemn and dignified. He had told Carlos before the ceremony, “The national anthem is sacred to me, and this can't be sloppy.”
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Choosing to make their stand during the anthem provided an expression of the duality that many black Americans felt, a double consciousness of being both American and black. The racism of American society imposed an identity problem on black citizens. The response to this has had an effect on how African Americans express patriotism. The gesture by the two sprinters embodied an “iconoclastic patriotism,” the like of which had been expressed by Paul Robeson in the early twentieth century and Martin Luther King Jr. in his opposition to the Vietnam War. Smith and Carlos rejected traditional patriotism and fundamentally challenged American racism. In so doing their stand contrasts with those of Frederick Douglass during the Civil War, W. E. B. DuBois before World War I, and Al Sharpton after 9/11, who subscribed to the belief that loyalty and devotion to American culture and ideals would eventually be rewarded with racial equality. Smith and Carlos showed devotion to the United States by fundamentally challenging American racism.
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The expression of black pride and strong group identity simultaneously with the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” powerfully expressed a double consciousness.

While Smith stressed the solemn and essentially nonviolent or nonaggressive nature of the protest, in a postceremony press conference Carlos infused the podium salute with greater anger and confrontation. Carlos fumed, “If we do the job well, we get a pat on the back or some peanuts. And someone says, ‘Good boy.' I've heard boy, boy, boy all through the Olympics. I'd like to tell white people in America and all over the world that if they don't care for the things black people do, then they shouldn't sit in the stands and watch them perform.”
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Carlos expressed a powerful race consciousness that provided a more aggressive expression of black power than the statement by Smith. What should not be forgotten is that there were three people on the winners' rostrum. Peter Norman, the white Australian silver medalist, wore an OPHR button. He added an interracial element to the protest that contrasted with the message of strident racial pride that is emphasized by viewing the protest through a distorted Black Power lens, a lens that views Black Power in a one-dimensional way, focusing on the black militant and violent elements of that movement while ignoring its other, more nuanced aims and developments.

The podium salute is remembered as a Black Power protest. A 2008 BBC documentary focusing on the incident was titled simply
Black Power
Salute.
The reporting of the incident at the time, and since, has placed great emphasis on the raised, gloved fist and the Black Power symbolism to which it is connected. Certainly the raising of a black fist was the most recognized symbol of the Black Power Movement and various items of merchandise could be purchased that displayed this symbol. African American publications also used the raised fist in cartoons with great regularity. It is not the contention here that Smith and Carlos were not consciously adopting the symbols and meanings of the Black Power Movement in their stand; they undoubtedly were. What is important, however, is to recognize the way their protest was misinterpreted and criticized in the same way that the Black Power Movement was. Furthermore, their stand showed the interconnected nature of the Black Power and Civil Rights Movements.

The stand by Smith and Carlos and the gold medalist's explanation of the podium salute were deeply infused with racial consciousness. Smith talks of black pride, black unity, and black dignity. The beads around Carlos's neck were a clear symbol of Black Nationalism. The reaction of the IOC and the USOC saw an attempt to isolate the sprinters as representatives of a minority opinion, a small group of angry young black men who represented a threat to the sanctity of the Olympic movement and society as a whole. The racial prejudice of the U.S. Olympic organization was barely veiled. The relative ignorance of the USOC to the cultural and racial sensitivities was revealed further when one of their representatives spoke to Smith and Carlos after the podium salute. After it had been explained to the sprinters that they were to be expelled from the village the USOC administrator dealing with the matter asked, “You boys know why you did it?” Smith snapped back that they were not “boys.” Discussions of these references in the meeting of the executive committee were accompanied by laughter and jokes from those around the table.
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The reaction to a reference to black athletes as “boys” by the USOC representative and the angry words of Carlos expressed in the postceremony press conference reveal the issue of black manhood in the protests of the OPHR. Black male athletes were so often treated as performers and belittled as men in the process. The stand by Smith and Carlos reflected the clear desire by black male athletes to be treated as men. The desire to reclaim black manhood was a key element of the Black Power Movement and was clearly part of the message that the two sprinters expressed in their podium salute. It was also a key ingredient in the protests by many black male athletes during campus revolts.

The USOC attempted to construct a popular perception of the podium
salute as the action of two angry and isolated young black men. The interracial support for the stand made by Smith and Carlos and the deeper significance of their actions were consciously ignored. Jesse Owens—who was part of the board set up before the games to advise athletes against engaging in any protest activity—was sent by the USOC to judge the mood of black athletes and counsel them against any further demonstrations. Owens was viewed by the Olympic community as the personification of the ideal that sport was a positive racial force, that a black man could receive whites' respect through outstanding competitive achievements. In an interview given in the lead-up to the 1968 Olympics Owens had argued, “Athletics has provided negroes with the best chance to break down the barriers of prejudice and to offer models to young people. Attacking the Olympics is like burning down the building we live in. I think it is foolish.”
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Harry Edwards and his supporters, however, represented a new generation of black athletes who were no longer prepared to play by these rules. He argued during the campaign for the original boycott of the 1968 Games, “You can no longer count on the successors of Jesse Owens to join in a fun-and-games fete propagandized as the epitome of equal rights so long as we are refused those rights in white society.”
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There was a distinct sense that Owens was out of touch with black athletes and was simply a mouthpiece for the Olympic authorities. Vincent Matthews wrote of Owens, “He was a messenger sent by the USOC to determine the mood of the black athletes. The fact that Jesse was black gave him a calling card.”
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Lee Evans commented, “Jesse, I don't know what he was thinking, he was connected to the Olympic committee.”
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Carlos saw Owens as a man out of touch with events in 1968 and suggested he should have done more to further the cause of racial equality.
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Pointing to Owens's outdated views, Edwards wrote in his account of the OPHR, “He belongs to a controlled generation, the inheritors of Binga Dismond running on the outside. Does it occur to Jesse Owens that blacks are ineligible by color-line and by endless economic obstacles to compete in some 80 per cent of scheduled Olympic events?”
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Owens faced a credibility gap and his approach to the black and white athletes sympathetic to Smith and Carlos reveals much about the breakdown in relations between the U.S. Olympic authorities and a significant portion of their athletes.