Sidelined (20 page)

The twenty-five or so teammates whom Owens was sent to address included some notable white athletes. Owens preached the liberal ideals of integration and gradual racial progress. Nevertheless, when confronting
this interracial group of Smith and Carlos supporters he responded by asking the white athletes to leave. Owens said, “It's nothing against you other men personally, but these are my black brothers, and I want to talk to them. I think you can understand.”
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Owens asked why white hammer throwers Hal Connolly and Ed Burke were present. Connolly remarked, “He was upset at seeing white athletes there, especially me.”
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Owens obviously felt that it would be easier to persuade black athletes of his point of view without a white audience. He perhaps believed that this racially pure environment would help him to make the point to black athletes that they should behave as narrowly defined ambassadors for their race. Owens, as a spokesman for the USOC, was attempting to construct a view of the podium salute as an unwise expression of a black militancy that could only damage the sporting sphere.

Owens wanted to use race as the distinguishing factor when attempting to dissuade athletes from any further protest. Lee Evans and other black athletes present insisted that their white teammates stay in the meeting, wherein Owens counseled those present not to do anything they would regret. He reminded them of their patriotic duties and the importance of the Olympic Games. The black athletes were “cordial” but largely ignored a man they perceived as “out of touch” with the situation.
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Nevertheless, his appeal was directed specifically at his “black brothers”; he wanted them to realize what he saw as the folly of conducting any further demonstrations.

The attempt to see the podium salute as simply the expression of black militants distorts its wider symbolic significance. The button that was worn by Peter Norman and other white athletes during the games represented the Olympic Project for Human Rights, not the Olympic Project of Black Power nor the Black Militant Olympic Movement. The OPHR button had a wreath as the focal point and was designed by white students at San Jose State College. That Smith and Carlos were making a stand for black people and for justice in racist America is undeniable, but there was an interracial message to the symbolism and meaning of that podium salute that has often been overlooked. The USOC's desire to paint the protest as an episode of black militancy was threatened by the vocal support offered for Smith and Carlos by white athletes like Tom Waddell, Hal Connolly, and the Harvard rowing crew. Hoffman was very nearly suspended from the rowing final simply for giving Peter Norman the button that he wore on the winners' rostrum. U.S. Olympic authorities were adamant that politics should not enter the sporting arena, but they were also worried that
an interracial protest would be much harder to neutralize. It was one thing to have two angry young black men throw a Black Power salute during the national anthem, quite another to have white teammates offering support and threatening to pull out of the rest of the games. It was reported that black and white athletes might go home in protest at the treatment of Smith and Carlos.
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The USOC was extremely concerned about the actions of white athletes like Hoffman and the Harvard crew who supported the actions of Smith and Carlos. In a letter sent after the games to the Harvard rowing coach, Harry Parker, Douglas Roby argued that the crew had “embarked on a rather strenuous program of civil rights and social justice with other members of our Olympic delegation to Mexico City.” Roby continued, “Civil rights and the promotion of social justice may have their place in various facets of society, but certainly this sort of promotion has no place in the Olympic Games, and particularly when they are held in a foreign country, which country is not particularly involved in these internal problems of ours.”
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Furthermore, decathlete Tom Waddell, one of the white athletes who had voiced support for the OPHR, was asked by a reporter if he thought Smith and Carlos had discredited the American flag. Waddell replied that he felt that Smith and Carlos, as African Americans, had been discredited by the flag more often than they had disgraced it. When questioned about whether the image of the United States had been tarnished, he argued that the nation's image was so bad already it could not get any worse.
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Waddell, who was a medical doctor serving with the army, saw his comments widely reported in the press. He received a cable from his commanding officer ordering him to retract his remarks or face a court-martial.
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There was a definite interracial dynamic to the OPHR movement. Harry Edwards himself struggled to negotiate the divide between white liberals and a growing black militancy. Edwards dedicated his account of the OPHR to the white athletes who supported the cause and commended the Harvard crew for their commitment to understanding the problems in black America. Nevertheless, the brash and abrasive character of Edwards and the contentious hyperbole that flowed from him did much to promote a misunderstanding of and hostility toward the ideals of the OPHR. Even those sympathetic to the movement were not entirely comfortable with his role. Furthermore, Edwards explained sometime after the events of 1968 that he was skeptical about the extent to which whites could help the cause he was seeking to promote.
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The degree to which the protest by Smith and Carlos and the reaction to it represented the tensions of the wider black freedom struggle has often been overlooked. Certainly it suited the agenda of the Olympic authorities and the U.S. government—the 1968 Olympic team was not invited to the White House for the customary reception with the president—to portray the podium salute as part of the militant Black Power agenda. The wider message of interracial support for the advancement of civil rights was ignored. Images of Smith and Carlos were placed in the same symbolic context as race riots in cities across America in the spring and summer of 1968. Historical accounts of the sixties or specifically of 1968 often include the image of the podium salute alongside pictures of the slain Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Black Panther rallies, or scenes of racial violence, usually with a generic caption about Black Power or racial turmoil. What needs to be recognized is that the Smith and Carlos protest reflected the very complex state of the black freedom struggle in the late 1960s. The presence of Norman on the podium wearing the OPHR badge and the support Smith and Carlos received from some of their white teammates showed liberal white sympathy for their cause. Their actions were not, therefore, a simple, one-dimensional expression of black militancy. It is crucial that this is recognized in full and that the subsequent meaning of the protest on the victory podium is not reduced.

It would be fascinating to learn what Martin Luther King Jr. would have said about the podium salute had he not been assassinated six months before the games. His support of the original boycott idea can be interpreted as part of his increasingly radical agenda as his career progressed. Nevertheless, he had strongly objected to the use of the slogan “Black Power” as part of the Civil Rights Movement. He would have admired the courage and dignity of Smith and Carlos, but how would he have responded to the raised black fists? The NAACP, the main moderate civil rights organization, has nothing relating to the Smith and Carlos salute in the sports files of its archives.
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It is difficult not to conclude, however, that what Smith and Carlos did was in many respects “moderate” and not connected to the black radicalism of the late 1960s in the way it was simplistically portrayed. It was in fact very much in the spirit of nonviolent and dignified protest that both the NAACP and King had long endorsed.
New York Times
sports correspondent Robert Lipsyte later reflected that in the context of things that they could have done, the build-up to the Olympics, and the threatened boycott, the sprinters' gesture hardly seems very extraordinary.
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A letter to the editor in the
New York Times
stated that
Tommie Smith “did not riot, or loot or burn…. His gesture was restrained, even dignified. What more can America conceivably ask from people who have been second-class citizens for so long?”
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The fact that sport had so long resisted the political intrusion of the civil rights agenda intensified the negative reaction to the podium salute, but also important was a fundamental misinterpretation of the message of Black Power. Here again the Smith and Carlos protest encapsulates a key component of the wider civil rights struggle in the late 1960s. The sprinters were cast as ghetto militants; men who shared the same ideology as those rioting and raging against the forces of law and order. Their defiance of Olympic protocol was extended as a metaphor for the defiance of white authority by the black underclass. Here were two black men in U.S. uniforms betraying their country by disrespecting the flag. Smith and Carlos, however, bowed their heads on the podium. They did so to remember the fallen heroes of the Civil Rights Movement. Theirs was a solemn and relatively nonthreatening defiance of injustice.

The negative reaction to their gesture and its association with racial disorder was and is based on a fundamental misinterpretation of the Black Power Movement. As Van Deburg asserts, “Black power was not a one-dimensional social movement sponsored by a small but vocal minority of Afro-Americans whose passion was racism and violence.”
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It was in fact an effort to raise black consciousness and facilitate African Americans' gaining of influence on the national stage. This is precisely what Smith and Carlos were aiming to do. The fact that their stand was so anathema to the sporting authorities contributed to the portrayal of the protest as a manifestation of the negative interpretation of Black Power. One correspondent to Brundage in the aftermath of the decision to send Smith and Carlos home regarded that decision as misguided precisely because it would promote the sprinters as black militants. Rather than being seen as a silent and peaceful protest, the podium salute would be viewed as a stand by “black power” heroes because of the expulsion of the two men from the Olympic village. This would in turn widen the mistrust and anger felt toward their white countrymen by many in black America.
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While the Smith and Carlos salute is connected to these different strands of the civil rights struggle in many clear ways, there is a sense in which the symbolism and explanation of their salute revealed a more nuanced development in this struggle. In wearing no shoes on the victory rostrum the two men were highlighting the poverty of black America, while their arms formed an arch of unity for black America. This unity was
increasingly illusory, however, as the poverty of some in black America contrasted with the economic progress of a growing middle class. The violence, destruction, and looting that were linked to the Black Power Movement by the media had poverty as its root cause. Before his death King was organizing a poor people's campaign that called for a fundamental redistribution of American wealth. The civil rights legislation of the 1960s had not solved the problems of the ghetto but it had helped to promote the growth of an affluent black middle class. By making their stand Smith and Carlos sacrificed any hope of a lucrative professional sports career; they restricted their opportunity to climb out of the poverty they were protesting against.

In the aftermath of the Olympics Smith was denied a chance to pursue a career with the Los Angeles Rams, who had negotiated a possible contract with him before the games. He played on the Cincinnati Bengals' taxi squad before being cut and playing some football in Canada. Carlos too played football in Canada, having been unable to make it in the United States. Smith's marriage broke down; he received death threats and was unable to make ends meet before taking a coaching job that he was overqualified for in Santa Monica. Carlos did not complete his college degree and so had no qualifications to fall back on. He had to do odd jobs, including working as a bouncer in a bar. He later explained, “We had four children, and some nights I would have to chop up our furniture and put it in the fireplace to stay warm.” His wife committed suicide in 1977 and Carlos admitted this had a lot to do with the legacy of 1968.
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Tarnished by the dominant negative interpretation of their stand in Mexico City, the two men were victims of the endemic racial prejudice of American society. One element of the podium salute reflected a cry on behalf of an impoverished black underclass that was largely untouched by the legislative advances of the Civil Rights Movement. In the decades that have followed an affluent black middle class has benefited from that legislation while an underclass has remained. The radical messages of the civil rights struggle have been ignored as a conservative agenda has sought to proclaim the successful emergence of a color-blind society in which individuals of any race or creed have equality before the law. Since the 1980s Smith and Carlos have been lionized as civil rights heroes and their stand offered as a touchstone for racial pride. The broader and more complex meanings of their protest have been ignored, and they have instead been cited as courageous men who made a stand for equality in sport and wider society. This popular cultural message looks past the deeper significance
of the podium salute. Smith and Carlos wore no shoes to highlight black poverty. They stood as symbolic representatives of a diverging black freedom struggle that was increasingly focusing on the economic deprivation of African Americans and demanded true social justice. This aspect of their podium salute has not been fully acknowledged by popular culture representations.

The stand by Smith and Carlos is celebrated and memorialized with a superficial gloss. Robert Lipsyte described Smith and Carlos on that podium as “statues in history.”
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In many respects what they stood for and what their protest symbolized has been set in stone. The podium salute is there to be admired; it changed the Olympic landscape and provides a context for African American athletes. The image of Smith and Carlos is, therefore, used in much the same way as King's “I Have a Dream” speech. King has been placed in the safe category of civil rights hero and great orator. In the process of commemorating his achievements the more radical elements of his message have been forgotten. King has been portrayed as a “non-abrasive hero” who can be used as a resource for “rocking our memories to sleep.”
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