Sidelined (4 page)

We can see this attempt to use sport as a power lever to bring wider racial change in Edwards's activities at San Jose State College. His principal aims were to end the situation of segregated housing that existed in the areas around the university and the discrimination black students faced in relation to course choices and fraternity membership. These were issues that affected all students and black members of the local community, not just black athletes. Edwards had experienced these problems himself when he was a student athlete at the college, and he was dismayed when he returned as a member of the sociology department to find that things had not changed. Edwards and the Black Student Union presented the administration with a list of demands and began picketing college departments on September 18, 1967. Among Edwards's demands were an end to “closed door” meetings of administrators empowered to alleviate black students' grievances, closure of all discriminatory housing near campus, an end to the discrimination shown by fraternities and sororities, and assurances that black athletes would be given the same treatment as their white counterparts in all areas—including social events.
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What was crucial in the approach Edwards adopted was his use of sport to force the university to take note of his demands. The college was given a week to address the problems or face significant disruption to the opening game of the football season between San Jose State and the University of Texas at El Paso.
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This was dually significant. First, it focused the attention of the administration on a specific and traditionally important event. Kurt Kemper has highlighted the great cultural significance of college football in the postwar period as a vehicle through which wider social changes were interpreted.
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Threatening the first college game of the season with civil rights activism had a deep impact on college administrators and San Jose State football fans. It brought the racial tensions of wider society directly into the local sporting community. Second, the potential financial implications if the game was cancelled were serious. It would likely cost the athletics department between $15,000 and $30,000.
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Edwards and his followers offered a direct attack against the myth that sport acted as a positive racial force. Furthermore, the emerging black athletic revolt straddled the tactical and rhetorical paradigms of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. The revolt that Edwards led was heavily loaded with Black Power rhetoric and posturing; however, it also utilized traditional tactics of protest that had been tried and tested in the Civil Rights Movement.

The tactical approach of Edwards and his supporters drew opposition not only from white athletes and administrators but also from black athletes. Similarly, while many commentators and historians have designated the actions of Smith and Carlos and other OPHR initiatives as part of the Black Power Movement, in reality many of their tactics and ideals were also characteristic of the Civil Rights Movement. It is therefore important to clearly place the activism of the black athletic revolt within the context of these overlapping and interconnected phases of the freedom struggle.

As activists marched through Mississippi in June 1966, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leader Stokely Carmichael repeated the slogan “Black Power” and the walking crowd echoed his words with enthusiasm. SNCC members ridiculed the ideal of nonviolence and changed the words of freedom songs. They sang as they marched, “I'm gonna bomb when the spirit say bomb … cut when the spirit say cut … shoot when the spirit say shoot.”
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Martin Luther King Jr., who had preached the doctrine of nonviolent resistance throughout his leadership of the Civil Rights Movement, was uncomfortable with the call for Black Power and with the radical and violent views of many in SNCC. King wrote in 1967, “Probably the most destructive feature of Black Power is its unconscious and often conscious call for retaliatory violence.”
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The tension between differing tactics of protest in the freedom struggle did not, however, emerge suddenly in the 1960s. The origins of Black Power predate the mid-1960s and the movement was about more than simply a violent response to oppression. As Peniel Joseph has explained, central to the Black Power Movement was a “black empowerment that was local, national, and international in scope, held political self-determination as sacrosanct, and called for a redefined black identity.”
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A willingness to use violence to fight oppression was one facet of the Black Power Movement, however. Such was the oppression of black
Americans in the South while Jim Crow segregation was ascendant that any attempt at a mass violent revolt would have been suicidal. The race riots witnessed in many American cities in the period after the First World War took place mainly in the North. This is not to say, however, that armed self-defense was not a feature of race relations in the South. Especially following the emergence of increased black consciousness during and after World War II, some blacks were prepared to use violence to defend themselves against white oppression and mobilize for racial change. In his study of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) activist Robert Williams, Timothy Tyson argues that “throughout the civil rights era black southerners stood prepared to defend home and family by force…. The Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement emerged from the same predicaments and reflected the same quest for African-American freedom.”
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When Dr. Perry, a member of the local NAACP in Monroe, North Carolina, was threatened by the Ku Klux Klan in 1957, Williams organized a response. Sixty black men worked in shifts to protect the doctor's house and fired at the Klan from behind fortified positions. When Perry was arrested following his decision to perform an abortion for a white woman, many from the black community surrounded the police station and demanded his release; the women who joined the protest carried butcher's knives and cleavers.
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Williams broke with the traditions of the NAACP as a middle-class organization and recruited ordinary, working-class black men and women from pool halls and street corners. These men and women had a history of grassroots, armed self-defense against racial oppression.
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Although other scholars of the Black Power Movement argue that the roots of the movement ran deeper in the North than in the South, Tyson shows that its origins were not simply a product of the mid-1960s.

The NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), however, held on to the tenets of nonviolence because their model of a hierarchical organization with a strong central leader enabled them to maintain the philosophy. SCLC relied on community mobilization to organize major campaigns that demanded media attention and were therefore able to maintain disciplined nonviolence.
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SCLC staffer Andrew Marrisett recalled that during the Birmingham campaign in 1963 people were sent away from marches and demonstrations when they arrived with guns and other weapons.
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Well-organized, specifically civil rights demonstrations allowed SCLC to maintain a fundamentally nonviolent approach.

King recognized, however, that many in the movement were becoming
disillusioned with the slow progress of change. The Kennedy administration also observed the growing frustration among African Americans and put pressure on business leaders to end segregation lest nonviolent protest give way to violent revolt.
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The emergence of Black Power rhetoric, armed self-defense, and then violent reaction could not be successfully restrained, however. The more democratic nature of organizations like SNCC and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the extent to which they engaged with grassroots protesters meant they were more readily transformed from below than SCLC. SNCC and CORE were more fully absorbed into communities with a tradition of armed response to white oppression, and the fluid and democratic nature of their organizations precluded a repudiation of these methods by a central leadership with a rigid commitment to nonviolent protest. As a consequence these organizations were more likely to draw on armed self-defense methods at the local, grassroots level.
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The black athletic revolt engaged with leaders of both the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. At a press conference to spell out the aims and demands of the OPHR, Harry Edwards was flanked by both Martin Luther King Jr. of SCLC and Floyd McKissick of CORE. King argued that perhaps a total boycott of the Olympics by all blacks was necessary, as little else in the way of nonviolent protest was available.
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In early 1968 H. Rap Brown, the radical chairperson of SNCC, pledged his support for the OPHR. Black Panther and SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael also supported an African American boycott of the Olympics, which he referred to as that “white nonsense.”
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In his leadership of the boycott movement Edwards adopted something of a pragmatic approach. One commentator described him as “moderate and militant; separatist and integrationist.”
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During the demonstrations that he organized to protest racial discrimination at San Jose State, Edwards used the threat of possible violence by outside agitators to pressure the administration. Simultaneously, however, he outlined the need for whites and blacks to sit down and discuss the issues constructively.
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Prior to the boycott of an event at the New York Athletic Club in early 1968, Edwards threatened possible violent retribution for anyone who crossed the picket line.
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When the police began to lose control of the crowd outside Madison Square Garden they gave Edwards a loudspeaker. He told the crowd that they could “rush the Garden” if they wanted but that he was heading to Harlem to be with his “black brothers.” The crowd soon began to disperse and the crisis was averted. Edwards consistently argued that violence was “natural and desirable” and kept an arsenal of weapons for self-protection.
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His approach emerged from the overlapping tactics of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements.

The final symbolic moment of the OPHR was the clenched-fist salute of Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the winner's podium following the 200-meter final in Mexico City. This action and the supporting gesture of white Australian Peter Norman were intended as nonviolent actions. The protest was not intended to be threatening nor intimidating—although many interpreted the black fist salute as an aggressive Black Power symbol. The protest does not fit neatly into either of the conventional categories of the civil rights struggle in the 1960s.

The Olympic authorities interpreted the athletes' action as confrontational and castigated the two sprinters, who were suspended from the team and expelled from the Olympic village. Avery Brundage and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) hierarchy vehemently criticized the intrusion of politics into the sporting arena. Those who opposed the black athletic revolt continually espoused the view that blacks were achieving equality and opportunities through playing the game, both on the international stage and on high school and college fields. Throughout the 1960s the national political administration increasingly listened to and cooperated with the nonviolent protest actions of leaders like King and Roy Wilkins while criticizing the radicalism and militancy of men like Carmichael. The Johnson administration, for example, attempted to work with moderate leaders in order to exercise some form of control over the freedom struggle.
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Black athletes who participated in boycotts or nonviolent protests were, however, largely criticized. Those who rejected such demonstrations in favor of playing the game were praised as good examples for their race. The ideals of the sports world significantly restricted the potential for athletes to dramatize the racial injustices of American society.

Yet in some areas and on some levels participating in sport could be viewed as a form of militant and, potentially, violent direct action. In contact sports, especially football, black men could use integrated sporting contests to physically fight racial injustice. In the 1960s Arthur Griffin Jr. attended Charlotte, North Carolina's, Second Ward High School, and he remembered being desperate to play against the white schools. Griffin explained, “We'd say, let's go beat the white boy's ass. We wanted to play white schools so we could beat them up and bloody them.”
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Bob Abright, a white basketball player at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1960s, remembered that there were fights between white and black
teammates almost every day in practice.
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University of Wyoming football player Melvin Hamilton remembered being subjected to “cheap shots” by white opponents and taking pleasure in beating those opponents and “kicking ass” on the field.
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In professional sports black men like Johnny Sample of the Baltimore Colts and Duane Thomas of the Dallas Cowboys frightened white America with their violent and menacing displays.
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On the field, within the confines of the rules of a sporting competition, black athletes were able to engage in a subtle form of violent direct action. They proved their manhood and asserted their equality by performing on the field and physically punishing white opponents. For some black athletes, playing the game was their way of expressing a direct and physical protest. They saw their performance on the field as evidence of their pursuit of racial equality. Nevertheless, those who chose to play the game rather than use the sporting arena to engage in protests and boycotts were often branded “Uncle Toms” by the leaders of the black athletic revolt.