POWERFUL PROTEST
It’s been 50 years since Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists during the U.S. anthem. The fight continues today,
We don’t always appreciate the sheer audacity of the plan.
Even against a world-class field, in an Olympic track competition dotted with world records, Tommie Smith and John Carlos didn’t just think they would claim two of the three available medals in the men’s 200 metres in Mexico City. They knew it.
The pair had mapped out their post-race protest before lining up in the Olympic 200metre final on Oct. 16, 1968, and attacked the race with tactics as distinct as their back stories. Carlos, Harlem-raised and street smart, blazed the bend, looking to hit the home straight with a lead competitors couldn’t erase. Smith, a Texas native who grew up in tiny Lemoore, Calif., raced with the patience of a man who knew he could maintain his speed while other runners fatigued.
As its 50th anniversary approaches, Smith and Carlos’ demonstration remains the most famous image of the 1968 Games. Atop the podium in stocking feet, each with a black-gloved fist pushed skyward, Smith and Carlos crystallized a turbulent time in U.S. race relations, and became avatars of athlete activism.
We don’t mention one without discussing the other these days, and we rarely speak of either outside the context of that pivotal moment. We treat the protest as inevitable, but part of what makes the moment so special is the way events, circumstances and civil rights strategies aligned to allow it to happen. Changing one variable alters the entire equation.
It was never guaranteed, for example, that the city-dweller Carlos and the rural-raised Smith would adopt similar stances on the continuing campaign for racial equality in the U.S. But the two men, teammates in the powerhouse sprint program at San Jose State University, were both early joiners of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, which initially called for African-American athletes to boycott the Olympics.
Launched in November 1967 by Harry Edwards, then a PhD student in sports sociology, the OPHR succeeded in galvanizing a civil rights leadership splintered by differences in age and philosophy. Non-violent integrationist Martin Luther King Jr. supported the proposed boycott, as did radical Black nationalist H. Rap Brown.
Dr. King’s assassination in April of 1968 prompted the OPHR to drop its boycott, and left athletes to seek other ways to register their dissent during the Mexico City Games. Some sported black berets, others wore OPHR lapel pins.
But not every African-American Olympian was a supporter. After winning his gold medal, heavyweight boxer George Foreman pulled a tiny U.S. flag from his robe and held it aloft during the anthem. The gesture aimed to lower the temperature on racial tensions that had climbed in the 10 days since Smith’s and Carlos’ demonstration, and signal to white Americans that Foreman represented a non-threatening brand of Black athlete.
Beyond Mexico City, O.J. Simpson, who had competed against Smith and Carlos as a college sprinter, was in the midst of a senior football season that included 1,880 rushing yards, 23 touchdowns and a Heisman Trophy. Even then, Simpson was crafting an apolitical and aggressively race-neutral public image that contrasted sharply with the podium protest.
In a recent Sports Illustrated feature, Smith and Carlos described themselves more as teammates and colleagues than close friends, and aside from events commemorating their protest they rarely speak. That two men from far-flung regions, with little personal affinity, landed so close together on the broad spectrum of political opinion between H. Rap Brown and O.J. Simpson, speaks to the serendipity that set the stage for their iconic protest.
So does the fact that both specialized in the 200 metres.
Imagine how differently the protest would resonate today if the men contested different events, with the runner who medalled first donning the black glove and raising his fist. We might never have seen a second protest. Or one runner might overshadow the other the way Neil Armstrong eclipses Buzz Aldrin, or Jackie Robinson does Larry Doby.
But by October 1968, the pair had emerged as the fastest 200-metre runners in history. Two years earlier Smith ran 220 yards — a longer race by 1.5 metres — in 20 seconds flat, setting a new world record. A month before Mexico City, Carlos won the U.S. Olympic trials in 19.92 seconds, but his time was never ratified as a world record because his spikes didn’t meet IAAF specifications.
Either way, Smith and Carlos entered the 1968 Games so far ahead of their peers that landing on the podium to enact their planned demonstration wasn’t an issue. Instead, questions surrounded which of them would win, and how soundly they would shatter Smith’s world record.
Carlos maintains he decelerated on purpose after blasting through 120 metres with a clear lead. His plan, as he wrote in his 2011 autobiography and has since reiterated, was to wait for the slower-starting Smith and cross the line together. Naturally, Smith disagrees. And it’s difficult to say whether Smith would have lost even if Carlos had kept pressing. Pro sprinters say the key to elite 200-metre running is the final 50 metres, and the replay makes clear Smith had mastered that phase of the race. He cruised past Carlos at 150 metres and spread his arms in triumph seven strides from the finish line, crossing in a world record 19.83 seconds.
Carlos, meanwhile, struggled over the race’s final quarter. He never regained his rhythm, and sputtered across the line while Australian Peter Norman nipped him for the silver medal.
Shortly afterward came the protest that would echo for generations — Olympic champ Smith and bronze medallist Carlos raising their fists, with Norman wearing an OPHR pin in solidarity.
From there, it’s easy to flash forward to Nike’s recent reboot of the “Just Do It” marketing campaign, which kicked off with an online poster of exiled NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick and a call to action.
“Believe in something,” the ad reads. “Even if it costs you everything.”
Smith and Carlos are the athletes to whom Kaepernick, who began demonstrating during pre-game anthems to protest racism and police brutality, is most often compared. And nearly 50 years before Kaepernick found himself an NFL free agent launching a collusion case against the league, Smith and Carlos endured backlash against their activism.
The International Olympic Committee quickly banished them from Mexico City, and whatever sponsorship opportunities might have awaited them vanished.
Smith never again competed at a high-level track meet, while Carlos eked out two more seasons on a poorlyorganized pro circuit. Both men dabbled in pro football. Smith spent parts of three seasons on Cincinnati’s practice squad, appearing in two regular-season games and catching one pass. Carlos’s NFL experiment left him with a shredded knee.
Neither Smith nor Carlos regrets demonstrating on the medal podium, and it’s impossible to project how their careers would have unfolded if they had stood at attention during the anthem.
Endorsement riches weren’t guaranteed, and neither were better results on the track. The times Smith and Carlos laid down in 1968 left little room for improvement — Carlos’ 19.92 clocking would have made him the eighth-fastest 200-metre runner in the world in 2018, and Smith’s 19.83 would place him fifth.
Those numbers hint at untapped potential, but they also back up what the medal podium protest later proved: Smith and Carlos weren’t just men of their moment, they were decades ahead of their time.