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Puerto Vallarta News NetworkEditorials | Issues | October 2008 

1968 Mexico City Olympic Games Heralded Change
email this pageprint this pageemail usLinda Robertson - Miami Herald
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American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raise their fists and give the Black Power Salute at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. The move was a symbolic protest against racism in the United States. Smith, the gold medal winner, and Carlos, the bronze medal winner, were subsequently suspended from their team for their actions.
 
Forty years ago, the Mexico City Olympics reflected the turbulent era in which they took place - and helped to bring about an awakening.

In 1968, the world seemed to reel off its axis, weighted as it was by events that could fill a decade. In the span of one year, revolution rocked mankind. Young people rose up, from Paris to Prague to New York to Chicago to Mexico City to protest repression, inequality and war.

"You say you want a revolution, well, you know, we all want to change the world," sang the Beatles.

The Tet offensive and the My Lai massacre intensified the Vietnam War. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. Students took over Columbia University. The Soviet Union crushed reform in Czechoslovakia. Demonstrators clashed with riot police at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Feminists disrupted the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. George Wallace campaigned for segregation.

Forty years ago, on Oct. 12, the Summer Olympics began in Mexico City, 10 days after hundreds of protesters were gunned down by Mexican troops in the Tlatelolco Massacre. The tumult of the times pierced the illusion of the Olympic Games as a harmonious and apolitical international competition.

On Oct. 16, American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos showed that black athletes were participants in the struggle, not pawns. They used the medal podium as a platform for their message. When the national anthem played, they stood shoeless and bowed their heads. Each raised a black-gloved fist into the air.

Of all the pictures of 1968 - from the Vietnamese officer shooting his enemy point-blank in the head, to King's body lying on the Lorraine Hotel landing, to police pummeling activists - none carried the quiet eloquence of Smith and Carlos' gesture, which was both forlorn and powerful, angry and hopeful.

It has become an iconic image, and undeniable proof of the intersection of sports and society.

"It was militant and moving," said Harry Edwards, the sociologist who wrote The Revolt of the Black Athlete. "It has come to symbolize the era. It's taken 40 years for the world to see that they were right."

Smith and Carlos, pariahs then, are heroes today. Smith, who won the 200 meters in world-record time, and Carlos, who finished third, were kicked off the U.S. team and sent home. For years, they received death threats. They were treated like traitors and outcasts. They couldn't find good jobs. Their wives and children were ostracized, too.

Forty years later, Carlos, 63, considers the state of the world and the theme of Barack Obama, a black man running for U.S. president: change.

"I smile to myself and think maybe I had something to do with his aspirations," said Carlos, who counsels troublemakers at Palm Springs (Calif.) High School. "We've come a long way, but it's evident - with all the hate, poverty and racism in the world - that we have a long way to go. Mr. Smith and I were beacons to the next generation."

WORLD-RECORD LEAP

Two days after the protest of Smith and Carlos came another historic moment in Mexico City: Bob Beamon obliterated the world record in the long jump by nearly two feet. On his first attempt, Beamon, who almost fouled out during qualifying, leaped 29 feet, 2 ½ inches through the thin air of the high-altitude capital - so far that the optical measuring device couldn't reach Beamon's footprints. Officials had to unspool an old-fashioned measuring tape before they posted the distance of 8.90 meters. His record would last for 22 years.

"Ralph, how far is that?" Beamon asked teammate Ralph Boston, gold medalist in 1960 and silver medalist in 1964.

"Bob, that's over 29 feet," Boston replied.

"I don't believe it," Beamon said.

Igor Ter-Ovanesyan of the Soviet team told Boston: "Ralph, he's made us look like children."

Boston also recalled the reaction of Great Britain's Lynn Davies, who said, "I can't jump after that. We'll look silly. Bob, you have destroyed the event."

Beamon suddenly felt weak and collapsed to the ground, sobbing. Boston and Charlie Mays pulled him to his feet.

Beamon went over to the stands and "some lady kissed him," said Boston, who finished third. "He had lipstick all over his face."

Beamon and Boston, friends of Smith and Carlos, wanted to show their support on the medal stand. Smith and Carlos had been banished from the Olympics that day. Boston, who was from Laurel, Miss., in the heart of Ku Klux Klan territory, decided to accept his bronze medal in bare feet. Beamon rolled up the legs of his warmup suit pants to reveal black socks.

Like Smith and Carlos, Beamon and Boston were part of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, created by Edwards, then an instructor at San Jose State. Smith and Carlos had been his students. OPHR athletes, inspired by the words of Edwards, King, Kennedy, Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X, and stirred by worldwide upheaval, wanted to make a statement through sports.

"It was an awakening for me," Beamon said. "Man, those were trying times. It was like 9/11 over and over. Everything coming to a standstill. But there was also a sense of energy and possibility."

Edwards, a member of the Black Panthers and on J. Edgar Hoover's FBI list of agitators, called it a time of "daily rebirth." He advocated a boycott of the Olympics unless International Olympic Committee chair Avery Brundage resigned, apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia were banned and Muhammad Ali's boxing titles were restored.

"Why should we run in Mexico only to crawl home?" Edwards said.

He and OPHR athletes received hate mail and were shadowed by bodyguards during the Olympic track and field trials.

"We went to Harry's house one day after practice and someone had left a dead dog on his doorstep," Carlos said.

Athletes voted not to boycott but to choose personal forms of protest. Smith and Carlos hurriedly hatched a plan after their final. They decided not to wear shoes to signify poverty. Smith wore a black scarf to represent black pride, and Carlos wore a beaded necklace to honor blacks killed in lynchings. Then Smith pulled out a pair of gloves his wife, Denise, had bought while shopping with Carlos' wife, Kim. He offered to share one with Carlos, although Carlos insists the idea was his.

On their way to the infield, Carlos asked silver medalist Peter Norman of Australia if he wanted to participate and Norman, son of Salvation Army workers and an opponent of Australia's treatment of aborigines, said yes. Carlos grabbed an OHRP button from Paul Hoffman, the U.S. rowing team coxswain who was in the stands. Norman pinned it on his jacket.

'I told Tommie and Peter, `If you hear the crack of gun, hit the ground, dudes,' " Carlos said.

Carlos remembers the stadium crowd turning silent when he raised his arm, then booing and jeering.

"There was cheering, too," he said. "The people of Mexico cheered."

Many people thought Smith and Carlos were giving a Black Power salute. But they have maintained their protest was about human rights, not civil rights.

"It wasn't about black vs. white in America, it was about humanity," Beamon said. "It was misinterpreted and they took a beating for it. I loved my teammates, and it really hurt that the American people did not support their brave act."

The IOC pressured the U.S. Olympic Committee to expel Smith and Carlos. In other countries, Smith and Carlos were celebrated, just as Czech gymnast Vera Caslavska was celebrated for bowing her head and turning away on the medal stand during the Soviet Union's national anthem. Cuba's 1,600-meter relay team runners dedicated their silver medals to Edwards and his cause. But back home, Smith and Carlos' gesture was called "Nazi-like" by the Los Angeles Times. Brent Musburger called them "black-skinned storm troopers." Time magazine said they had turned the Olympic credo into "Angrier, Nastier, Uglier."

Carlos struggled for years and said his first wife committed suicide because of the heartache.

"I took various broom jobs, security guard jobs," he said. "I hustled some money together to go to Vegas and try to win so I could support my family."

Smith was a faculty member and coach at Santa Monica College from 1978 to 2005.

FULL CIRCLE

Smith and Carlos don't seem to like each other, although Carlos said the relationship has been better in the last three months than it has been in 35 years. Carlos has aggravated Smith by asserting that he slowed in the stretch of the Olympic 200 to allow Smith to win. Smith wrote in his autobiography that Carlos is only famous and only made it into the National Track and Field Hall of Fame because he was "on that victory stand with me."

Edwards' explanation: "You've got Tommie, a shy, small-town guy, and John, an extrovert from Harlem, and they get joined at the hip and soul by history. After all these years, they are like two old dudes at the bar telling war stories, and they get more and more outrageous. They have great affection for each other, but they're not going to admit it."

After graduating from Adelphi University, Beamon felt lost for a period in the 1970s.

"The full magnitude of the record came much later, and it's still coming even now, I think," said Beamon, 62. "What's the encore? I toyed with that for years."

He moved to Miami 25 years ago to work for the Miami-Dade parks department. Retired and living in Aventura, he runs the Bob Beamon Organization for Youth that mentors promising athletes. He was diagnosed with diabetes last year and was hospitalized on "three close calls," he said. With the help of a Medco pharmacist, he was able to trim his medications from 11 to two and return to a normal life. Beamon is now a spokesman for Medco.

"I thought I was on my way out, but I'm like James Brown now," he said. "I feel good."

Edwards, 66, a retired Cal-Berkeley professor, has done diversity training for the FBI, Major League Baseball, the NBA and NFL. He is a counselor for the San Francisco 49ers. He worked with Billy Donovan's NCAA championship teams at Florida. He has a standing weekly lunch appointment with ex-FBI agent Dick Held, who used to monitor his "radical" activities.

"I'm saying the same things, but today I'm called a consultant instead of a subversive," Edwards said.

Edwards looks back and sees the 1968 Olympians as part of a movement.

"Their era included Muhammad Ali, Bill Russell, Jim Brown, Arthur Ashe and Curt Flood," Edwards said. "It signified a break with our fathers and mothers - Jesse Owens, Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Althea Gibson. It was a new generation with a new disposition because the challenges were different."

Edwards and the OPHR athletes heard echoes of 1968 in 2008, when China's human rights record was a major issue before and during the Beijing Olympics. Beamon was in Beijing and cautioned athletes who sought his advice about the price they would pay for a public protest. Boston, a retired University of Tennessee dean, speculated that the Chinese government may have "snuffed out" a protest before the Games and covered it up, just as the Mexican government did. Edwards hoped that an athlete would boycott the Games, and speak out on Darfur, Tibet and the imprisonment of dissidents, but no one did. Carlos expected to see an athlete do something provocative on the medal podium, but no one did.

"How far have we come? We've seen Ali light the Olympic flame, a stadium named after Ashe and a 30-foot statue built to honor Tommie and John," Edwards said. "America comes around, and another courageous athlete will come along.

"Keep the faith."

lrobertson@MiamiHerald.com



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