< Back | Home

A photograph of Tommie Smith being interviewed by Spartan Daily reporter Lloyd LaCuesta at San Jose Municipal Airport after Smith and John Carlos' protest.

Speed, power, defiance

By: Jon Xavier

Posted: 10/9/08

It was Oct. 16, 1968. Mexico City. SJSU alumnus and Olympic athlete Tommie Smith had just run the most important 200 meters of his life.

Coming off a muscle pull in an earlier qualifier, it wasn't even certain that Smith would be able to compete, let alone win. But 10 seconds into the race, coming from far back in the pack, Smith began to make his move. At 14 seconds, he was neck-in-neck with fellow SJSU student John Carlos, vying for the lead.

And then he really opened up. Carlos had just enough time to glance at his teammate as Smith blazed past him, both arms raised in triumph. Tommie Smith had won Olympic gold, shattering the previous world record with a time of 19.83 seconds.

It was the first time that anyone had run the 200-meter in less than 20 seconds, and it was a record that would remain unmatched until 1979. But along with John Carlos, Tommie Smith was about to do something even more memorable.

He was going to raise his fist.

Smith and Carlos graciously accepted their medals, Smith allowing himself another celebratory arm pump as he stepped onto the podium. But then, as the "Star-Spangled Banner" began to play and the flags were raised, the pair's expressions became serious.

Each man bowed their head and raised their fist: Smith his right, Carlos his left. Each wore a single black glove. Each had feet bare save for black athletic socks. Carlos was wearing a string of beads around his neck in addition to his bronze medal. Smith carried a box in his left hand containing an olive branch.

All three men on the podium, including second-place sprinter Peter Norman, wore pins emblazoned with the logo of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, a movement by black athletes to raise awareness about the plight of black people all over the world. Started on the campus of San Jose State by sociology professor Harry Edwards and student Ken Noel, the project had originally planned to boycott the Olympics entirely.

But when a vote by the athletes involved in the project failed to pass the motion to boycott, it fell to the athletes themselves to decide what, if anything, they were going to do at the games.

"I was surprised at the magnitude of what they did," Noel said. "They took it a lot further than anything I expected them to do. I think they took it a lot further then I would have thought to do myself if I had been there."

"I thought it was beautiful," Edwards said.

Not everyone agreed. The next day, International Olympic Committee President Avery Brundage called an emergency meeting on the protest. The committee voted to expel Smith and Carlos from any further Olympic activities and recommended that the U.S. Olympic Committee send the two sprinters home. The USOC initially refused, according to Olympic historian C. Robert Paul, Jr.

That night, the USOC sent Jesse Owens, a black athlete who had attained international fame in track and field at the 1936 Olympics, to talk to Smith and Carlos, according to a 1968 article in Life magazine.

Owens told them that the IOC was accusing them of violating the precepts of the games, and told them that the USOC was being pressured to send them home. He proposed that the athletes agree on a clear form of protest that wouldn't offend anyone. But the athletes declined, insisting that they be given the freedom to express themselves.

The next day, Paul said, the IOC met again. This time the committee had a stronger message for its American counterpart: Expel Smith and Carlos, or the entire U.S. track and field team would be barred from competition.

The USOC complied, and Smith and Carlos were given 48 hours to leave the country by the Mexican government.

Lloyd LaCuesta, then a reporter for the Spartan Daily, said he decided to meet them at the airport when they came back.

"It was a very interesting scene at the San Jose airport, because at that time the news media tended to be all white. So there was a bunch of old, white men standing around saying, 'Do you know what he looks like? Do you know what he looks like?'" LaCuesta said. "These guys ran to the first tall, black person they saw get off the airplane. And that wasn't Tommie."

"I saw Tommie coming, and we rushed over," he said. "We started firing questions at Tommie and John. I remember Tommie didn't really want to say anything, but I was being very persistent."

"And John said to me 'If you shove that microphone in my face, I'm gonna shove it down your throat.' ... For the most part, they weren't saying anything. I think they were kind of shell-shocked by the kind of media coverage they were getting," he said.

Media reaction was mixed. The Washington Post ran an editorial on Oct. 20, 1968, that said it was sad that Smith and Carlos felt the need to protest at the Olympics, and that no matter how right their sentiments were, "the time and place was wrong."

Many other publications agreed, although many also decried the decision of the Olympic committees to throw them out of the games.

But the welcome home wasn't all bad.

"I had two white students living above me at the time," Carlos said. "And they had so much respect and admiration and pride for (me) that when I came home, despite any negatives that I might have seen on the way to my house, they had a big sign out, like a sheet hanging from their window: 'Welcome home, John Carlos: San Jose State's hero.' That shaved off any rough edges I might have had."

"I'll never forget it as long as I live," he said.