Smith recalls Mexico City Olympics silent protest
LONDON (Reuters) - Framed in one of the iconic images of the tumultuous 1960s, two young men stand on the victory podium at the Mexico City Olympics with black-gloved fists raised and heads bowed.
Tommie Smith and John Carlos, first and third in the 1968 Games 200 meters final, had followed their track triumphs with an unprecedented protest on behalf of oppressed American blacks.
The reaction to the silent gesture, flashed around the global village, was swift, savage and unforgiving. Avery Brundage, the autocratic head of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), was outraged and the pair were ordered to leave the athletes' village.
At home they were heroes to their contemporaries, pariahs to the establishment. Carlos's wife committed suicide, Smith's marriage collapsed and both men struggled for years to make a living.
The symmetry of the Mexico City image, Smith's right hand and Carlos's left aloft, with second-placed Australian Peter Norman next to them, is perfect.
Yet in a telephone interview with Reuters, 40 years after the Vietnam war raged, students rioted on the streets, American cities burned and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated, Smith said the protest had not been choreographed.
Smith, who lives in Georgia, said he had planned to protest on behalf of the Olympic Project for Human Rights and given Carlos a black glove and black sock after winning in world-record time.
"I didn't know until afterwards what he had done," Smith said. "I couldn't see him on the podium."
CHILLING PASSAGE
Smith had more immediate concerns. In a chilling passage in his autobiography he spells out the paranoia of the times.
"I prayed, prayed that the next sound I would hear in the middle of the Star-Spangled Banner, would not be a gunshot, and prayed that the next thing I felt would not be the darkness of sudden death...I thought every gun in the world was pointed at me," he said.
Smith can still recall vividly the tense summer of 1968.
"It was a time of the changing of the guard, we had riots on campuses, we had riots in every major city in the U.S," he said.
"And campuses in those cities were in turmoil. Why were they in turmoil? They were in turmoil because of the civil injustice, civil rights. There were things that needed doing that the government wasn't doing. There was a civil war."
The road to Mexico City for Smith, born on D-Day (June 6), 1944, and one of a sharecropping family of 12 children, was long, arduous and uncertain. Continued...
