It was a touch of black to the first ever colour telecast of the Olympic Games in Mexico, 1968. The swinging sixties’ radical spirit soon sidelined the world’s greatest sporting spectacle.
The Star Spangled Banner, America’s national anthem, was played after the 200 metre sprint medal presentation following Tommie Smith’s gold and John Carlos’s bronze winning feats.
Heads bowed, Smith raised a gloved right fist and Carlos his left. Silver medallist Peter Norman of Australia stood in silent solidarity, also wearing the OPHR (Olympic Project for Human Rights) badge.
The African-American duo was booed, but the crowd’s anger surprised the trio. “I threw my arm up, and said ‘Please, God, get me out of here,’” Smith recalled. At the press conference that followed, he was unfazed though.
“If I win, I am an American, not a black American. But if I did something bad then they would say a ‘Negro.’ We are black and we are proud of being black. Black America will understand what we did tonight,” Smith stated.
The black scarf represented black pride, symbolising the lynchings taking place then in the American South. The black socks with no shoes stood for black poverty in racist America, he explained.
“It is very discouraging to be in a team with white athletes. On the track you are Tommie Smith, the fastest man in the world, but once you are in the dressing rooms you are nothing more than a dirty Negro,” he rued.
Carlos expected to see fear in Norman’s eyes before the medal ceremony, when there was no turning back from what they’d decided to do. But he didn’t see fear. “I saw love,” he reminisced.
“It has been said that sharing my silver medal with that incident on the victory dais detracted from my performance. On the contrary, I was rather proud to be a part of it,” Norman added.
The price the three paid for the part they played out on the podium was prohibitive. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) gave Smith and Carlos 48 hours to leave Mexico, while Australia banned Norman from competing again in the quadrennial showpiece.
The Americans returned home to death threats and dire straits, Carlos’s wife committed suicide less than a decade later. John Dominis’s photograph became the demonstration’s iconic image if not the portrait of a defiant act defining a generation.
In 2005, San Jose State University immortalised the protest by its most famous alumni with a 22-foot high statue. Norman’s nephew Matt produced ‘Salute,’ a documentary on the Mexico happenings.
In 2006 when Norman departed for that great dressing room in the sky, Smith and Carlos kept him company for a part of the way as pall-bearers at the funeral.
