Thoughts from Dr. Joe: Standing up isn’t always popular
I often assist students with navigating the spectrum of scholastic research. I help them shape an idea, then provide historical, social, philosophical and political perspective. In light of the recent racial travesties, local high schoolers asked if I’d help research an example of when athletes peacefully took a stand for civil rights.
The kids asked about using the basketball players who recently wore black shirts in solidarity with black lives matter.
I told them that I don’t mean to belittle their initiative, but that idea is like kissing your sister. You’re speaking about today’s athletes who bask in celebrity and who are nurtured by megamillion endorsements and whose contracts rival the GNP of some countries. They speak within the confines of political correctness. Their mantras are typically skewed toward public opinion.
“Today’s athletes risk very little,” I said.
I believe the students got it.
I told them that to my mind, the most iconic demonstration of athletes sacrificing for civil rights occurred on Oct. 16, 1968, during the Mexico City Olympics. It happened during the gold medal ceremony.
Americans Tommie Smith and John Carlos, along with Australian Peter Norman approached the podium. At 19.83 seconds, Smith had just set a new world record in the 200 meters. John Carlos was a step behind him. Smith and Carlos were students at San Jose State. Called speed city, San Jose had the fastest sprinters in the world. There, Tommie tied or broke 13 world records.
Smith and Carlos won a gold and a bronze medal respectively at the ’68 Olympics and what they did next couldn’t stand in starker contrast to today’s depoliticized, sanitized and hyper-commercialized sports world. These guys had a point to make.
As they approached the platform they removed their shoes, carrying them to protest poverty in America. Protesting the lynching of blacks, they wore beads and scarves. John Carlos unzipped his jacket to represent the working class of New York City, a violation of Olympic protocol.
Finally, to show solidarity with the civil rights movement, they raised their fists during the national anthem. It was the most iconic gesture in both Olympic and sports history. Both Smith and Carlos wore a black glove professing that in 1968, black lives mattered.
Australian Peter Norman supported the Americans and wore the Olympic Project for Human Rights pin.
They inspired millions around the world but their punishment was swift and severe. Avery Brundage, then president of the International Olympic Committee, immediately suspended Smith and Carlos from the team and banned them from Mexico. Their athletic careers were ruined. For years they received death threats and were called traitors. They couldn’t find employment. As a result of the relentless harassment, John Carlos’ wife committed suicide. For his complicity, Peter Norman was banned from the Australian team.
“We ask for an equal chance to be a human being,” John Carlos exclaimed.
Such moments are crucial to American sports and part of a long legacy of courage and struggle in the face of injustice. Politics has come to be considered not only inappropriate in sports but antithetical to it.
We want to see sports solely as an arena of play, not seriousness, but this diminishes not only the greatness and relevance of sports but also the course of athletes. We do an injustice to them and to what’s best about sports when we sanitize the past and rip athletics out of the political and cultural context that it has always been a part of. Keeping quiet in the face of human injustice may assure that we stay popular with the keepers of normality, but real courage means standing up when it’s not popular.
I told the kids, “You should never ask permission to raise your fists in the face of injustice. There’s your story!”
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JOE PUGLIA is a practicing counselor, a retired professor of education and a former officer in the Marines. Reach him at doctorjoe@ymail.com. Visit his website at doctorjoe.us.
