Statue Plan Recalls ’68 Olympic Tumult

The pair of Olympic sprinters stood on the victory stand in Mexico City. As the U.S. national anthem played, each bowed his head and raised a black-gloved fist in protest of racial inequality in America.

Gold medalist Tommie Smith cradled a boxed olive branch as an emblem of peace. John Carlos, third in the same 200-meter dash, wore love beads with his bronze medal. Their shoeless feet, clad in black socks, represented poverty among African Americans. The year was 1968. The men were condemned as traitors and banned from the Games forever.

The image of their black power salute helped define an era. But 35 years later, few remember the path that took Smith and Carlos to Mexico City.

That path cut cleanly through their alma mater, San Jose State University, where a public reassessment may be underway. A young white student has vowed to honor the controversial act by bringing a sculpture of Smith and Carlos to campus.

San Jose State was once known as Speed City, for the Olympic track and field stars it spawned. The black athletes’ protest movement flourished here too in the months leading up to Smith and Carlos’ notorious stand. It was a year of tumult for the Civil Rights movement: the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, rising protests against the Vietnam War.

But here at San Jose State, the footprints to the past have long faded. The university dropped its intercollegiate track and field team 15 years ago. And the names of Smith and Carlos draw mostly blank stares on the campus of 31,000 students.

Against this backdrop, 23-year-old Erik Grotz decided it was time to act.

“I see it as a part of living history,” said Grotz, who graduated three months ago with a degree in political science and devised the plan for the sculpture depicting the black power salute.

“We’re celebrating that San Jose State students can become leaders on the world stage -- that we can make a difference at a really young age.”

After the Olympics, Smith and Carlos both struggled for years with poverty, ostracism and depression before hitting new strides -- Smith as head track coach at Santa Monica College, Carlos as a counselor and, for a time, a coach at Palm Springs High School. For them, the tribute from a young activist is a moving welcome home.

“It took a lot of courage on his part, being a young white individual, to step up to the plate and say, ‘These people have been wronged and we need to give them the honor and respect they deserve at our institution,’ ” said Carlos, now 58.

The Associated Students -- the nonprofit student governing body implementing the project -- and university administrators have already received some critical responses -- all from outside the campus. In a time of high patriotic sentiment, the endorsement of a challenge to the flag is bound to inspire antipathy.

“They essentially ‘spit in the face’ of ALL Americans,” read one e-mail that derided the student effort. “If the USA were as racist as you imbeciles claim, you would never have seen these fellows compete.”

University officials responded to the criticism last spring with a statement from then-President Robert L. Caret. The San Jose State athletes “expressed their views in a peaceful manner” -- a cherished freedom at the campus -- and opponents are entitled to the same right of self-expression, Caret said.Still, both Carlos and Smith have warned Grotz to brace for more.

“I told him ... that the easy part is over,” Carlos said. “You see whether you’re a true soldier when they start firing at you.”

By the late 1960s, San Jose State University had attracted a crop of world-class black athletes on sports scholarships. But Harry Edwards, a longtime sociology professor at UC Berkeley, said recently that academics were not emphasized for African American students. Edwards, who just stepped down as director of Oakland’s Office of Parks and Recreation, petitioned his way into more rigorous classes. He formed the university’s first black student organization, then left to pursue a higher degree.

After returning as a lecturer, Edwards led a black student protest in 1967 that forced cancellation of the school’s opening football game. Then he formed the Olympic Project for Human Rights, urging black athletes to boycott the 1968 Games. It was in that cauldron of activism that Smith, the son of a Texas farmhand who had moved his family to the Central Valley’s Lemoore, spent five years. He embraced Edwards’ project.

Meanwhile, the Harlem-born Carlos enrolled at East Texas State University, only to be shocked by the segregation. “I looked up and saw: black bathroom/white bathroom, black water fountain/white water fountain,” Carlos said. “Then right away the coach started calling me ‘Boy.’ ”

After Carlos went on record in support of an Olympic boycott, white neighbors forbade their kids from playing with his daughter. He returned to New York, where he met King and Edwards, who lured him to San Jose.

But the boycott was not to be. While the San Jose Olympic athletes -- four students competed in track -- were at the nexus of the movement, other black teammates were not prepared to join them.

Smith won the 200-meter dash in a world record time of 19.83 seconds. Carlos took the bronze. They thrust their fists into the air in what they then described as an “arc of black power and unity.” The huge crowd in the Estadio Olimpico jeered and the two were given 48 hours to leave Mexico. Carlos and Smith both say now that the salute was never meant as a “black/white thing” but as a call for justice and equality for all.

Harassment and death threats followed. Job possibilities evaporated. Carlos recalled such destitution that he was forced to burn his children’s beds for heat during a cold winter in Altadena. The strain cost both men their first marriages. But both say they held tightly to their religious beliefs. Both are now happily remarried.

As their lives stabilized in obscurity, Grotz was growing up in a flower-rimmed cottage in Belmont, an affluent suburb south of San Francisco where he lives with his parents, brother and sister. In three years of student government at San Jose State, Grotz’s activism never grazed controversy. That changed with a comment from a political science professor last year.

Sometimes, his teacher noted, years pass before heroes are honored. His case in point: Smith and Carlos.

Grotz first saw the photograph of the men when he was 12. To the clean-cut sports fan with cropped brown hair and an open smile, “it showed solidarity. It showed individual strength.” He made up his mind that night in class. He wanted to honor the runners.

The Associated Students approved Grotz’s resolution last December. The student government hopes to raise as much as a quarter of a million dollars for the project, to be anchored by a statue, said the Associated Students’ executive director, Alfonso de Alba.

The organization honored Smith and Carlos in a May reception and is accepting proposals from artists. A winning team will be announced on Oct. 18 -- the 35th anniversary of the protest.

Administration officials have agreed to support the student effort. Monica Rascoe, vice president for student affairs, said the university stood behind the men in 1968. She called the commemorative effort “a historic moment.” More than a nod to Smith and Carlos, the project aims to spur activism in an often complacent student body.

“The more Tommie Smiths and John Carloses that come out of San Jose State, the better our society will be,” de Alba said. “Unfortunately, out of 31,000 students, I think there are 31 who could tell you who they were.”

Many believe the honor is long overdue.

“The first thing most of America tried to do was to muzzle them and treat them like outcasts,” said Ross Greenburg, president of HBO Sports and executive producer of “Fists of Freedom,” a Peabody-winning documentary on the men. “They need to be remembered for their courage, for standing up for what they believed.”

The project is equally momentous for recognizing San Jose State’s place in history, said Edwards, who has encouraged the U.S. Postal Service to issue a stamp of the moment on the Mexico City victory stand.

“San Jose State ... forced us to look at sports as a serious institution of society and international relations.”

Still, bitterness lingers.

Jim Hines -- who became the first man to break 10 seconds in the 100-meter dash, at the same Olympics -- has expressed resentment against his teammates. He maintains he lost perhaps $1.5 million in potential endorsements, and that job applications by black men across America were tossed into the trash in response to the protest.

Between Smith and Carlos, too, grievances have festered. They have never been friends. And each carries a different version of the day’s events. On his Web site, Smith doesn’t mention Carlos by name, describing the historic gesture by himself “and others.” He says he asked his then-wife to bring the gloves to Mexico City for his protest. As they prepared to head to the victory stand, “I turned to John and said, ‘This is what I’m going to do,’ ” Smith said in an interview. “He said, ‘It’s a good idea. Can I have the other glove?’ I said, ‘Of course you can. I wasn’t gonna use it anyway.’ ”

Carlos tells it differently, saying the moment had even come to him as a vision at age 7, when he saw himself standing on a victory podium surrounded by a crowd that was alternately adoring and hateful.

“After the race, just before the final, I put my arm around Tommie and told him, ‘Man, I’m going to do something. I’m going to make some kind of statement,’ ” Carlos said. “He said he had some gloves ... I told him to bring what he had.”

Edwards says none of that matters.

“Fifty years from now, all of us will be on the other side of the lawn,” he said. “This whole idea of who was riding shotgun and who was holding the reins is self-serving. What will prevail will be the gesture, the historical era and their role in it.”

Grotz, too, hopes the act of memorializing the men will help smooth over differences.

“If anything,” he said, “I think this is a good way to heal old wounds.”