The Sixties were a great time to be young; All You Need Is Love preached The Beatles, while Scott McKenzie told us to "be sure to wear some flowers in your hair" if we were going to San Francisco. It was also a time of hate in America where race riots broke out across the country in 1968 following the assassination of Martin Luther King. By the time of the Olympic Games in Mexico City, Tommie Smith had endured enough.
As a frightened tot of five, he had watched his sharecropper father being beaten to a pulp by the white field boss...at the age of nine he had been enjoying his first lick of an ice cream cone until a local bully knocked it out of his hand yelling manically that blacks "don't eat ice cream". As a young adult he had grown weary of being refused entry to a cinema, a table in a restaurant, a room to rent, for the unvoiced reason that he was black.
Now Smith stood on the Olympic podium with his Olympic gold medal and the eyes of millions upon him. He stood shoeless to represent black poverty and with a knotted silk scarf around his neck to symbolise lynchings. In his left hand he held the sprig of an olive tree, the emblem of peace; his right hand was encased in a black, leather glove. As the American flag was raised and the first strains of the Star Spangled Banner filled the stadium, he bowed his head and thrust his right fist towards the night sky. Forty years on, the image of Smith and his teammate John Carlos, the 200m bronze medallist, delivering their Black Power salute remains affectingly powerful.
Muhammad Ali called it "the single most courageous act of the 20th century", while Arthur Ashe described it as "an inspiration to a generation". To some white Americans, it was the work of a black devil. "I was deathly afraid," recalls Smith softly. "Every little crack I heard sounded like a gunshot, I honestly thought I was a goner. "Hey, man, we were wide open out there. We'd been threatened thousands of times. Someone tampered with the brakes on my car and I lost count of the number of rocks that came flying through my windows. Whooo, the Sixties were a real scary time. They'd got to Malcolm X, they'd got to Martin Luther King. I was an easy target."
Now a loving grandfather of 64, quietly devout Christian, motivational speaker and former college lecturer, Smith was the greatest athlete of his era, the only man to hold 11 world records simultaneously. He is suffused in such an air of dignity and decency, how could anyone have possibly regarded him as a devil? "It was the fist that scared white folks. They could have forgiven the black socks and the silk scarf but when they saw that black fist they were afraid.
"Hey, we meant to scare people. We had our whole lives in front of us so we were fully aware that we were risking everything. Heck, I already had the gold medal so I didn't need a claim to fame. It was a simply a cry for help. We didn't preach and we didn't carry weapons. "When I stepped on to the running track I was thought of as a god but when I stepped off the track I was hungry. I opened the cupboard and the only thing to eat were cockroaches. I wanted to walk as proudly as I ran. I wanted to walk as proudly as the white people who came to watch me run.
"I wanted to be a whole human being. I needed a job, I needed to feed my wife and baby. Heck, I was the easiest-going black militant you'll ever find." The seventh of 12 children, Smith was raised in a wooden shack in Clarksville, Texas, where, when his work in the fields was finally done for the day, his father, James, taught himself to read by opening the bible. His mother, Dora, was a Native American.
"We lived in the real backwoods, I didn't stand on a sidewalk until I was nine. I saw more snakes and alligators than humans. "I started working in the fields as soon as I could walk, 12 hours a day from six in the morning at my father's side. But I was happy. It wasn't a life of misery, just a tough one. But I hadn't been educated so I didn't know there were other lives available." He may have lacked sophisticated schooling but Smith had learned one important fact. "I knew I was black from childhood. The lighter your skin, the better the job you got. I didn't grow up hating whites, because my parents never talked about that kind of thing."
By the age of 13, Smith had come to realise that as fast as he could run, education was the swiftest route into the white man's world. "I didn't want to go back in the fields, picking cotton, gathering grapes, milking cows. I had to rise above where my daddy had been stopped by lack of schooling." Smith emerged as the country's leading sprinter at San Jose State College where he set a series of world records at 200m and 400m.
More importantly, he was attracted by the "magnetic personality" of sociology professor Harry Edwards, a one-time discus thrower who was encouraging America's black athletes to boycott the forthcoming Olympics in protest at racial inequality. "I didn't want anything to do with it at first. A gold medal would feed my family, why should I jeopardise that? Then I looked in the mirror, took off my shades and looked even closer. 'Tommie,' I asked myself, 'what are you going to do?'"
What Tommie did was join Edwards' Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) whose list of demands ranged from the banning of South Africa because of apartheid to the resignation of IOC president Avery Brundage for alleged racism. "That's when the threats started coming with every mail delivery. Letters which made me mad and scared me to death. 'I will kill you and rape your wife' . . . 'your house will not be standing tomorrow'. It is only by the grace of God I'm still here."
Smith won the 200m final in a world record time of 19.83secs but prays that the impact of his actions will survive 100 years and more. "I did it because I was afraid to do it. Did I explain that right? I knew it might get me killed but it had to be done. I felt the necessity for change. And who better to do that than someone who had the world's eye? It was my obligation, it was my duty to make the sacrifice.
"I knew my protest had to be silent, so it could be understood by all nations. It had to be strong, imposing, prayerful. I told John [Carlos] what I planned and he said 'Hey, man, I'm with you'. I still want to cry when I think about it." We can neither comprehend the terror they felt, nor their burning sense of pride. "Pride, that's the key word. Like a drowning man my whole life flashed before me. Oh, I never felt such a rush of pride. Even hearing the Star Spangled Banner made me proud, though it didn't totally represent me. But it was the anthem which represented the country I represented.
"They say we demeaned the flag. Hey, no way man. That's my flag, and the flag of a lot of people served under in the military to build this country. Black people died because of that flag. That's the American flag and I'm an American until the day I die. But I couldn't salute it in the accepted manner when I was obliged to come home and be just another n*****." And so, there they stood; Smith, the thoughtful academic, Carlos, the super-cool, super-belligerent, dude, and silver medallist Peter Norman, the quiet Australian who pinned an OPHR badge on his tracksuit top as a message of support (at Norman's funeral in 2006, the two Americans with whom he will forever be associated served as his leading pallbearers).
Two days after their historic run, Smith and Carlos were expelled from the US team and given 48 hours to quit the Olympic Village by the outraged Brundage. But their message burned as brightly as the Olympic flame in Mexico City; Bob Beamon, who had previously been a vociferous opponent of boycotts and demonstrations, wore black socks of protest to receive the gold medal for his world record leap in the long jump, while Lee Evans, Larry James and Ron Freeman, 1-2-3 in the 400m, donned the berets of the militant Black Panthers at their medal ceremony.
Tommie Smith would never run again. The Los Angeles Rams, with whom he was planning on launching a new career in American football, summarily cancelled his contract, whereupon his agent, Jim Brown, a gridiron superstar turned Hollywood actor, demanded the return of a US$2,000 advance. As befitting a man of abundant gentleness, Smith felt no anger at this rebuff from a fellow black athlete whom he had always admired, merely sadness.
Amidst the outpouring of hatred and death-threats, Smith received one letter in the post to bring a smile to his face; The US Army had declared him "unfit" for active duty, thereby banning him from participating in the Vietnam War. "Black athletes won seven of the US track team's 12 track and field gold medals in Mexico City and set six world records. But none of us came home to become millionaires."
Despite gaining a master's degree in sociology at Goddard-Cambridge University in Boston, Smith and his second wife, Denise, existed on the breadline for many years before he was offered a lecturer's role at Santa Monica College, California in 1978. "When I came home from Mexico City, white folks used to come up to my dad and ask: 'What's wrong with Tommie? When he lived here and worked in the fields he was such a good boy, smiling all the time. We never heard him complain. What happened?' Well, what happened, of course, was that I went to college and then Mexico City.
But all my daddy could say to them in reply was: 'Yeah, you're right, he was a good worker'. You see, educationally he couldn't attack. What was he going to say? 'Well you people must think that just because Tommie was a sharecropper's boy he should stay right here on the farm and be obedient to you?' My father couldn't say that to white folks . . . but I could." Invited to explain his actions at a public meeting of his townsfolk in Leemore, California, Smith was gloriously unrepentant when he addressed them.
"I told them that white folks were no better than any other folk, the only difference was, they believed they were better because of the colour of their skin. After that speech, one of my favourite teachers came up and said: 'Tommie, I didn't know you felt that angry. Something must have changed you'. And I said: 'Yeah, your education. Your education changed me. I now know the Constitution is basically a lie. It really doesn't represent me. It represents you, it represents me about three fifths'."
In an era when athletes can cash in their Olympic medals for many millions, Tommie Smith, the greatest sprinter of his time, lives modestly but contentedly. "Who can say how things would have turned out if I'd refused to answer God's call. Sure, I might have been wealthier, but happier? No, I really don't think so. "There's never a day goes by I don't look at the old photograph of me, fist raised, head bowed and heart on fire. I'm mighty proud of what that young man did in Mexico City. I've lived my entire life up on that victory stand. I guess I'll never step off it."
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