Kaepernick’s Knee and Olympic Fists Are Linked by History
In the summer of 1968, a roiling year of war, assassination and political and racial tension, I turned 14 in the Cajun town of Eunice, La. Schools would not fully integrate until a year later, after man walked on the moon. So naïve was I as a boy, so complete and unquestioned was segregation, I thought the sign at the laundromat that said, “Whites Only,” referred to the color of clothing.
In 1968, I was also first drawn irresistibly to the Olympics, an event I have now covered 14 times: Bob Beamon launched a magnificently unbound long jump at the Summer Games in Mexico City. And most startling to a sheltered white teenager in the South, the 200-meter sprinters
Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised gloved fists on the medal stand during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” to protest the treatment of black Americans.
Oct. 16 is the 50th anniversary of what is probably the most indelible image of sports activism of the last half-century. It’s the first thing I thought of upon hearing about Nike’s ad campaign with Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback who lost his N.F.L. career after kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial and social injustice.
Kaepernick is a direct activist descendant of Smith and Carlos, unyielding in his conviction, fully understanding of risk and sacrifice and the power and dignity of
silent gesture. And he knows something they did not a half-century ago, that history can act as sandpaper, smoothing abrasive denunciation into burnished acceptance.
While speaking at Notre Dame last spring, Carlos called Kaepernick “
my hero.” The scuff of criticism that Kaepernick was unpatriotic, disrespectful to the flag and the military, Carlos predicted, would be buffed and polished until he was more widely celebrated as righteous and courageous for calling attention to income equality and police brutality.
Last year, on his website,
Carlos wrote that Kaepernick would one day be compared favorably to Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Rosa Parks, praising him as “one of the key fruits of our labor.”
Carlos, 73, a native of Harlem who said he danced outside the Savoy Ballroom with boyhood friends and was rewarded with silver dollars from
Fred Astaire, speaks from hard-earned experience. After the Mexico City protest, he and Smith were kicked out of those Olympics and infamously
called “black-skinned storm troopers” by Brent Musburger, then a Chicago columnist. Both athletes received death threats. The F.B.I. monitored them for years.
Both played professional football, briefly, forgetfully, and struggled at times to find work. Smith worked at a carwash. Carlos told The Boston Globe that he could not afford the electric bill and
burned furniture in the fireplace to keep his family warm. His marriage broke up and his first wife, Kim, committed suicide in 1977. Decades later, he said he still felt haunted.
Public perception of Smith and Carlos began to change by the 1980s. Both became emissaries for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and have been inducted into the United States Track and Field Hall of Fame. In 2005, a 23-foot statue depicting the Mexico City protest was
unveiled at San Jose State, their alma mater.
Smith, 74, a son of Texas sharecroppers, earned a master’s degree in sociology and, like Carlos, settled into a career of coaching, teaching, counseling. While their protest is often characterized as a black power salute, Smith
described it to Smithsonian magazine in 2008 as “a cry for freedom and for human rights. We had to be seen because we couldn’t be heard.”
The most direct connection between Smith and Carlos and Kaepernick is Harry Edwards, a sociologist who was a mentor to Smith and Carlos at San Jose State in 1968 and has been a longtime adviser to the San Francisco 49ers, whom Kaepernick led to the Super Bowl during the 2012 season. Edwards calls Kaepernick the “Muhammad Ali of his generation.”
“You don’t make this sacrifice, pay this price, unless you love this country,” Edwards said of Smith and Carlos and Kaepernick. “What they are saying is, ‘We’re better than this as Americans.’ ”
Smith and Carlos and Kaepernick were empowered by separate but broad-based social movements, the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the Black Lives Matter movement of today. All three athletes brilliantly understood the capacity of silent gestures conveyed through the rituals of sport, said Douglas Hartmann, chairman of the sociology department at the University of Minnesota. Kaepernick’s kneeling during the anthem, he said, “is taking a gesture that is religious in overtones, very spiritual almost.” (A military veteran and former N.F.L. player suggested to Kaepernick that he not sit but kneel, as is done for fallen soldiers.)
There are differences, too, between the protests then and now. Kaepernick has the corporate backing of Nike, the reach of social media, public support from white athletes and coaches and belongs to a generation of athletes more broadly willing to use their platforms to address social issues, Hartmann said.
“In 1968, it was a small sample of elite Olympic athletes who were the only ones who really dared to think about boycotts or protests; now you’ve got high school teams taking a knee,” said Hartmann, the author of “Race, Culture and the Revolt of the Black Athlete: The 1968 Olympic Protests and Their Aftermath.”
I was unable to reach Smith or Carlos through telephone and email messages. So I called another person who was at Estadio Olímpico in Mexico City on Oct. 16, 1968. Dixie Saucier was then a physical education teacher and the girls’ basketball coach at Eunice High School in my hometown. She and her daughter, Adele Smith, then a student, attended the Games as spectators and brought home posters that were placed in the gym.
Still robust enough at 91 to play an occasional round of golf, Saucier recalled the crowd growing impatient at the delay caused by the medal ceremony after the 200 meters. But of the protest by Smith and Carlos, she said: “It took guts. They probably knew what was going to happen to them.”
