Summary

There wasn’t a specific plan on that day in Mexico City in October 1968, when 24-year-old Tommie Smith won the Olympic gold medal in the men’s 200 meters and approached the podium alongside fellow American John Carlos. But both men knew they would protest racial injustice in some form.

What they didn’t know is that their actions would spark a legacy of athlete activism for decades to come.

“We were preparing to walk across the track and get on the victory stand and receive the award. John Carlos and I had talked and we knew we were going to do something,” says Smith, now 76. “But nobody knew exactly what Tommie Smith and John Carlos were going to do, including Tommie Smith and John Carlos.”

Smith and Carlos’ gesture on a warm October night has become immortalized in Olympic lore over the last five decades. Their fists in the air have come to symbolize strength in the face of injustice, solidarity against our society’s greatest ills. The raising of Smith’s fist was a truly spontaneous act. Though the plan for a demonstration had been years in the making.

Smith, the son of a field worker and cowboy in north Texas, made his way to California in 1965 as he joined the San Jose State track team. And he quickly helped the program become a national powerhouse. Smith set a world-record in May 1966 as he ran the 200 meters straight in 19.5 seconds, and he won the NCAA men’s outdoor track and field championship one month later. Yet Smith’s excellence didn’t lead to admiration throughout the community. Smith and his fellow athletes were treated as second-class citizens the second they left the track.

“San Jose State was the strongest track and field team in history. But nothing was really done about the negatives of being treated less than,” Smith says. “We would break a world record or run a good meet and we would still be relegated back to second-class status when we returned to campus or returned to our communities.”

The athletes at San Jose State quickly became tired of the treatment they received outside of the track. And in October 1967, Smith and Co. chose to fight back. Smith and Carlos joined the the Olympic Project for Human Rights, a group founded by sociologist Harry Edwards in an attempt to protest against racial segregation in America and abroad. The group’s aims weren’t radical, especially by modern standards. But to Smith, they were revolutionary.