The image still stands as tall the men with the raised black-gloved fists.
Forty years ago this Olympics, Tommie Smith and John Carlos climbed onto the medal stand in Mexico City. The American sprinters had seized Olympic glory, Smith winning the 200 meters, Carlos finishing third.
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Smith also broke the world record with a time of 19.83 seconds, not so far from the new record set by Jamaica's Usain Bolt in 19.30 seconds Wednesday.
What Smith and Carlos did on the track, though, isn't how they are remembered.
It's what they did on the podium that still resonates.
As the national anthem played, Smith and Carlos each lifted a single black-gloved fist. They stood silently, heads bowed, fists raised, to protest the plight of blacks in America.
Even as Oklahomans remember The Katz Drug Store sit-ins, the Olympic salute to black power that October evening four decades ago continues to stir emotions.
"Can you imagine how brave those guys had to be to do that?” said a man who knows all about being black and brave.
Tex Rollins is now the longtime track coach and football assistant at Carl Albert High School, but in 1963, he was the first black football player at East Central University.
He moved from Terrell, Texas, to Ada not knowing what to expect.
"I never heard one discouraging racial remark,” he said. "Not one.”
For as good as Rollins had it, racial harmony was largely out of tune in America. There were protests and sit-ins. There were clashes and shootouts and deaths.
The violence only escalated before the 1968 Olympics, culminating with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Add in the Vietnam War and the Cold War, and the turbulence was fast and furious.
The Olympians, focused as they were on practicing and preparing, were not immune to the tumult.
Bobby Douglas sure wasn't. Even as the former Oklahoma State wrestler trained for his shot at gold, he took calls from several athletes involved with the Olympic Project for Human Rights. The group started by activist Harry Edwards to protest racial apartheid wanted black athletes like Douglas to boycott the 1968 Olympics.
"One of the main themes of the games is peace,” Douglas said. "My attitude was, ‘Hey, we can do a lot more by participating that we can by boycotting.'”
Eventually, OPHR called off the boycott and encouraged athletes to do what they felt was right.
For Douglas and most other American athletes, that meant trying to win a medal. They were going to Mexico City to compete, and that's what they did.
Douglas, who would become the longtime coach at Iowa State, suffered a bout of food poisoning and failed to win a medal.
"Disappointment,” he said of his Mexico City recollections, "but very, very fond memories.”
Among them was going to the Olympic stadium for track and field. Douglas happened to be there the day that a goateed American took an early lead in the 200 meters only to be passed down the stretch by his long-striding teammate.
Tommie Smith and John Carlos were headed to the medal stand.
When the music played and the fists raised, a smattering of boos could be heard in the stadium.
Douglas had no idea why.
Neither did his Olympic teammate Wayne Wells. The former Oklahoma wrestler, who is now an attorney in Edmond, was at the stadium that day, too.
"It was kind of offensive and very much a surprise,” he said of the silent protest, "but to tell you the truth, it wasn't that big a deal there. Those guys just got up there and kind of made jerks of themselves, and then we all went on.”
While there might have been little talk amongst athletes and limited buzz in the Olympic Village, Smith and Carlos were all the rage elsewhere. The picture of their medal-stand salute appeared in newspapers and magazines all over the world.
There was support and outrage and everything in between.
Tommie Smith knew he would have to live with the consequences of his actions for the rest of his life.
"But I didn't know how it would affect the rest of my life,” Smith said via telephone from his home in Georgia. "I didn't know the ramifications of hardship until I stepped off the victory stand.”
In the short term, the United States Olympic Committee asked that Smith and Carlos return their medals; Smith has said they never fulfilled that request and still have them.
When the men returned to the States, they were greeted with death threats and cold shoulders.
Perhaps they would have decided against the podium protest had they known the difficulty they'd encounter finding jobs and building careers, but that seems doubtful.
"We were constantly singing, ‘We shall overcome,'” Smith said, his voice dancing over the words of the old gospel protest anthem. "We've been overcoming for 400 years, and we're still second-class citizens. So, when does it stop?
"I suspect it won't.”
Racial harmony still hits its share of sour notes, but the discord isn't anywhere close to as bad it was when Smith and Carlos took the stand and made a stand.
They helped influence that change.
"Had they not done that ... the world in general would probably be a little bit different,” Douglas said. "I think it took great courage for them to do that.”
So does Tex Rollins.
Fighting in Vietnam at the time, he didn't learn of what Smith and Carlos had done until months afterward. Still, he understood why they did.
"Here I am, fighting in the jungles of Vietnam, and there are still restaurants in America that I can't go into,” Rollins said. "Here these guys are, representing the whole country, and there are things they can't do because of the color of their skin.
"They weren't against America. They were just against the policies and the way people were being treated.”
Rollins believes he is among those who benefited from the legacy left by Tommie Smith and John Carlos. He was able to have a career, buy a house, support a family and build a life.
He could live the American dream regardless of his skin color.
Those American sprinters who lofted black-fisted gloves toward the night sky four decades ago in Mexico City helped him get there.
"Very much so,” he said, "they were stepping stones.”
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Bob, you need to learn to improve your reading comprehension skills before you tell someone they got their facts wrong. What I wrote was that blacks were brought over here in SLAVE SHIPS! That is factually correct and it is factually incorrect on your part to equate indentured servitude with slavery as practiced here. Whites were not brought over in salve ships. As for the rest of your post, you are simply trying to spread the blame around, perhaps to assuage your own guilt, I don't know,but your arguments don't hold water. The Africans who earned money from the slave trade were in fact working for WHITES. Get it? Because they had forms of servitude too does not mitigate the crimes that were committed by white people here, principally in the south. I notice you didn't address any of the more important and recent facts regarding discrimination, lynchings, etc. because you don't have any rebuttal there - unless you are going to make another silly claim trying to equate treatment of whites in this country with blacks. You are in serious need of a history lesson.
Steve, many white people were, in fact, brought here against their will as indentured servants. True, they were eventually able to earn their freedom, but your point is factually incorrect. Also, you seem to think that Africans had nothing to do with the slave trade. In fact, almost NO blacks were captured by whites in Africa. African tribes did that job, and delivered their captives to the coast for sale to British slave ships. (There were no American ships at that time, as America was a British colony.) The African kings were paid quite handsomely for that. Warring tribes routinely took defeated enemies as slaves, by the thousands. The "surplus" were simply killed. Then the slave trade came along and made many African kings extremely rich. Instead of slaughtering the ones they didn't need, they sold them to the British. It's a very sad chapter in human history, and goes far beyond America's shores. No one had clean hands in the slave trade, certainly not the Africans who profited from it as much as anyone.
At the time I remember the gestures were widely criticized for many reasons and first and foremost was because the salute was associated with what was called "black power". Black power to many whites was assciated with the violent group, the Black Panthers and the riots. Cities were abaze that summer and "black power" was being blamed so Smith and Carlos became pariahs to whites. Many more people including whites were sympathetic to Dr. King's non-violent methods of achieving change but of course he had been shot and killed a few months before these olympics. I don't know how I would have felt had I been black and growing up the sixties. The one man who was quoted makes a good point. He was over in that hell hole called Vietnam putting his life on the line for his country and yet there were restaurants he couldn't eat in. I probably would have been angry too. I'm sure Carlos and Smith's actions looked very different through African-American eyes than they did through the lense of my experience as a white person in the sixties.
Well, JJ, since white people weren't brought over here in slave ships, sold at market like animals, whipped, hung from trees for trying to register to vote, murdered for advocating civil rights, denied jobs, houses and education for hundreds of years because of their race, I imagine anyone who did that will be looked upon as being as dumb as your post.
Several news reports have recently noted that soon white people will be the "minority" in America. So, when that day comes, I wonder what the reaction would be if a white person made a familiar salute on the Olympic stand in honor of white people?
Nice column. And timely, just as Smith's and Carlos' gestures were timely. That photograph is iconic. I think were it not for statements like the ones they made, Obama would not be a household word.
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Leave a comment. Log in below or sign up (it's free).Editor's note: It is not our intent to offer comments on crime or fatality stories.