During the ceremony, Smith and Carlos protested against racial discrimination: they went barefoot on the podium and listened to their anthem bowing their heads and raising a fist with a black glove. In addition to better treatment for people of African descent worldwide, Smith and Carlos were gravely concerned over an event that happened 10 days before the Summer Games began.
On October 2, , Mexican military troops and police officers shot into a crowd of unarmed student protesters, killing as many as youth official estimates of the number of dead remains uncertain. This incident, along with their existing concerns about human rights, influenced the pair to make a political statement at the Olympics.
After winning the gold and the bronze medals in the meter race a white Australian athlete named Peter Norman won the silver , the duo stepped up to the podium wearing their symbolic beads, scarves, socks and gloved fists. Bass notes how coverage of the gesture was amplified in the United States because the Olympics marked the first time an American network had broadcast the Games. So, there's like million eyes on Smith and Carlos. For their peaceful protest, Smith and Carlos were suspended from the U.
Olympic team and forced out of the Olympic Village. Death threats awaited them when they made it back to the United States. Both experienced major personal challenges. Their marriages fell apart. Carlos had difficulty getting employment for many years.
Carlos went on to become a community liaison for the Los Angeles Summer Olympics. Both men also worked in educational settings. In , Smith coached track at Oberlin College , an academic institution long known for being racially progressive. In the decades that passed, Smith took care not to describe the gesture he and Carlos made as a Black Power salute. He was far more of a kind of traditional American individualist. You know, he was planning to go into the military. Among the Games athletes, opinions were divided.
Australia's Peter Norman, the winner of the silver medal in the meter sprint, mounted the podium wearing a badge supporting Edwards' organization. Heavyweight boxer George Foreman—who would win a gold medal and wave an American flag in the ring—dismissed the protest, saying, "That's for college kids.
Smith and Carlos returned home to a wave of opprobrium—they were "black-skinned storm troopers," in the words of Brent Musburger, who would gain fame as a TV sportscaster but was then a columnist for the Chicago American newspaper—and anonymous death threats. The pressure, Carlos says, was a factor in his then-wife's suicide in Smith recalls, "I had no job and no education, and I was married with a 7-month-old son.
Both men played professional football briefly. Then Carlos worked at a series of dead-end jobs before becoming a counselor at Palm Springs High School, where he has been for the past 20 years. Now 63 and remarried, he has four living children a stepson died in Smith earned a bachelor's degree in social science from San Jose State in and a master's in sociology from the Goddard-Cambridge Graduate Program in Social Change in Boston in After teaching and coaching at Oberlin College in Ohio, he settled in Southern California, where he taught sociology and health and coached track at Santa Monica College.
Both of them continued in athletics. Smith later played football with the Cincinatti Bengals before becoming a assistant professor at Oberlin and a U. National Team coach. Carlos played football for the Philadelphia Eagles before working as a community liason for the Los Angeles Summer Olympics. They are still remembered though for one of the most overt political statements in the year-plus history of the modern Olympic Games.
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