[News] Smith and Carlos embodied many African Americans' Summer of Love and Reckoning

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/oct/17/smith-and-carlos-embodied-many-african-americans-summer-of-love-and-reckoning 



  Smith and Carlos embodied many African Americans' Summer of Love and
  Reckoning

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar - October 17, 2018
------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the summer of 1967, 100,000 fashion-forward and social-forward youth 
gathered in San Francisco in what has famously been called the Summer of 
Love 
<https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2017/jun/03/san-francisco-summer-of-love-50th-anniversary-hippy-movement>. 
Similar gatherings occurred throughout the US, Canada, and Europe, all 
in an effort to reject the Vietnam War, consumerism, and governments who 
had proven less than forthright, while promoting the ideals of love, 
kindness, and compassion. The Summer of Love has been branded and 
celebrated as a symbol of the 60s. African Americans had another name 
for that summer: the Long, Hot Summer of 1967 
<https://www.britannica.com/story/the-riots-of-the-long-hot-summer>. 
During that time, 150 black communities burned in riots, with 26 people 
killed in Newark, New Jersey, and 43 in Detroit 
<https://www.history.com/topics/1960s/1967-detroit-riots>. By the 
following summer, Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Bobby Kennedy, two 
guiding lights in civil rights, had been assassinated 
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/04/martin-luther-king-last-31-hours-the-story-of-his-prophetic-last-speech>. 
Black people were not feeling the love. That’s the context for the 1968 
Summer Olympics when, 50 years ago this week, Tommie Smith and John 
Carlos raised their gloved fists 
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/30/black-power-salute-1968-olympics> 
from the podium in Mexico City, medals dangling from their necks, while 
the US national anthem played. To many African Americans, /that/ was the 
Summer of Love – and Pride, and Reckoning.

I was 20 when this happened. I’d been invited to join the Olympic men’s 
basketball team and had anguished about it for weeks. I gathered with 
several other black athletes to discuss our misgivings with sociology 
professor Dr Harry Edwards, who urged us to boycott the Games. We 
discussed the turmoil in the cities and the systemic oppression. The 
Vietnam War was also on our minds. We were the same age as many of the 
soldiers fighting and dying. One Air Force report confirmed what black 
soldiers already knew: “Unequal treatment is manifested in unequal 
punishment, offensive and inflammatory language, prejudice in 
assignments of details, lack of products for blacks at the PX, 
harassment by security police under orders to break up five or more 
blacks in a group and double standards in enforcement of regulation.” 
Military discrimination had harsh consequences: by 1966 over 20% of US 
combat casualties in Vietnam were black, which was a much higher 
percentage than the total of blacks in the military.

We had a lively debate, with some athletes explaining that this might be 
their only chance to compete at this level. Dr Edwards was for the 
boycott. As he later told the New York Times Magazine: “For years we 
have participated in the Olympic Games 
<https://www.theguardian.com/sport/olympic-games>, carrying the United 
States on our backs with our victories, and race relations are now worse 
than ever … [I]t’s time for the black people to stand up as men and 
women and refuse to be utilized as performing animals for a little extra 
dog food.” In the end, we decided that a mass boycott wasn’t the answer. 
Given the rampant racism of the time, I couldn’t see me competing to 
glorify the country that was working so hard to keep black Americans 
from having their constitutional rights. The hypocrisy didn’t sit right 
with me. Instead, I took a job in my hometown of New York City, teaching 
basketball to inner-city kids.

Fast forward to 16 October 1968. Smith and Carlos, after winning first 
and third in the 200m dash, raised their black-gloved fists from the 
medal podium and bowed their heads during the playing of The 
Star-Spangled Banner. It was a shout-out heard ‘round the world. The 
reaction wasn’t just a matter of race: conservative whites and blacks 
were disgusted and liberal blacks and whites were elated. Jesse Owens 
had been sent to talk to the black athletes before the games to dissuade 
them from showing any form of protest. He was angry that it hadn’t 
worked. Some blacks thought that such overt displays of frustration and 
anger only goaded racist America to justify their bigotry. Others, in 
contrast, were convinced that civility and manners had resulted in very 
little progress.

For me, the sight of those two proud athletes raising their fists to 
call attention to social injustices, knowing they would face death 
threats and probable expulsion from the Games, made my heart swell. The 
public backlash only proved their point: on one hand, you had voter 
suppression, police brutality, poverty, starving children, lesser 
education, lesser job opportunities, and a government doing very little 
to change it. On the other hand, you had people worried that their 
enjoyment of a sporting event was momentarily “ruined” because someone 
silently expressed a shameful truth.

Sadly, here we are 50 years later facing some of the same shameful 
truths and witnessing some of the same shameful reactions. Tommie and 
John came home heroes to the millions of Americans who they had spoken 
up for and villains to the millions they had spoken to. The outspoken 
athletes of today – like Colin Kaepernick, LeBron James, Steph Curry, 
and many others – face the same hostility from good people who are just 
ignorant of the facts, from those who are terrified of the gradual 
browning of America, and from those who profit from social disparity. 
They already have a voice in the White House under the most dishonest, 
racist, and reactionary administration in modern history 
<https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/jun/11/kareem-abdul-jabbar-donald-trump-anthem-protests>.

We all long for the day when no athlete will raise a gloved fist or take 
a knee or wear a t-shirt that says, “I can’t breathe.” 
<https://ftw.usatoday.com/2014/12/kyrie-irving-i-cant-breathe-t-shirt-before-cavaliers-eric-garner-lebron-james> 
But most of us want that day to come about because there’s no more need 
for those gestures, because America has finally committed to following 
its own Constitution. Until that day … well, you know.


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