Ames, Ia. - John Carlos won an Olympic bronze medal. Carlos played in the National Football League, helped organize the 1984 Summer Olympics, set a world record in the 200-meter dash, coached high school track and field, and is a youth counselor, husband and a father.
But Carlos isn’t remembered for those things.
His will forever be the image of a black man bowing his head and holding aloft a gloved fist on a fall night in Mexico City.
“It’s the first thing people ask me,” Carlos said Friday in an interview with The Des Moines Register. “I think it’s good because people need to know.”
[b]Carlos, the keynote speaker Friday at Iowa State University’s Conference on Race and Ethnicity, and Tommie Smith created one of the most indelible images of the racially charged 1960s after winning medals in the 200-meter dash at the 1968 Summer Olympics.
They wore no shoes to symbolize poverty, and with heads lowered each raised a fist - Carlos his left, Smith his right - covered in black gloves to represent unity among people of color.[/b]
It was not, Carlos contended, a symbol of black power.
“The Olympics were about human rights and we had to deal with so much adversity merely because we were black attempting to do something,” Carlos said. “We didn’t have an Olympic project for black power; we had an Olympic project for human rights.”
The International Olympic Committee barred Smith and Carlos from the Games the following day, and the U.S. team sent them home.
“We always thought it was comical that they kicked us off the team, but we noticed when they did the medal count, they didn’t drop our medals out,” Carlos said.
During his speech Friday, Carlos dedicated plenty of time to Peter Norman, a white Australian, who finished second behind Smith in the historic race.
While accepting the silver medal, Norman wore a badge from the Olympic Project for Human Rights to show support for Carlos and Smith’s cause.
“There could have been 10,000 guys (in that race) and they wouldn’t have done what Peter Norman did,” Carlos said.
Much like Carlos and Smith, Norman received hostility upon returning home. Carlos spoke at Norman’s funeral.
“He never denied us,” Carlos said. “I know they wanted him to say, ‘I think I made a mistake’ and he never did.”
The scrutiny also strained the relationship between Carlos and Smith. The rift between the two lasted for years, but was closed before they received the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the 2008 ESPYs.
“He put me down so bad in his book. I was heartbroken. It was contradictory to what we were supposed to stand for,” Carlos said. “Everybody wanted to be the lead man, but that’s all water under the bridge.”
[b]Carlos, who works with at-risk youth at Palm Springs (Calif.) High School where he was track coach, shakes his head when asked about attitudes of today’s athletes about taking stands on social issues.
“They fear if they do something it’s going to cut their dollars off,” Carlos said.
“How many millions of dollars do you have to have to be a man?”[/b]
The International Olympic Committee has not issued an apology for barring the two from the Olympics.
The history, though, is undeniable.
[b]“You can’t talk about the (Olympic) rings without talking about Tommie Smith and John Carlos,” Carlos said. "Eventually, someone will say we were done an injustice.
“Whether we’ll be alive to hear it, I don’t know, but it’s just as good if our kids and our grandkids hear it.”[/b]