Not the Triumph but the Struggle

Tom_Green · June 1, 2003, 2:59pm

Here is an interesting book I got the chance to take a look at the other day at a college bookstore-

http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/B/bass_triumph.html

The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete

Amy Bass

A sweeping look at black athletes through the lens of the Black Power protests at the Mexico City Olympics.

Jesse Owens. Muhammad Ali. Michael Jordan. Tiger Woods. All are iconic black athletes, as are Tommie Smith and John Carlos, the two African American track and field medalists who raised black-gloved fists on the victory dais at the Mexico City Olympics and brought all of the roiling American racial politics of the late 1960s to a worldwide television audience. But few of those viewers fully realized what had led to this demonstration-events that included the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., uprisings in American cities, student protests around the world, the rise of the Black Power movement, and decolonization and apartheid in Africa.

In this far-reaching account, Amy Bass offers nothing less than a history of the black athlete. Beginning with the racial eugenics discussions of the early twentieth century and their continuing reverberations in popular perceptions of black physical abilities, Bass explores ongoing African American attempts to challenge these stereotypes. In particular, she examines the Olympic Project for Human Rights, an organization that worked to mobilize black athletes in the 1960s and whose work culminated with the Mexico City protest.

Although Tommie Smith and John Carlos were reviled by Olympic officials for their demonstration, Bass traces how their protest has come to be the defining image of the 1968 Games, with lingering effects in the sports world and on American popular culture generally. She then focuses on images of black athletes in the post-civil rights era, a period characterized by a shift from the social commentary of Muhammad Ali to the entrepreneurial approach of Michael Jordan.

Ultimately Bass not only excavates the fraught history of black athleticism but also offers an incisive look at media coverage of athletic events-and the way sport is intimately bound up in popular constructions of the nation.

“In this far-reaching examination, Bass-assistant professor of history at Pittsburgh State University and a research expert for the past three Olympics-explores the history of the black struggle and the events that led up to this unforgettable moment in time. Moreover, it’s really a history of black athletes and their impact beyond the playing field.” Toronto Sun

“In addition to being competition, entertainment, business, and shared experience, Sport has often been a stage where significant social issues were played out. In the twentieth century, those issues often pertained to human rights and race. Sometimes the dynamics of sports served to clarify those issues, sometimes to muddle them. Here, Amy Bass sorts through the events and perceptions linked to some of the biggest names and moments in sports history, and assesses their meaning beyond the playing field.” Bob Costas

Amy Bass is assistant professor of history at Plattsburgh State University and worked as a member of the NBC research team for the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, the Sydney Olympics in 2000, and the Salt Lake Olympic Winter Games in 2002.

$27.95 Cloth/jacket ISBN 0-8166-3944-2

400 pages 5 7/8 x 9 (October 2002)
Critical American Studies Series

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Note on Usage
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Tiger in the Woods

The Race between Politics and Sport
What Is This “Black” in Black Athlete?
An Olympic Challenge: Preparing for the “Problem Games”
The Power of Protest and Boycott: The New York Athletic Club and the Question of the South African Springboks
Tribulations and the Trials: Black Conciousness and the Collective Body
“That’s My Flag”
Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Star?

Notes
Index

Tom_Green · June 1, 2003, 3:02pm

http://www.berkshireeagle.com/Stories/0%2C1413%2C101~6337~1210581%2C00.html

New book explores the role of black athletes in the U.S.
Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete
By Amy Bass

University of Minnesota Press, 400 pages, $27.95

Reviewed by Daniel Caplice Lynch
Special to The Eagle

Race, athletic victory, nationalism, protest – these are big notions, and they came together in Tommie Smith’s and John Carlos’ televised, head-bowed, black-glove salute on the medal platform of the Mexico Olympics in 1968. This was a very powerful image, seen and argued about around the world. To the white TV audience back home, it was scary, unexpected and infuriating. To the African-American audience, something else.

Who were these guys? What were they doing? Why did they do it? What happened to them? Richmond native Amy Bass answers these questions in “Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete.” Bass is a scholar, and she uses the methodology and vocabulary of her field to explore substantive issues and raise challenging questions. She is knowledgeable and passionate, sympathetic to Smith and Carlos, and open to exploring their political ideals and their place in the struggle for human rights.

Her audience is not only the general reader, but the professorate, comfortable with sentences like: “Given the centrality of sport to popular constructions of the nation it follows that unreconstructed sentiments of racial difference surrounding the black athlete have remained tenaciously pivotal in contemporary culture.” The first word “Given” suggests that the reader will be willing to entertain the ideas that follow, without the author having to go through the laborious, and for most of her audience, unnecessary, task of explaining them. In the last few decades in the academy, much important work has been done on the social construction of gender, race and, as here, a nation. The terms do not, in this context, have an independent reality: they are what we (everybody, all together now) say they are. To put a reader’s caution another way: If you believe in the Curse of the Bambino, this may not be the book for you.

The analysis of sport can be intellectually exciting. As Bass says, “… sport provides a contradictory terrain upon which a multitude of questions and claims of identity – race, gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality – are constructed, challenged and yet sustained.” The black athlete, man and woman, is at the center of so many important questions in our society: “nationalism and internationalism, the operation of mass media in the postwar period, multiple methods of civil rights struggles, and the numerous manufactures of both race and racism in American culture.” Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Serena and Venus Williams are very important people in our culture. What they say or do not say about the membership policies of a southern country club or the employment practices of a sneaker company are intensively reported, mulled over and commented upon. When Muhammad Ali agreed to light the torch at the Olympic Games he was not just making another appearance, he was bestowing a blessing. These men and women are larger than their games, and Bass’ book on Smith and Carlos helps us to understand why.

There is an underlying sympathy in her book for Smith and Carlos but she goes beyond the personal issues toward the vast tectonic forces that rumble beneath our lives.

Harry Edwards, a scholar and activist and former athlete, founded the Olympic Project for Human Rights in 1967. The notion of political action at the Olympics, perhaps a boycott, was in the air. Dick Gregory had suggested in 1960 that black athletes boycott the Olympics and, after that, a Soviet-US track meet. Edwards and his associates had organized around the issues of the treatment of black athletes at San Jose State which led to the cancellation of a football game against Texas, El Paso. They later vigorously pursued a boycott of the New York Athletic Club’s annual track meet because the Club’s membership was all white and they angrily protested International Olympics Committee President Avery Brundage’s support for the inclusion of the apartheid state, South Africa, in the games. Athletes in the black community were caught up in the discussions of an Olympic boycott, but in the end, the boycott did not find enough supporters and off to Mexico City went the US team.

Around this time Edwards left behind the suit and tie of the Ivy League and the middle class to project a more iconographic black image: “When I couldn’t bedazzle them with brilliance, I bamboozled them with bull. But the black cap, the beard, the work boots and jeans, the beads, the ‘shades’ and the black jacket with the occasional book of matches pinned to the front attracted more attention from more varied sources than I would have felt desirable. The mystique just may have worked too well.” Tommie Smith, Edwards’ student at San Jose, had a master media manipulator at hand.

The televising of the '68 games was the handiwork of ABC and its resident genius, Roone Arledge, in charge of a 450-person, 45-camera crew, relayed around the world via satellite. He instituted the sports commentator, astute observers like Jim McKay and Chris Schenkel, to interpret and accentuate the drama on screen. Dozens of major corporations shelled out big bucks for commercials. The modern quadrennial spectacle, for good or ill, was being born.

The summer before the Olympics began, university students in Mexico City engaged in a series of rallies protesting government policies which attracted upwards of 200,000. President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz grew increasingly edgy over the prospect of the Olympics being disrupted, especially since several events were scheduled for college campuses. He deployed the army to guarantee quiet and met any organized expression of dissent with bullets. On Oct. 2 a thousand troops fired on a demonstration of three thousand students of the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) near a housing project called Tlatelelco.

The soldiers used rifles and machine guns and killed anywhere from twenty to two hundred people, “and wounding at least a hundred, including women and children.” Actual numbers remain hazy even to this day. American athletes, sequestered in the Olympic village, learned almost nothing of these events. Edwards said he had met with representatives of the students and supported their cause and linked the cause of the students with the plight of African Americans.

Tommie Smith shattered the world record for the 200 meters with a time of 19.83. His teammate John Carlos finished third. Smith’s wife had bought a pair of black gloves for him to wear if he had to shake hands with Brundage. He shared a glove with Carlos, but Brundage stayed away. Here is what Smith said to Howard Cosell: “The right glove that I wore on my right hand signified the power within black America. The left glove my teammate John Carlos wore on his left hand made an arc with my right hand and his left hand also to signify black unity. The scarf that was worn around my neck signified blackness. John Carlos and me wore socks, black socks, without shoes, to also signify our poverty.” The US Olympic Committee revoked Smith’s and Carlos’ credentials, expelled them from the Olympic Village and forced them to return home. An international media storm enveloped them, and the two were instantly transformed into spokesmen whose views on race in America were eagerly reported. They also became opportunities for commentators on race and sport to sound off. Bass carefully sorts out the different reactions of the press as the pair’s protest moved from news event to legend. Cosell, for example, later said the politicizing of the games by the black glove incident may be regarded as the genesis of the massacre of eleven Israelis at 1972 Munich Games. Bass makes clear that the games have always been political.

It is just that Smith and Carlos to many people made the wrong political statement. Bass closes her excellent book with a meditation on the place of the modern black athlete in America: “When Michael Jordan, under contract to Nike, refused to don his U.S. sweat suit because it was manufactured by Reebok, his solution was easier to come by than a black-gloved fist: he covered the Reebok logo by wrapping himself in an American flag.” The flag and the logo can cover the “un-American” symbols of collective struggle. A figure like Jordan, she writes critically, “the corporate protector and symbol of the politically reactionary 1980s and 1990s” completes the project of Reaganism. “Yet,” she writes, and how much longing for the bold, idealistic, political action of Smith and Carlos is tied up in that authorial “Yet”: “the image of black protest remains because of its political malleability and potency.” The struggle continues.

Tom_Green · June 1, 2003, 3:04pm

http://citypaper.net/articles/2002-10-10/cover7.shtml

…
Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete
By Amy Bass University of Minnesota Press, 424 pp., $27.95

Not long ago, Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb signed the richest contract in NFL history ($115 million over 12 years, with a $20 million signing bonus); Eagles owner Joe Banner summed up, “We’re ecstatic, but broke.” Word that Michael Jordan is playing another season with the Wizards thrilled the NBA and related industries. And Tiger Woods’ declaration that he wouldn’t play Olympic golf in order to pursue as many majors as possible basically put the kibosh on further IOC efforts to bring the sport to the Games.

Money, power and respect. It would seem that black athletes have it all. But, as Amy Bass’ Not the Triumph but the Struggle contends, the story is far more complicated and far from over. Absorbing and cogent, the book traces the “historical production of the black athlete,” using the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) and the Black Power protests at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics as a simultaneously definitive and disruptive moment. “While the Nation of Jordan might overshadow the structural realities of racism in the United States,” Bass writes, “the memory and call of the black-gloved fist linger.”

Beautifully written, as well as appropriately complex and wide-ranging, the book examines the tangled relations among racism, global and national politics, commercialism, civil rights, national identity (looking, for instance, at various interpretations of “The Star Spangled Banner,” by Jose Feliciano, Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye and Jimi Hendrix), labor and play, gender, “science” (as this is recurrently used to “explain” athletic prowess and performance), definitions of “professional” and “amateur,” television, and sports-related industries (fashion, endorsements). To consider the many effects of icons like Jesse Owens, Arthur Ashe, O.J. Simpson, Muhammad Ali, Wilma Rudolph, and of course, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, the two track and field medalists who raised their fists on the victory dais in 1968, Bass draws on the work of academic theorists (C.L.R. James, Robin Kelley, Cornel West), as well as historians and sportswriters.

As much as sports might appear to be a straight-ahead business, where the “best” might be rightly rewarded, Bass deftly reveals the difficulties of maintaining a sense of self, collective consciousness and political urgency – multimillion dollar contracts go a long way toward “erasing” the ongoing effects of prejudice. “Victory can be defined in many ways,” Bass concludes, “including by the struggle itself.”

Cindy Fuchs

Tom_Green · June 1, 2003, 3:09pm

http://www.upress.umn.edu/notthetriumph.html

From Amy Bass’s Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete

EXCERPT

from Chapter 6

“THAT’S MY FLAG”

You do not accrue prestige when you go the Olympics because when you come back you’re still a nigger.
–Harry Edwards, San Jose Mercury News, 1967

My whole life flashed in my face. I had two minutes to see everything. Oh man, I never felt such a rush of pride. Even hearing the Star-Spangled Banner was pride, even though it didn’t totally represent me. But it was the anthem which represented the country I represented, can you see that? They say we demeaned the flag. Hey, no way man. That’s my flag . . . that’s the American flag and I’m an American. But I couldn’t salute it in the accepted manner, because it didn’t represent me fully; only to the extent of asking me to be great on the running track, then obliging me to come home and be just another nigger.
–Tommie Smith, Daily Telegraph, 1993

When the U.S. Olympic track team, seventy-seven members strong, arrived in Mexico, it faced many questions from the international press regarding the political role of the self-proclaimed black athletes on the team. As reporters descended upon the athletes with questions about political militancy, the Americans sang the national anthem in the Plaza de las Banderas in the Olympic Village while Ambassador Fulton Freeman and USOC president Douglas Roby raised the American flag. Although U.S. track coach Payton Jordan assured reporters that there would be “no trouble whatever” and assistant coach Stan Wright insisted “there will be no demonstrations,” the words John Carlos offered indicated otherwise: “We have no intention of disrupting the Games. But that does not mean we will not do something to accentuate the injustices that have been done to the black man in America. . . . If I win a gold medal, I will be up there to get it. I may throw it away afterwards, but nothing is going to keep me from getting it.” Yet Jordan and others shelved Carlos’s statement in light of the harmonious participation in the traditional flag-raising ceremony. “We have a fine rapport on our team . . . ,” stated Jordan; “I’m convinced John was speaking from his heart-but also only for himself.”

It became clear when the athletes began to settle into the Olympic Village that the pursuit of gold was but one focus at these Games. Despite Avery Brundage’s quest for an apolitical arena, the turbulence of 1968 had saturated the arena of sport. While some wondered what kind of conflict might erupt between the Mexican government and Mexican students, the Soviet Union did not let the sleeping dog of South Africa lie. At a press conference in the Olympic Village, the Soviet contingent maintained its opposition to Springbok participation on any international playing field as well as assuring reporters that there would be no Soviet-Czech hostility for the duration of the Games. The political circus even came close to bringing down Brundage himself, for he found his very presidency at risk upon his arrival in Mexico. French IOC member Conte Jean Beaumont, a critical player in the South African controversy, initiated the challenge at the apparent urging of IOC members from the United States, Iran, and Morocco. But despite an increasingly pervasive sentiment that the elite governing body was in need of change, Brundage held off the challenge and buttressed the more conservative facets of the organization, taking the reins of his fifth term.

As host, Mexico made valiant attempts to steer attention toward the grandeur of the Games and away from its own domestic turmoil. Pedro Ramírez Vázquez welcomed the international press corps to the Olympic city at an extravagant dinner affair at the Hacundo de los Morales. The party, commented Baltimore Afro-American reporter Sam Lacy, “must have cost as much as it took to build the place.” Outside such festivities, however, officials struggled to avert the chaos stemming from the massive influx of people, while hopeful sports fans waited in lengthy lines for almost every service. Such lines seemingly solidified U.S. attitudes toward the Olympic setting, building on the observations made while the Mexicans had constructed their Olympic city. “It is not difficult to separate the natives from the foreigners,” one Chicago sportswriter quipped. “The Mexicans, a patient people with a peon heritage, can stand passively in one line for hours.”
Yet regardless of native patience or the number of white doves instructed to fly through the air, the political turbulence of the moment persevered. By the time the smoke had settled at Tlatelolco in the wake of the massacred students and Smith and Carlos had thrust their fists into the air, any stability seemed crushed. One especially bizarre incident that graced the pages of the American press was the attempted murder of a Mexican resident, twenty-one-year-old Ramon Hernandez Vallejo. In a statement made to Mexican police, Vallejo alleged that four Cubans had thrown him from the bell tower of a local cathedral because he refused to kill a U.S. athlete, a plan designed, he explained, “so that Mexico would have problems with the United States.” Of course, anti-American sentiment would be the province not only of the unnamed Cubans. As Americans, Smith and Carlos would also challenge the United States by creating the definitive gesture of these Olympics as well as one of the most reverberant images in the collective memory of both American sport and American race politics.

TAKE THE STAND: A BLACK-FISTED SALUTE TO THE FLAG

Critical, of course, to the power of the statement made by Smith and Carlos was their use of a visual medium. They understood that their victory ceremony would be permanently fixed in the memory of anyone with access to print or televised media. While Mexico City’s viewing audience achieved nowhere near the enormity of audiences of recent Olympics, the broadcast garnered a twenty-seven share and reached a prime-time peak of 14.3 rating points, gluing a huge number of eyes-approximately four hundred million worldwide-upon Smith and Carlos. Harry Edwards had understood the visual component of the athlete’s existence as crucial to the success of the OPHR, noting how sports stars’ “access at a moment’s notice to the mass media” made it imperative that they “take a stand.” Of course, some observers would misconstrue that stand, such as the Los Angeles Times’s description of the eventual action taken by Smith and Carlos as a “Nazi-like salute.” But even the misconceptions enabled a message-any message-to create space for the people it represented in the public eye, and they did so in an unparalleled capacity. As Edwards later pointed out, the action taken by Smith and Carlos was the only route both accessible to Blacks and promising an international protest platform, an escalation long advocated by many of the more militant spokesmen in the Black struggle who saw the oppression of black Americans, not as a domestic civil rights issue, but as a violation of international human rights law and principles. And increasingly in 1968, as the racial situation deteriorated and violent confrontation heightened, people began to see some advantage, however limited, in dramatizing Black America’s plight before the international community.

One of the earliest signs in Mexico that American black athletes refused to relinquish their moment in the international spotlight was an indirect demand that Brundage not present their medals should they win any. Rather than celebrate the possibility of an American IOC president presenting medals to an American athlete, those who made this request demonstrated how definitively Brundage represented all that the OPHR spurned. The matter was first raised in a query to Olympic officials by sprinters Jim Hines and Charlie Greene. “We asked them who was going to present the medals and they replied Brundage,” Hines later told the press. “We didn’t say anything. Neither did we smile. They apparently got the message.” Although Brundage was scheduled to bestow the honors on the 100-meters champion, Hines, the first athlete to run 100 meters in under 10 seconds, received his gold medal, and Greene his bronze, from Lord David Burghley, British Olympic official and president of the International Amateur Athletic Federation, leading many sportswriters to believe that Brundage, who was in Acapulco watching sailing events, stayed away from the dais because of the black athletes’ reluctance to receive accolades from him. While Stan Wright dismissed the incident as immaterial, saying, “I don’t care who gives them the medals, I just want them to win them,” Tommie Smith indicated that it was not immaterial, telling the press that if triumphant he did not want to receive his medal from Brundage. In preparation, his and Lee Evans’s wives purchased black gloves for their husbands to wear if either had to shake Brundage’s hand. Smith, of course, would go on to share his gloves with Carlos.

The medal ceremony was a natural focus of concern. The Olympics are organized around three rites of passage: the Opening Ceremony, the victory ceremonies, and the Closing Ceremony. As John J. MacAloon notes, the Opening Ceremony takes place to separate Olympic events from those of everyday life. In it, specific Olympic symbols-flag, torch, flame-transform the national identity expressed by each team into a universal one. In the victory ceremonies, another symbolic presence is added, the individual athlete, which represents the body itself. Through the body, the victory ceremony reinforces the results of athletic competition. Additionally, the nation and the Olympics also are reinforced through national flags, national anthems, Olympic medals, and the olive branch offered to each gold medalist. Thus, the athlete assumes a dual persona, because he or she stands on the dais as a member of both a nation and what MacAloon designates as “a wider human community.” The Closing Ceremony reiterates this wider community by bringing both participants and spectators back to everyday life by having athletes march into the stadium together rather than as members of a national team.

Smith and Carlos, under heavy media scrutiny because of their OPHR membership, did not wait for a victory ceremony to stake their symbolic claim. In their qualifying heats for the 200-meters, the duo wore tall black socks-what Newsweek described as ghetto “pimp socks”-unusual items for athletes gearing for speed. In addition, Carlos wore a badge imprinted with “Olympic Project for Human Rights,” which had been seen on other African American athletes, including Lee Evans, in the Olympic Village. While Stan Wright discounted the socks and the badge, stating, “If they can run 20.2 wearing badges it’s perfectly all right with me,” Smith, who claimed he did not wear a badge because he did not have one, stressed that their attire was symbolic, although he elaborated no further. Jesse Owens, continuing his role as a talking head, dismissed the socks as impractical and, despite the resolute label of “Uncle Tom” by members of the OPHR, offered advice to the young men from San Jose: they should cut their black socks below their calves so as not to retard circulation while running. Watching Carlos strip down for the semifinal and reveal much shorter black socks than worn in the previous heats, Owens smiled to one sportswriter, “Maybe they’re listening to their uncle.” Yet he retained his stance on the OPHR. “I’m old enough to be their uncle,” he acknowledged, “but I’m not their Tom. We don’t need this kind of stuff. We should just let the boys go out and compete.”

In addition to wearing supposedly militant symbols, Smith also ensured a maximum audience for his final when he tied the Olympic record, 20.3, in his first qualifying heat. Australian Peter Norman, a relative unknown, upped the ante a few heats later by breaking the record with a career best of 20.2, which Smith matched in the third heat, despite a relatively slow start coming out of the blocks. His performance only added to the spotlight on American spikers that day. Al Oerter threw the discus for an unprecedented fourth consecutive gold, and Wyomia Tyus dominated a one-two U.S. finish in the 100-meters, with a world record of 11 seconds flat, making her the first athlete to defend a 100-meters Olympic title in successive Games, as previously discussed. By the time Smith and Carlos took their marks in the 200-meters final, the United States had taken an early lead in the unofficial medal total. Many fans fully (and rightly) expected that the duo would add more gold to the American pile, with one of them likely to come out on top.

The gold medal that Smith won in the 200-meters on October 16, 1968, was a spectacular athletic achievement. Before the start there had been some fear that he would not be able to run because he had pulled an abductor muscle in his groin in the semifinal, clocking 20.1. Nevertheless, once in the starting blocks, Smith gave no sign of discomfort and shattered the world record with an awe-inspiring 19.83. After effecting an exhilarating burst of speed that left the field behind with sixty meters to go, Smith raised both hands over his head in victory several yards before the finish line, a dramatic gesture not aerodynamically suited to a record pace. Carlos, who turned to look at his teammate, was caught by Norman’s own burst of speed and lost the silver in the final charge, although both athletes were given the same time (20.0). It was the fastest 200-meters in the history of the timed track; no one would run it again in under 20 seconds until Carl Lewis in Los Angeles in 1984.

Despite the brilliant nature of the race itself, the symbolic medal ceremony that followed, of course, proved most historic, bearing out how, as Toni Morrison has argued, “spectacle is the best means by which an official story is formed and is a superior mechanism for guaranteeing its longevity.” The spectacle created by Smith and Carlos crowned the mission of the OPHR and, again, solidified a politicized notion of “black athlete” in spite of the continual fragmentation and reinvention the label had undergone. With their gesture, they created a moment of resistance and confrontation with dominant and existing forms of racial identity. They borrowed pervasive and normative conceptions of the nation and substituted new representations by replacing the dominant image of the American flag with a black-gloved fist. In front of a global audience of approximately four hundred million people, the duo used their moment to denounce racism in the United States, creating a cultural strategy effective in its attempt to change or shift the “dispositions of power,” in the words of Stuart Hall. Again, the arena of sport was already highly politicized when Smith and Carlos took their places. Their protest, then, exemplified a collective transformation from “Negro” athlete to “black” athlete, one that mediated various internal identities of political consciousness and enunciated a new cohesiveness to the protest’s expansive audience.

When Smith and Carlos took their positions on the dais as gold and bronze medalists, they wore black stockings but no shoes, a black glove on one hand, and Smith had a black scarf around his neck. The silver medalist, Norman, wore an OPHR badge on his jacket. With their medals hanging around their necks, the athletes turned, as expected, to face the American and Australian flags. As “The Star-Spangled Banner” began, Smith and Carlos bowed their heads and simultaneously raised a black-gloved fist, and the stadium crowd slowly but steadily booed and jeered in reaction. Smith remained perfectly still, while Carlos raised his head slightly. The surrounding Olympic officials never turned to see what drew the catcalls from the stadium. As the two athletes left the stadium, the booing grew again in volume. Both athletes responded immediately by raising their fists again.