WHEN Tommie Smith and John Carlos bowed their heads and raised their black-gloved fists during a medals ceremony at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968, they moved the world. It was only six months since Martin Luther King’s murder and the race riots it sparked. The protest was also visibly supported, in a gesture of global solidarity with black Americans, by a white Australian, Peter Norman, who had finished second to Mr Smith. A memory of the humiliations suffered by Jesse Owens, America’s greatest athlete, who had bested Hitler at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 then come home to segregation, lent additional force to the protest. So did the experiences of racism that Mr Smith later described: “On the track you are Tommie Smith, the fastest man in the world, but once you are in the dressing rooms you are nothing more than a dirty Negro.” That contrast, between glory on the playing-field and discrimination off it, has electrified many protests by black American athletes, from Muhammad Ali...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2yKbMVR
Next
« Prev Post
« Prev Post
Previous
Next Post »
Next Post »
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
EmoticonEmoticon