Books: The John Carlos Story

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 Richard Mellor*
Afscme Local 444, retired

GED/HEO

 

“They violated one of the basic principles of the Olympic Games: That politics play no part whatsoever in them.” Avery Brundage

I was just 21 in 1968. That summer I took off again like the previous year and this time got as far Istanbul. By the time the 1968 Olympics took off, I was back in the UK.

I remember seeing that famous picture of John Carlos and Tommy Smith all over the media, on TV and in the papers. I had spent my early years in Nigeria so I didn’t have a fear of people with black or dark skin. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t influenced by the world around me and the world around me was mid 20^th century England.

 

Most of the Africans I knew or interacted with in London where I lived were middle class or the children of families with money back home. The black working class I came across in my everyday life were from the Caribbean, mostly Jamaicans, some from Barbados, St Lucia and other Islands, more working-class Africans, especially from Nigeria came later. I had no experience with black Americans to speak of.

When I saw that photo, I remember feeling uneasy about it at first and that was certainly how the mass media in the UK, and the US wanted millions of workers to feel. Black Power, I was supposed to believe, was anti-white, was a symbol of hatred for people with white skin. While whiteness was not the issue it is today and certainly not anything like in the US------ after all the Irish were white and they were the brunt of all sorts or racist jokes-----I felt so sorry for the lone white guy on the podium. How must he feel, I thought, being all alone like that.

But he wasn’t all alone and I never knew that until some 40 years later in 2006 when I read an article about the death of Peter Norman, an, Australian athlete described as the “other man on the podium”.  It had a picture of these two black guys carrying his coffin. It was Tommy Smith and John Carlos.

I just finished The John Carlos Story, his account of those events. A friend gave it to me some 6 years ago and I just got to it.  

John Carlos writes about his life growing up in Harlem in a working-class family and how diverse and exciting it was, hustling down at the Savoy ballroom and being thrown a silver dollar for the performance by Fred Astaire. His mother was Jamaican who was a nurse at Bellevue and his father a sharecropper from North Carolina, an army veteran who was a carpenter by trade but ended up a cobbler with a small shop.

Carlos’ Parents brought them up to respect the law, work hard and be a good human being. He had a stable two parent family life compared to many of his peers which, he claims, was the root of this stability. Like all youngsters in the community he had a hustle and one of them was robbing freight trains that were parked at a local rail yard. He had seen the movie Robin Hood and it had stayed with him that Hood robbed from the rich to give to the poor and the needy. So for a while him and his buddies distributed all sorts of social necessaries, food, clothing, that they took from freight trains to the people in the community.

 

The appeal of the Robin Hood theme stuck with him and whenever he was in a position where he wasn’t quite sure what to do he would ask himself, “What would Robin Hood do”.

When it came to breaking the law he was acutely aware that all across the south people were breaking the law they called Jim Crow. “God put food on the planet everywhere before man stepped in….God made this earth so no child would ever have to go to sleep with a rumble in their tummy or not have clothes. That was the law I was to follow and die for.

He knew Malcom X and they became friends, Malcolm X “challenged the legitimacy and seriousness of the two dominant political parties to take the realities of racism seriously” he writes.

So he grew up in the 1960’s the Civil Rights movement, the French General strike, the Black Panthers, the colonial revolutions that were driving European colonialism from Africa and the Middle East. Like all of us, he consciousness was formed by the objective conditions in which he found himself and a solid family structure.

He was very athletic and strong even as a youth and wanted to pursue sport. He was fascinated by the Olympics and wanted to be a swimmer. But his father made it clear to him that, despite being good at it, it wasn’t an option. To make it to the Olympics as a swimmer you’d have to have access to a pool. It was not simply a matter of money his father said, you have to belong to a private club where you can train and black folks can’t get in to private clubs as there was a color bar.

 

Carlos explains in detail the rotten business of college football and how athletes are exploited as they are today.

 

As for the Olympics, the idea that this event is not, or sports are not political, as the racist and xenophobe Avery Brundage claimed at the time is sheer hypocrisy. The Olympics is all about politics. In fact, nothing in life is not political.

 

By 1968, there was already a plan to get black athletes to boycott the games as a protest to the treatment of black people in the US.

 

Carlos writes of attending a meeting to organize the boycott at the Americano Hotel and knowing very little about who might be at it. Entering the hall, he sees Ralph Abernathy and Andrew Young. But the entrance of Martin Luther King was what convinced him he was on the right track. Can the reader imagine what it was like for a young man, from any background, but particularly a black American man, attending a meeting that Martin Luther King was in?

 

The Olympic Project For Human Rights. (OPHR) had been planning to boycott the games for some time and one of its major demands was for the committee to bar Apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia from the games. But many events undermined the plans of the OPHR including the assassination of King. Then there was the pressure from other black athletes who had worked so hard to get there and didn’t want to jeopardize their Olympic chances of a medal with political statements. The hard core were faced with the reality that they couldn’t pull it off.

 

By the time they got Mexico City, Carlos explains that they had no idea what he was going to do but he was going to do something. By the time him and Tommy Smith agreed to do what they did that day, and this Australian “white boy” Peter Norman came second and won the silver medal, they asked him if he would mind wearing the emblem of the OPHR on the stand and he was all in. 

Smith and Carlos Carry Peter Norman's Coffin

 

The two black Americans were demonized and attacked viciously for their stand. Brent Musburger descried them as “A pair of black skinned stormtroopers.” And the Los Angeles Times accused them of displaying, “a Nazi Like Salute”.

The Australian, Peter Norman’s life was destroyed. He was forbidden to compete at the Munich Olympics in 1972, suffered from alcoholism and died a broken man. Tommy Smith and John Carlos faced isolation and even death threats. Reading about this event over a half century since it happened, not only was I unaware of Peter Norman’s involvement, but Carols mentions that the Harvard Swim Team also supported them.  The mass media is very quick to promote examples of racism and social division but, even with the racist history of the US, there have been great moments of class unity across racial and ethnic lines. That is not something the ruling class wants to popularize.

If you have a son or daughter interested in athletics, The John Carlos Story is a must read for them. It is an inspiring story of courage and dedication not only on the sports field but also in the struggle for justice and human decency

* I just want to urge young people to read The John Carlos Story.