personal opinion on mexico olympics blacks
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The black power salute by American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos on a Mexico City medal stand at the 1968 Summer Olympics is one of the most iconic images in the history of sports activism. Even though the majority of Americans alive today weren’t born yet, it’s a part of our collective consciousness. We remember it, even if we didn’t experience it.
But with many people comparing the media coverage and public perception of Colin Kaepernick to the precedent set by Smith and Carlos, it’s important to ask how things really went down that night 50 years ago and how it was covered by the American media at the time.
The answers are different from what one might believe.
First of all, it didn’t take place in the summer at all, but on Oct. 16. The Mexico City Games had begun four days earlier, an autumn concession to the Mexican heat and the American viewing public, which was preoccupied with the World Series until Oct. 10, when the Detroit Tigers beat the St. Louis Cardinals in Game 7.
The 200-meter final easily could have taken place without either of the famous protagonists. In the semifinals, ABC television cameras captured Carlos, who won his heat, stepping on the line separating his lane from the next, an automatic disqualification that the judges simply missed. Smith, meanwhile, strained a groin muscle during his semifinal, yet still went on to win gold in a world-record time of 19.83 seconds (besting his own mark of 20.0 set two years earlier).
It wasn’t until the day after the 200-meter final, during an ABC Evening News broadcast hosted by first-year anchor Frank Reynolds, that many American television viewers saw the protest by Smith and Carlos. Reynolds, a World War II veteran and Purple Heart recipient, covered the story in an empathetic fashion, giving no airtime to critics of the gesture, a significant difference from coverage of today’s NFL protests.
In the immediate aftermath, Americans weren’t confronted with the image of Smith and Carlos wherever they turned. The photo didn’t appear at all in the succeeding issues of Sports Illustrated, let alone on the cover, and Newsweek buried it on Page 78. Many newspapers carried the photo, but often as a small sidebar next to images of the victorious Smith crossing the 200-meter finish line in record-breaking time. At the time, many considered Smith’s athletic feat the bigger story. Now we struggle to remember whether it was Smith or Carlos who won the gold medal, and mistakenly believe the other won silver, not bronze.