Months after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, two sprinters wearing Team USA navy blue singlets rounded the far turn of Mexico City’s Olympic track and burst onto the home stretch on Oct. 16, 1968.Tommie Smith won the 200-meter race and his teammate John Carlos finished third. Smith finished in 19.83 seconds, a world record and the first legal sub-20-second 200-meter performance in history. However, the race isn’t remembered for the impressive time or the two American medals, it’s remembered for the medal ceremony.
Smith and Carlosstood on the podium wearing black socks to raise awareness for Black poverty, and Carlos wore beads around his neck to protest lynching. When the national anthem began to play the duo bowed their heads in prayer and raised their black-gloved fists high to bring awareness to the suffering of Black Americans and oppressed people worldwide.
The backlash for the American athletes was swift and harsh. They were suspended by the U.S. Olympic team and sent home, received death threats and were criticized by the media. Brent Musberger, a prominent American sports commentator, then a columnist for the Chicago American newspaper, compared Smith and Carlos to Nazis.“Smith and Carlos looked like a couple of black-skinned stormtroopers,” Musberger said.
The photo of Smith and Carlos with their fists raised in protest is one of the indelible images of the 1960s, but the history of athletes’ protesting social injustices did not begin — or end — in Mexico City.In 1961, the Boston Celtics traveled to Kentucky for an exhibition game. The team’s Black players, including Hall of Famer Bill Russell, were refused service at a restaurant and responded by boycotting the game. Russell, Jim Brown, Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabaar) and several other well-known Black athletes met in Cleveland in 1967 to support Muhammad Ali, the heavyweight boxer who refused induction into the U.S. Army as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. After beingbanned from boxing and convicted of a felony charge for draft evasion, Ali became an outspoken civil rights advocate, often giving speeches at colleges and universities.
Many athletes' historic protests and social justice efforts are less well known.In 1970, nine Black football players at Syracuse Universitysat out the season to protest inequality in the program. In 1976, theYale women’s crew team went into their athletic director’s office, removed their shirts, and read a statement to protest poor conditions and Title IX violations. NBA player Craig Hodges gave President George H. W. Busha letter imploring the president to take action to combat racism and poverty when the Bulls visited the White House after winning the championship in 1992. When Ethiopian marathon runner Feyisa Lilesa crossed the finish line of the 2016 Rio Olympic marathon in second place,he crossed his wrists above his head, a symbol of defiance against the Ethiopian government’s treatment of the Oromo ethnic group. With fear for his safety, Lilesa went into exile fortwo years after the Olympics.
San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernickbegan kneeling during the national anthem in 2016 to bring attention to systemic racism and police brutality in the United States. Kaepernick’s protest quickly gained the attention of the national media, and other players in the NFL, like Kaepernick’s teammate Eric Reid, began taking a knee. Just four years after leading the 49ers to Super Bowl XLVII, Kaepernick went unsigned after the 2016 season.
Kaepernick has not played in the NFL since 2016, but a handful of NFL players continued to kneel, and the issue of NFL anthem protests became a hot button political issue, thanks in large part to the words of President Donald Trump. While campaigning in 2016,Trump said NFL protesters had a lack of respect for the United States and should leave the country. In September 2017, a month after a white supremacist and neo-Nazi “unite the right” rally incited violence in Charlottesville, Virgina, Trumpreferred to NFL players who kneeled as 'sons of b------' and said that NFL owners should fire them.
In the past, athletes typically protested individually or in small groups. However, after the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd this year, players protesting social injustices have reached an unprecedented level, and athletes across the United States’ major sports leagues are more united than they’ve ever been.
After thevideo of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds was released, protests erupted in cities across the United States. Many professional athletes, including NBA players Jaylen Brown and Malcolm Brogdon,were at the front lines of these protests, marching through the streets and speaking to crowds with megaphones.
Jacob Blake was shot in the back seven times by a Kenosha, Wis. police officer as he tried to get into his car on Aug. 23. A horrifying video of the shooting captured by a neighbor went viral on social media. In response to the shooting, the top-seeded Milwaukee Bucksdecided not to play their playoff game on Aug. 26 in protest. Other teams and leagues followed suit and games in the NBA, WNBA, MLB and MLS were cancelled or postponed. As teams returned to their respective courts and playing fields, countless players have continued to demonstrate by kneeling during the national anthem, wearing the names of victims of police brutality on their uniforms and using their press conferences solely to speak about social issues.
In the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, athletes have turned their protests into actions, specifically related to getting out the vote. NBA players agreed to continue playing during the playoffs on the condition that owners would agree to work with local government officials to turn their arenas into safe polling locations for the Nov. 3 election.Chris Paul, president of the NBA players association, reported that90% of the league’s players had registered to vote in the upcoming election. Viewers tuning into NFL games each Sunday are peppered withadvertisements encouraging people to vote, featuring star players like Deshaun Watson and Cameron Jordan. LeBron James, who was told by Laura Ingraham in 2018 to “shut up and dribble” after criticizing President Trump, founded the voting rights group More Than a Vote with the goal of protecting voting rights for Black Americans. President Barack Obama recently went on James' HBO show “The Shop” to talk voting.
“You’ve got Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, folks like Bill Russell in the NBA, Arthur Asche in tennis. Then for a while I think there was a suspension of activism,”President Obama told James. “To see this new generation without fear in speaking their mind and their conscience, I think you guys are setting the tone for a lot of young people ... and it made me real proud.”
