Banner” played to acknowledge their accomplishments and to indicate the nation they represented, Smith and Carlos each thrust closed fists in the air to protest racial and class discrimination in the United States. The two athletes did not invent this gesture. It was used by Ron Karenga’s group, US, in the aftermath of the 1965 Watts Rebellion as well as by members of Huey Newton’s Black Panther Party, formed in Oakland, California, in 1966. Surely, Smith and Carlos popularizedit. The gesture was quickly adopted as a symbol of protest against white supremacy and corporate power worldwide. A number of African, black, and Third World athletes in Section 22 of the Olympic stadium immediately flashed closed fists in return to Smith and Carlos. Within weeks, students protesting racial discrimination and in loco parentis at universities in the United States used the gesture to disrupt campus events. Workers on strike at factories in South America also adopted the gesture as a symbol of solidarity. Years later, blacks in West Africa and Algeria found that the fist earned them discounted rides with native cabbies. The Black Power fist, as it became known, continues to stand for power and pride in black communities and defiance of white supremacy.
American sprinters Tommie Smith (center) and John Carlos give the Black Power salute at the Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City, Mexico, on October 16, 1968. American sprinters Tommie Smith (center) and John Carlos give the Black Power salute at the Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City, Mexico, on October 16, 1968.
Although the Smith and Carlos protest lasted less than a minute, it was a year in the making and a product of the larger Black Power Movement. Smith and Carlos were members of the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), a group of Black Power, black student, and athletic activists who campaigned for a black boycott of the Olympics as a means of raising awareness of institutionalized racism, the poverty and structural and cultural racism that continued to denigrate the quality of life in black communities. As late as 1964, despite considerable gains in income since World War II, black workers on average earned approximately only 56 percent of white workers’ earnings, and unemployment among blacks remained almost twice that of the national average. Beginning in the summer of 1964, frustration with unrelenting poverty and acts of police brutality led blacks to riot against ghetto conditions in places like Philadelphia and Harlem and Bedford Stuyvesant in New York City. Over the next five summers, more than 250 civil disorders of varying intensity occurred in cities nationwide.