It is a look behind the very famous photo of the black power protest of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, gold and bronze medalists in 1968 in the men’s 200-meters. The book focuses on the organization that Smith and Carlos were part of – the Olympic Project for Human Rights – which proposed a boycott by African Americans of the Olympics if its list of civil rights demands was not met. It eventually called the boycott off, asking its members to protest at the Games instead.  Smith and Carlos did just that, and used this moment -- their moment -- in front of the world to speak out against racial oppression. That moment became the central symbol of the Mexico City Olympics, and one of the best representations of just how complex 1968 was, and let me explore multiple historical themes, including civil rights movements, the rise of newly independent African nations, ideas of minority identity, sweeping student unrest, and the relationship between politics and mass media.
 

Why did you pick that topic for
your dissertation and the subsequent book?

I didn’t start out focusing solely on the Olympic Project for Human Rights, but after my stint in Atlanta in 1996, which ended with me at the Closing Ceremony, roaming  the infield of Olympic Stadium wearing an all-access badge, searching for athletes that the cameras needed to focus on, it quickly changed. Now that I had shaken hands with Michael Johnson and Jackie Joyner Kersee, I only wanted to write about the Olympics. Mexico City became the focal point of my work, and Smith and Carlos my main characters.

ABC television bought the rights to the Olympics and made Mexico City the first large-scale broadcast of a summer Games. So all of these things – black power, apartheid, protesting students, etc. – were televised. Indeed, a lot of the tumultuous politics of 1968 in general were televised: the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the Democratic Convention in Chicago. So the Black Power protest of Smith and Carlos fits well within the trajectory of this pivotal year.

How has your own experiences working
at the Olympic Games been important to your work?

My Olympic experience has been really unique. I worked in Atlanta, Sydney, and Salt Lake for NBC, supervising the research operation behind the scenes. In return, I got incredible access to both the Games in general and, specifically, to the media operations that portray them. The observations that I made during these times had a tremendous impact on me: I think that it is hard for anyone who has never been to an Olympics to understand their magnitude. They are, bottom line, an awesome spectacle – the pageantry, the personal stories, the wealth of competition, the many walks of life represented. There are lots of reasons to be critical of the Olympics – doping, corporatism, Western dominance, media saturation, elitism, and, of course, the scandals of the International Olympic Committee.  But sitting in an Olympic Stadium watching a Closing Ceremony, in which athletes dance together, trade parts of their uniforms, and exchange Olympic pins, one is struck by just how remarkable it all is. Where else do people from some 200 countries gather, and not just the rich or the famous, but some very real, very “everyday” kinds of folk? Because for every Prince Albert in a bobsled, there is an Eric Moussambani of Equatorial Guinea in a swimming pool.

The clenched black gloved fist was certainly not a new sight in 1968 – why did Smith and Carlos’ action cause such furor?

Members of the Olympic Project for Human Rights were largely viewed as ingrates by both the general public and by the sporting establishment. They were considered to be the ones who had ‘made it’ – they were a part of the Show. By threatening to boycott the Games unless full citizenship was granted to black America, they were voluntarily removing themselves from an arena that was considered, albeit spuriously so, to be integrated, using their medal-winning potential, which was terribly important to Cold War America, as a means of power for others who didn’t have that kind of voice.

You go as far as to say that Smith and Carlos
were blamed for politicizing the Games. How so?

The Olympics had, and still does to some degree, a perception of itself that was apolitical – that despite requiring an athlete to compete under the auspices of a national flag, the competition was not between nations but rather between individuals. Officially, for example, the IOC does not keep a national medal tally – it’s a media constructed count that began during the Cold War, when the U.S. and the USSR used the number of gold medals won as evidence as to which employed a better political system, democracy versus communism.  And we still see vestiges of that “East versus West” medal race today, especially in the wake of the scandal that surrounded the pairs figure skating competition in Salt Lake City.

Smith and Carlos’s action was seen as introducing national politics into this so-called apolitical arena, with little regard to the transnational struggle they were fighting (ie: human rights). When the massacre of Israeli athletes at Munich occurred four years later at the hands of the Black September Movement, Smith and Carlos were directly invoked, indeed blamed, by quarters of the media who concluded that if the black power protest hadn’t happened, no one would have seen the Olympics as a viable showground for terrorism. Of course, this kind of historical amnesia lets a figure like Hitler, who certainly politicized the Berlin Games, off the hook, but even more dangerously avoids examining just how impossible it is to separate the pageantry of an event like the Olympics from politics.

Do you consider the Olympic Project for Human Rights successful?

As the title of the book indicates, victory can be defined in many ways. I think that a common misconception that many people have regarding civil rights movements in general is success. Did the OPHR succeed in boycotting the Mexico City Games? No, obviously not. An important part of understanding collective action is defining the collective itself. Racial identity cannot create an unconditionally unified whole – that is something that every politically defined movement must deal with. Getting all self-identified black athletes to boycott the Games was a near impossibility, as an Olympic gold medal can have such a tremendous bearing on an amateur athlete’s future. The OPHR found that out, and unless all those involved boycotted, it would not be an effective action. So after a year of intense media spotlight, the boycott was called off.

That said, did the OPHR have an impact? Absolutely. It demonstrated an alternative arena for civil rights actions, one that combined a more traditionally defined mode of action, the boycott, with a more radically defined ideology, Black Power. The threat of the boycott nurtured the spotlight that eventually gave the gesture of Smith and Carlos so much meaning, and brought the varied demands of the OPHR – the restoration of Muhammad Ali’s title, the banning of South Africa from international competition, the addition of black members to the International Olympic Committee – further attention. Of course, in terms of where their images are today, that becomes debatable. Without question, the image of successful athletes like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods makes a lot of Americans feel better about our race record, but somehow within the corporatism that Jordan and Woods encompass, new models of civil rights movements need to emerge.

You seem always to refer to civil rights movements,
rather than the Civil Rights Movement. 
Is that an important distinction?

Making it plural acknowledges the nuance and variety created by those who directly engaged in struggles for equity. Common goals did not necessarily mean common approaches, with the most familiar example being the split between King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the cry for Black Power that came from organizations such as the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panthers. Utilizing sports as a civil rights arena was the idea of many, but it most forcefully came to fruition through the OPHR, who capitalized on the economic, cultural, social, and political importance that sports has at both the national and international level.

Do you think that the Olympic Games
are important and worthy of our attention?

I think the success of Salt Lake, for example, speaks volumes about the ability of much of the world to conduct itself peacefully for a length of time. While there is, certainly, much to criticize in the stories Salt Lake told via its Opening and Closing ceremonies, there is something to be said for what kind of a global experience one gains from participating – whether as an athlete or a spectator – in the Olympics. Sport serves as a stage with the potential for tremendous symbolic power, one literally – physically – focused on human possibility, and the Olympic Games achieve a global nature unparalleled. They are flawed, certainly, plagued by accusations of corporate scandals, doping, elitism, aristocracy, an overly-Western influence, and a seemingly ever-lasting rivalry between Communist (and even former Communist) athletes and the rest of the world.  

But the International Olympic Committee also makes some interesting decisions in terms of its role as a world power: it censured Afghanistan when the Taliban took power; threw South Africa out during its apartheid era; and has allowed delegations from Puerto Rico, East Timor, and Palestine autonomy not found elsewhere. It also, perhaps most importantly, lets much of the world see what it looks like for some 200 nations, wearing something representative of their identity, to get together in a manner that is not, well, boring. Indeed, attending an Olympic Closing Ceremony is a profound experience, one that can convince most anyone that the Olympic movement must continue through its flaws, and one that you just can’t totally get unless you go.

As a women’s college, Title IX is very important to us.
How did Title IX demonstrate its importance at the Olympics?

 At the Atlanta Olympics, an unprecedented 3,700 women competed. While women had always done well in individual sports for the United States, as there were few other elite outlets for their talent, Atlanta marked a successful collective effort for American women, bringing home team gold in basketball, softball, soccer, and gymnastics. Without question, American women were the face of the Atlanta Olympics, and they were the women who were the first generation to grow up under Title IX – the first who knew it was okay for girls to play hard.

Dr. Bass, are you a sports fan?

In terms of being a fan, yes and no. I love tennis, and I’m both cursed and blessed to be a Red Sox devotee. But I’m not an ESPN-watching/sports page-reading junkie. I’m more interested in how sport is a central arena in which questions of racial identity are hashed out. The black athlete is one of the most visible representations of race in modern society: seen on television and in print, cheered by millions in the stands and in their living rooms, gracing cereal boxes and magazine covers, teamed with white counterparts and – at least superficially – accepted.  So an examination of the black athlete, one which looks at the black athlete as a character invented or created by our own societal and cultural perceptions, serves as an amazing place to discuss ideas of national identity, the operations of mass media, multiple methods of civil rights struggles, and numerous manifestations of both race and racism in American culture.

What will your fall course in sports focus on, Dr. Bass?

It is an upper-division seminar, meaning it’s a lot of reading, research, and writing. The course argues that athletes are an excellent window through which to study ideas of racial and national identity, because athletes are among the most integrated and diverse racial subjects in the world – seen in all facets of media, cheered by millions of  fans. Students will be using Athens as a vehicle for discussion, doing reading on subjects such as Althea Gibson, Ali, and Jackie Robinson; the 1936, 1960 and 1968 Olympics (for obvious reasons); and developing research projects of their own to share with the class. It builds on other courses that I offer in cultural history, such as U.S Youth Culture, which I taught last semester, which used the idea of youth and popular culture to understand major themes in American history.