Good That Came Out of That Salute is Being Lost

The telephone rang. Another corpse had been found in an Oakland park and Harry Edwards was angry. The driving force behind America's 1960s black power movement in sport put the receiver down and spat out his words: "What's happening now means the end of the great era of achievement for black sportsmen in this country."

This 60-year-old, physically imposing giant of a man was warming to a theme. "1968 was important, but the real story is now. A whole generation is being wasted, and in many cases incarcerated or dead. We talk about war in the Middle East but the real battle is here in our cities, and nothing is being done about it. Nobody is ready to take it on."

Edwards knows quite a bit about battles. He was an admirer of the 1960s Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X and he became a key figure in the American black power movement, one of whose most notable moments was the salute on the podium in the Mexico City Olympics in 1968.

Edwards is now a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and is taking a sabbatical. He is in charge of the parks department in Oakland, a city half an hour's drive across the water from San Francisco. Some sabbatical. Last year 113 people were murdered in Oakland, largely in drugs-related turf wars, and many of the bodies were found on Edwards' park territory.

He thrusts forward an article which he wrote for the Civil Rights Journal. "This tells you the real problem facing America," he says. Read it and the words sound a depressing drumbeat of the hopelessness Edwards believes is enveloping black America. He produces statistics to prove recruitment among black athletes in basketball, American football and baseball is declining, and he says it is a reflection of "spiralling deterioration in institutional viability in many black families - a deterioration encompassing the functionality of the family, education, the economy, the political infrastructure, and even the black church".

In this environment, Edwards says young blacks lose hope of gaining employment, and he writes: "Playgrounds, sand lots, parks and backyard recreational sites in many instances have been taken over by drug dealers, or they have become the battleground in gang disputes." Put simply, they have become too dangerous to use.

"In the face of such discouraging circumstances, many black youths have opted to go with the flow, exchanging team colours for gang colours or simply dropping out of everything to chill."

With drugs-related gun crime in Britain on the increase, the danger that could face inner cities on this side of the Atlantic is evident and Edwards' warning for America will be heard only too clearly in areas of London, Manchester, Birmingham and other cities where traditional outdoor recreation is threatened by mounting street violence.

Edwards remains a passionate and charismatic advocate of racial equality and the part he believes sport can play in achieving that aim. He wears a heavy gold ring, presented to him by the San Francisco 49ers for work he undertook to alleviate their problems of racial integration. When he speaks, people tend to listen.

Black involvement in sport, he says, cannot be allowed to wane. Investment in school sports programmes and in secure supervised play areas is vital if gangs and gun culture are to be resisted. One of his suggestions is that young people should be allowed 24-hour access to basketball, volleyball, tennis, bowling, badminton or swimming.

Gloved fists

It is a persuasive view, and he adds: "We cannot afford to wait passively for better times. We must understand the forces threatening black sports participation."

Edwards was instrumental in the moment that did most to change the black sporting experience. It is hard to imagine that there can have been many sporting photographs that have become so indelibly printed in the history of the 20th century as that capturing the moment when two young athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, raised their gloved fists to the sky on the 200-metres victory podium at the 1968 Games, or that any single sporting moment can have had a more profound effect.

The black power salute was beamed around the world. Its immediate effect was to provoke the United States Olympic Committee to expel Smith and Carlos from the team. Smith and his family were the target of numerous death threats, amid an avalanche of criticism.

Smith, whose grandfather had been a slave and whose father had spent his life as a farmhand, was anything but a violent man. Religion played an important part in his upbringing and, as a student of San Jose State University, he had been inspired by the teachings of a young lecturer and disciple of Malcolm X: Harry Edwards.

Almost 35 years on, speaking in his office at Santa Monica College where he is the head coach, Smith still looks every inch an athlete. His tall, lean frame is betrayed only by his grey-flecked hair, and he smiles with pride as he looks at the print which hangs on the wall along with many others recalling a brief but brilliant running career.

"You know, I was in Italy a few years ago with Muhammad Ali and he said: 'What you did, nobody could have done it any better. You know, you're a great man, you're the greatest.' That meant so much, knowing that I did something important to a man like Ali."

Edwards spent much of 1968 agitating for a boycott of the Olympics by black members of the American team. Although the group decision was to vote against a boycott, Smith was determined to make his protest and recalls: "My wife brought the black gloves from the United States to Mexico. Just before we went out to the victory ceremony, I told John Carlos [who had finished third] what I was going to do. He looked at me and said, 'I want the other glove.' And I remember saying: 'This is it. God bless us all.'

"People had been killed in America that year. Martin Luther King had been assassinated and students had been shot by the police in Mexico during demonstrations. I knew what I was going to do, but what would happen then? Man, I was scared.

"Once the anthem started, I knew it was being played for Tommie Smith, the No1. I shut my eyes and raised my fist. It felt like there was a breeze blowing round it. It was a very eerie but dignified feeling. I was crying and praying, saying the Lord's Prayer. I knew I must be right.

"I did not go up there to demean anything, only to ask for help. My problem then, I thought, was how to get my carcass off that stand and off the track still breathing. And when I got out, I thought, man, it's all over. I didn't know how true that was because I never ran another competitive race."

Smith was effectively hounded out of the sport, and eventually found a teaching job after trying and failing as an American football player and a basketball coach. His fame may have been assured but he says he "neared rock bottom" in the ensuing years, even having to attend his classes by night because he feared for his safety.

Mixed reaction

Many admired the stance he had taken for his colour and his beliefs, but others were less forgiving, including his black team-mate Jim Hines, who broke the world record in winning the 100m, dipping inside the 10-second mark for the first time.

Hines, educated at the University of Texas, was from a wealthier background than Smith and still resents the actions of his two team-mates, claiming it cost him endorsements which would have earned as much as $1.5m. He said: "There were 44 blacks on the US team. If they [Smith and Carlos] had sat down and discussed what they wanted to do we would have overruled them, but they decided to break rank.

"There were hundreds of thousands of black men who had put in applications for jobs in America, but when this was done those applications were torn up and destroyed. When we got back to America they weren't talking about all the gold medals and the world records, they just talked about Smith and Carlos.

"What we did on the track would have sent a strong enough message to all the world and to all races about what blacks could achieve in America. What they did was wrong."

John Smith, coach to the current Olympic 100m champion Maurice Greene, was a brilliant 400m runner who made the US team for the Munich Olympics of 1972, and he says Tommie Smith (no relation) and Carlos brought a change of attitude and an awareness of racism in sport.

"In the 60s we could run, dance and sing but we couldn't eat in major hotels. We still have problems on buses. If I took my seat in the front, they looked at you like 'Nigger, get in the back'.

"Tommie went to school and got an education. He had watched his father cow to somebody who was white and basically he worked in the fields until he died without anything. When Tommie got on that stand, it was his emancipation from slavery.

"What is more important, to have money in the bank or be remembered as somebody who changed things? Jim Hines never changed anything. He is a good man, but he's wrong. By the time I got in the team there was a black coach. Today I look at Tommie and John and say: 'They helped all of us'."

Edwards, the lecturer who befriended and taught Tommie Smith, stayed away from the 1968 Olympics after being tipped off that he might be murdered along with other black members of the American team if he travelled to Mexico. Instead he watched in Canada, where he had gone into hiding with friends.

"My reaction when I saw Tommie and John on television leaving Mexico was 'my God, they got out alive'," says Edwards. "What they did was crucial. It showed that we were no longer satisfied to turn the other cheek, to act like we didn't feel the racist humiliation when the coach told a nigger joke. The demonstration meant, from that point on, that the revolt of the black athlete was cemented into the culture of US society.

"Every black athlete who has an endorsement and has an opportunity to move into the broadcast booth or coaching, and everyone with a chance to start a business or put his name to a clothing line . . . on one given day, they should get down on their knees and thank Tommie Smith and John Carlos."

Before I leave Edwards' office, by the side of a picturesque lake in downtown Oakland, he pulls out a newspaper article. An 80-year-old jazz trombonist, Taswell Baird Jr, had just died three weeks after a mugging which left him with a broken pelvis. He had been knocked off his motorised wheelchair and savagely beaten by an 18-year-old black man. Baird had played with Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong and was a friend of Edwards. The big man had tears in his eyes as he said: "Can you believe it? They could do this to an old man going shopping. It has got to stop. This is the war America should be fighting."

Race, presented by John Rawling: Monday, Radio 4, 8pm