Damarius Johnson
Good afternoon, we’re continuing a series of interviews with Picturing Black History. I have with me Dr. Blackman. Specific to your essay, if you can talk a bit about how you chose the photograph, why you decided to tell that story in particular.

Dexter Blackman
That photograph obviously is iconic. Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their fists at the 1968 games, that photo probably entered my conscious when I was a kid, I was born in the 1970s. And I always wanted to know what those brothers meant. And so, in reading popular literature, you know, it just was a stand-in for Black Power, it was this, you know, stand-in for protests. But, I didn’t know what Black Power meant, you know, I didn’t know exactly what they were protesting. So, that picture kind of motivated me to try to study what exactly were these two guys trying to get across. And what I quickly learned, or what I learned was that they were part of a movement of student athletes and Black students who were trying to raise awareness and attract attention to something. So that photo in itself, just it being iconic attracted my attention. Then my curiosity, and I’ve always had this kind of curiosity about social issues, led me to just research that topic, and I’ve been passionate about it ever since. And, ultimately, like I said, what they would do is try to raise awareness of what they call institutionalized racism – the demeaning poverty that remained in Black communities, even after civil rights laws were passed. When that picture was taken in 1968, that was after the fifth straight year of rioting in Black communities and urban communities in the cities. Some of the most significant riots happened in 1967. And then again, when King was assassinated in April 1968, they protest several months later. And so, what they subscribed to was this argument that the riots meant that Black people and poor people in cities, in particular, were dissatisfied with their conditions, and that the government and the state were not doing enough to rectify those conditions. And so they, instead of rioting, what they did was use an international moment, in particular, a Cold War moment that was benefiting the United States to just attract attention to that concern.

Damarius Johnson
I wanted to know if you could talk a bit about how athletes, in particular Olympic athletes, become representations, typically of their nation, you know, kind of, avatars of a nation. If you could talk about, in this photograph, do you see that these athletes are kind of turning that on its, that notion on his head in the sense that they’re drawing visibility to another cause with, you know, typically, you see kind of it as a proof of American patriotism?

Dexter Blackman
Absolutely. So you have to think of, well, you have to know a kind of history of the Olympics, they were regenerated in the 1890s. And the 1890s, we can call that the age of imperialism. And part of what’s going on is not just that European nations are subjugating other nations, it’s that they’re also competing against one another, right, for the right to subjugate other nations. So for instance, France, England, Germany, Portugal, Spain, they all had empires across the globe, including Africa, and at times, they went to war with one another to control the territories. So you have this competition about imperialism. Because imperialism means money, it means who’s going to control resources in certain places, who’s going to control labor in certain places, who’s going to control markets in certain places. So you have this heavy competition during the Age of imperialism. And that influences the start of the Olympics in the 1890s. The person, Pierre de Corbin, who basically he started, who led the charge for the restart of the Olympics in the 1890s, one of the reasons that he did it was he felt that the French needed to jolt what he called their masculinity, or their manliness, their manhood, right, and one of the ways that they could do that was train year round and compete against other Europeans. This idea of patriotism and international sport, they’re tied together, they always have been since the 1800s. And so very quickly, even though individuals come through their state, and they’re supposed to be individuals when they get to the games, you notice that they wear the colors of their country. So very quickly, they become representations of their countries. The same is true with boxing. By the time you get to the 1870s, the 1880s, boxers are representations of their country’s manliness or their quote, unquote, “manhood”. And so, that’s even heightened when you get to the 1940s with the Cold War, when Russia enters international sport in the early 1950s and the 1952 games, it takes on even more significance for the United States and the West. And there’s an argument to be made, that whoever wins the most medals or the most points in the Olympics, even though it’s an unofficial team score, it’s considered the society with the better system that produces, you know, a better stock of people. This certainly influences what John Carlos and Tommie Smith are doing. There’s a lot of evidence, and I’m working on it in my manuscript, that the federal government COINTELPRO, the FBI, all tried to stop Tommie Smith and John Carlos from even getting to the Olympics. They were part of a larger group called the Olympic Project for Human Rights, and they were trying to orchestrate a boycott that fell through. But even when the boycott was finished, there was an understanding that some Black athletes might use the Olympics as a world stage to protest, and so there was some hinderance to try to prevent that from happening as well. The argument was that if the Black athletes boycotted, then the United States team would perform poorly, the Russians would outscore them, and that would lower the morale of American society. That sounds crazy. But when you understand these ideas of manhood and manliness, and how much they’re attached to patriotism, it absolutely made sense in the 1950s and the 1960s when black athletes first began to protest.