MLK’s murder fueled Olympic boycott talk

Ed Temple was fully aware of what was going on around him. The young women he coached at Tennessee State University knew what time it was as well. This wasn’t the time to go dancing in the streets. The acts of rebellion spilled out over the United States like a dark cloud of sawdust by the time 1968 rolled around.

Revolt and defiance were heavy in the air. Black athletes were just as attached to the movement for the call of social justice as civil rights leaders.    

As black Americans, these individuals wanted to do their part to help bring about change as the next man. The fact that they were cheered while in athletic competition didn’t shade them from the full-frontal bigotry they endured and being treated with less respect than a cup of spit. Racism was just as embedded in this country’s falsehood of democracy as a slice of apple pie.

It certainly was not a walk in the park.  

That was highlighted in a call to arms as discussions of a full-fledged boycott by black athletes heated up as the 1968 Summer Olympics approached. This wasn’t something new to Temple. He had seen this drama play out before.

Mal Whitfield, a three-time gold medalist and a former Tuskegee Airman with certified combat duty, called for black athletes to boycott and ditch the 1964 Tokyo Olympics altogether. Whitfield felt America needed to live up to its standard of treating all its citizens equally.

The country, he reasoned, fell way short of that goal when it came to Negro Americans as he wrote in a commentary to Ebony magazine.

“I advocate that every Negro athlete eligible to participate in the Olympic Games in Japan next October boycott the games if Negro Americans by that time have not been guaranteed full and equal rights as first-class citizens,” Whitfield said in the March 1964 edition of Ebony.

“I make this proposal for two reasons: First, it is time for American Negro athletes to join in the civil rights fight – a fight that is far from won, despite certain progress made during the past year. For the most part, Negro athletes have been conspicuous by their absence from the numerous civil rights battles around the country. Second, it is time for America to live up to its promises of Liberty, Equality and Justice for all, or be shown up to the worlds as a nation where the color of one’s skin takes precedence over the quality of one’s mind and character,” Whitfield added.

Dr. Harry Edwards and the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) picked up the mantle that Whitfield left behind. Edwards and OPHR, with card-carrying members Tommie Smith and Lee Evans, meant business about gutting the appearance of American black athletes at the Mexico City, Mexico Olympics. They had a pretty good impetus for this to come to fruition.

To OPHR, athletics was just another arm of injustice used against black Americans. Starting with Muhammad Ali fighting to get back his heavyweight championship belt, OPHR wanted to see change. Ali saw his heavyweight title stripped because of his refusal to go into the United States military draft.

OPHR also wanted the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to rid itself of president Avery Brundage, the same man who brokered the deal that gave Adolf Hitler the 1936 Berlin Olympics. 

With these and other demands going on deaf ears, Edwards and OPHR ramped up their efforts to arouse the consciousness of the black athlete. It seemed to work. Dozens of colleges and universities were left to deal with the upheaval of black athletes requesting better treatment.

Protest had been years in the making, so by the time 1968 rolled around, the black athlete was sick and tired of being sick and tired about the perceived abuse they faced.   

In Smith, OPHR had the perfect national shot-caller. Smith was on top of the food chain in track and field, having collected 10 world records before he even set foot in Mexico City. His penned letter “Why Negroes Should Boycott the Olympics,” placed Smith alongside Whitfield in the bodacious Negro department.

The one major difference was that Whitfield had already put behind his Olympic glory days. Smith was aiming to get his moment to shine, should it come to pass. He wasn’t too concerned about that. Smith was more alarmed at the way black Americans were treated.          

As far as Evans, the introspective quarter-miler sort of blended in the background but had the same mindset as his “Speed City” brethren that something had to change…and change soon.              

John Carlos decided to hop aboard the mutiny train after attending an OPHR meeting in which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights stalwarts made an appearance. According to Carlos, King wanted a full-fledged strategy behind the idea. The talk of a black athlete boycott was getting serious.            

“Dr. King made it clear from the beginning that he wasn’t just there to lend moral support,” Carlos said in his book, “The John Carlos Story. “He wanted to help us out hammer a plan and he made it clear that he a public support of the Olympic boycott.”

Temple didn’t want his runners to get too caught up in the outside noise that could possibly distract them from what he wanted them to achieve. That outside noise, however, was too loud for anyone to put their heads in the sand and pretend racial tensions had not become the epicenter of the nation’s pulse.

The state of Tennessee was in the middle of all this noise when King took a gunman’s bullet on the side of the neck in the spring of 1968. The assassination of the civil rights icon in Memphis set off rioting in hundreds of cities. Temple and his group of athletes could not escape the reality of being black in America.     

“I was devastated and sad like everybody else,” Temple said. “It happened in Memphis, Tennessee, so it happened not too far away from us. We felt like everybody else.”

This article is an excerpt from a forthcoming book written by Dennis J. Freeman about the Olympics and the legendary Tennessee State Tigerbelles