Silent Gesture: The Autobiography of Tommie Smith (Sporting) PDF
Preview Silent Gesture: The Autobiography of Tommie Smith (Sporting)
SILENT GESTURE 2 S I L E N T G ESTU R E The Autobiography of Tommie Smith 2 Tommie Smith with David Steele Temple University Press PHILADELPHIA Temple University Press 1601 North Broad Street Philadelphia, PA 19122 www.temple.edu/tempress Copyright © 2007 by Temple University All rights reserved Published 2007 Printed in the United States of America In the series, Sporting,edited by Amy Bass Text design by P. M. Gordon Associates, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smith, Tommie, 1944– Silent Gesture:the autobiography of Tommie Smith/Tommie Smith with David Steele. p. cm. ISBN-13: 978-1-59213-639-1 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-59213-639-7 (alk. paper) 1.Smith, Tommie, 1944– 2.Track and field athletes—United States—Biography. 3.African American athletes—Biography. 4.Olympic Games (19th:1968 :Mexico City, Mexico) 5.Olympics—Participation, African American. 6.Sports—Social aspects. I.Steele, David. II.Title. GV697.S65A3 2007 796.42092—dc22 [B] 2006051455 Frontispiece:Silhouette of Tommie Smith, adapted from a photograph of Rigo23’s sculpture at San Jose State University. 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 Contents 1 Welcome Home 1 2 October 16, 1968 20 3 Out of the Fields 42 4 The Biggest City I Had Ever Seen 73 5 Run Before You Walk 95 6 The Coach and the Professor 114 7 Linked Forever 135 8 No Gold, No Glove 148 9 Paying the Price 172 10 Going Underground 194 11 Families Lost, and Found 211 12 It Will Outlive Me 233 Silent and Eternal 255 EPILOGUE Acknowledgments 259 Index 261 Photographs follow page 134 SILENT GESTURE 2 1 2 Welcome Home IHAD TRULY BELIEVEDthat I would be six feet under before some- thing like this took place. But I had lived long enough to see it, and to be part of it. My alma mater was welcoming me back. It was embracing me as one of its own, as a part of its history and of its legacy and of its contribution to American society. And it was going to immortalize me with a statue right on the campus grounds I once walked. Thirty-five years earlier, I had thought I would never see the city of San Jose, the campus of San Jose State College, my home on the west edge of campus, or my wife and son ever again. On the night of October 16, 1968, I had stood on a platform on the infield of the Olympic Stadium in Mexico City, with a gold medal around my neck, black socks on my feet, and a glove on the right fist I had thrust in the air. My head was bowed, and inside that bowed head, I prayed— prayed that the next sound I would hear, in the middle of the Star- Spangled Banner, would not be a gunshot, and prayed that the next thing I felt would not be the darkness of sudden death. I knew there were people, a lot of people, who wanted to kill me for what I was doing. It would take only one of them to put a bullet through me, from somewhere in the crowd of some 100,000, to end my life because I had dared to make my presence—as a black man, as a rep- resentative of oppressed people all over America, as a spokesman for the ambitious goals of the Olympic Project for Human Rights— known to the world. That was my victory stand. Not only because I had won the gold medal in the 200-meter final a half hour earlier, in world-record time. This was my platform, the one I had earned by years of training my body and my mind for the ultimate achievement. The athletic achievement paved a road toward my quest for a social victory, where 1
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