At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, U.S. Olympic athlete Tommie Smith mounted the top of the victory stand after winning track and field’s 200-meter race in world-record time. At the medal awards ceremony, as the U.S. national anthem played, Smith and John Carlos, who finished third, raised their black-gloved fists and bowed their heads to protest the oppression of Black people in America. Australian Peter Norman, who finished second, wore an Olympic Project for Human Rights1 badge in support of Smith and Carlos.
Smith tells his life story and how he got to that podium to protest racial injustice in the U.S. in his new graphic memoir, Victory. Stand! Raising My Fist for Justice (Norton Young Readers/W.W. Norton). This is a beautifully written and graphically illustrated book,2 in which Smith speaks to growing up in the cotton fields of Texas in a sharecropping family and moving to the California Central Valley, and his athletic pursuits that got him to that victory stand. He credits racing his sister, Sally, as what developed him as an athlete.
Most importantly, he chronicles the racism he faced growing up as a Black youth and as an adult. He speaks about how his experiences, the experiences of other Black people, the civil rights movement, and learning from those who mentored him shaped him politically. He gets into how the Olympic protest was planned and the death threats he received before and after the Olympics. He never backs down from what he did and says, “I’d do it again.”
He writes:
Those fists in the air were dedicated to everyone at home, back in the projects of Chicago, Oakland, and Detroit,
to everyone in the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn,
to all the brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers in Birmingham, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, St Louis, New Orleans,
to everyone struggling, working their fingers to the bone on farms in America,
to everyone holding out hope that things will get better…
…that was for you, from John and me.
We had to be seen because we were not being heard.
Smith dedicates the book “To my young readers around the globe. Keep your faith, and with all your might—continue to fight on for justice.”
