A Courageous Stand

The thought of surrendering his chance for an Olympic gold medal was repellent to Smith. "At first I didn't want to get involved," he says. "Why should I risk all I had? On the other hand, if I didn't use the influence I'd gained from being a world-class athlete, I wouldn't be doing my part in society."

"Come to the meeting," said Evans.

"I looked in the mirror," says Smith, facing it again in memory. "I took off my shades and looked harder. 'Tommie,' I said, 'what are you going to do?'

"The mirror said what mirrors say: 'Do you know what is right?' "

Smith knew. But he also knew that no social improvement has ever arrived without disproportionate sacrifice by a few human beings. He knew that sacrifice can get out of hand. He knew that if he joined this movement, he would move into the unknown.

Where does courage begin? Martin Luther King Jr. felt it flowing from the young, from the innocently fearless children who marched out singing to face Birmingham police commissioner Bull Connor's fire hoses, police dogs and jails.

Smith, this innate improver, was unencumbered by a true sense of how desperately human beings can hold on to their ingrained, exploitive ways. "I am a kid," he says. Innocence tipped the balance.

"Come to the meeting," said Evans.

"Reluctantly," says Smith, "I went."

The gathering of 50 or 60 athletes issued a list of demands to the U.S. Olympic Committee, asking that South Africa be barred from the Games (it already had been, but it was pushing for reinstatement), that International Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage resign because of his allegedly anti-Negro views, that a second black coach be added to the 1968 U.S. Olympic staff (joining assistant track coach Stan Wright), that Muhammad Ali be reinstated as heavyweight boxing champion (an issue with which the USOC had nothing to do) and that the New York Athletic Club cease its whites-only policy. If all this weren't done, the petition warned, black athletes would boycott the Mexico City Olympics.