mmmightymightypeople:

talldarkbishoujo:

wretchedoftheearth:

I’ve never seen a GIF of this.

I was just reading about this during a wiki binge on Olympics incidents and did a little research on it. I never knew how deep the message was that Smith and Carlos were trying to send. Just about everything they wore and how they wore it had symbolism attached to it. (unzipped tracksuits for solidarity with blue collar workers, necklace of beads for lynching victims, etc) Calling it a “black power salute” is really reductive and it’s a shame (and predictable) that if it’s taught at all, that’s what it’s boiled down to.

Another thing I didn’t know: the Australian guy who came in second wore a patch for solidarity with them, he was protesting racist Australian immigration policies. When he passed away, Smith and Carlos were pallbearers at his funeral.

There was just a thing on NPR about a documentary that the australian guy’s son (i think) did and just being released about this—it was super interesting, but also incredibly sad, all three of these guys (the two americans far more than the australian, but still) suffered a huge economic backlash and major consequences for this action—and the only thing I could think when I heard the story was how sad i was that it happened back then and not now, cuz i would’ve fund raised like a mother fucker for them.

Ahh, thank you JR for reblogging this. I had no idea. Here is the NPR link. This is from the transcript:

MARTIN: Do you have any sympathy for the notion that you should just let your athleticism speak for itself in the same way that Jesse Owens did, which is his winning those gold medals was a rebuke to the notions of white superiority that Hitler was promulgating? Any sympathy for that?

CARLOS: Well, when (unintelligible) you should let your athleticism speak for itself, when Jesse Owens came home from the Olympics, he had to run against horses. I guess he was letting his athleticism speak for itself.

MARTIN: And you’re saying he had to run against horses because he couldn’t get a job?

CARLOS: Absolutely. Larry James. When he came home from the games, he had to run against horses. That’s insane to think that we had to prove to society in order for us to get a meal for our kids that we would run against a four-legged animal just to put on a show or a spectacle in that sort. No. That was not the idea that John Carlos had to represent himself, his race, to his kids and his grandkids.

(via worsement)