The Memory of a Moment: The Making and Transformation of Tommie Smith and John Carlos's 1968 Olympic Protest

This thesis explores the way Americans have come to remember the raised-fist gesture that Black American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos made at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. For much of 1968, Smith and Carlos were involved in an unsuccessful movement that sought to have Black American athletes boycott the Olympics to protest racial discrimination in the United States. Still wanting to make a statement about racial inequality, Smith and Carlos chose, at the last minute, to bow their heads and raise their gloved fists as the national anthem played at the end of their medal ceremony. The American public paid little attention to their gesture initially, but after International Olympic Committee President Avery Brundage ejected Smith and Carlos from the Olympic Village, the mainstream American press condemned the two sprinters as un-American. Over the ensuing decades, as the Olympics became more political and as the civil rights movement became an idealized part of the past, Smith and Carlos were transformed into civil rights exemplars. This thesis analyzes the factors that led to Smith and Carlos’s initial condemnation and the distinct phases through which Smith and Carlos evolved from villains to heroes between 1968 and the early 2000s.