1968 - Mark Kurlansky [192]
Harry Edwards, a six-foot-eight, bearded twenty-five-year-old in sunglasses and black beret, was a former college athlete who insisted on referring to the U.S. president as “Lynchin’ Baines Johnson.” From his sports boycott office in San Jose, he was interested not only in the Olympics, but also in boycotts of college and professional programs. In 1968, though, the big target was in Mexico City. A poster on his wall said, “Rather than run and jump for medals, we are standing up for humanity.” His wall also featured the “Negro traitor of the week,” a prominent black athlete who opposed the boycott. Among those so honored were baseball’s Willie Mays, track’s Jesse Owens, and decathlon champion Rafer Johnson. A boycott of the 1960 Olympics had been suggested to Johnson, and Dick Gregory had called for a boycott in 1964. But this year, with the help of Harry Edwards’s office, the idea seemed to be gathering force.
In March, Life magazine published a survey of top black college athletes and was surprised to discover a widely held conviction that it would be worth giving up a chance at an Olympic medal to better conditions for their race. Life also found that black athletes were angry about their treatment at American universities. They would be promised housing but would get no help when confronted with housing discrimination. At San Jose State, white athletes were entertained by the athletic department in fraternities that did not accept black members. In the top 150 college athletic programs, there were only seven black coaches. White coaches bunched the black athletes together in locker rooms or on road trips. Academic advisers were constantly counseling them to take special easy courses so they could pass. And they would find that no one on the faculty or the student body ever talked to them about anything other than sports.
The International Olympic Committee had made the decision to let South Africa back early in the year, after a successful winter Olympics. It did not yet understand what 1968 was going to be like. In the spring, the Mexicans, sensing disaster, asked the committee to reconsider after at least forty teams threatened to boycott the games. The committee reversed itself, once again banning South Africa. This made a number of black American athletes, including Smith and Evans, say that they would reconsider competing in Mexico. The Americans were trying desperately to avoid a black boycott because they were putting together a track and field team that had the potential of being the best in American history and perhaps in the history of the modern sport. At the end of the summer, Edwards told a Black Panther meeting that the Olympic boycott had been called off but that athletes would wear black armbands and decline to participate in medals ceremonies. By September the Mexican government had every reason to hope for an extremely successful Olympics.
The Mexican government did not see itself as a dictatorship, since the president, in spite of his absolute power, had to step down at the end of his term. There would be no Porfiriato, as the three decades of Porfirio Díaz’s rule was known. The government responded to the needs of the people. If workers wanted unions, the PRI would provide them with unions. Mexicans who wanted to change things, improve things, make life better, needed to join the PRI. Only PRI members could be players. Even Emiliano Zapata’s three sons, one of whom inherited his father’s spectacular face, worked for the PRI. In Mexico the PRI still encountered Villa-like people who could be bought off, as well as a few Zapatas, people too stubborn to be co-opted, people who had to be either locked away indefinitely in prisons or killed. When the peasants kept noticing that the revolution was not delivering on its promise of land, they turned to peasant organizations, which were all controlled by the PRI. Sometimes a new organization