“RUN, JUMP, OR SHUFFLE ARE ALL THE SAME WHEN YOU DO IT FOR THE MAN!”: The OPHR, Black Power, and the Boycott of the 1968 NYAC Meet

Abstract

The article examines black activists' use of sports and protest in the 1960s to elaborate on the meaning of black advancement in the period, especially Black Power. Mainstream opponents labeled scholar-activist Harry Edwards a "black militant" for initiating the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), a black boycott campaign of the 1968 Olympics. As part of a plan to counter that repression and attract supporters and provide the OPHR a media platform, Edwards launched a boycott of the New York Athletic Club (NYAC) track meet in February 1968. While opponents and scholars concluded that Edwards's threats of violence were the primary reason the NYAC boycott succeeded, the article demonstrates that it succeeded because of the Black Power agenda of raising awareness of the need to combat "institutionalized racism." Consequently, the NYAC garnered the OPHR significant credibility and more allies and allowed Edwards to continue campaigning for an Olympic boycott. Worried opponents, however, continued to label Edwards and blacks' use of protests in sports militant. Consequently, because of the media and other opponents’ dominance, the meaning of the protest against the NYAC, blacks use of protest in sports, and Black Power continue to be demonized and distorted.

Keywords:

• Black Power network
• Harry Edwards
• institutionalized racism
• mainstream media
• New York City
• 1968
• Olympics
• sports

Notes

1 “How Sports Helped Break the Color Line,” Ebony, September 1963: 114–15; also see, “Negro Athletes and Civil Rights,” Sepia, June 1964: 31, 33.

2 Rhonda Sanders, “African-American Journalists Name the Most Important News Events of the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 24 (1999): 16–18.

3 “5 More African Nations Join Boycott of Olympics,” New York Times (NYT), February 18, 1968: 173.

4 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago, 2016); Robin D. G. Kelley, “Integration: What’s Left,” The Nation (December 3, 1998): par 1; http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45/305.html (accessed November 5, 2009).

5 For the development of the myth, see Dexter L. Blackman, “‘The Negro Athlete and Victory’: Athletics and Athletes as Advancement Strategies in Black America, 1890s-1930s,” Sport History Review 47, no. 1 (May 2016): 46–68; the myth and strategy were most thoroughly articulated by Edwin B. Henderson, “The Negro Athlete and Racial Prejudice,” Opportunity, 14 (March 1935): 77–79; also see Oswald Garrison Villard, “Issues and Men,” The Nation, August 15, 1936: 185; for definitions of 19th-century manliness, see Martin Anthony Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900–1930 (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 2004); and Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

6 There is no satisfactory work on black athletes and the State’s use of them in its Cold War consensus. However, Damion L. Thomas's Globetrotting: African American Athletes and Cold War Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012) examines the State Department’s use of black athletes in goodwill tours abroad in the 1950s and 1960s; for the State’s Cold War narrative concerning the declining significance of race, see Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 10–14.

7 Only a few works have explicitly explored athletics and athletes as a black advancement strategy. They include Patrick B. Miller, “Muscular Assimilationism: Sport and the Paradoxes of Racial Reform,” Race and Sport: The Struggle for Equality On and Off the Field, edited by Charles K. Ross (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 155–57; David K. Wiggins, Glory Bound: Black Athletes in White America (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997), 200–21; Patrick B. Miller, “To ‘Bring the Race along Rapidly’: Sport, Student Culture, and Educational Mission at Historically Black Colleges during the Interwar Years,” History of Education Quarterly 35, no. 2 (1995): 111–16; for a counter argument, see Blackman, “The Negro Athlete and Victory,” 46–68.

8 Sundiata K. Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” Journal of African American History 92, no. 2 (2007): 271–73; Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture During the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 1996); Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 9–14.

9 Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from MLK to Naomi Thomas,” The King Center Archives, Atlanta, GA, January 8, 1968, http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/letter-mlk-naomi-thomas (accessed April 13, 2013).

10 Wiggins, Glory Bound; Douglas Hartmann, Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

11 Cha-Jua and Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire,” 271–73; Peniel E. Joseph, “Introduction,” in The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era, edited by Peniel E. Joseph (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1–16; Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945–2006 (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 52–54; Jeanne Theoharris and Komozi Woodard, “Introduction,” in Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America, edited by Jeanne Theoharris and Komozi Woodard (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 1–16; Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002), 60–63.

12 For a definition of institutionalized racism, see Stokely Carmichael, “Toward Black Liberation,” in Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writers, edited by Leroi Jones and Larry Neal (New York: Morrow, 1968), 123–25; “The Man Who Coined the Term ‘Institutional Racism,’” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 23 (1999): 39.

13 Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, 4–9; Charles E. Jones and Judson L. Jeffries, “The 50th Anniversary of the Black Panther Party: A Scholarly Commemoration,” Spectrum: A Journal of Black Men, 5, no. 1 (2016): 2; Donna Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 2010); Hasan K. Jefferies, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Michael K. Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign (New York: Norton, 2007), 24–27; Rhonda Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles Against Urban Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Komozi Woodard, A Nation Within A Nation: Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) & Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 1999).

14 Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael {Kwame Ture} (New York: Scribner, 2003), 527–28; Martin Luther King, Jr., “Black Power Defined,” in I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World, edited by James M. Washington (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1996), 162; L. H. Stanton, “The Black Power Conference,” Liberator, August 1967, 8; “Black Racism,” NYT, July 22, 1967, 1; Chuck Stone, “The National Conference on Black Power,” in The Black Power Revolt: A Collection of Essays, edited by Floyd B. Barbour (New York: Collier, 1969), 194.

15 Robert L. Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1992), 23–28; Harry Edwards, Sociology of Sport (Homewood, IL: Dorsey, 1973), 143–52; Carmichael, “Towards Black Liberation,” 125–29.

16 “Hobbling the Winged Foot,” Newsweek, February 19, 1968: 85; “NY March to Back Track Boycott Protest At SC Massacre,” Daily Worker, February 16, 1968: 8.

17 NYT, December 23, 1967; “Molser Decides to Quit NYAC,” February 15, 1968: 53; Leslie Matthews, “The Sports Whirl,” New York Amsterdam News (NYAN), January 6, 1968: 26.

18 NYT, January 9, 1968: 48; Robert Lipsyte, “Sports of the Times,” NYT, February 10, 1968: 41; John Morin, “N. Y. March to Back Track Boycott Protest at S.C. Massacre,” Daily Worker, February 18, 1968: 8; “Hobbling the Winged Foot,” 85.

19 “Olympic Boycott Called Courageous,” Chicago Defender (C.D.), December 16, 1967: 12; “Games' A La NYAC,” NYAN, December 23, 1967: 36; Frank Litsky, “Russians Out of NYAC Track,” NYT, February 16, 1968: 41.

20 Carmichael, “Towards Black Liberation,” 125–29; Lawrence P. Neal, “Black Power in the International Context,” in The Black Power Revolt, edited by Lawrence P. Neal (New York: Sargent, 1969), 140.

21 Jack Olsen, The Black Athlete, A Shameful Story: The Myth of Integration (New York: TimeLife, 1969), 7–10; Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (New York: Verso, 2002), 27–38.

22 Harry Edwards, Revolt of the Black Athlete (New York: Free Press, 1969), 65.

23 Ibid., 65–66.

24 Dick Edwards, “NYAC Meet Dead' Says Harry Edwards,” NYAN, February 10, 1968: 31; “Black Students,” NYAN, March 2, 1968: 14.

25 Edwards, Revolt, 65–66; Harry Edwards, The Struggle that Must Be (New York: Macmillan, 1980), 183–84; “Arrogant NYAC,” NYAN, January 10, 1968: 16; Dick Edwards, “‘NYAC Meet Dead,’” 31.

26 The Black Power Manifesto and Resolutions, New Jersey Historical Society, MG 882, Box 8, Folder 14.

27 “Should Negroes Boycott the Olympics?” Ebony, 23, no. 5 (March 1968): 116.

28 “To the Olympics or Not? The People Have their Say,” NYAN, December 2, 1967: 1; “Olympic Mishap,” NYAN, December 16, 1967: 16.

29 Dick Edwards, “ProNYAC- And Black,” NYAN, January 13, 1968: 33; “The Arrogant NYAC,” NYAN, February 10, 1968: 16.

30 “SC's McCullouch Boycotts NYAC Meet,” Los Angeles Sentinel (LAS), February 15, 1968, B1; “The NYAC Games,” NYAN, February 3, 1968: 29; Jackie Robinson, “Some Resolutions for the New Year,” C.D., January 13, 1968: 10; “Ralph Boston Breaks Boycott Unity,” Muhammad Speaks (M.S.), January 26, 1968: 26.

31 Jackie Robinson, I Never Had It Made (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1995), 76–80; “Inquiring Photographer,” C. D., December 2, 1967: 15; Jackie Robinson, “Mixed Emotions Over the Boycott,” December 16, 1967: 12; Howie Evans, “Sort of Sporty,” NYAN, February 10, 1968: 33.

32 “Athletic Clubs Discriminate: Poll,” C.D., May 6, 1968: 7; Howie Evans, “Sort of Sporty” NYAN, February 10, 1968: 33; “Commission to Investigate Charge of Bias at NYAC,” NYT, January 13, 1968: 22; William J. Miller, “Two School Groups Withdraw From NYAC Meet Feb 16,” NYT, January 28, 1968: S1; “Pentagon Says Service Athletes Must Make Own Decisions on Track Boycott,” NYT, February 4, 1968: S7.

33 Pete Axthelm, “Boycott Now-Boycott Later,” Sports Illustrated, February 26, 1968: 25; Gerald Eskenazi, “Boycott of New York A. C. Games Threatened by Negro Athletes,” NYT, January 9, 1968: 48; “USC Track Ace To Shun NYAC Meet,” C.D., February 15, 1968: 33.

34 Miller, “Two School Groups Withdraw”; “Pentagon Says Service Athletes Must Make Own Decisions on Track Boycott,” NYT, February 4, 1968: S7; “400 Are Entered in NYAC Track Meet Friday,” NYT, February 13, 1968: 59; “Hobbling the Winged Foot,” 85; “Negroes, NY Preps Boycott NYAC Meet,” Track and Field News (TFN), February I, 1968: 11; Dick Edwards, “NYAC Boycott Gains; Many Schools Quit,” NYAN, February 3, 1968: 31; “USC Track Ace To Shun NYAC Meet,” C.D., February 15, 1967: 33.

35 Dick Edwards, “NY Urban League Head NYAC Member,” NYAN, February 3, 1968: 1; Evans, “Sort of Sporty,” February 10, 1968: 1, 33; Evans, “Sort of Sporty,” February 17, 1968: 1, 16; “Mosler Decides to Quits the NYAC,” NYT, February 15, 1968: 53.

36 “Black Students,” NYAN, March 2, 1968: 14; Carmichael, “Towards Black Liberation,” 125–29.

37 Evans, “Sort of Sporty,” NYAN, February 10, 1968: 33; Neil Amdur, “AAU Here Bars Bid to Stop Meet,” NYT, February 14, 1968: 35; “Three New Groups Blast N.Y. Athletic Club Bias,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 17, 1968: 15.

38 Edwards, Struggle, 166–71; Edwards, Revolt, 67; William Van DeBurg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 12–13; Bobby Seale, “Free Huey,” in Rhetoric of Black Revolution, edited by Arthur L. Smith (Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1969), 177–78; Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994), 8.

39 Gerald Fraser, “Negro Pickets Ready,” NYT, February 16, 1968: 41; William Gildea, “Negroes in NYAC Meet Warned They Face ‘Serious Consequences,’” Washington Post (W.P.), February 16, 1968, D1; “Picket Lines Set to Stop Athletes,” BAA, February 17, 1968: 22.

40 Jane Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon (New York: Norton, 2007), 2–12, 68–79; James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 504–505.

41 Edwards, Revolt, 67; “Statement for Immediate Release,” American Committee on Africa Papers, February 1968, Reel 7, Frame 103/55, Schomburg Center for Research for Black Culture, New York, NY; “SPORTS FILM TRANSFER: NY-19980624-0059,” NBC News Clip, 5: 33–11: 30 minute, http://www.nbcuniversalarchives.com/nbcuni/clip/51A06381_s01.do (accessed August 17, 2016).

42 “Picket Lines Set to Stop Athletes,” BAA, February 17, 1968: 22; Edwards, Revolt, 67; Ronald Lawson with Mark Naison, eds., The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904–1984 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 175–79; Joel Schwartz, “The New York Rent Strikes of 1963–1964,” Social Service Review, 57, no. 4 (December 1983): 545–53; “The Black Boycott,” Time, February 23, 1968: 6; “Rent Strike in Harlem,” Ebony, 19, no. 4 (April 1964): 112–20.

43 Arnold Hano, “The Black Rebel Who ‘Whitelists’ The Olympics,” NYT, May 12, 1968: SM32.

44 John Morin, “NYAC Boycott Victory Boosts Olympic Protest,” Worker, February 20, 1968: 4.

45 Axthelm, “Boycott Now,” 24–26; Homer Bigart, “Police Repel Rights Pickets,” NYT, February 17, 1968: 19; “Success or Failure,” NYAN, February 24, 1968: 31; “Troubled World of Track,” TFN, February 2, 1968: 3.

46 “Ethiopia, Algeria Out of Olympics,” NYT, February 17, 1968: 19; Robert L. Allen, “Track Meet Stirs Protest,” Guardian, February 24, 1968: 4; Les Matthews, “Success or Failure,” NYAN, February 24, 1968: 31.

47 Axthelm, “Boycott Now,” 24–26; Alex Harte, “700 Picket Fake Bout—Ali Still Champ,” Militant, March 11, 1968: 1; “Ali Supported,” Guardian, March 9, 1968: 4.

48 Axthelm, “Boycott Now,” 24; Les Matthews, “Success or Failure,” NYAN, February 24, 1968: 31; William Gildea, “Two Wrongs Don't Make Negro Rights,” W.P., February 16, 1968, C4; February 18, 1968: C4; “5 More African Nations Join Boycott of Olympics,” NYT, February 18, 1968: 173; “Lennox Miller Doesn't Like Idea of ‘Boycott,’” Los Angeles Times, February 18, 1968: C11.

49 Lipsyte, “Sports of the Times,” 41.

50 Sam Lacy, “Wholesale Boycott of NYAC Shaping,” BAA, January 13, 1968: 1; Dick Edwards, “Plan Injunction To Stop NYAC Meet,” NYAN, January 20, 1968: 28.

51 Brad Pye, Jr., “SC's McCullouch Boycotts NYAC Meet,” LAS, February 15, 1968: B1; “Ralph Boston Breaks Boycott Unity,” M.S., January 26, 1968: 26; “I Intend To Play,' White tells Core,” C.D., June 1, 1968: 15; Robinson, “Some Resolutions,” 10.

52 Axthelm, “Boycott Now,” 24; Gildea, “Two Wrongs,” C4; Allen, “Track Meet Stirs Protest,” 4; “Ethiopia, Algeria Out of the Olympics,” NYT, February 17, 1968: 19.

53 Van DeBurg, New Day in Babylon, 12–25.

54 “The Black Boycott,” 61; “Hobbling the Winged Foot,” 85; “5 More African Nations Join Boycott of Olympics,” NYT, February 18, 1968: 173; “Boycott Runners,” Newsweek, February 26, 1968: 82–83.

55 “N.Y.A.C. CANCELS 1969 TRACK MEET; Move Linked With Boycott Trouble Last February,” NYT, November 13, 1968, 51.

56 “The NYAC Boycott,” C.D., February 20, 1968: 13; “Olympic Boycott,” February 26, 1968: 13; Robert W. Cottrol, “Inside and Outside of the Garden at the NYAC Meet,” NYAN, February 24, 1968: 1, 16, 31; John Morin, “Black Athletes vs. White Barriers,” The Worker, February 18, 1968: S3; Elizabeth Barnes, “Afro-American Boycott of NYAC: Sports Revolt Gains Momentum,” The Militant, February 26, 1968: 8; “Why Black Athletes Should Fight for Black Humanity,” M.S., March 29, 1968: 7–8; Skip Bossett, “Behind the Movement, Part II: The Black Athlete Becomes a Giant,” M.S., April 5, 1968: 11–26.

57 Harry Edwards, “Why Negroes Should Boycott Whitey’s Olympics,” Saturday Evening Post, March 9, 1968: 6; Tommie Smith, “Why Negroes Should Boycott,” Sport, March 1968: 40–41, 68; Hano, “The Black Rebel Who ‘Whitelists’ The Olympics,” NYT (Magazine), May 12, 1968: 44–48.

58 Tommie Smith with David Steele, Silent Gesture: The Autobiography of Tommie Smith (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2008), 156.

59 Vincent Matthews with Neil Amdur, My Race Be Won (New York: Charterhouse, 1974), 165.

60 Edwards, Struggle, 171–73; “Blackballed,” Sports Illustrated, March 18, 1968: 14; Cathy Aldridge, “Private Clubs and Who Belongs,” NYAN, December 21, 1968: 1; “May Boycott Ohio, NY Athletic Clubs,” M.S., March 29, 1968: 7; “Athletic Clubs Discriminate: Poll,” C. D., May 6, 1968: 7.

61 Edwards, Struggle, 183–204.

Additional information

About the Author

Dexter L. Blackman is an assistant professor of History and African American Studies at Morgan State University. His work has previously been published in the Journal of African American History and the Sport History Review. He is the author of the forthcoming manuscript We Are Standing Up for Humanity: Black Power, The Myth of the Black Athlete, and the Olympic Project for Human Rights.