Sidelined (9 page)

This, it would appear, was a veiled reference to Edwards and the OCHR, and certainly the reaction to the role they played goes some way toward qualifying the success of the NYAC boycott. In a theme that will be explored in greater depth below, it was the persona and tactics of the OCHR leadership that often alienated those who broadly shared their ideals. There was dislike for the influence of Black Power rhetoric and posturing alongside the strategy of a boycott that was more readily associated with the Civil Rights Movement. Even among those who aligned themselves with the movement there was unease about the leadership of Harry Edwards. Speaking of the time of the NYAC boycott, Vince Matthews describes a broad agreement with the views of the OCHR leadership but a lack of any meaningful contact with such views or in-depth understanding of the leadership's exact aims.
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Dave Morgan, the leader of African American athletes' protest at the University of Texas at El Paso, made it very clear that he was not simply following Edwards's lead and that he had not been, nor would he be, swayed by the OCHR leader.
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Sympathetic white athletes were angered by the pressure put on their black teammates and the abrasive nature of the message of the OCHR and the movement surrounding it. John MacAloon saw his black teammates from the Catholic University of Washington, D.C., shaking after finishing their relay at the NYAC event; such was their fear of reprisals after competing. MacAloon argued that he and other white athletes were sympathetic to the human rights message but were dismayed by the pressure on black athletes to join the boycott and the generally uncompromising nature of the OCHR agenda.
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Sportswriter Paul Zimmerman argued that the middle ground was becoming lost as the issues became polarized. White University of Tennessee athlete Richmond Flowers Jr. believed in racial progress and had been abused at track meets in the South because of his beliefs, but he competed at the NYAC meet because he did not agree with the political stance and methods of men like Edwards and H. Rap
Brown. Three white athletes from the University of Oregon expressed a willingness to help their black teammates' quest for human rights if they were approached in a “rational” way instead of with the scare tactics used by what they termed “black power guys.”
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Therefore, while the boycott of the NYAC event was a publicity success for the OCHR and increased speculation about a possible Olympic boycott, the way in which it was achieved raised questions for the long-term sustainability of this form of civil rights protest through sport. Although the name of their umbrella organization carried the term “human rights,” Edwards and his supporters were infusing racial protest through sport with an aggressive and uncompromising expression of black consciousness. The largely liberal ideology of the sporting world was uncomfortable with such radicalism. Sport was very clearly an institution of the American cultural mainstream, a mainstream that was increasingly under pressure as the 1960s progressed.

Edwards argued that the meet was a complete failure, that attendance was down by 50 percent and those who did attend were witness to mediocre performances. The
Chicago Defender
reported that the “boycott of the New York Athletic Club's Centennial Track meet at the new Madison Square Garden was an effective and right way of showing resentment against segregation.”
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The
New York Times
reported that the crowd may have been one thousand to two thousand fewer than the officially announced attendance that
Newsweek
termed a “near-capacity” crowd of 15,972 and that there were few good performances. This was not as unqualified an endorsement of the success of the boycott as that offered by Edwards, but it was confirmation of the significance of the OCHR efforts.
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Edwards did praise the white athletes who supported the boycott by refusing to participate, but he qualified this with an assertion that they were only following the lead of black teammates and that many white schools took part mainly because of opposition to leaders like H. Rap Brown and himself.
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In many ways the NYAC boycott was the high-water mark for the OCHR. Since it had successfully used the boycott of a national sporting event to draw attention to racial discrimination, then why not a boycott of the Olympics themselves? Yet at this point there were key difficulties in extending the appeal of the movement. Even among those who supported the broad principles of the organization there was discomfort about the methods being utilized. On the “contested terrain” of race relations in sport there was a continuous realignment and repositioning in response
to the pressure applied by the OCHR. Athletes and administrators, black and white, sought a position on the wider racial conflict and specifically the impact of this conflict in the sporting arena. Zimmerman argued that the middle ground was being drowned as extremes polarized the issues. Although this ground was not irreparably damaged, it was becoming increasingly difficult to inhabit as the practical realities of using sport as an arena for racial protest affected athletes and administrators.

Polarization arose partly because the leader of the OCHR and the proposed boycott of the Olympics was indisputedly Harry Edwards. His actions and rhetoric were heavily loaded with Black Power ideals and symbolism. For many athletes, their understanding of Edwards informed their perceptions of the movement he led. Edwards was and remains something of an enigma. One journalist described him as “moderate and militant, separatist and integrationist.” President Robert Clark of San Jose State College referred to him as “both militant and responsible.”
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New York Times
writer Robert Lipsyte described Edwards as a “moderate” in the same way that Jackie Robinson was a moderate: “Edwards thinks along constitutional avenues of protest and pressure.”
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One West Coast writer, however, described the sociology professor as a “black Hitler.”
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What is certain is that Edwards was absolutely central to the OCHR. Lipsyte argued that “without him [Edwards] nothing would have happened…. A powerful and polarizing figure … theoretically smart and tactically smart … he was essential.”
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It is difficult not to concur with Lipsyte's assessment; however, we must appreciate the responses of athletes to Edwards and his ideas if we are to understand fully the progress of the OPHR in the months leading up to the Mexico City Olympics. Edwards's own experience of college sport left him extremely disillusioned with the system. He saw the sporting arena as a place in which young black men were exploited and was outraged by the double standard that persisted between life on and off the field. Edwards argued that there was no sense in playing a football game and “acting as if somehow we were representing the school. The school was exploiting us.”
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Nevertheless, he acknowledged that for many black athletes a realization of the inequalities they faced did not come easily; they needed to be educated in this respect. “The athletes did not demand a revolt; they did not foment a black athletic struggle. That was a vision
that was projected, that some athletes, a minority of black athletes, subsequently identified with. It was not started by black athletes. They had to be propagandized, they had to be educated, [but] they were particularly disinclined to become involved in unconventional or controversial politics, because it could end up getting them kicked off the team, or they could lose their scholarship.”
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It was Edwards who was the driving force behind this education process, and he won important converts to his cause at San Jose State. Teaching a class on racial minorities, Edwards had an audience of six hundred students. Tommie Smith described him as “magnetic. He challenged you. He used whatever he could to stop you in your tracks and get you to listen—black jargon, profanity, jokes, threats or a Ph.D. soliloquy on history.”
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As a former athlete himself with an imposing physical presence, Edwards won the support and following of world-class athletes like Smith, Lee Evans, and John Carlos. When he met Edwards, Martin Luther King Jr. observed, “I see why those folks are so scared of you.”
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He was one of the “few leaders of that time who was bigger than most of the athletes that he was talking to, which is great currency in the sports world.”
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Sprinter Vince Matthews found Edwards to be a persuasive figure and an imposing individual and agreed with his analysis of the place of black people in the United States.
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Many white athletes' views of the OPHR were shaped by their response to Edwards's message and, equally important, his manner of delivering it. Pole-vaulter Bob Seagren claimed that he was unfamiliar with the aims of the OPHR and had only a very broad understanding of what the black athletes were campaigning for. He did, however, recognize the name and rhetoric of Edwards as central to the movement before the 1968 Olympics. Seagren argued that Edwards was among the main individuals outside sports who were “trying to get the black athletes to boycott the Olympics.”
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George Young identified Edwards as the man who had started the drive for the boycott that was then kept alive by the media. Young believed this created pressure for many black athletes.
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Hal Connolly asserted that many white athletes were “down on Harry Edwards.” There was a perception that he was manipulating the athletes and there was a great concern that this could jeopardize the chances of the U.S. team at the Olympic Games.
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Olympic swimmer Jane Swagerty believed the number of black athletes interested in some kind of boycott or protest statement to be only small and largely manipulated by Edwards and his political machine.
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There was a perception that athletes were being influenced
by outside forces. These views are consistent with a wider white unease concerning the role of militant racial forces in the late 1960s—forces, it was believed, that had a negative impact on the average African American. A 1969
Newsweek
report found that many white “middle Americans” were increasingly uneasy and angry about the demands of black militants and the impact such demands had on the black population.
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For many white athletes on or close to qualifying for the U.S. Olympic team, this feeling was further strengthened by a belief that sport was being sullied, that politics was intruding in an area where it was not wanted. Water polo player Bruce Bradley argued, “If there were any racial problems it was with the administration and the political situations people dragged it into. People made it more; I think Harry Edwards made it more a racial issue than it really was.”
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Even those who gave support to the OPHR later expressed concern about the role of Edwards. Ralph Boston saw Edwards as the mouthpiece for the movement and argued, “As it turned out, it seems that Harry's whole involvement in the thing was to further the cause of Harry.”
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Phil Shinnick argued that the calls for a boycott of the Olympics that came from Edwards put too much pressure on athletes and that his demands came without a full appreciation of what a great sacrifice it was for athletes to give up an attempt at Olympic glory.
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Hostility toward Edwards himself increased the probability that an Olympic boycott by black athletes was unlikely to materialize. Edwards's brash and abrasive character and the contentious hyperbole that flowed from him did much to promote a misunderstanding of and hostility toward the ideals of the OPHR. Even those sympathetic to the movement were not entirely comfortable with his role.

These feelings of discomfort were mutual, especially where white athletes were concerned. Edwards felt that even white supporters were not fully committed to the struggle that he was fighting. “I don't care how liberal whites were; there was a container of racism and white superiority that they could not escape.” Edwards was given assurances by some athletes that they were sympathetic to the OPHR, but they expressed an opposition to the methods the movement was utilizing. “In other words, there is a price that they put on black freedom and there was no limit for us,” commented Edwards. He argued that many white athletes would go only “so far up the road,” and as a result the OPHR focused most of its energies on educating black athletes.
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In this sense there was a considerable breakdown in communications at the interracial level. Edwards's hard-line position and the radical rhetoric he employed served to antagonize many
white athletes, and at the same time Edwards spent little time attempting to soften the presentation of his message. In many respects, however, Edwards would have found any such softening extremely difficult. The dynamics of black militancy demanded a certain amount of machismo and radical posturing as necessary prerequisites for legitimacy in the black community. To sustain this legitimacy Edwards also had to keep up the momentum of the boycott movement.

In a May 1968 profile of Harry Edwards,
New York Times
columnist Arnold Hano stated that the OPHR had achieved a great success when “twenty of the nation's finest collegiate basketball players, black and white—including Lew Alcindor, Elvin Hayes, Neal Walk, Bob Lanier, Westley Unseld, Larry Miller, and Don May—passed up the [Olympic] tryouts.”
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Douglas Hartmann refers to their nonparticipation as “another organizing success.”
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The issue was more complex than this, however. Speaking for the triumphant trio of the champion UCLA team—Alcindor, Warren, and Allen—athletic director J. D. Morgan said that their decision not to try out for the Olympics was not linked to the boycott movement. Morgan explained that the UCLA players regretfully decline their selection “due to the interruption of their academic program.”
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Alcindor argued, “School is still a big thing with me and I may have to work this summer too.” All three players pointed to academic commitments and the desire to graduate as their reason for not going to the Olympics.
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Elvin Hayes, the black Houston forward, cited the desire not to jeopardize his chances for a professional career when explaining his nonappearance at the Olympic tryouts. “I wouldn't want to do anything that would hurt my chances as a pro,” he argued. “You don't just walk in there and play a game like you do in college. It's so much tougher. So I wouldn't want to report late or anything like that.”
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White basketball star Neal Walk chose not to attend the trials after consulting with his academic advisers and cited the pressures of classroom work as the reason why he would not try to make the Olympic team.
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In a letter to the editor of the
New York Times
one reader attacked Arnold Hano's article, arguing that Westley Unseld of the University of Louisville had no part in the boycott and that he had decided not to go to the trials because he was tired. The correspondent went on to state that all at the university were proud of “big Wes,” who did a lot of work in the local community and was a “true all-American.” Hano replied that he stood by his assessment pointing to the fact that the players had deliberately chosen not to go to the Olympics and argued that this was the important fact, regardless of the reasons they had given publicly.
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