Where is tommie smith

Immediately, I went, 'oh my gosh, they could get killed'. Something could really happen to them. Within minutes Tyus left the stadium with another US athlete because they were worried for their own safety.

For their gesture, Smith and Carlos were suspended from the Olympic team and had to fly home. Both men received dozens of death threats on their return. They also struggled to find work and new jobs. There was also negative criticism in the media and both faced discrimination and harassment.

In an interview last year Smith revealed he still receives death threats and hate mail. The death threats were also aimed at Smith's family and, although he expected "trials and tribulations", he says he did not understand the scale. Smith says: "I had really very little idea of what type of hurt or harm, and danger that that would put me and my family in. The sprinter is the seventh of twelve children and says some of his younger siblings were "scorned to a certain point" because many viewed his gesture as a negative and hateful act.

Some were too young to understand the context of what had happened. His brothers lost their place on their high school football team and the only job he could get was washing cars. He faced poverty despite being an Olympic gold medallist and world record holder. His mother also received hate mail and died of a heart attack in As well as being an Olympic champion Smith set 13 world records during his running career, and held 11 simultaneously.

Although he would never go to another Olympics, Smith switched sports and played three seasons of professional football for the NFL team Cincinnati Bengals where he spent most of the time on the practice squad. Smith, who had already got a degree from San Jose State in , got a master's degree in social change in He taught and coached at Oberlin College in Ohio for six years. The m Olympic champion then taught sociology, was a Professor in physical education and worked as a coach at Santa Monica College in California for 27 years.

In his old university San Jose State built a foot statue of the American athletes on campus recreating their iconic protest. They also awarded them honorary doctorates. In recent years Smith has continued to use his voice in interviews and documentaries and works with young people across the country as part of the Tommie Smith Youth Initiative which uses athletics and health to mentor young children to lead better lives.

I'll leave that with you," Smith says from his home in Atlanta. For many in the US and around the world, Smith and Carlos are an inspiration. Among the generation who grew up with the image. In schools. Among the African-American population. And athletes too. Lewis Hamilton raised his fist on the podium at last year's Styrian Grand Prix to emulate the gesture by Smith and Carlos. He said last year he had been "inspired" by the image and reading about the protest.

Smith received the Courage of Conscience Award from the Peace Abbey for his lifelong commitment to athletics, education and human rights. Is Anyone Listening? They got a standing ovation after being introduced by Colin Kaepernick who said on a video that the pair "had an impact on the heart and mind of millions and have been a huge inspiration to me, personally.

What does Smith think about progress when he sees US athletes and football players in the UK take a knee before games? The most difficult thing in understanding is the knowledge of your inside, how you feel about a colour.

And there's no such thing as perfection. There's working toward the freedom of feeling a need to understand and to love. So it's the understanding of the biasedness that's killing instead of togetherness that is a new birth. In Colin Kaepernick decided to take a knee to protest against police brutality and racial inequality in the United States.

Many compared it to the stand taken by Smith and Carlos. Smith adds: "The move to do something by Colin had come into his body, into his mind, into his thought process of making a change. Otherwise, it would not have been done. There have been people dying in the streets longer before Colin.

He had to do that himself. He was born to do what he did otherwise it would not have been done. Or bridge the gap of 'I'm not saying anything because I'm embarrassed, or I might have too much to give up'. And move forward with that feeling of sacrificial movement. Not movement for money every day. You must give up to receive. Sitting a few rows from the front, they watched as Obama highlighted their stand in and said it was "controversial but woke folks up".

Both athletes got a round of applause from the President, then vice-President Joe Biden, and the hundreds of athletes squeezed into the East Room of the White House. When asked about living under Obama's successor President Donald Trump, Smith said: "You speak of politics and the last President - let's not go there now!

It's a bit much for me especially. And those who are listening might say, 'Yeah, you're right Smith, it is a little big for you'! So there's something good [that] is happening to what we are doing, and there's always going to be differences.

Nothing is forever and nothing is perfect. The younger generation must understand that you are the future. You have a general right to make, or it will be broken. Since those moments on October 16 in Smith has always maintained he did the right thing and talks about his "purpose". And now I guess it seems to me a rebirth of that stand because it's basically the same.

Meaning you can see the difference in the colour. Of course everything has a colour. But in this particular human case, we have to work in spite of being black or being white or being brown. We have to see it as different colours come together, making the idea true that you don't have to be.

But it is a fact that you have to understand. The tidy afro has been replaced by a shiny bald head and a grey beard, but Smith looks the picture of health as he speaks from his home outside Las Vegas he has another home in Atlanta, Georgia.

As well as speaking engagements, he works with a leadership academy and has various business interests. For Smith, the two were fused together permanently one weekend in March At an athletics meet on a Saturday, Smith broke his first world records — for the m and yards simultaneously as the track had two finish lines. He then went to join, part-way along, his first civil rights march, a mile walk from San Jose to San Francisco calling for equal educational opportunities.

It was a pivotal moment for him. Things were thrown at us. His feet must have been killing him, I say. I came back, slept overnight four or five hours in my dorm, worked out and went to classes the next day and worked out that evening, and life kept going. Smith credits his hard childhood for his athletic ability.

In effect, his training began as soon as he could walk, and work. He was the seventh of 14 siblings, two of whom died, in a poor family in rural Texas. As with most Black families in the area, they were sharecroppers — working land owned by white people, who took most of the profits. In the Jim Crow south, Smith barely ever saw any white people, he says, or any other people at all; the nearest neighbours were several miles away. The whole family worked in the cotton fields and lived in a leaky wooden house.

When people ask who his favourite athlete is, Smith says his mother. The family moved to California when Smith was six, to better conditions but essentially the same social position.

So I had to work all night, many times by myself, to make sure the water was going in the right places. It was very difficult. That earned him a scholarship to San Jose State University, where he studied sociology. As one of the few Black students on campus almost all of whom were male and athletes , he continued to experience discrimination. A lot of so forth. In his studies, though, Smith was learning African American history, even as the civil rights movement was writing a new chapter of it.

African Americans were standing up, and being beaten down. Smith felt he needed to act. You got to lay that book down and apply to the system what you learned in the book that the system wrote. At the same time, Smith was going from strength to strength on the track: the Usain Bolt of his day. In , he held 11 world records concurrently, across m and m and their imperial counterparts. His m time was pretty respectable, too.

There was little question he would be on the US Olympics team for Mexico The year before, African American athletes had discussed boycotting the Olympics. Soon the hate mail and death threats began. The goal was human rights , Smith stresses, not Black power. Brundage was steadfastly opposed to politics in sports.

He had supported the Olympics in Nazi Germany, and was doing everything he could to prevent an embarrassing boycott in Mexico. He even sent over Jesse Owens, hero of the Olympics, to try to talk the Black athletes out of it. Eventually they decided by a democratic vote that each athlete would do as they saw fit.