“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

Black athletes and athletic institutions have long been a notable source of race pride in black communities. For more than a century, black, liberal, and Civil Rights entities have celebrated the athletic accomplishments of blacks and the racial integration of sports as evidence of blacks’ noteworthy abilities and achievements and the feasibility of integration in a society that has persistently treated blacks as inferior. For example, in 1963, after two decades of the mass integration of team sports, an article in the black popular magazine Ebony declared that “via its total impact on the American scene,” no vocation exemplified “democracy at its workable best” better than sports. The article declared that “A hundred million Americans applaud the performance of an Elston Howard or Willie Mays in a World Series baseball game,” and that such demonstrations of blacks’ capability had a significant impact on the prejudices of whites: “while cheering a member of a favored team without regard for race or color, they must be only for a little while, better human beings.” The article concluded that because of the opportunities that sports created for blacks to demonstrate their capabilities, it was even more impactful than the then-current direct-action protests: “Moreover, in many instances, the break-through gains in the cited areas of Dr. [Martin Luther King, Jr.’s] concentration often are made more easily because sports have previously proven the human practicality of integration.”[1] For the remainder of the century, the ever-increasing presence and visibility of black athletes in white-controlled sports institutions motivated black, mainstream, and liberal medias to make similar declarations. Indeed, in 1999, a group of black journalists declared “Jackie Robinson’s integration of major league baseball” the ninth “Most Important News Event of the Twentieth Century.” The declaration is indicative of the importance that those medias continue to attribute to athletes and sports in the long Black Freedom Struggle.[2]

As significant, the regularity of such pronouncements has influenced understandings of the utility of sports and athletes in the long Black Freedom Struggle, including events during the Revolt of the Black Athlete, the period of Civil RightsBlack Power protests in sports, like the successful protest of the New York Athletic Club (NYAC) in 1968. On February 16, in protest of the club’s policies that barred blacks and other minorities from membership, a local Black Freedom Movement successfully disrupted the 100th annual NYAC track and field meet at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Only nine of 200 black athletes invited to the meet participated and more 1,500 activists manned pickets outside the venue, successfully attracting media attention and persuading some ticketholders not to enter. Judging by several sports journalists’ reactions, the mainstream media and sports establishment were flabbergasted at the success of the protest because, as they had reported for much of the Cold War, many sports were successfully integrated. Indeed, black athletes had starred on predominately white college and national track and field teams for three decades. According to the mainstream media, sports were the best model of effective integration in an otherwise racially turbulent American society. Consequently, mainstream journalists argued that protest in sports was contrary and offensive. New York Times sports editor Arthur Daley suggested that the protest of the NYAC was deviant and only succeeded because “militants” used threats of violence to persuade athletes not to attend. Daley warned against protests in the future by surreptitiously suggesting that white-controlled sports institutions would hesitate to invite blacks in the future, thus terminating an effective means of integration.[3]

The interpretation of the successful protest against the NYAC dominated the mainstream media and has been largely unchallenged because it is theoretically supported by the pervasive historical acceptance of the liberal conception of integration as the most viable solution to racial discrimination in American society. Historian Robin D. G. Kelley has concluded that the conception has historically meant “bringing black people into formerly all-white institutions … [so they can] benefit from social interaction with whites … [and] adopt [whites’] middle-class values, their work ethic, and sense of self-esteem.” As important, Kelley notes that the conception has and will not challenge neither capitalist exploitation nor white privilege, but in effect reifies them, which has been critical to its acceptance by mainstream Americans and the State. Indeed, beginning with the Cold War and for the past several decades, the visibility of black athletes has been used to assert the feasibility and success of integration and the lack of far-reaching economic reforms. The latter remains key to the pervasive acceptance of the myth that sports have contributed significantly to improving race relations. In fact, by the late 1960s, after two decades of the mass integration of sports, it had evolved into a social convention: the myth of the black athlete.[4]

In a previous article, I demonstrated that this myth began as a product of postReconstruction black advancement beliefs that performances of manliness, as historian Martin Summers terms it, through such venues as military and community service, advanced blacks’ claims to equality. The geopolitical tensions of the imperialist and interwar periods further enhanced the importance of manliness in American and Western societies. Consequently, by the mid 1930s, black Olympians like Jesse Owens and champion boxers like Joe Louis garnered tremendous praise in the mainstream media for advancing the nation by besting foreign athletes, especially from U.S. geopolitical foes like Nazi Germany. The mainstream press’s praise of blacks was extremely unusual and, consequently, many black and liberal entities articulated that athletic success wrought white recognition that blacks possessed the same manly capabilities as whites, which supposedly improved whites’ image of blacks, and thus advanced race relations and increased the feasibility of integration, as evidenced by the nascent integration in sports during the period.[5]

In the 1950s, the myth received a significant boost in credibility from the State’s Cold War narrative. The State, including the federal government and philosophically like-minded entities like the mainstream media, attempted to counter Soviet propaganda that highlighted racial discrimination in the United States by asserting that the ever-increasing popularity of black athletes and entertainers provided evidence of the declining significance of anti-black discrimination in American society. Disseminated by the State’s global propaganda devices and supported by liberal and black medias domestically, by the late-1960s, the assertion had evolved into a social convention that has been hegemonic in American society since.[6]

Indeed, the myth’s hegemony has influenced the study of black athletes and sports and obscures as much as it reveals about black communities’ use of sports and athletes in the long Black Freedom Struggle. Most significantly, several scholars have projected the social convention backward, conceiving a revised history that suggests that since the emergence of mass spectator athletics in the late 19th century, black entities have conceived of and used athletics as a means of demonstrating the capability of their racial group, thus advancing claims to complete citizenship.[7] While there is certainly evidence that supports that this has been a traditional use of sports in black communities, the scholarship ignores that black institutions and communities also routinely used athletics for other means, most significantly to inculcate and demonstrate moral values in its charges and to protest anti-black discrimination.

This article further challenges the prevailing conclusion by demonstrating that blacks’ use of sports has been complex, varied, contested, and evolutionary in response to political environs and local circumstances, which is similar to black entities’ uses of other advancement strategies.[8] This examination of the black-led protest of the NYAC meet demonstrates that many black athletes and communities used sports as not only a means to demonstrate that blacks were as capable and masculine as whites, but also joined with other activists to protest the terms of blacks’ participation in white-controlled sports institutions and discrimination in society at-large, especially during the period of the Revolt. Like many black activists in the period, many black athletes did not define equality solely as integration (entrance and participation) into predominately white institutions; equality also included recognition of their rights and agency as well as their humane treatment within those institutions. Their activism encountered opposition from the whitecontrolled sports establishment and mainstream media, but just as notably, enjoyed widespread support across black America, thus suggesting that many blacks agreed that participation in sports represented more than just the potential of demonstrating black capability and the feasibility of integration. Their support suggests that sports and athletes also were and should be used to advance other understandings of equality. Dr. King, for example, endorsed boycotts of the NYAC and the 1968 Olympics as a means of raising awareness that further reforms were needed to improve the quality of black lives.[9]

By recognizing that the use of athletics was often complex and situational, rather than historically uniform and static, the study of sports and athletes can further be used to improve and enhance our understanding of the long Black Freedom Struggle: in this particular case, the Black Power Movement. Scholars examining the Revolt of the Black Athlete have concluded that a black boycott of the 1968 Olympics failed to manifest because supposedly like Black Power, it was almost universally viewed as irrational and unpatriotic, and therefore was unpopular and lacked sufficient support. These works uncritically duplicate the opinion of the period’s mainstream media, which opposed Black Power as a threat to the status quo and, as a part of the sports establishment, opposed protest that disrupted sports, sports revenues, and the State’s Cold War use of sports. Additionally, these works do not account for black activists’ longstanding criticism of the mainstream media’s anti-black biases and failure to adequately articulate blacks’ grievances. Thus, these works are uncritically reliant on the mainstream media and assume that Black Power was the product of angry black militants and the prominence it gained was an aberration. Consequently, they have concluded that Black Power–related protests in sports like the movement against the NYAC had minimal significant support and made little to no contribution to black advancement or race relations.[10]

Over the last decade, however, several scholars have credibly revised our understanding of Black Power by demonstrating that black liberal and black nationalist strategies have co-existed throughout the long black struggle, and that Black Power (nationalist) and Civil Rights (liberal) entities, despite often having significant ideological differences, frequently shared the same motivations, goals, and personnel and worked together on various projects.[11]

This article furthers our understanding of Black Power by demonstrating that such cooperation among black activists from across the political spectrum was fostered by the need to combat institutionalized racism, the poverty and structural and cultural racism that continued to denigrate black lives and communities in the wake of the end of legalized discrimination in the 1960s.[12] Black activists from across the political spectrum deemed institutionalized racism the cause of the proliferating riots. Indeed, recent scholarship demonstrates that combating poverty in black communities created by centuries of discrimination served as the focus of local and national black movements in the Black Power era.[13] The urgency to address institutionalized racism and the riots stimulated a search for solutions, including an iteration of Black Nationalism that was Black Power. In the midst of the riots, black radicals, progressives, and some liberals declared that integration and liberal gradualism had failed to address the socioeconomic needs of blacks, and consequently, they supported a range of tactics from black economic, cultural, and political self-determination to government-led economic reforms to address institutionalized racism. They also often worked together, including supporting Black Power–related programs such as the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), a proposed black boycott of the 1968 Olympics, and the attendant boycott of the 1968 NYAC meet as a means of raising awareness of institutionalized racism.[14] Indeed, Harry Edwards, the OPHR’s lead organizer, is among several activists who have declared that combating institutionalized racism served as the raison d’^etre of the Black Power Movement.[15]

Edwards capitalized on the shared interest of black intellectuals and their allies in institutionalized racism to build a successful protest movement of the NYAC and to publicize the OPHR. During the early months of the Olympic boycott campaign (fall 1967), Edwards and his mentor Louis Lomax, a pioneering black intellectual and journalist, devised a plan to counter the dominance of opposition in the mainstream media by attracting media attention to disseminate their message by linking the campaign to other popular efforts to combat discrimination in sports, including a protest of the NYAC’s racist policies, and capitalizing on the white-controlled mainstream media’s fascination with so-called black militants. In contrast to the mainstream media and sports establishments’ assertions that the OPHR was unworthy of support, this article demonstrates that the protest of the NYAC attracted significant support from across the black political spectrum, primarily because it articulated one of the most popular understandings of Black Power in black communities: the need to combat institutionalized racism.

Black Power and the NYAC Boycott

For decades, the NYAC was considered the most prestigious annual domestic meet and as such, it attracted the nation’s best track and field standouts. Both proponents and opponents of the Olympic boycott considered the protest of the 1968 meet a litmus test for an Olympic boycott. Edwards understood that to accomplish a boycott of the Olympics, the OPHR needed moral and organizational support to combat the opposition of the mainstream media and sports establishment. The protest against the NYAC would be an indicator of whether black athletes and communities would use sports as a vehicle of protest and if the OPHR could effectively organize a boycott.[16]

Edwards and Lomax believed that a call for action against the NYAC would both attract allies and media attention and garner the OPHR much-needed credibility. Over the previous two decades, several New York City (NYC)–area activists had raised concerns about blacks participating in the event while being barred from club membership. The most significant instance occurred in 1962, when baseball great Jackie Robinson, City Commissioner Earl Brown of Harlem, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) condemned the club’s policies, which compelled Mayor Robert Wagner to resign from the club in protest. Despite this and other sporadic calls, an effective protest of the club never materialized. The OPHR hoped that its call would galvanize past critics of the NYAC into a coalition that would also support a black Olympic boycott.[17]

Edwards also suspected that a boycott would garner the OPHR international attention because the 1968 NYAC meet, as the New York Times (NYT) explained, was attracting “even more press and television coverage than the meet usually would” because it was celebrating its centennial and because the event would inaugurate a new Madison Square Garden (MSG), the city’s premier sports auditorium. The entrance of a seven-person Soviet team also made it a minor Cold War event. All these coincidences prompted ABC television to announce plans to broadcast the meet to a national audience. The media coverage presented a tremendous opportunity for the OPHR to disseminate its message and attract allies.[18] Consequently, in the weeks leading up to the meet, the OPHR and its black and leftist media allies tried to ensure that the most significant attention the meet received was because of the club’s racist policies. The club’s officers refused to provide member information, but the media reported that in its 150-year history, the NYAC had not admitted any blacks and only two Jews as members. By contrast, much of the mainstream media defended the club. The NYT, for instance, declared that it was the right of the club’s 9,500 members to determine membership and detailed its history of sponsoring events, teams, and other clubs that included minorities as evidence of the club’s racial benevolence.[19]

In addition to attracting support from past critics of the club and the black media, the OPHR also hoped to attract support from NYC-area black communities and activists because its criticisms of the club paralleled and expanded Black Power’s critique of the failure of integration and liberal gradualism. Black Power intellectuals argued that integration as constructed by liberals was a failed solution because it did not combat institutionalized racism, poverty and structural and cultural discrimination caused by centuries of racial socioeconomic discrimination that continued to denigrate black lives and communities following the defeat of legal discrimination. Stokely Carmichael, a Black Power doyen, noted that integration proceeded slowly and only allowed an infinitesimal number of blacks to escape the denigrating deadly effects of institutionalized racism, while the vast majority of blacks remained trapped in communities that would continue to suffer unforeseeably. Just as significant, integration reinforced notions of black inferiority, or cultural racism, as Carmichael termed it, by suggesting that black communities were inferior and that blacks had to migrate out of black communities and into white-controlled institutions to improve the quality of their lives. Thus, not only did integration fail to improve the quality of life for most blacks, it did not challenge the pervasive assumptions about black inferiority that continued to rationalize the anti-black discrimination that pervaded American society.[20]

Edwards noted that another significant consequence of integration was that blacks in white-controlled institutions, including sports, often encountered harsh discrimination because many whites continued to believe in black inferiority. Max Elbaum and other scholars have demonstrated that throughout the Black Power era, black prisoners, students, soldiers, and workers, among others, organized against the racist conditions they endured in white-controlled institutions. Although discrimination in sports was masked by the longstanding myth of the black athlete, black athletes also continued to experience cultural and socioeconomic discrimination, which motivated them to organize protests on dozens of campuses. In his massive 1968 investigation of black student-athlete protests, reporter Jack Olsen concluded that contrary to the myth, “[a]lmost to a man,” black athletes in white-controlled institutions “are dissatisfied, disgruntled, and disillusioned” and “say they are dehumanized, exploited, and discarded, and even say they were happier back in the ghetto.”[21] The NYAC attracted the ire of black activists and athletes because it perpetuated cultural racism by sponsoring integrated events while relegating blacks to second-class citizenship by denying them membership. Edwards and the OPHR spoke for black activists and athletes who challenged traditional liberalism by declaring that it would no longer be considered progress for blacks to participate in racist institutions like the NYAC. In fact, Edwards announced that the goal of the OPHR was to end the track meet and shame the club, rather than for blacks to integrate with racists. Characteristic of Black Power’s challenge of established liberalism, Edwards later explained that the “boycott marked the end of an age when Afro-American athletes would compromise black dignity for a watch, a television set, a trophy, or merely the love of competition” or recognition of their abilities by whites.[22]

The question at hand was, did a significant number of blacks and other Civil Rights supports agree?

The Black Power Network

The OPHR began receiving an affirmative answer during the initial organizing stages of the campaign. First, the members of the local NYC Black Power network agreed to help Edwards organize the boycott; Edwards later wrote that “facing the California-based [OPHR] was the task of mounting a boycott and demonstration to be held more than 3,000 miles away—and this with no available funds other than my salary and no means of communication with the East Coast other than by telephone.”[23] Consequently, he contacted Omar Abu Ahmed, a member of the National Black Power Conference Continuous Committee and the East River (Harlem) Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Chapter; Algernon “A. J.” JohnsonCooper, Jr., head of the New York University Black Law Students Association; H. Rap Brown of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); and Marshall Brown, the chief officer of the Plainfield, NJ, NAACP chapter, and an Amateur Athlete Union (AAU) official, all of whom were members of the national Black Power network based in New York. Lomax, a journalist in the city in the 1950s and 1960s, had allies among the local black grassroots and likely facilitated some of these connections. While Edwards contacted athletes on the West Coast and foreign teams, the New York activists effectively appealed to many black athletes and historically black colleges on the East Coast. They also ensured that their activist networks would be on hand to man pickets at the meet. Brown told the press that he and his organization would be there to “hand out a slip of paper to every black athlete we see going in. It’ll say ‘Nigger, go in and run for the white man.’”[24] Johnson-Cooper added that his organization would be there to monitor activity between protesters and police. Floyd McKissick announced that CORE, now a Black Power group, would seek a legal injunction to prevent the meet. The support of the local Black Power network would be critical to the success of the local boycott. Ultimately, the New York–area activists would bring together a massive effective coalition to protest. Edwards later acknowledged their importance, remarking that it “was these persons, working through their various organizations, who took on the major responsibility of mobilizing black people to demonstrate at the meet.”[25]

The activists’ efforts were indicative of the widespread support and meaning of a black Olympic boycott among the national Black Power network and Black Power in black communities. A year earlier at the 1967 National Conference on Black Power held in Newark, New Jersey, several activists called for a black boycott of boxing and the Olympics in support of Muhammad Ali, the heavyweight champion and member of the Nation of Islam (NOI) who was being persecuted by the State for criticizing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War as racist and imperialistic. The conference’s resolutions as a whole, The Black Manifesto, rebuked the traditional liberal belief that serving the nation, whether through the military or athletics, advanced blacks’ claims to citizenship rights. Instead, it promoted protest, the radical self-determination of black communities, and solidarity with Third World struggles against the common oppressor of white supremacy as the best means for combating institutionalized racism. Edwards’s argument that an Olympic boycott could raise awareness of institutionalized racism resonated with activists from the conference and the like who were desperate to find a means to channel the despair of blacks into more constructive protests than riots.[26]

Like Edwards, these activists subscribed to few of the Cold War concerns that restricted most liberals and moderates from supporting the proposed Olympic boycott. Charles V. Hamilton, an activist, political scientist, and OPHR supporter, spoke for radicals motivated by the riots when he elaborated on the necessity of using sports as a forum for protest.

… [It] gives us another way of confronting the system of racism in this country. … What Black Power people are saying is that those of us who have “made it,” star athletes or whatever, have a responsibility to bring all our people along with us. The boycott expresses our concern for the plight of most of our people in this country. And it gives the problem international visibility.[27]

Hamilton’s position was indicative of the Black Power network’s support of both proposed boycotts as a means of raising awareness of and combating institutionalized racism. Therefore, it is not surprising that many black radicals rallied to support a boycott of the NYAC.

Beyond those who explicitly identified as Black Power activists, the protest against the NYAC also attracted the support of black liberals and progressives, several of whom had previously considered the OPHR unnecessarily radical. The call for action against the NYAC prompted them to reassess the OPHR. Foremost among them was the New York Amsterdam News (NYAN), a prominent progressive black weekly. In November 1967, an editorial in the paper sympathized with the proposed Olympic boycott, arguing that its cause of raising awareness of institutionalized racism was just. But, the editorial concluded, it would be a “meaningless effort” on the part of athletes because it did not have an accompanying plan to improve the conditions of blacks. A second editorial on the same page, however, noted that if the charges against the NYAC were factual, the newspaper supported protesting the meet. The paper contacted the NYAC for a response to the charges, but to no avail. However, the editorial declared, it “does not intend … to allow the matter to die.” The NYAN’s subsequent investigation of the NYAC over the next several weeks led the paper’s staff to become an ardent supporter of the OPHR: the NYAN found the OPHR’s grievances valid, published a poll that suggested that at least half of its readership supported the OPHR, and finally, endorsed a boycott of the Olympics.[28]

Additionally, the NYAN also articulated the OPHR and Black Power’s message that the next step to realizing black equality was combating institutionalized racism. For example, after several readers questioned the logic of boycotting the meet by suggesting that the absence of blacks was contrary to the liberal goal of integration, sports editor Dick Edwards responded that they had “really missed the point.” He argued that participating in a meet sponsored by a whites-only group that continued to regard blacks as inferior did not equate to equality; rather, it compromised the dignity of blacks and reaffirmed white supremacy by privileging whiteness as the most desirable space. He concluded that the publicity gained from a black withdrawal and forcing the club to answer for its racist policies would allow blacks to reclaim a measure of “human dignity.”[29] The NYAN was exceptional only in that it was based in New York and thus, had local media interest at the meet. Indeed, the NYAC issue compelled other black progressives and media across the country, including the Chicago Defender and the Los Angeles Sentinel, to reexamine the OPHR. Like the NYAN, they supported boycotting the meet and several would eventually support an Olympic boycott.[30]

The protest also gained the OPHR the support of several black liberals who had sympathized with the OPHR’s goals but had concerns about its association with Black Power. For example, Jackie Robinson had initially waffled on the OPHR. He seconded Edwards’s argument that a boycott would be a significant alternative to the riots and as a former athlete, he found the athletes’ willingness to sacrifice an opportunity to win Olympic medals admirable. However, he was also concerned that “militants” like Edwards were exploiting the athletes. Nonetheless, he overcame all of his concerns after the OPHR targeted the NYAC, a club that he had called out a few years earlier. Like most blacks, Robinson had experienced the racial slights, humiliations, and violence that robbed blacks of dignity, wealth, and, too frequently, life. As the first black player in Major League Baseball (MLB), he had endured verbal and psychological abuse from the mainstream media and white fans, opponents, teammates, and league officials, as well as segregated accommodations. The experience embittered Robinson because, as he noted, accommodating racists and discrimination was contrary to his personal beliefs, and he believed it psychologically injurious to blacks. He had only agreed to the difficult sojourn because he believed that if he played well, it would create opportunities for other blacks. By 1949, his third MLB season, he concluded that accommodation had very limited effectiveness. After proving his worth by leading the Brooklyn Dodgers to two World Series, Robinson began challenging discrimination on and off the field. The mainstream media responded by condemning him as “ungrateful” and an “uppity nigger.” Robinson later concluded that a white player who challenged others was usually labeled a “man.” But at best, blacks’ “manhood” rights were only “partially accepted” in MLB. In his 1972 autobiography, I Never Had It Made, Robinson noted that every black person he knew who had integrated an institution had endured a similar ordeal. It led him to conclude that integration did not equate to equality if blacks had to endure discrimination and humiliation in white-controlled institutions. Thus, blacks would have to protest to eliminate discrimination. Robinson was among several black liberals motivated by the case against the NYAC to reevaluate and support the OPHR.[31]

A few significant white liberals also publicly condemned the NYAC. For example, after several colleges announced they would not participate in the meet, the city’s Commission on Human Rights, which was based in the mayor’s office, announced an investigation and pledged that if the charges were true, it would ask that any government funding to the club be terminated. The city’s University of Notre Dame alumni chapter also asked all Catholics to resign from the club. They found the club’s discrimination anachronistic and reminiscent of the rampant anti-Catholicism that had denigrated their rights for centuries. While their positions contrasted measurably with the mainstream media, which either openly or surreptitiously defended the club, they did not publicly endorse the OPHR, and there is no record of them joining the pickets. Edwards recognized the support of white liberals as tenuous as compared to blacks, but welcomed it because it contributed to the movement’s larger goal of attacking the NYAC and bolstering the legitimacy of the OPHR.[32]

The OPHR also received a significant boost when Tommie Smith and Lee Evans, two of the nation’s most likely Olympic sprinters, announced their intentions to boycott the meet. They were followed by several other notable black Olympic hopefuls, including John Carlos. These developments were followed by a number of athletes issuing tacit endorsements. For instance, rather than openly endorse the boycott and risk repercussions, both University of Southern California sprinter and football all-American O.J. Simpson and hurdler Earl McCullough cited scheduling conflicts. Simpson later told a reporter, “I wouldn’t run that weekend even if my mother was holding the meet.”[33] These endorsements and abstentions were reported and scrutinized on the front pages of sports sections across the nation.

In early January, several black colleges and track clubs that had historically participated also publicly declined invitations. After NYC’s public and Catholic high schools withdrew, the prep portion of the event was canceled. By early February 1968, all the historically black colleges that traditionally attended, several Catholic universities, all three military service academies, and several predominately white schools withdrew as well, citing concerns for their black student-athletes. With two weeks until the meet, the media estimated that fewer than twenty of the more than 200 black athletes originally expected to participate would attend. According to various news outlets, the absence of star athletes caused the NYAC to frantically search for foreign athletes and teams to invite in hopes of fielding a meet worthy of its tradition.[34]

The significant number of withdrawals and the endorsements of the boycott from several notable activists and liberals made the silence of black moderates like the NAACP and the Urban League conspicuous. They were on record condemning the NYAC’s policies. For example, the NAACP had joined Robinson and Earl Brown in calling for action against the club in 1962. But they also condemned Black Power as separatist and opposed the 1967 Black Power conference’s call for an Olympic boycott as unpatriotic. Their silence was likely predicated on the concern that a successful boycott of the NYAC meet would only strengthen the credibility of Black Power and the OPHR. Thus, during the initial weeks of the boycott campaign, black moderates did not issue a statement on the NYAC.

Their purposeful distance, however, became embarrassing after the NYAN’s investigation revealed that the head of the city’s Urban League chapter, John Mosler, and his brother, Edwin Mosler, Sr., were the two token Jewish members of the NYAC—and it was alleged that they had joined in 1964, two years after the NAACP had publicly criticized the club. Additionally, it was reported that Edwin led local fundraising efforts for the U.S. Olympic team. Thus, a few critics accused the brothers of collaborating with a racist enemy. John initially argued that the brothers were working from the inside to liberalize the club’s policies, but the explanation was met with such skepticism in the black media that he credited the protest against the NYAC with helping him to realize that the club was using him to perpetrate a ruse. He also feared that the news might impair the family’s business, Mosler Safe Company, and alienate several star black athletes who helped in his brother’s fundraising efforts. Within a week, John had resigned from the club, but not before the NYAN questioned why he was allowed to continue to lead the local League.[35]

Despite the lack of an endorsement from the traditional black Civil Rights establishment, by early February 1968, the OPHR had amassed an impressive coalition to boycott and picket the NYAC. Just as significant, the coalition represented the widespread appeal of Black Power and the OPHR across the black political spectrum. Many blacks agreed that institutionalized racism continued to denigrate the quality of black lives and that the resulting anger was the source of the riots, which after three straight summers seemed to have no abatement. Integration had failed to address institutionalized racism; to the contrary, it had rationalized it by suggesting that blacks and their communities were inferior. The continued proliferation of the riots and black suffering necessitated the urgency of new solutions. Black radicals and progressives disgruntled with gradual liberalism supported Black Power and attendants like the boycotts of the NYAC and the Olympics as a means of raising awareness of the need to combat institutionalized racism. Johnson-Cooper shared their perspectives when he noted that all blacks, “young and old, in and out of school, poor and middle-class have a contribution to make (and an obligation to make that contribution) to the battle for securing freedom for black people. We believe that one contribution which black athletes can make is the boycott of events which either practice or symbolize racism.”[36] In many black communities, boycotting the meet came to be understood as protesting institutionalized racism and led to the formation of the broad and diverse Black Power–led coalition against the NYAC.

In fact, the widespread support for boycotting the meet (and perhaps the embarrassment of the Mosler incident) led black moderates like the NAACP, Urban League, and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, all of whom had their national offices in New York, to, as one observer explained it, get “on the wagon to run [the NYAC] out of town.” On February 14, 1968, the day before the meet, the moderates held a rather sparsely attended presser at the NAACP’s downtown Manhattan offices, where they issued a joint statement condemning the club and announced they would also picket the meet. These Cold War moderates, however, declined to endorse the OPHR. Instead, they would orchestrate a separate picket. The episode was metaphorically indicative of the increasing importance of Black Power in the Black Freedom Struggle: despite mainstream condemnation of Black Power, moderates had to support certain elements of it to retain credibility in black communities. It was also indicative of the widespread support a boycott of the NYAC had in black communities.[37]

Edwards’s Use of Militancy

In contrast to the moderates, the subsequent OPHR events were grassroots affairs that Edwards attempted to use to explain the connection between black protests in sports and the Black Freedom Struggle to a national audience. On the same day as the NAACP presser, February 14, 1968, the OPHR held a press conference uptown, in the Harlem offices of the Tenants’ Rights Headquarters. Although it was a grassroots affair, Edwards capitalized on the mainstream media’s fascination with “black militants,” another component of his plan, to ensure that the presser and its content were reported across the nation. Early in the campaign, Edwards and Lomax accurately surmised that the mainstream media’s reflexive condemnation of black nationalists as “militant, violent revolutionaries” who perpetrated the riots also provided those militants with enormous publicity and media platforms. Since the launch of the campaign in the early fall of 1967, Edwards had attempted to present his cause rationally, patiently explaining to journalists the connections between an Olympic protest and black demands for equality. By the NYAC meet, however, he had decided to play the “militant” in exchange for publicity. In this regard, he was following the strategy of several of the period’s most effective black radical firebrands. For instance, Malcom X and the Black Panther Party (BPP) purposely used militant theatrics to garner media attention, while simultaneously understanding that their opponents, including the mainstream media, highlighted and distorted their militancy to confirm that they were troublemakers who should be condemned. Edwards and Lomax also understood as much and like Malcolm X and the Panthers concluded that any publicity, even if condemning, provided them a platform that helped disseminate their message to those who were similarly oppressed and thus, provided invaluable opportunities to attract allies and further their agenda.[38] While beneficial short-term, Edwards’s militancy would also allow the mainstream media to confirm to a national mainstream media that the OPHR was similar to the destructive black militants fomenting riots across the nation.

First, Edwards made sure to sound like a militant. At the beginning of the presser, he and the other activists declared that they would not respond to any reporters who called them “Negro”: they were “black,” which meant they were defiant of white and liberal expectations. They further stated that rather than force the integration of the NYAC, the goal of the local boycott was to condemn the club into closure—and that they would do so by any means necessary, which suggested violence. The presence of Rap Brown, the then-current cause c'el'ebre of the radical black movement, reinforced that threat. In the previous six months, Brown had faced fifteen criminal charges in fourteen courts, including a trumped-up federal charge of inciting arson during a protest in Cambridge, Maryland. Throughout that trial, Brown, usually dressed in the Panther’s black beret, exclaimed to reporters that “Violence is as American as cherry pie. If America don’t come around, we’ll burn her down.” On this day, he lent his militant credibility to the OPHR by telling reporters that an alternative to the boycott could be that MSG “be burned down or blown up.” Edwards added a vague threat suggesting that blacks who crossed the pickets would be in “trouble,” and he refused to condemn anonymous threats made to several athletes weeks earlier warning them not to participate.[39]

Second, beginning with the presser and for the duration of the OPHR, Edwards adopted the look of the media’s stereotypical “black militant.” The award-winning Ivy League grad student abandoned the erudite suit and tie he had worn at earlier media events and wore the BPP’s patent beret, a leather jacket with matches pinned to its front, and combat boots. He also had grown out an Afro and a Malcolm X–styled goatee, both of which were also understood as symbols of a defiant blackness. Scholar Jane Rhodes has demonstrated that by late 1967, the Panthers were “the privileged signifier of Black militancy writ large” in the national media. In May 1967, the Panthers garnered national media attention by marching into California’s legislature with firearms to protest pending legislation designed to end their armed patrols of police in Oakland. In October, party cofounder Huey Newton was wounded in a shootout that also left a policeman dead. The incident and the resulting Free Huey campaign attracted international media attention for more than a year. Edwards suggests that he would go to radical lengths to achieve the OPHR’s goals. In addition to his rhetoric and dress, Edwards also stood 6’8 and a muscular 250 pounds and usually he wore a permanent scowl. Almost every white reporter he encountered remarked that Edwards was a menacing presence who could not be ignored.[40]

The militant theatrics helped the OPHR attract attention. In addition to the several major periodicals that covered the presser, clips of it were disseminated via nightly news programs across the nation. But as he and Lomax expected, most of the mainstream media focused on his militancy almost to the complete exclusion of his rationale for the boycott. For example, Edwards explained that despite the myth of the black athlete, the sports establishment was as racist and exploitative as any other American institution. He noted that in addition to being sponsored by the NYAC, the meet was sanctioned by the AAU, the administrating body of amateur athletics, and hosted by MSG. All three of these organizations ignored or knowingly accommodated anti-black discrimination in their pursuit of profits and publicity. Therefore, discrimination was pervasive in sports and ending such discrimination required protest. Indeed, he concluded that boycotting the NYAC was just “the first step” and he had already “white-listed” other sports entities that discriminated against blacks. His explanation can be found in the press release but is absent from most mainstream accounts.[41]

Although, the mainstream media’s coverage all but ignored Edwards’s message, the presence of several young black progressives and radicals on the podium with Edwards suggested the campaign was reaching its intended audience. For instance, the NYAN noted that in addition to Rap Brown, Edwards was joined by local “black power leaders,” including Ahmed and Chuck Stone of the National Black Power Conference, Callis Brown and Roy Innis of CORE, and Lincoln Lynch of the United Black Front. The presence of the CORE activists and the environ of the Harlem Tenants’ Rights Party were particularly representative of the protest’s focus on combating institutionalized racism. The Tenant Rights Movement was organized by veteran community activist Jesse Gray, who had some qualified successes organizing rent strikes in Harlem that forced slumlords to maintenance buildings and local government to enforce housing laws. CORE had worked with Gray to organize a massive rent strike and the direct-action protests of 13,000 residents in Harlem, which, combined with rent strikes in other parts of the city, forced Mayor Wagner and the city government to begin a million-dollar rodent control program, inspect tenements and force repairs, and fine and jail some offending landlords. In 1964, local CORE chapters dramatized the poverty of minorities in the city and the negligence of local government by orchestrating an infamous car “stall-in,” clogging traffic en route to the World’s Fair, which the city was hosting in Queens at an estimated cost of over $100,000,000. These activists likely hoped that protesting the new Garden, which cost approximately $43 million to construct, would raise questions about the nearby slum housing they were protesting as well. Although some scholars dispute the effectiveness of Gray and CORE’s networks, many of the Harlem activists associated with the rent and housing campaigns planned to be on the pickets at MSG. Few if any in the mainstream media understood these connections, and thus failed to take seriously Edwards’s announcement that he expected 5,000 protesters at the meet. The Black Power activists present, however, understood that combating institutionalized racism was significant and that it had the support of the area’s black communities.[42]

In the short term, Edwards’s theatrics, combined with some of the OPHR’s early successes and the mainstream media’s search for black militants, attracted national media attention that bolstered the profile of the OPHR; for instance, just weeks after the NYAC, Edwards and Smith would pen and be the subject of feature pieces in several national news magazines. The features indicated that, despite mainstream white disapproval, they capitalized on the situation to disseminate their message and their cause had an audience. The long-term consequences, however, were that because of the popularity and dominance of the mainstream sources that condemned them, Edwards, the OPHR, and Black Power were and continue to be portrayed as irrationally militant.[43]

The First Battle for the NYAC

Although the specter of violence dominated mainstream media’s expectations, the protest succeeded because of the organizing done by the Black Power network beforehand. The activists’ efforts to publicize the club’s policies resulted in only nine of the 200 invited black athletes participating in the meet. They also earned a major propaganda victory when the Russians withdrew the day before the meet. In addition to an effective boycott, seemingly, the whole of the local Black Freedom Struggle came out to picket. According to John Morin of the Communist Party USA’s The Worker, the picket lines “represented virtually every civil rights and Black Liberation group in the city, including SNCC, CORE, DuBois Clubs, Black Power Conference, United Black Front, Black American Student Alliances, Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, NAACP, Urban League, AntiDefamation League, and American Jewish Congress.”[44] More than 1,500 picketed the Garden that night and although it was far fewer than the 5,000 Edwards had predicted, they were extremely effective: they commanded the sidewalks, harassed athletes, heckled spectators, and clashed with police, creating a tense atmosphere around the Garden. Their presence turned away ticket holders. Indeed, the media reported that the NYAC sold out the Garden’s capacity of 19,000 seats, thus making a profit, but according to the club’s report, only about 15,700 people attended. Several journalists suggested the crowd contained several hundred less than reported. The pickets also made it difficult and unsafe for many to enter the venue. Indeed, some of the attending athletes and spectators had to run a gantlet to get inside. Reporters noted that once in, they seemed preoccupied with the potential of the protesters storming the building. The nervous crowd remained subdued throughout the meet and reporters attributed the inordinate number of subpar performances to the athletes being unnerved by the m^el'ee outside. Protestors and police confronted each other at least twice, but physical violence was minimal, according to the NYAN, because of the leadership of Edwards and other local black leaders among the pickets.[45]

In addition to effectively disrupting the meet, the pickets also collectively articulated black radicals’ critique that integration alone had failed to significantly improve the quality of blacks’ lives. In fact, the pickets articulated that black participation in racist institutions like the NYAC was an endorsement of the cultural racism that continued to rationalize institutionalized racism. This was visually articulated by one picketer’s sign that declared that “The NYAC is New York’s Orangeburg bowling alley,” which was a reference to the murder of three unarmed South Carolina State College students by police during a protest of an illegally segregated bowling alley in Orangeburg on February 8, 1968, a week earlier. Members of the DuBois Club and SNCC sought to raise awareness of the murders and the continuation of Jim Crow law and terror by carrying a coffin marked “ORANGEBURG MASSACRE” through the streets surrounding the Garden. The signs and props on hand suggested that the consequences of accommodating racism in an integrated setting were no less deadly than the violence openly perpetrated in the South.[46]

This also applied to sports, which was touted as a model of effective integration. Indeed, several mainstream critics attempted to combat the boycott by suggesting that sports had a notable history of improving race relations and that participation in the meet would further that cause. The movement responded by suggesting that any black person, including athletes, who participated in an institution that continued to deny blacks equality enabled racists. One picketer articulated this on a sign that read “RUN, JUMP, OR SHUFFLE ARE ALL THE SAME WHEN YOU DO IT FOR THE MAN!” It was further iterated by signs that supported Ali, who was being persecuted by the State for condemning U.S. participation in the war in Vietnam as racist. Collectively, the picket line represented the Black Power argument that rather than accommodating racism for an opportunity, it would be more effective to protest instead.[47]

The Second Battle for the NYAC

In the week following the demonstration, proponents and opponents alike debated the success of the boycott of the NYAC. Both sides eventually agreed that the boycott had succeeded, but they disagreed on the reasons it had and its subsequent influence on the proposed Olympic boycott. The mainstream media, characteristic of its coverage of Black Power, almost universally ignored the appeal the OPHR and Black Power had in black communities and argued that Edwards’s threats against the athletes and the protesters’ apparent willingness to resort to violence contributed significantly to the success of the boycott. Indeed, approximately five of the attending athletes and a few coaches reported receiving threatening letters and phone calls warning them to not participate in the meet. Additionally, at the press conference the day before, Edwards implied that those blacks who did participate might be retaliated against. At the meet, picketers did indeed confront several athletes and successfully convinced and/or coerced them, depending upon whom is queried, to not enter MSG. In the most widely reported incident, sprinter James Dennis of the Houston (TX) Striders got into a scuffle with protestors, which caused him to miss his event, and his glasses were broken. Additionally, police and small groups of protesters were reported to have physically clashed twice. Eleven demonstrators, to the satisfaction of the black press, were arrested before the pickets dissolved around 11 p.m., and eight of them were scheduled to face related misdemeanor charges. For mainstream journalists then and several scholars since, the threats and clashes are foolproof evidence that Edwards used “pressure” to force black athletes to join the protests, and his willingness to resort to violence confirms that Edwards was a militant and invalidates any success the OPHR had. For instance, Washington Post columnist William Gildea declared that the threats, the clashes, and the association with “irresponsible persons” like Edwards and Rap Brown should be enough to convince more respectable people to distance themselves from the OPHR.[48]

Such sentiments, however, conveniently ignore that only five athletes reported threats and that the overwhelming majority of the 200 black athletes who were invited did not report any threats, nor did they attempt to appear at the meet. They also ignore that many of the schools that declined invitations issued statements condemning the NYAC. For example, NYT reporter Robert Lipsyte interviewed several coaches and found that they declined to enter teams in the meet in “deference to their black athletes”; other coaches had “given their athletes [the] individual option to compete or not.”[49] Additionally, a few colleges specifically asked their students not to attend. For example, the faculty of Morgan State College of Baltimore, Maryland, passed a resolution advising their student-athletes to abstain. Other schools simply did not attend and provided little or no explanation as to why. For example, the Secretary of Defense issued a short statement that simply notified the press that the military academies would not compete. The available evidence suggests that the majority of absentee athletes and schools boycotted of their own volition, rather than because of any kind of pressure. Indeed, despite the mainstream assertion that the boycott was forced, opponents and scholars have yet to produce evidence that the OPHR had the leverage to force the Department of Defense to boycott the meet.[50]

Second, singling out threats as the dominant “pressure” that forced athletes to boycott the NYAC also obscures the fact that much of the black community vehemently supported a boycott of the NYAC and that athletes who defied the boycott were rebuked by a variety of black activists. For instance, Jackie Robinson and the NOI’s Muhammad Speaks expressed sharp disappointment in athletes who planned to participate in the meet. The black media condemned Edwards’s threats as indefensible, but his was only the most extreme exhortation from those advocating athletes to boycott. Indeed, an NYAN columnist scathingly condemned any black person who would cross the picket lines as an “Uncle Tom.”[51]

Scholars have also avoided addressing the charge that the mainstream media purposefully exaggerated the threats and violence as a means to discredit the protest. But several black, leftist, and liberal reporters have suggested that is exactly what the mainstream media attempted to do. In response to the charges, several noted that not only was violence at the protest minimal, they debated whether the police or the protestors were responsible for the two clashes. For example, NYAN and socialist reporters on the scene accused the police of resorting to brutality. Pete Axthelm, who covered the event for Sports Illustrated and Johnson-Cooper both roamed the sidewalks and concluded that the threats and clashes had very little effect on the boycott because very few black athletes actually came to the Garden to participate. The NYAN also gave Edwards and Black Power activists Ahmed, Bob Snide, Donald Washington, and Charles Shabazz and Charles Kenyatta of the Organization of African American Unity credit for keeping the demonstrators orderly and preventing violence and more clashes with police. In his conclusion, Axthelm accused the mainstream media of focusing on the threats until “the issue at stake—the … club’s refusal to admit Negroes and all but a few Jews into its hallowed dining rooms and steam baths was all but irrelevant.”[52] Given the mainstream media’s decisive opposition to the boycott and support of the status quo, their suspicions have merit.[53]

Although the mainstream media attempted to discredit the boycott, it ultimately conceded that it was a success. Indeed, as much as mainstream journalists attempted to dismiss the absentee athletes, the subpar performances, the weary crowd, and the pickets, they could not ignore that the vast majority of black athletes did not participate, that the Russian team withdrew, and that the local Black Freedom Struggle marred the meet.

The mainstream media also could not ignore that the successful boycott suggested that blacks would use sports as a vehicle of protest and thus, that a black boycott of the Olympics was more feasible than previously believed. Indeed, upon recognizing as much, a Time editorial railed against the OPHR, but concluded that the boycott of the NYAC “was enough of a success to encourage [the OPHR] to campaign all the harder against the U.S. Olympic team.”[54]

Conclusion

The campaign against the NYAC was a success for several reasons, not least of which is because it caused the cancelation of the annual meet. In May 1968, the club announced that, rather than be “subjected to the abuse the NYAC had to take,” it would not sponsor a 1969 meet, ending a 100-year tradition.[55] (The club would begin sponsoring another version of the meet in the mid-1970s.)

The campaign also yielded several much-needed benefits for the OPHR. First, it raised the media profile of the black Olympic boycott. In the weeks after the protest, Edwards and Smith both penned op-eds for major magazines that allowed them to explain to a national audience the connection between the OPHR and the Black Freedom Struggle.[56] Second, it won the OPHR several new significant allies in the form of consistent coverage and endorsements from progressive black media like the NYAN, black nationalists like Muhammad Speaks, the largest circulating black weekly, and leftist publications like The Worker.[57]

The success of the boycott, as well as the additional endorsements and coverage, also bolstered the morale of the activist-athletes already associated with the OPHR. For instance, as the first well-known likely Olympian to publicly support the OPHR, Smith had been the target of the mainstream sports and media establishments’ wrath in the months before the NYAC. After the success of the NYAC boycott, however, he concluded that he was part of an effective movement with significant allies.[58]

The successful NYAC boycott also attracted other potential Olympians to the OPHR. For instance, Vincent Matthews, who attended Johnson C. Smith College in North Carolina, considered participating in an Olympic boycott even though he got very little firsthand information from the OPHR, which was based in California. However, he was a native New Yorker who was resentful of the NYAC’s racist policies and the boycott of the meet led him to continue to believe an Olympic boycott could be effective.[59]

The boycott of the NYAC was among the OPHR’s most literal and figurative successes because it countered the dominance of the media and other opponents’ assertions at a critical early point in the OPHR by demonstrating that there was a potential coalition of blacks, leftists, and progressives who could effectively organize an Olympic boycott. But it also occurred more than seven months before the Olympics were to open in October 1968, and the OPHR had the challenge of sustaining that momentum against opponents that had command of greater resources to influence public opinion. As such, Edwards would continue to link the OPHR with other anti-discrimination campaigns in sports, most notably the international effort to expel South Africa from the 1968 games, and capitalize on the media’s fascination with militants. While those efforts would garner the OPHR publicity and media opportunities, it would not be enough for the OPHR to counter the dominance of the mainstream media for the remaining eight months of the Olympic boycott campaign. In that regard, Edwards failed to take advantage of some of the opportunities created by the NYAC protest. During the campaign, black grassroots groups across the nation called for action against clubs in their locales. It is speculative, but given the support the boycott of the NYAC attracted from local black activists, perhaps the OPHR could have attracted even more attention and allies by helping to organize protests against other clubs or sporting events in the interim between the NYAC and the Olympics. Instead, the NYAC would be the OPHR’s first and only direct-action protest, and the lack of action reflected the OPHR’s failure to build a grassroots base of active members.[60]

Nonetheless, in addition to effectively challenging discrimination in sports, the successful boycott of the NYAC meet demonstrates one of the prime raison d’^etres of the Black Power movement. Prominent black activists joined hundreds of local black activists and the OPHR to call attention to the urgent need to combat institutionalized racism. Motivated by the proliferation of rioting in the mid-1960s, black activists across the political spectrum, from radicals like Edwards and Muhammad Speaks to progressives like King and the NYAN, argued that integration as conceived by liberals had failed to improve the quality of life for blacks and that the NYAC’s racist policies were indicative of the cultural racism that continued to rationalize anti-black discrimination. For black radicals and progressives, integration was ineffective because it did not improve black communities, where the majority of blacks continued to live, and did not challenge the cultural racism that continued to rationalize racial discrimination.

In fact, racism continued to influence the mainstream media’s coverage of the OPHR and Revolt of the Black Athlete. Indeed, despite the success of the movement against the NYAC, the mainstream press and sports establishment continued to portray the OPHR as unworthy of support. It also continued to act as an opponent of the OPHR and furthered the demonization of it. As this examination demonstrates, however, Black Power and the OPHR had significant support, which further suggests that other factors were significant in preventing an Olympic boycott from manifesting. Scholars have yet to examine the influence of the State’s counterintelligence programs on the OPHR and the role of the press in that opposition, despite the fact that both Edwards and Smith have detailed the State’s efforts against the OPHR and that other scholars have detailed the role the State and media had in repressing Black Power movements.[61] That failure further demonstrates that dependence on mainstream sources for information on black and Black Power episodes typically obscures, rather than accurately reveals, impetuses, goals, and achievements of those movements.