The Olympics was the only international political stage that grassroots blacks had access to. The Olympics were about politics.

Harry Edwards was the main organizer of the 1968 Revolt of the Black Athlete which led to the famous Black Power salutes by Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the victory podium at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. He is now professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a consultant to various professional and collegiate sports organizations and to the media.

David Leonard of the ColorLines editorial staff interviewed Dr. Edwards on January 26, 1998, at his Berkeley office.

ColorLines: What activities led to your involvement in the 1968 Olympic protest?

Harry Edwards: The 1968 Olympic protest was something that I originated. It grew out of the circumstances of blacks in sports during the 1960s. I had been a student-athlete at San Jose State and graduated from there with honors in 1964. I had won a Woodrow Wilson fellowship, and chose graduate school over tryouts with the San Diego Chargers or the Minnesota Vikings. I earned my masters degree at Cornell University and then took a part-time teaching job back at San Jose State.

All of the race-related problems that were at San Jose State when I was a student-athlete were by now exacerbated. The segregation was awful. You couldn’t live in approved housing if you were black because they were afraid white students would move out. There were restaurants we couldn’t eat in. Blacks didn’t have access to the recreation hall on campus. If you went to a dance, you almost always danced with white women because there were virtually no black women on campus. But the minute you did that you could be in big trouble. I knew athletes who believed their scholarships were taken, who were kicked off campus, because they were accused of dating a white woman.

Blacks faced academic inequities. If blacks wanted to major in something outside of social welfare, physical education or criminology, they had to go through all kinds of changes. In order to major in sociology, I had to petition. The basic wisdom was that blacks were natural athletes so we could cut it in physical education. Blacks could study social welfare or criminology, because we were always going to be criminals and welfare recipients. But we weren’t allowed the same freedom to enroll in sociology, a more academically challenging and less “applied” field.

These were guys that would go out and run world record times on the track and then, they would leave, not for a party, but to drive up to East Palo Alto or Oakland, and participate in a march against police brutality.

Black athletes were not graduating. There were about 70 blacks on campus, out of 22,000 students, and 60 or so were athletes, or former athletes trying to finish their degrees. I think I was the first athlete since 1951 to graduate within the period of his athletic eligibility.

So when I came back as an instructor all of those problems had escalated. They had begun to bring more blacks on campus as a consequence of the 1966 NCAA championship game where the University of Texas El Paso started five black players and beat the storied, lily-white University of Kentucky team. The Black Power movement had gotten underway. Anyway, when I came back I went to the president of the University to talk about the problems blacks faced. He sent me to each dean or vice president who was in charge of a specific area which I had raised a concern about. The president literally sent me to the vice president in charge of housing, to the dean in charge of academics, etc. They literally laughed in my face -- they took my concerns as a joke.

At that point I began to organize the athletes. We got mobilized and were able to get a football game canceled when blacks on both teams threatened to boycott. Then Governor Reagan promised to call out the National Guard to assure the game was not disrupted. Time and Newsweek picked up the story because it was the first time in 100 years of NCAA Division I history that a football game had been canceled because of campus protest.

We began to get letters from athletes all over the country. So I began traveling around the country and organizing what came to be known as the Revolt of the Black Athlete. By traveling we found out that those black athletes who were being shafted on the campuses, were the same athletes the nation depended on as part of its Olympic contingent. These black athletes could participate in the N.Y. Athletic Club’s indoor track meet at Madison Square Garden, but weren’t allowed to join the Club or be housed there with their white peers. So it was not a huge jump from the Revolt of the Black Athlete on college campuses to the Olympic Project for Human Rights. Many of the people at the higher echelons of the NCAA were also connected to the United States Olympic Committee. It was all one sports hierarchy. We were battling one beast that had several heads. That was essentially the evolution of the Olympic Project for Human Rights.

CL: What was the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) about, in terms of tactics, goals, ideologies?

HE: The Project was not just about athletic goals. We recognized that the black athlete was inextricably embedded in and reflective of the community circumstances from which these athletes emerged. We felt we had to speak not just about the predicament of athletes, but to the interests of their communities. To simply speak to athletes’ interests would not only have been short-sighted, but self-serving. We had to understand the broader context and configuration of the black struggle for freedom and justice.