15. “Black Power Salute” details show that the two athletes carefully planned the moment to send a powerful message.
This famous image of American sprinters, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, captured by John Dominis, an American photographer, and photojournalist, shows the moment when the two athletes use their moment of triumph at the Olympic games in Mexico, 1968, to make a powerful political statement. As the Star-Spangled Banner begins to play, Smith and Carlos in a pre-planned gesture, raise a gloved fist – a black power salute. As Carlos later put it, “we knew that what we were going to do was far greater than any athletic feat.”
Apart from the Black Power salute the two men made, they both used what they chose to wear and not to wear as further symbols of solidarity with their fellow African-Americans. Carlos wore a black scarf, which was a symbol of black pride. Around his neck, he wore a bead necklace as a symbol of remembrance of all black men who had been lynched or killed. Carlos’s open jacket was an expression of solidarity with blue collar workers in the United States. Smith wore black socks, with no shoes as a symbol of black poverty.