Stand!

More than the 19.8 seconds of lightning-fast speed, fifty years later, it is the ninety seconds of motionless and statuesque protest that we will remember this week. The date was October 16, 1968; the setting was the Olympic Games in Mexico City. The event was the 200-meter race. The world record would be set and the gold medal received by Tommie Smith, who was joined on the awards podium by bronze medalist and college teammate John Carlos, who in his final strides had been overtaken by the Australian Peter Norman (who still holds the world record for Olympian most frequently cropped out of an iconic photograph). While the trigger for their protest began with the readmission of apartheid South Africa to the Olympic Games, it came to encompass racial injustices in Africa and America writ large. In the run-up to the race – with rumors of potential protests swirling – Smith, Carlos, and their teammates were subjected to intimidation from the US Olympic Committee and even from their own coaching staff.

The decision was made to let winning athletes choose their own form of protest. The first test, the 100-meter, did not bode well. Jim Hines and Charles Greene – gold and silver medalists respectively – stood stolidly as “The Star-Spangled Banner” played, and Greene quickly went on to sign a professional football contract. Upon their victory, Tommie Smith and John Carlos were taken to the dressing room beneath the stadium to await the presentation of their medals, where Smith produced the black gloves – right for him, left for Carlos – that were “the focal point for the gesture to follow.” “The national anthem is a sacred song to me,” Smith said to Carlos. “This can’t be sloppy. It has to be clean and abrupt.” Moments later, with a black scarf around Smith’s neck, a human rights button on their lapels, and black stocking feet, both men stood with head bowed and fist raised for the ninety-second duration of the American anthem. As Smith would later explain: “My raised hand stood for the power in black America. Carlos’s raised hand stood for the unity of black America. Together they formed an arch of unity and power. The black scarf around my neck stood for black pride. The black socks with no shoes stood for black poverty in racist America. The totality of our effort was the regaining of black dignity.” (H. Edwards, The Revolt of the Black Athlete : 50th Anniversary Edition, pp. 76-93).

The response was immediate. The US Olympic Committee warned all athletes that severe penalties would follow any further protests. Smith and Carlos were suspended from the Olympic team and given 48 hours to leave Mexico. In the days to follow, the image of Smith and Carlos with fists pumped in the air would be reproduced on the front pages of every newspaper, and in the decades to follow, in every high school American history textbook – one of, if not the most, iconic image of social protest on record. (D. Hartmann, Race, Culture and The Revolt of the Black Athlete, pp. 3-14).

Students of sports history know well that our present-day debates over sports and social protest are only the latest chapter in a storied history that began long ago. As Ecclesiastes taught: “There is nothing new under the sun.” As much as this week’s 50th anniversary of John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s famed protest in ’68 is an opportunity to revisit their courage, it is also a reminder that the kneeling football players of our era walk in the footsteps of those who came before. Depending on your athletic passions and when you were born, your point of reference will vary. In his study on the subject, sports sociologist Harry Edwards identifies four waves of black athletic activism. The first began with Jesse Owen’s victory at the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany or Joe Louis’s defeat of Max Schmeling, as black athletes sought to establish the basic legitimacy of their athletic prowess. The second wave, roughly from 1946 to 1965, can be characterized as a struggle for access, with athletes like Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby in baseball, Woodie Strode and Kenny Washington in football, and Earl Lloyd and Chuck Cooper in basketball. The third wave of athletic activism (to include the ‘68 Olympics) was led by athletes such as Bill Russell, Jim Brown, and Arthur Ashe, who leveraged their talents, success, and celebrity toward seeking dignity, equality, and justice for black people across society – an era embodied most famously by Muhammad Ali’s famed declaration: “I ain’t got no problem with them Vietcong,” his refusal to serve in Vietnam, and the stripping of his boxing license and title.

If you will permit me a digression, I draw your attention to one of the more underappreciated chapters of the third wave of activism, when the AFL scheduled its 1965 all-star game in New Orleans. As African American players arrived, not only were they left stranded at airports, having been denied taxi service, but they were refused admittance to nightspots and restaurants. Led by Buffalo Bills end Ernie Warlick, the twenty-one African American players met in the Roosevelt Hotel and announced that they would not play in an all-star game hosted in New Orleans – prompting the cancellation of the game. This past summer, Dr. Chris Warlick – the late Ernie Warlick’s son, now a professor of urology in Minnesota – reminded me of the incident and was generous enough to share a draft of Warlick’s press conference speech that historic day. (There are copies in the back of the Sanctuary for you to take and read at the end of services.)

By the 1980s and 90s the social movements of the prior decades began to wane. The loss of leaders with the moral and organizational authority of MLK or Malcolm X, the reluctance of certain athletes to take on leadership roles (think of Michael Jordan’s “Republicans buy gym shoes too” or Charles Barkley’s “I am not a role model”) and the premature presumption that America was entering a post-racial era, resulted in a short-lived hiatus in black athlete activism until the Black Lives Matter movement. The 2012 hoodie protest of the Miami Heat, the 2015 “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” gesture by the five players on the St. Louis Rams, the “I Can’t Breathe” t-shirt of Lebron James, and, of course, the much-debated kneeling by former San Francisco Forty-Niners quarterback Colin Kaepernick, among other examples, all signaled the fourth wave of black athletes’ activism, which we are very much in the midst of to this day. By this telling, neither the protests themselves nor the responses of the establishment are new. In fact, the only interesting thing about our era is that in times past, protests came at a great financial cost to any athlete, like Smith, Carlos, or Ali, who placed principle over profit. Today, it would seem, it is not an either/or proposition. Not all athletes are punished for their activism; one can, it would seem, both protest and sign with a major shoe company.

Now I am no legal scholar – though I do know one or two attorneys. From what I can make out, given that sports teams are privately owned, these are not First Amendment issues in the purest sense. Players may be able to do and say anything they want, just as owners on their part have the legal right to fire players. As to the question of whether a protest in the face of the flag or national anthem is or isn’t “kosher,” I would refer you to the concurring opinion of Justice Kennedy in Texas vs. Johnson that “the flag protects [even] those who hold it in contempt,” or, if you like, the words of my favorite fictional American President, Andrew Shepherd, who taught us that if you claim this land to be the land of the free, “Then the symbol of our country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest.” As varied as the motivations and methods of protesting athletes may be, I have to believe that for many if not most of them, their decision to protest reflects their highest hopes for a country they love that has failed time and again to live up to the ideals and freedoms implicit in its founding documents and symbols.

While our tradition, not surprisingly, says very little about the nexus of athletics and social protest, it does – beginning with this week – have plenty to say about matters of exercising conscience. No matter how righteous Noah may have been, his virtue is circumscribed by his unwillingness or inability to respond to the wickedness of his day. As the flood waters rose, not only did he enter the ark as his generation perished, but he proved unwilling, despite his privileged relationship with God, to leverage his stature toward changing either the behavior of his contemporaries or the decree of God. Et ha-elohim hit·halekh noah, Noah walked with God – he was in the room (or ark) where it happened; he could have used his clout to make a difference, but he didn’t.

Which is why it is not Noah but Abraham whom we meet at the tail end of this week’s Torah reading and who is our moral exemplar as Jews. Not only, as the Midrash explains, was Abraham willing to stand on one side of the world as the rest of the world stood on the other, but Abraham was willing to stand in the breach and put himself at great risk for the good of others. Not just for his own kin, as he would on behalf of Lot and his family, but also on behalf of those altogether undeserving of his aid, as in the case of the wicked citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah. The promise made to Abraham was twofold: to be the father to a great nation and to be a blessing to all of humankind. Abraham understood that given his privileged relationship to God, it was incumbent upon him to use that privilege to speak truth to power toward redressing the injustices of his age, even if taking a stand came at his own expense. From our founding father Abraham to Moses’s fight for freedom from the house of Pharaoh to Queen Esther in the royal court to – dare I say – the privileged pulpit of Park Avenue Synagogue, it is the willingness of individuals to leverage their position toward redressing the ills of society that has been the Jewish measure of moral leadership throughout the ages. As the Talmud teaches, “Anyone who is able to protest against the transgressions of their household and does not protest is held accountable for the actions of the members of their household. . . . Anyone who is able to protest against the transgressions of the entire world and does not, is held accountable for the transgressions of the entire world.” (Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 54b-55a) The question is not whether you agree or disagree with the causes for which athletes are protesting. After all, if you disagree, you have the self-same right to use your position of privilege to advocate on behalf of your beliefs. The question is whether athletes – given the attention, wealth, and celebrity we, their complicit fans, bestow upon them – have the right to speak out and protest on behalf of the causes in which they believe. As a Jew, one could go so far as to say that not only do they have the right, but they have the obligation to do so. As Tommie Smith and John Carlos teach us, it is the character of our deeds, not the number of our medals that are ultimately memorialized in the judgement of history.

In his fifty-year retrospective on the ’68 Olympics, Harry Edwards reminds us of the six great movements of our country: abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, labor, civil rights, environmentalism, and gay rights. “Not one of these movements,” Edwards writes, “was initiated or had its basic concepts, methods and goals first articulated by an elected or appointed official in conjunction with mandated duties. Not one of these movements precipitated initially out of government policy. . . . Movements are, therefore, an imperative of democracy. This is the true meaning and relevance of the opening line of the preamble to the United States Constitution: ‘We the People. . .’” (Edwards, p. 167). Important as national anthems are, as Jews our moral compass has been wrought from those songs that call on us to “Stand! For the things you know are right,” the songs that remind us, “You’ve been sitting much too long, there’s a permanent crease in your right and wrong.”  These are the battle hymns that date back not just to 1968, but to the beginnings of our people. These are the anthems that have carried our people from generation to generation and deserve to be sung – and must be sung anew – again and again in our day.