Nearly 48 years ago, USA Olympic sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith bowed their heads and raised black-gloved fists on the medal stands at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics as The Star-Spangled Banner played. The “Black Power salute” was actually later called a human rights salute by the then-young black men who made history that was both loved and hated at that time.

There may not be an Olympic team in Rio de Janeiro that owns a bigger spotlight than the USA Basketball team, which is entirely composed of African-American players. And with veteran forward Carmelo Anthony very vocal as of late on the topic of race relations and the violence between African-Americans and police officers, Carlos and Smith believe the gold-medal favorite USA Basketball squad could make a big Olympic statement if it chooses to.

“One of the best basketball teams have been put together,” Smith told The Undefeated at an event announcing the return of San Jose State University’s men’s track and field program on Monday. “You not only have one star, but you have a plethora of stars on that team. And each star has its own light to shine. And hopefully that light that they will shine will make a better picture of things that are extending out there in the world that needs light to be shone on.

“The visibility of greatness will always have some type of picture painted. It’s up to the individuals to decide what they see in the picture. I think the basketball team will do that. It’s very, very visible. This is the Olympic Games.”

“I would hope that they circumvent the circumstances of society and digest it and do what they feel is necessary for them to help alleviate the pain of so many people, not just in the United States, but around the world,” Carlos told The Undefeated at the San Jose State event.

Smith and Carlos were immediately suspended from Team USA, banned from the Olympic Village and kicked out of the Mexico City Games by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for their Black Power statement. So does Anthony have the strength to make a major political statement with the major risk involved?

One provision of Olympic Charter Rule 50 states that no type of demonstration, political or religious, is allowed during the Olympics. Any violation of the clause may result in disqualification or withdrawal of accreditation of the person concerned after review by the IOC executive board. The U.S. men’s basketball team is projected to play in the gold-medal game on the last day of the Olympics, which would make expulsion for any political demonstration by Anthony or one of his teammates on the medal stand too late for impact. USA Basketball executive director Jerry Colangelo recently told The Undefeated he wouldn’t silence his team or tell them what to say.

Anthony spoke to The Undefeated after USA Basketball’s final pre-Olympics exhibition contest, a 110-66 win over Nigeria on Monday in Houston. He said that he is very well aware of Olympic Charter Rule 50 and that he is not scared to make a political statement either. But the three-time Olympian believes a gold medal will make the strongest statement and he plans to adhere to Rule 50.

“I know about that rule,” Anthony told The Undefeated. “We had a rule talk about the do’s and the don’ts. What you can do and what you can’t do. I know the basics of what I want to do and what I don’t want to do. But for me, I think I’ve laid the foundation down and laid the platform down where the best thing for me at this point is to win a gold medal and show our country that we are united through all these times. I think that’s the image I want to send out.

“If I wanted to do something, I’d do it. I wouldn’t let nothing hold me back. But I know I got a group of guys that got my back and need me there for them. The message I want to send is us standing on that medal stand united with them putting that gold medal around our neck despite everything that is going on in our country. I haven’t thought about putting the black glove on. I want to stay away from that, especially right now. I think the message we have an opportunity to send is big enough.”

Anthony was born on May 29, 1984, long after Carlos and Smith held their black-gloved fists in the air in Mexico City. The New York Knicks forward, however, is very knowledgeable about American black history and said he “knows a lot” about Carlos and Smith. Anthony also expressed strong respect for Australian silver medalist Peter Norman, who joined Carlos and Smith on the podium wearing a human rights badge on his jacket.

Norman’s badge on the podium was in support of the Olympic Project for Human Rights and was borrowed from U.S. rower Paul Hoffman. Norman also suggested that Smith and Carlos share the black gloves used in the famous salute after Carlos left his pair in the Olympic Village. Norman died of a heart attack on Oct. 3, 2006, at the age of 64. Smith and Carlos gave eulogies and were pallbearers at his funeral.

“It was a lot different back then as far as the racial divide and what was going on back then,” Anthony said. “I was more impressed with the Aussie that was there because he was something in his own country that a lot of people don’t recognize.”

“As Peter Norman said once before, throw a rock in a pool and watch the ripples come to show, ” Smith said. “And this is life. It’s a beautiful thing if you view it proactively. If you view it proactively, there are going to be problems. There are going to be problems no matter what you do. It’s a bigger problem if you don’t flush it.”

A week earlier, Anthony spearheaded an event at a Los Angeles youth center where the men’s and women’s U.S. Olympic basketball teams, community leaders, young adults and police talked in groups about the importance of respect, communication and safety. The nine-time NBA All-Star has been involved in social activism in the past, including walking in protest in his hometown of Baltimore last year to honor the late Freddie Gray, who died in police custody. In early July, Anthony awoke in the middle of the night and penned a 280-word Instagram post in which he said that the “system was broken” and called for sports superstars to spark a change.

Carlos said he is impressed by the socially conscious Anthony’s “attitude of truth.”

“He is direct, very direct. And there is truth in [being] direct because there is purpose,” he said. “Carmelo Anthony, he has always been out there doing what he feels is necessary. But it wasn’t as strong until he adapted an avenue that brought back what has already been done in the Smith and Carlos stand in Mexico City and our belief in education. I think he is going to continue with the programs that he has going with the athletes he has involved. The truth he tells like it should be told, so the other people can see themselves in what he is doing. It’s a bit like the old times.”

Anthony also joined fellow NBA stars LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Paul in putting a spotlight on violence and racial issues during the opening of The ESPYS on July 13. Carlos was very impressed by those collective star NBA voices.

“It’s not just Carmelo Anthony. It’s LeBron. It’s Chris. It’s Wade. It’s all the individuals collectively,” Smith said. “I think this is a lifelong relay. This is not a moment with two people in 1968. It’s a movement. These young individual athletes are an extension of that movement. They have a vision on how things can be based, on how we felt at that time that is relative to the fact that I can’t be concerned about myself as much as I should be concerned about individuals who grew up in my community or the individuals who are suffering throughout the world for various reasons.

“They realize they can be what we anticipated being in ’68. So we commend each and every one of them for what they’re doing. We hope that they can encourage others, not only professional athletes, but professionals in general to stand up and be a voice for the voiceless.”

Anthony said that the timing and the sport was “totally different” for Smith and Carlos than it is for USA Basketball now. Even so, Carlos and Smith hope that more athletes like Anthony will follow in their footsteps as the 50th anniversary of their statement approaches.

“All individual athletes, superstars in particular, have the opportunity to perform their duties as athletes to do a courageous job to defend their Stars and Stripes in the United States,” Carlos said. “But just in the same vein, they have the right to expound upon what they feel are the ills of their personal lives. Their personal lives reflect the people of their environment from which they came as well as their travels throughout the world. They realize there is pain and suffering and they can be a catalyst to try and right those things out.”

“That door has been opened,” Smith said. “And the sacrifices that we took was only reached by hammering and twisting. Now we’ve opened it and let everybody in. And they are coming in. But come in with something and leave with more.”

Nearly 48 years ago, Tommie Smith and John Carlos stood on the podium during the 1968 Olympics and, as the national anthem was played, each raised a gloved fist to make a statement about the unequal treatment of blacks in America.

Their silent gesture made people uncomfortable.

Yesterday, Smith and Carlos were at San Jose State University, where they starred in the 1960s, as the school announced the return of the men’s track program. Confetti flew, people cheered and later Smith and Carlos were among the featured speakers during a two-hour panel discussion. Much of that passionate talk shifted toward current protests over problems of inequality in America, including the Black Lives Matter movement.

The conversation, at times, appeared to make some of the people in attendance uncomfortable.

The school plans to reinstate its men’s track program on Oct. 16, 2018 — the 50th anniversary of Smith and Carlos raising their fists after they won gold and bronze medals in the 200-meter dash at the games in Mexico City. Men’s track was cut in 1988 because of budget problems. San Jose State wanted to reconnect with its storied program, and has already raised $2 million for a new $5 million stadium adjacent to the school’s football stadium.

The outdoor ceremony — which was followed by the panel discussion and luncheon — was held at the base of a 23-foot-tall fiberglass, steel and ceramic statue unveiled in 2005 that captures the controversial medal stand moment that led to the two being banned for the remainder of the games.

Nearly 500 people — including past and present school athletes — attended the announcement, which celebrated the history of a program that produced 43 world records and 49 American records between 1958 and 1979. Back then, San Jose State was known as “Speed City,” and four people from the school — Smith, Carlos, Lee Evans (two gold medals in the 1968 games) and coach Bud Winter — are in the USA Track and Field Hall of Fame.

“I’m just so honored and humbled,” Carlos, 71, told the crowd about being invited back for the announcement. “If God ever has a program where he recycles and sends you back, I would hope he sends me back to San Jose State.”

While the program was developing runners who starred on a world stage, it also was known as a place where student athletes stood up for causes. Much of that activism stemmed from the creation of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, which was established in 1967 by Harry Edwards to raise awareness about racial issues in society and sports.

Edwards had just earned his master’s degree in sociology from Cornell (he later earned his doctorate from there as well) when he began the program. He recalled being quizzed during the 1960s about the movement on the San Jose campus.

“A reporter said to me, ‘Is there something in the water there?’ And I said, ‘Yes, there is and they call it Spartan Spirit,’ ” Edwards told the crowd, referring to the school mascot. “They call it the Spartan courage and this is who we are and what we we’re all about.”

Looking at Carlos and Smith — and the statue right behind them — Edwards got emotional as he spoke about the return of track and field to the school.

“And now it’s time to turn the page, and for the new generation to add their contribution to the legacy,” Edwards said. “But the people that we bring to talk to what San Jose is about have to also remind these new recruits, these 21st century Spartans, that they stand on the shoulders of giants.”

Those giants — Carlos, Smith, Edwards and Evans — were later the featured panelists during a luncheon that included former track athletes. Their conversation was largely about the activism of the athletes that began when Edwards, who had been captain of the San Jose basketball team and threw the discus on the track and field team, returned to the school to teach in 1966.

When Edwards, who had graduated from San Jose State University in 1964, came back, he found a campus that had few black professors, no black coaches, and black athletes who were unable to find housing because of landlords who refused to rent to them.

“There was a dearth of black people in positions that provided a culture of nurturing that you needed as a student,” Edwards said. “After speaking to the president about it without satisfactory results, I raised a simple question: Why should we play where we can’t work?”

Eventually that led to the formation of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, which helped in the social transformation of African-American athletes on campus. The group attempted to organize a boycott of the 1968 Olympics by black athletes.

“We wanted to raise shade to bigotry, racism prejudice and bias,” Carlos said. “We decided that we weren’t going to run for glory for ourselves; we ran for glory for humanity. This is why young people are stepping up now, based on the seeds we planted and watered. These [professional] athletes today are just an extension of a lifelong relay.”

Despite their stance, Carlos said that many high-profile athletes of his era didn’t embrace the activist role because of fear.

“That fear factor is why we have the problem with black people in America and law enforcement,” Carlos said. “If you take a newborn puppy and put it in a corner and throw stuff at it every day, smack around and beat it and don’t feed it — eventually that little puppy that doesn’t have any hatred whatsoever will strike out against you.”

He compared that wounded puppy to members of the current demonstrations throughout this country.

“When there’s enough friction, there’s combustion and then ‘Boom!’ ” Carlos added. “And that’s where we are in society now. The same racism we face today we faced 48 years ago. We’re still fighting. Now the youngsters are telling us, ‘You did your job. Now we’re going to spring off your shoulders.’ ”

Then Carlos made a pointed comment to the audience.

“I challenge each and every one of you right now to step up against bigotry, step up against racism, step up against pandering to one another. Step up and start speaking the truth.”

Some in the cheered enthusiastically. Others sat silent.

While the panelists were messengers from a different era, what they stood for still resonated with some of the youth there yesterday. Like Austin Morales, 21, a fourth-year student who waited patiently to approach the table occupied by Smith.

When he saw an opening, he introduced himself and unfurled a poster that showed two gloved fists with a quote that the poster attributed to Smith (although a published story credits it to Carlos):

“We are not a show horse doing a performance.”

Afterward, Morales, autographed poster in hand, spoke about what Smith and Carlos meant to the school.

“They’re inspiring, and it makes me feel good to attend a school with representation like these guys,” Morales said. “I can only hope that as I grow, I can carry the influence that they did.”

Smith, still holding court at his table, was asked what goes through his mind when he sees his statue. He turned his head and glanced at the giant likeness.

“Look at that face of the young man up there,” said Smith, 72. “That was a cry for freedom and that was sadness.

“I knew anything that was being done, there would be repercussions,” he added. “I didn’t worry about that. It was done because there was a need to stand up for those who did not have a platform to be heard.”

Which is why Smith understands the actions of the activists of the current generation. Like Smith and Carlos, they have decided to make people uncomfortable.

Long before “The Dream Team” — the collapse and rise of USA Basketball with LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, Dwyane Wade and Kevin Durant leading Team USA into the 2016 Rio Olympics — there was Spencer Haywood.

Haywood was a relatively unknown member of the USA Basketball team that lacked lots of black talent during the civil rights movement at the renowned 1968 Mexico City Olympics. The Silver City, Mississippi, native went from picking cotton in his youth to leading the United States to an unexpected gold medal. Haywood scored a USA Olympic record of 145 total points that wasn’t surpassed until Durant scored 156 in 2012.

Haywood was most known for winning a lawsuit against the NBA in 1971 as a 7-2 U.S. Supreme Court decision overturned an old requirement stating that a player can’t be drafted by an NBA team unless he waited four years after graduating from high school. In the next NBA collective bargaining agreement, the Las Vegas resident is hopeful that the rule allowing kids to leave school early to the NBA will be called “The Spencer Haywood Rule.” The four-time NBA All-Star was also the 1970 ABA MVP, won an NBA championship with the Los Angeles Lakers in 1980, had his No. 24 jersey retired by the Seattle SuperSonics and overcame serious drug issues.

With the arrival of the Rio Olympics, Haywood talked to The Undefeated about his amazing rise from picking cotton in Mississippi to being terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan while working at an all-white country club to growing into a little-known teenager who starred in the 1968 Olympics highlighted by Tommie Smith and John Carlos’ “Black Power salute.”

What do you remember about picking cotton in Mississippi?

I grew up competing with the idea that I’m going to be the greatest cotton picker ever. So my brothers and I would get up in the morning — we were young, like 7, 8, 9 — get the cotton when it was wet, put it in the sack and then drag it. Cotton-picking is kind of brutal stuff. You’re that young. You put 100 pounds of cotton in a sack. You’re like maybe a half a mile away. So you put the sack back on your shoulder and you learn how to walk with 100 pounds on your shoulder. And you get back to the trailer and dump it out.

I didn’t know I was building a basketball player. You’re picking two rows. You’re picking with your hands. You’re getting your coordination. I didn’t know what I was training for, but I was picking cotton. I did it all the way up until 15. I did it from the time I was born. You’re born by a midwife on the bed in which you were conceived on. That’s where they put the babies out, pull them out and cut the cord and everything. And my mother would get maybe one day or two days off and then we were back out into the cotton field, strapped on my mother’s back.

I remember looking up at cotton as a baby, pulling from the bottom. What you learn is you got to pull it from the bottom because they can’t get it up there, they down there and you riding on the sack while they’re picking and you riding. And you’re like a little baby and you’re picking that cotton. I started at maybe 3 years old.

How do you look back on cotton-picking?

I look back on it like it was the best thing that ever happened to me. We were dirt poor. We had no food. So that was salvation. Basketball and training and stuff, like later on, I mean practice for two hours, three hours, I’m like, ‘That’s all?’ I always worked from sun up to sun down. I never worked like other people worked. And as a young kid, you learn work ethic.

Did you feel like you were a slave picking cotton in Mississippi?

When I was down in Mississippi? I knew I was. But I knew I was in indentured slavery. I didn’t have no rights — I couldn’t. I had to go to different bathrooms, I had to go to different water fountains. Oh, I lived my whole life like that.

And then you see the men who own the cotton field, sitting on the porch with big straw hats on looking like Colonel Sanders or something, and drinking julep, talking, ‘Boy! Y’all sho’ can work hard!’ We made $2 a day, he sitting on his ass making $2,000.

How did you go to school as a child?

You didn’t go to school. You went to school, but the Mississippi law was they would shut down the school during harvest time. Planting, picking and chopping. So you only went to school a third of the time. Slavery, but you know, it’s after reconstruction so it’s still slavery. I was growing up in that system. We didn’t go to school that much.

When I got to Detroit, I did this test. They were going to find out where I was, what grade level we got to work on. I get there and I got everybody around me like, ‘Wait a minute. Your education is very lacking. How? What?’

Could you read?

I could read. But I remember going up to the chalkboard and writing, ‘s-p-e-n.’ I was introducing myself to the class and I put a small ‘s’ for Spencer and a small ‘h’ for Haywood. And everybody cracked up. I was like, ‘What’s the joke?’ But I hadn’t been taught.

So then I figured what I need to do is apply my cotton field work ethic to academics while I’m here at [Detroit’s] Pershing High School. I had Dr. Wayne Dyer, the noted author, he was there at the school and he took me under his arm and we buckled down three and four hours a day. I caught up. And when I left high school I was carrying a B average. I had such horrible grades up until that point.

How did you start playing basketball?

I started playing basketball because my brothers played and I wanted to fit in with them. My brother Andrew was like this, ‘I’m the man of the house … ’ And he was just determined to make a man out of me. He was four years older so I started playing basketball with him. I just remember all my time I was playing with him I always was bloody with a black eye or something because he always popped me really good, getting the ball or something.

One night, we were playing over this boy’s house named ‘Pee Wee.’ And my brother is talking about me like, ‘You’re the worst. I’ve never seen such a horrible player.’ So the ball came off the basket and something came over me. I grabbed it. I went back up and I dunked it. And they were like, ‘What the f—?’ So we played until deep into the night by the moonlight.

I was 13. I never walked with my brother side by side because he would keep me back behind him. ‘Don’t you walk beside me, boy.’ Because he only learned from the whites down there in Mississippi. He didn’t know better. I was always walking behind him because he didn’t want to lose his ground to me of all people. And that night he said, ‘Let’s walk together.’ That was my right of passage. In basketball, that was the one. That’s like bringing up some real cool stuff now. That was like, almost like, winning a gold medal.

I was tall. I had to be 6-foot-5, so I grew so fast. I grew 5 inches in a summer. So coach told me, ‘You got to be in the gym!’ [I said,] ‘What about Andrew?’ [Coach replied,] ‘Aw, he’s uncoachable. He’s a renegade. We want you.’ And, I’m like, ‘Oh my God.’

How did you end up in Detroit for high school?

They call you a ‘Big Buck’ in Mississippi, and they have all of that farm work you have to do. What happens is they take the Big Buck and they put him in jail on false charges. I was put in jail for one night for false charges and my mother said, ‘I don’t want my baby to go down like this.’ Willie Harris said I was disturbing the peace over at the country club. I was a caddy. Harris welded a quarter to a nail and nailed it down. So then I’m trying to get this quarter off because I’m thinking in my head, ‘Man I got some [crackers] and a Coca-Cola.’ I’m thinking I found me a quarter. So I’m trying to get the damn thing off and it was like stuck to the thing. So he’s like, ‘Aw, you trying to steal my quarter!’ And, I’m like, ‘Oh my God.’ And I didn’t get the joke until he sat down. Then he came out and he was beating me.

So he’s whooping my ass and I decide to fight back. And they say, ‘Well, you know you going to jail … ’ So when I got in jail for that one night, which is like horrible.

Then my mother said, ‘It’s time for you to go,’ because all of these old women had seen all of this. They had seen this s— for years and years and years. All of my brothers had to leave my hometown at a certain age. And mine just came a little bit earlier because they were going to get me.

What was the most degrading thing you heard and happened while working at the all-white country club?

The worst thing that happened was the day that [President John F.] Kennedy got shot. And some members were with the [Ku Klux] Klan. They lined us up as kids and on the fairway and drove golf balls at our head. And they wanted to explain to us, ‘We got your n—– loving Kennedy and we going to make an example out of you guys.’ It was a hell of day around there.

Did you get hit by a golf ball?

Nah, I didn’t get hit. But another kid got hit and we saw the golf ball hit him in his head and his head just blew up. It was just really horrible. They hit golf balls at us, and we just duck them. I would think, ‘Hell, for an hour?’

If the ball comes in after you, you duck your head, then let it hit you, and you roll over with it. If it hits you in the spine, you’re f—–. But if it got all the other parts, you’re all right. So that’s the anger we had to deal with while caddying in Silver City, Mississippi, being in that environment.

Can you talk about when Jesse Owens addressed the black athletes on the 1968 U.S. Olympic team?

Tommie Smith, John Carlos, Lee Evans, George Foreman, all of us were sitting there and he was addressing us. George wanted to knock the Russian out and be rich. I don’t want to go back to whatever we were going back to [in America]. So Jesse came in talking about all of this stuff about what a great thing for us to be Americans and do this. Tommy and John were rough. John Carlos was really rough.

So Carlos and Smith were not listening to Owens?

No. Hell no. So the killing point was when [Owens] got angry and he said, ‘What the hell would any of you SOB’s feel like running in front of [Adolph] Hitler?’ [Owens] warned us not to do the protest, not to do any stance or anything because you are fighting against the world. ‘You’re not fighting just for the black cause.’

Tommy was saying, ‘When you get back, you going to get us jobs?’ And, Tommy was like, ‘Man, I can’t get no job now. Ain’t nobody getting no damn jobs now.’ So [Smith] was like confrontational. It was beautiful, just beautiful. Then of course [U.S. sprinter] Wilma Rudolph came in and she spoke her nice words and stuff.

So you were hanging out with George Foreman during the 1968 Olympics?

Yeah. We just had turned 19 so we were the youngest guys there. We were like, ‘Man, you want to go to the commissary?’ That’s all we did was eat. We’re growing and all that food. And all of the Russians come into the commissary. They eating like all the stuff up. And we were like, ‘We got to get this food.’

So [USA Basketball coach] Hank Iba would always say, ‘If you’re looking for those two sons of b——, go to the food line.’ So that was our thing. Just trying to enjoy it.

What was it like being on a USA Basketball team that a lot of young black stars decided not to play for during the civil rights movement, and you still won gold?

Harry [Edwards] had did such a phenomenal thing. Then Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar] was boycotting. And Elvin Hayes and Westley Unseld didn’t boycott, but they were supposed to sign the contract to go with their team and become pro. They did. And we didn’t have Bob Lanier. Guys got cut from the team. Pete Maravich got cut. And Calvin Murphy got cut. Rick Mount got cut. Tom Boerwinkle. I mean all of the big dogs he cut.

Did you face any criticism for playing for USA Basketball from black athletes, media or people?

No. I didn’t because I was an unexpected selection. I was not a superstar when I went to the Olympics. I came back a megastar. But when I went people in Michigan and junior college knew about me and what I could do, but the vast public had no idea. That was the first time America had seen me play and they fell in love with me because I set the record as the youngest player in the history of America in the Olympics. And I broke the record in rebounding, points and in blocked shots.

How did you hear about Carlos and Smith’s Black Power protest?

When they did the protest, I remember because we were all living in the same compound. After the protest, Jo Jo White and Charlie Scott and Joe King, we’re coming in from practice and they were escorting Tommie and John out of everything. And we were like, ‘What the f— is this all about?’ So they were escorting them out, off the grounds.

And [International Olympic Committee president] Avery Brundage was like cursing and going on. And he was just being obnoxious. You know [telling the black athletes], ‘This is going to be a great example for y’all! We don’t want to see no more of this s— around here!’ So they kicked them out of the Olympics.

They were disappointed. They were hurt because they had gone to the Olympics. They didn’t boycott. They came there, did all of the right things. Wanted to just put on the glove and show solidarity back home.

What are your fondest memories of the 1968 Olympics?

That Olympics was something else, man. We saw that boy jump backward over the [high jump] bar: [American] Dick Fosbury. You’re used to a scissor kick, a dive, but he came to thing and jumped over backward.

And George [Foreman] was like, ‘I’m telling y’all, I’m going to put that Russian down.’ We were like, ‘George, man, come on. That Russian going to beat your ass.’ So George was like, ‘And it ain’t going to be no protest either.’

So when George put the Russian down I was looking at it because we had circuits and all the stuff in the village. So George came out and whipped out that American flag. I said, ‘Go ahead, big George.’ It was turmoil man. It’s like, what side are you going to come out of on this thing, you know? That was the ’68 Olympics.

How did you feel when you got your gold medal?

I was so happy, crying and was just overjoyed with all of the ecstasy in life. I’m accepted in America? And we’ve won this gold medal, when everybody said we were going to lose? And the announcers and everybody were talking loud. I could hear the announcement saying, ‘This young man saved America!’ And my chest was out. I couldn’t wait to get up on that stand and put that gold on my neck, man. I was like, ‘Wow,’ that was for my mom, everybody.

What did you think was the reaction in Detroit after winning a gold medal?

I was scared to come back to Detroit after I won my gold. I thought the brothers were going to hang me for representing the U.S. So when I arrived in Detroit, I had my medal around my neck, so … I’m thinking I’m going to get in that car and I’m going to get on over to the campus. I had signed with the University of Detroit as a sophomore [after junior college]. I get to Detroit and we land at Metro [International Airport] and the whole town, the whole city is there cheering me on because I just won the gold and brought it back home. All of the fear that I was having on the plane, what played out, and here it was the opposite.

What was the reaction in Silver City, Mississippi, when you won the gold medal?

When they finished with the gold medal, Mississippi says, ‘Oh, we got to throw a big parade for him at home.’ I wouldn’t go. But it was a big mistake by me not going. On my mother’s death bed, I asked, ‘What have I done that you were sad about, mama?’ And I’m thinking you know, she’s going to say, ‘That Laker year, son. You shouldn’t have never messed around with that coke.’

She said, ‘The day that you didn’t show up for the big parade, because that was my day.’ It hit me hard. I didn’t realize she was that deep into it. That was the struggle of all the Haywoods before her and until her. That was our day to shine. So I took it away. She told me on her deathbed.

So where is your Olympic gold medal now?

In Michigan. We have a house in Michigan. It’s in a vault there. So we’re moving all of our stuff [to Las Vegas] now.

Can you talk about the difficulties of getting a passport for the Olympics?

I didn’t even have a passport. I didn’t have a birth certificate. We were getting ready to get our passport because we had to go to Russia and Yugoslavia on a tour before we came to the Olympics. They said, ‘Where’s your birth certificate? You bring your birth certificate?’ I said, ‘I don’t have no birth certificate. I got an affidavit.’ [They said,] ‘You can’t get no passport on no affidavit. So we got to get a passport for you.’ So that’s when the drama broke out. And the team was all nervous like, ‘What are we going to do? He doesn’t exist.’

I didn’t have a birth certificate because I was born by a midwife. In Silver City, Mississippi, she just wrote the name down in the bible under John 21. And that was my birthday. So how we were going to get that Bible out of my mother’s hands? She wasn’t going to release it. So they had to fly somebody into Jackson, [Mississippi,] and then go all the way down to Silver City, take a picture of my name in my mom’s Bible because she said, ‘I’m not sending my Bible to up North no place. You crazy. That’s stupid.’

They had the birthdate written. The time of birth, everything, in the Bible. They take the picture back to Jackson to Vital Statistics and they issue me a birth certificate. So I get ready, we are in New York getting ready to go to Russia. So I look at my name, I’m like, ‘What?’ My name was Spencie. The midwife couldn’t spell well, so she just put what she knew close to it.

So your actual name on your birth certificate is “Spencie”?

Spencie. So all of a sudden, all of them, Jo Jo, Charlie, Scott, all of them, they just ragged me like, ‘What kind of backwoods s— is that?’ So we changed it to Spencer because it had to be the same with the program. Then we went to Russia, Yugoslavia and all that stuff and came back. That’s how I got my birth certificate. So I had a birth certificate and a gold medal. And three years before I was a slave. And now I’m an American hero.

If you were to address this year’s USA Basketball Olympic team, which is all-black, what would you say?

Most important thing is that you’re not playing for self. You’re not playing for your jersey. You’re not playing for anything but America. And you’re going up against the world.

The most important thing is to come back victoriously and just remember that you are amplifying your voice 1,000 fold because all of the world sees these wonderful black athletes. And what they see in America in media is like they’re setting a whole other pathway and example that uplift the people. So they are uplifting America, first and foremost, their families and more importantly when we play ball we always note that we’re doing it for our race.

Tell me about your documentary Full Court: The Spencer Haywood Story?

The film is coming at a great time in my life because it tells the story of Spencer Haywood. A poor kid coming up from Mississippi … Yeah, we just been running around at film festivals all over the country. We basically won the Seattle Film Festival.

I’m not about the money. I just want people to be educated. And this is seriously black history. So it’s that important to me.

When was the last time you went to Mississippi?

I was down there shooting the film. It felt great. I was at home. I picked cotton for the film. I show you what it was like. What the whole thing is about.

How do you feel about Mississippi now?

I feel like Nina Simone, I guess. Mississippi Goddam! Or like Oscar Brown Jr., you know? Straighten Up and Fly Right. The buzzard flew over Mississippi said, ‘Oh! Don’t you drop me!’

It was a half-century ago when Smith, along with fellow sprinter John Carlos, raised his fist with a black glove in protest of the state of black America while representing the United States in the 1968 Summer Olympics. The protest came after Smith won the gold medal in the 200 meters.

Smith spoke with ESPN’s Lindsay Czarniak on Tuesday to offer his support and words of wisdom to Kaepernick after the quarterback refused to stand for the national anthem.

“He’ll have to understand that the parables mounting against him will be a significant challenge as he moves through,” Smith said. “His beliefs have caused sacrifice. And sacrifice might cause a loss. And that loss hopefully won’t be the end of positive thinking about moving forward in a society. Physically, he’s already going through.”

It’s been hard to spot a headline lately that doesn’t include the words activism, protest, boycott or social justice.

Some conditions have improved, but racial tension and pleas for equality prompt plenty of unanswered questions.

To help find answers beyond the headlines, sociologist and civil rights activist Harry Edwards and San Jose State University (SJSU) launched the Institute for the Study of Sport, Society and Social Change on Tuesday.

The kickoff event, held on SJSU’s campus, featured Jim Brown, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Tommie Smith, Takeo Spikes, Chris Webber and Anquan Boldin, along with The Undefeated’s editor-in-chief, Kevin Merida, senior NBA writer Marc Spears and others. Two panels discussed what modern activism looks like, and how protest can be turned into progress.

Panelist Danielle Slaton, a former member of the U.S. women’s national soccer team and current sideline reporter for the San Jose Earthquakes, said she hopes that athletes use their platforms to pursue change. Sports columnist Ann Killion agreed, but said activism is something that can’t be forced.

“It’s got to come from the heart,”Killion said. “It’s got to be real. You can’t force anyone to be an activist … Sometimes you have to get shocked into taking action, and that’s for athletes too. I don’t think because someone is an athlete that we can expect just because they have a platform, we should insist that they use it.”

“In 2017, there are a lot of things that are new but there are a lot of things that are still the same,” Slaton added. “But I feel like my personal mantra and what I hope for athletes, what I hope for media, what I hope for everyone is don’t let what I can’t do stop me from doing what I can. It might not be perfect, it might not come out in the right way all the time, but there’s always something I can do. It’s not always knowing what to do, but doing what I know is right.”

The panel of athletes, including Brown, Spikes, Abdul-Jabbar, Webber, Boldin and Smith, addressed the point of view of athletes who have been spoken out against social injustice.

Abdul-Jabbar believes the power and influence athletes possess are enough to raise the consciousness of those who look up to them. For instance, it was NBA Hall of Famer Bill Russell who led Abdul-Jabbar to find his own voice.

“A lot of young people really admire athletes, they want to be like them,” Abdul-Jabbar said. “They’re interested in what [athletes are] interested in and just by being curious about what the athletes they admire are doing, a lot of young people find their way to social activism. I know in my life, just reading some of the things Bill Russell wrote enabled me to understand how I had to approach my activism and it really helped me. People didn’t want to hear about how angry you were, they wanted to hear what the issue was. Communicating your anger can really lead people not to listen to what your issues are.”

Boldin, a veteran wide receiver for the Detroit Lions and the panel’s only current athlete, said that players who fear fan backlash or losing endorsements for speaking out should look at the bigger picture.

“You just have to put in perspective what’s important,” Boldin said. “Yeah, you may lose endorsements or something like that, but I think it’s more important to be able to shape the world your kids are going to come up in. You have to be unselfish. We have a great life, but think about the ones that came before us that didn’t have the opportunities that we have now. It’s because of what they stood for and what they stood against, so we have to do the same thing for those behind us.”

Smith reflected on the similarities and differences from his time as an activist in the 1960s and activism today. Smith wants modern athletes to stretch beyond themselves and the fear that keeps them from speaking on issues they strongly believe in.

“There’s always going to be some type of challenge after you make any type of stand, so you must be ready for that stand,” he said. “I think there’s redemption in positive challenges a lot of us don’t take because we’re afraid.”

The former SJSU track and field star was grateful to be back on the grounds of a place he calls home. In the center of the campus stands a 23-foot-tall statute of Smith and teammate John Carlos made of steel, fiberglass and colorful ceramic tiles. The two men stand frozen atop an Olympic podium, heads bowed and fists to the sky — a silent protest during the medal ceremony of the 1968 Mexico City Games that led to their suspension by the U.S. Olympic Committee and expulsion from the Olympic Village.

“I look at it and cry almost every time I see it because I see the eyes of that 24-year-old youngster Tommie Smith back then, fighting for a cause which he understood but could not get directly in the limelight of explanation because I didn’t have words for the feeling I had,” Smith said. “I didn’t find it until the spirit made me do what I did in Mexico City. History is repeating itself, and I want to be part of that repeat.”

The statue represents a movement and fight that continues today. With the founding of the Institute for the Study of Sport, Society and Social Change at a university with a rich history of social activism, Smith hopes that he’ll be around to see the impact he knows the institute will make on society.

“There’s a lot of people with the ability, with the resolution, and action that Dr. Martin Luther King had,” Smith said. “They’re still here, we just haven’t found it, but it is coming. We are not in this forum in San Jose where the Olympic Project for Human Rights first started almost 50 years ago just for television. … This forum, this school of social change is going to bring about some magical solutions. We’re not looking at 20 years. We’re looking at five years or less. I hope God keeps me here so that I can come back, look at you in the face and say, ‘Do you see what I mean?’ ”

What are we willing to die for in the age of Donald Trump?

This was the overarching question that repeatedly came to mind Tuesday afternoon as I listened to an impressive panel of journalists, former and current athletes celebrate the launch of the Institute for the Study of Sport, Society and Social Change at San Jose State University.

The Institute is the creation of Harry Edwards, professor emeritus at the university and a renowned sociologist who is most associated with the study of political activism in sports beginning in the late 1960s.

A nearly full house at the Hammer Theatre heard a fascinating array of perspectives, from Jim Brown explaining why he met with then-President-elect Donald Trump, Chris Webber discussing the exploitation of young athletes, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar calling for economic cooperation among athletes, and Takeo Spikes and Anquan Boldin explaining why they played the violent game of football.

The overarching theme of the conference was Words to Power and what are we willing to risk.

My question after all the words and all the applause was what are we willing to risk. What in 2017, with so many African-Americans doing well, are we willing to die for?

Not necessarily a literal death, but career death, economic death or political death that comes with actively resisting.

“The issue of what I am willing die for at this point is simply the reverse side of what is it that I am fighting for in life,” Edwards said.

“It’s not being scared and saying, ‘Oh, my God, if it comes to that, am I willing to die?’ That’s not the question,” Edwards said. “Am I willing to forgo my responsibilities in terms of life , not to die?”

Edwards, who turns 75 in November, reconsidered the question of what he would die for and referenced his two grandchildren, ages 3 and 1 1/2. “What makes me more committed than ever is making sure that the world that I leave them is the best possible world that I can help to create,” he said. “In that process, I lose my house, I lose my money, I lose my life, that’s the price that has to be paid.

What I hope it will do is facilitate a plan of action for African-Americans gaining power and control in an industry which, in many ways, is there for the taking except for lack of unity and cohesion.

During an hourlong panel discussion, the need for unity and concerted action came up several times and was expressed in a number of ways. Achieving that unity has been elusive, except in team locker rooms, where athletes are trained to put aside differences that hinder the pursuit of a common goal.

In many ways, the negative reaction to Brown’s meeting with Trump is emblematic of the dilemma of a team — the Black Team — moving forward. Abdul-Jabbar, like Brown, supported Hillary Clinton. Unlike Brown, Abdul-Jabbar has been a vocal critic of Trump and could not bring himself to meet with him. But there they were, side by side on stage, respectful, cognizant of the mission at hand: how to move beyond words into action.

The object of Tuesday’s summit, and perhaps the signature of Edwards’ new institute, will be the creation of a veritable locker room space that will accommodate wide-ranging, far-reaching opinions. Perhaps it will also help answer the question: What does it mean to be an African-American and an African-American athlete in the age of Trump?

This was my first time seeing Brown since he took the meeting with Trump shortly after he was elected president.

After the panel, I asked Brown about that decision, and more pointedly, how do each of us, as African-Americans, avoid being water boys and water girls for white interests. How do each of us avoid being the person white folks point to as they attempt to deflect charges of racism?

Brown surprised me when he asked: “Who are your white people?”

Flippantly, I replied that I didn’t have any white friends.

First, that was not true. Secondly, he did not say friends. He was asking who had helped me get to this point in my life.

In fact, they have been an all-star cast of races, creeds and colors and of all political persuasions, some I liked, some not.

That was Brown’s point and this was the honest dialogue.

Brown, who operates the Amer-I-Can program, said that he wasn’t looking at black and white when he accepted the meeting. He was looking at power and access.

“I’m not astute in that,” Brown said. “I know people who have been good to me and I know people who have furthered my goals.”

Brown repeated that he did not vote for the president but as soon as his candidate lost “I began to look at how to deal with the new president.”

“While other people were sitting on their butts complaining, I was putting together a plan, so if I had an opportunity to talk to these people, I could solicit them to buy into my concept. They haven’t asked me to buy into any concept. They know that I voted for Hillary but they are willing to work with me because I brought something to them that made sense,” Brown said.

“We need jobs, badly,” Brown added. “We need to continue education, badly. We need to eradicate the violence, badly. That does not have a lot to do with Trump, it has to do with all of us.

“I don’t always know their politics, what they do behind closed doors. I speak for myself. I can withstand any kind of criticism because I’m 80 going on 81 years old and I’m interested in helping people, helping my family, helping my kids, leaving here with some dignity and to be my own man.”

The Institute for the Study of Sport is only the latest university-based think tank created to study issues related to the explosive field of sport and play.

The study of racism and sport has become a new cottage industry. Institutes have been created throughout the United States. They tend to look at statistics, at how many women or how many African-Americans are in this position or that position. The institutes tend to focus on how to develop better education classes in areas such as sport and gender.

Like the sports industry itself, the institutes also tend to be run and operated by non-African-Americans.

“We want to look at how sports interfaces with issues, structures, processes and dynamics in society to contribute to, if not create, social change,” Edwards said after Tuesday’s event.

Edwards was among the first scholars to chart how the evolution of African-Americans in sport has mirrored the evolution of African-Americans in society — from being locked out to being begrudgingly allowed in to demanding respect to changing how games are played to using the visibility of sport and the money generated by sports to create an unprecedented dynamic.

“Now, we’re into a struggle for power,” Edwards said. “The athletes are exercising that power.”

We have witnessed the phenomenon of athletes on professional sports teams joining protests outside of the arena, college athletes adding their voices to student protests, demanding airtime on networks to make statements. The black presence in sports is becoming an organized power surge.

“That power is even greater than ever, but the challenge is even greater than ever,” Edwards said. “Now it comes down to how do we negotiate those challenges, how do we manage those responses, how do we project those responses in the age of the internet. How do we manage what we can neither avoid nor eliminate.”

San Jose State is the university that produced John Carlos and Tommie Smith, whose demonstration at the 1968 Mexico City Games remains the most iconic image of protest in sport history.

Carlos and Smith are on the institute’s advisory board.

“This is what will distinguish this institute from all of the others that are counting bodies, doing things about developing classes on gender, sport and social issues in the university,” Edwards said. “We will be specifically looking at how, why and what are the dynamics, what are the projected outcomes of these developments at the interface of sport society and social change.

My concern with these institutes is that they often forge affiliations with sports leagues and teams, which they advise [and grade] — on issues of diversity. How harshly will you grade an organization that is funding your center to the tune of millions of dollars per year?

If you are a paid consultant to a team, is your role to get to the root of player uprising or to quell them. Are you a consultant or are you a management spy.

As we wrapped up our conversation Tuesday evening, Edwards said that, among other things, he wanted the institute to facilitate the convergence of a powerful black sports presence with the ongoing struggle for African-American survival and prosperity.

They are, in fact, intertwined. To make his point, Edwards recited a stunning statistic: “From 1882 until the end of 1968, the United States averaged 40 lynchings of black people every year,” he said. “From 2000 to 2015, the country has averaged 147 police shootings of black people every year, most of them unarmed.

“This is where we are,” he said. “That’s why we’re in worse shape.”

Tuesday’s event was ceremonial and only the beginning, a star-studded cast of athletes and scholars called together to make the point that the struggle continues and athletes’ informed voices are more critical now than ever.

“Why?” Edwards asked, “Because they have a megaphone, they have a forum and now there is a felt obligation because of the history.”

The theme of Tuesday’s inaugural event, indeed the imprimatur of Edwards’ Institute for the Study of Sport, Society and Social Change, is transforming words into power.

Never has there been a more important imperative.

The list is complete. The 50 Greatest Black Athletes have been determined by the public — 10,350 adults whom SurveyMonkey polled to decide who should be considered the best of the best in black athletic supremacy based upon four factors: overall ranking, dominance, inspiration and impact on society.

For months, debates have swirled in The Undefeated newsroom about who should be higher than whom, which athlete deserves to be No. 1 and, most importantly, who was left off the list. Below are The Undefeated’s picks of the top 10 omissions, with five more athletes receiving honorable mentions.

Allen Iverson

Arguably the greatest basketball player of all time — pound for pound — is none other than Allen Ezail Iverson (and don’t even think about @’ing us). During his 14-year NBA career, the point guard nicknamed “The Answer” took the hardwood at 165 pounds soaking wet while listed at 6-foot-1, although his true height is one of the most debated tall tales in NBA history (“There’s no way. He’s like 5-11,” a fellow NBA player once said.) Iverson, the No. 1 pick in the 1996 NBA draft, made the most of his size en route to 11 All-Star selections, four scoring titles, an NBA MVP award and his No. 3 jersey being retired by the Philadelphia 76ers. In 2016, he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, more than two decades after a four-month jail sentence in high school nearly derailed his hoop dreams. Oh, yeah, and he crossed up Michael Jordan … as a rookie.

Alice Coachman

Let’s play a quick three-part game of “Did you know?” First, did you know that Alice Coachman was the first African-American woman to win an Olympic gold medal? At the 1948 Olympics in London, Coachman leaped her way to gold with a high jump of 5 feet, 6 1/8 inches, an Olympic record that stood for nearly 20 years. Second, did you know that Coachman was the first African-American woman in history to earn an endorsement deal, when she became a spokeswoman for Coca-Cola in 1952? And last, the most prolific fun fact of Coachman’s career — did you know Coachman was inducted into nine halls of fame in her life? Her list includes the National Track & Field Hall of Fame and the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame. Long before Simone Biles, Gabby Douglas and Simone Manuel, Coachman showed the world #BlackGirlMagic on the Olympic stage.

Althea Gibson

On July 6, 1957, while wearing all white on the outdoor grass courts at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, Althea Gibson defeated Darlene Hard, 6-3, 6-2, to become the first African-American player to win a Wimbledon title. Gibson also earned the distinction as the first black player to win titles at the French Open and U.S. Nationals, which led tennis great Billie Jean King to refer to Gibson as the “Jackie Robinson of tennis.” Gibson was the ultimate trailblazer for the African-American stars who followed her, such as Arthur Ashe and Venus and Serena Williams. Also, don’t forget that Gibson played golf too. In the 1960s, she emerged as the first African-American player on the women’s pro golf tour.

Barry Bonds

Barry Bonds is, without question, the most decorated slugger in the history of major league baseball. He holds the record for home runs in a career (762), single season (73) and single postseason (eight), and he also boasts records for the highest single-season on-base percentage (.609 in 2004) and slugging percentage (.863 in 2001) in history. But even before Bonds allegedly began taking steroids in 1998, as detailed in the book Game of Shadows, he was a bona fide hitter. From 1986-98, Bonds hit 411 home runs, with 1,216 RBIs and a .996 (on-base plus slugging). Being linked to steroids, however, has marred Bonds’ legacy while keeping him out of the Hall of Fame with five more years of eligibility left, as well as off this list.

Deion Sanders

1. Play in both a Super Bowl and World Series
2. Suit up for both an NFL game and MLB game in the same day.

Those feats take a special breed of athlete.

Kobe Bryant

One of the most mind-boggling questions surrounding this list: How were both Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant picked ahead of Kobe Bean Bryant? In May, when The Undefeated and SurveyMonkey announced the 50 Greatest Black Athletes project, Nos. 60-51 were revealed. Westbrook, a month shy of being named the 2017 NBA MVP, and Durant, a month shy of winning his first NBA title, were ranked No. 54 and No. 51, respectively. As for Bryant? No. 58. Straight blasphemy — and that’s no disrespect to Westbrook and Durant. They just aren’t the Black Mamba, who has five championship rings, 18 All-Star selections, two scoring titles and an NBA MVP award, and he dropped a 60-piece in the final game of his career. Yes, he broke the record for most missed shots in NBA history. But he’s still top three all-time in scoring, behind only Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Karl Malone. Bryant might not be the greatest of all time, but even Jordan ranks him above LeBron James (No. 29 on our list) in the “who’s the best of all time” conversation. Mamba deserved better, y’all. Foreal.

Lawrence Taylor

Not a single defensive football player made the list of 50 Greatest Black Athletes. Not even Lawrence Taylor, the man who’s widely regarded to be the greatest defensive football player of all time. The way the Hall of Fame linebacker for the New York Giants played the game was instinctive. His motor ticked at a different, and higher, level, and the force of his rushes made it impossible for him to be blocked by a single player. In short, Taylor was a bad man. Before Houston Texans defensive end J.J. Watt, Taylor was the only player in history to win the NFL Defensive Player of the Year award three times. He also notched 10 Pro Bowl and 10 first-team All-Pro selections, with two Super Bowls and an NFL MVP award. It’s a travesty that he didn’t make the list.

Lisa Leslie

On July, 30, 2002 — six years, three months and six days after the WNBA was founded — 6-foot-5 Lisa Leslie became the first woman in league history to dunk in a game. Three years later, she became the first WNBA player to dunk in the All-Star Game. That distinction, being the first, became a staple of Leslie’s 12-year career, spent entirely with the Los Angeles Sparks. Leslie became the first player in league history to reach 3,000 points, 4,000 points and 6,000 points and the first to achieve the career milestone of 10,000 PRA (points plus rebounds plus assists). It’s hard to think of women’s basketball without Leslie, a three-time WNBA MVP and four-time Olympic gold medalist. Legendary University of Connecticut and Team USA women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma once called Leslie “a once-in-a-lifetime player” — and for good reason. For quite some time, before retiring from the game in 2009, Leslie was the queen of the WNBA — the queen of basketball.

Tiger Woods

Tiger Woods’ life and golf career have never been the same since Nov. 27, 2009, the day he crashed his Cadillac Escalade into a fire hydrant after news of his infidelity broke. But how can we forget the Tiger Woods who preceded that infamous night — the one who completely changed the athletic and cultural landscape of professional golf with his fist pumps, red-collared shirts on Sundays and sheer dominance on the course? At 24, Woods became the youngest player to complete a career Grand Slam by winning all four of the PGA’s major tournaments (the Masters, British Open, U.S. Open and PGA Championship). At 30, he became the youngest player to reach 50 career PGA wins. Woods’ 14 career major wins ranks second all-time, behind only Jack Nicklaus. At one point in his career, the question was when, not if, Woods would break Nicklaus’ record. Now, the question is whether he’ll ever play again. Besides not having won a major since 2008, Woods has only played in one tournament in the past two years. His majestic rise, and painful fall, is one of the most perplexing stories in sports. Regardless, he remains one of the greatest athletes of all time, warranting a spot high on this list — even though he might not fully consider himself black, but rather “Cablinasian,” a mixture of Caucasian, black, (American) Indian and Asian.

O.J. Simpson*

There’s an asterisk next to O.J. Simpson’s name because of the obvious — even though he was found not guilty in the criminal case for the June 12, 1994, murders of his former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. Here, though, we’ll make the case not for O.J. Simpson, the man off the field, but for O.J. Simpson, the athlete whose unparalleled talent in football has become a distant memory. Simpson is certainly in the conversation for the distinction of the greatest running back of all time. In 1973, he became the first player to rush for 2,000 yards in a single season. Only seven players in NFL history have achieved the milestone, and Simpson started the trend. Simpson was also a five-time Pro Bowler, five-time first-team All-Pro selection, NFL MVP, four-time league rushing yards leader, two-time league rushing touchdowns leader, a Heisman Trophy winner at the University of Southern California and Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee. His ability to run the football was so powerful that it earned him the nickname “The Juice.” Leaving him off the list is somewhat of an elephant in the room. But maybe he didn’t make the cut because, in his own words, he’s not black, he’s O.J.

Honorable Mentions

Tommie Smith and John Carlos

• No single moment in black sports history is more important than the stand taken by Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. After Smith won gold, and Carlos claimed bronze, in the 200 meters, the two men raised their fists in silent protest of racial discrimination in the United States. Smith and Carlos’ contributions to history go far beyond their athletic performance and instead lie within their everlasting Black Power salute, which reshaped the concept of athlete activism eternally.

Jack Johnson

• In 1908, Jack Johnson knocked out Tommy Burns to become the first African-American heavyweight boxing champion of the world. Because of Johnson’s dominance in the sport, and more importantly the color of his skin, many people in the country called for a “Great White Hope” to defeat the black champion and strip him of his title. He shook up the world with his flamboyant character while spending money excessively, driving fancy cars and dating white women. In 1912, he was convicted of violating the Mann Act by bringing a white woman across state lines before marriage. If a white boxer couldn’t stop Johnson, Jim Crow segregation could.

Sheryl Swoopes

• Sheryl Swoopes, a former four-time WNBA champion, three-time WNBA MVP and three-time Olympic gold medalist, was the first player to be signed by the league on Oct. 23, 1996. In 2016, to celebrate its 20th anniversary, the WNBA announced the league’s top 20 players of all time, with Swoopes making the cut.

Harrison Dillard

• With four gold medals from the 1948 London Olympics (100 meters and 4×100 relay) and 1952 Helsinki Olympics (110-meter hurdles and 4×100 relay), Harrison Dillard is the only man in Olympic history to win gold medals in both sprinting and hurdle events.

The list is complete. The 50 Greatest Black Athletes have been determined by the public — 10,350 adults whom SurveyMonkey polled to decide who should be considered the best of the best in black athletic supremacy based upon four factors: overall ranking, dominance, inspiration and impact on society.

For months, debates have swirled in The Undefeated newsroom about who should be higher than whom, which athlete deserves to be No. 1 and, most importantly, who was left off the list. Below are The Undefeated’s picks of the top 10 omissions, with five more athletes receiving honorable mentions.

Allen Iverson

Arguably the greatest basketball player of all time — pound for pound — is none other than Allen Ezail Iverson (and don’t even think about @’ing us). During his 14-year NBA career, the point guard nicknamed “The Answer” took the hardwood at 165 pounds soaking wet while listed at 6-foot-1, although his true height is one of the most debated tall tales in NBA history (“There’s no way. He’s like 5-11,” a fellow NBA player once said.) Iverson, the No. 1 pick in the 1996 NBA draft, made the most of his size en route to 11 All-Star selections, four scoring titles, an NBA MVP award and his No. 3 jersey being retired by the Philadelphia 76ers. In 2016, he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, more than two decades after a four-month jail sentence in high school nearly derailed his hoop dreams. Oh, yeah, and he crossed up Michael Jordan … as a rookie.

Alice Coachman

Let’s play a quick three-part game of “Did you know?” First, did you know that Alice Coachman was the first African-American woman to win an Olympic gold medal? At the 1948 Olympics in London, Coachman leaped her way to gold with a high jump of 5 feet, 6 1/8 inches, an Olympic record that stood for nearly 20 years. Second, did you know that Coachman was the first African-American woman in history to earn an endorsement deal, when she became a spokeswoman for Coca-Cola in 1952? And last, the most prolific fun fact of Coachman’s career — did you know Coachman was inducted into nine halls of fame in her life? Her list includes the National Track & Field Hall of Fame and the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame. Long before Simone Biles, Gabby Douglas and Simone Manuel, Coachman showed the world #BlackGirlMagic on the Olympic stage.

Althea Gibson

On July 6, 1957, while wearing all white on the outdoor grass courts at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, Althea Gibson defeated Darlene Hard, 6-3, 6-2, to become the first African-American player to win a Wimbledon title. Gibson also earned the distinction as the first black player to win titles at the French Open and U.S. Nationals, which led tennis great Billie Jean King to refer to Gibson as the “Jackie Robinson of tennis.” Gibson was the ultimate trailblazer for the African-American stars who followed her, such as Arthur Ashe and Venus and Serena Williams. Also, don’t forget that Gibson played golf too. In the 1960s, she emerged as the first African-American player on the women’s pro golf tour.

Barry Bonds

Barry Bonds is, without question, the most decorated slugger in the history of major league baseball. He holds the record for home runs in a career (762), single season (73) and single postseason (eight), and he also boasts records for the highest single-season on-base percentage (.609 in 2004) and slugging percentage (.863 in 2001) in history. But even before Bonds allegedly began taking steroids in 1998, as detailed in the book Game of Shadows, he was a bona fide hitter. From 1986-98, Bonds hit 411 home runs, with 1,216 RBIs and a .996 (on-base plus slugging). Being linked to steroids, however, has marred Bonds’ legacy while keeping him out of the Hall of Fame with five more years of eligibility left, as well as off this list.

Deion Sanders

1. Play in both a Super Bowl and World Series
2. Suit up for both an NFL game and MLB game in the same day.

Those feats take a special breed of athlete.

Kobe Bryant

One of the most mind-boggling questions surrounding this list: How were both Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant picked ahead of Kobe Bean Bryant? In May, when The Undefeated and SurveyMonkey announced the 50 Greatest Black Athletes project, Nos. 60-51 were revealed. Westbrook, a month shy of being named the 2017 NBA MVP, and Durant, a month shy of winning his first NBA title, were ranked No. 54 and No. 51, respectively. As for Bryant? No. 58. Straight blasphemy — and that’s no disrespect to Westbrook and Durant. They just aren’t the Black Mamba, who has five championship rings, 18 All-Star selections, two scoring titles and an NBA MVP award, and he dropped a 60-piece in the final game of his career. Yes, he broke the record for most missed shots in NBA history. But he’s still top three all-time in scoring, behind only Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Karl Malone. Bryant might not be the greatest of all time, but even Jordan ranks him above LeBron James (No. 29 on our list) in the “who’s the best of all time” conversation. Mamba deserved better, y’all. Foreal.

Lawrence Taylor

Not a single defensive football player made the list of 50 Greatest Black Athletes. Not even Lawrence Taylor, the man who’s widely regarded to be the greatest defensive football player of all time. The way the Hall of Fame linebacker for the New York Giants played the game was instinctive. His motor ticked at a different, and higher, level, and the force of his rushes made it impossible for him to be blocked by a single player. In short, Taylor was a bad man. Before Houston Texans defensive end J.J. Watt, Taylor was the only player in history to win the NFL Defensive Player of the Year award three times. He also notched 10 Pro Bowl and 10 first-team All-Pro selections, with two Super Bowls and an NFL MVP award. It’s a travesty that he didn’t make the list.

Lisa Leslie

On July, 30, 2002 — six years, three months and six days after the WNBA was founded — 6-foot-5 Lisa Leslie became the first woman in league history to dunk in a game. Three years later, she became the first WNBA player to dunk in the All-Star Game. That distinction, being the first, became a staple of Leslie’s 12-year career, spent entirely with the Los Angeles Sparks. Leslie became the first player in league history to reach 3,000 points, 4,000 points and 6,000 points and the first to achieve the career milestone of 10,000 PRA (points plus rebounds plus assists). It’s hard to think of women’s basketball without Leslie, a three-time WNBA MVP and four-time Olympic gold medalist. Legendary University of Connecticut and Team USA women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma once called Leslie “a once-in-a-lifetime player” — and for good reason. For quite some time, before retiring from the game in 2009, Leslie was the queen of the WNBA — the queen of basketball.

Tiger Woods

Tiger Woods’ life and golf career have never been the same since Nov. 27, 2009, the day he crashed his Cadillac Escalade into a fire hydrant after news of his infidelity broke. But how can we forget the Tiger Woods who preceded that infamous night — the one who completely changed the athletic and cultural landscape of professional golf with his fist pumps, red-collared shirts on Sundays and sheer dominance on the course? At 24, Woods became the youngest player to complete a career Grand Slam by winning all four of the PGA’s major tournaments (the Masters, British Open, U.S. Open and PGA Championship). At 30, he became the youngest player to reach 50 career PGA wins. Woods’ 14 career major wins ranks second all-time, behind only Jack Nicklaus. At one point in his career, the question was when, not if, Woods would break Nicklaus’ record. Now, the question is whether he’ll ever play again. Besides not having won a major since 2008, Woods has only played in one tournament in the past two years. His majestic rise, and painful fall, is one of the most perplexing stories in sports. Regardless, he remains one of the greatest athletes of all time, warranting a spot high on this list — even though he might not fully consider himself black, but rather “Cablinasian,” a mixture of Caucasian, black, (American) Indian and Asian.

O.J. Simpson*

There’s an asterisk next to O.J. Simpson’s name because of the obvious — even though he was found not guilty in the criminal case for the June 12, 1994, murders of his former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. Here, though, we’ll make the case not for O.J. Simpson, the man off the field, but for O.J. Simpson, the athlete whose unparalleled talent in football has become a distant memory. Simpson is certainly in the conversation for the distinction of the greatest running back of all time. In 1973, he became the first player to rush for 2,000 yards in a single season. Only seven players in NFL history have achieved the milestone, and Simpson started the trend. Simpson was also a five-time Pro Bowler, five-time first-team All-Pro selection, NFL MVP, four-time league rushing yards leader, two-time league rushing touchdowns leader, a Heisman Trophy winner at the University of Southern California and Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee. His ability to run the football was so powerful that it earned him the nickname “The Juice.” Leaving him off the list is somewhat of an elephant in the room. But maybe he didn’t make the cut because, in his own words, he’s not black, he’s O.J.

Honorable Mentions

Tommie Smith and John Carlos

• No single moment in black sports history is more important than the stand taken by Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. After Smith won gold, and Carlos claimed bronze, in the 200 meters, the two men raised their fists in silent protest of racial discrimination in the United States. Smith and Carlos’ contributions to history go far beyond their athletic performance and instead lie within their everlasting Black Power salute, which reshaped the concept of athlete activism eternally.

Jack Johnson

• In 1908, Jack Johnson knocked out Tommy Burns to become the first African-American heavyweight boxing champion of the world. Because of Johnson’s dominance in the sport, and more importantly the color of his skin, many people in the country called for a “Great White Hope” to defeat the black champion and strip him of his title. He shook up the world with his flamboyant character while spending money excessively, driving fancy cars and dating white women. In 1912, he was convicted of violating the Mann Act by bringing a white woman across state lines before marriage. If a white boxer couldn’t stop Johnson, Jim Crow segregation could.

Sheryl Swoopes

• Sheryl Swoopes, a former four-time WNBA champion, three-time WNBA MVP and three-time Olympic gold medalist, was the first player to be signed by the league on Oct. 23, 1996. In 2016, to celebrate its 20th anniversary, the WNBA announced the league’s top 20 players of all time, with Swoopes making the cut.

Harrison Dillard

• With four gold medals from the 1948 London Olympics (100 meters and 4×100 relay) and 1952 Helsinki Olympics (110-meter hurdles and 4×100 relay), Harrison Dillard is the only man in Olympic history to win gold medals in both sprinting and hurdle events.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is known as one of the greatest basketball players in history. During his 20-year professional career with the Milwaukee Bucks and Los Angeles Lakers, he appeared in 19 All-Star Games, won six championships and collected six MVP awards. In retirement, he has become a prominent cultural commentator and writer, a leading voice on the intersection between sports and politics. Recently, he published a memoir about his collegiate career at UCLA, Coach Wooden and Me: Our 50-Year Friendship On and Off the Court.

Fifty years ago he was the most dominant college basketball player America had ever seen. Between 1967 and 1969, he led UCLA to three consecutive national titles and an 88-2 record. Yet, his legacy transcends the game; in the age of Black Power, he redefined the political role of black college athletes. In 1968, when black collegians debated boycotting the Olympics, Lew Alcindor, as he was then still known, emerged as the most prominent face in the revolt on campus.

Why did Alcindor refuse to play in the Olympics? To answer that question we have to return to Harlem, New York, in July 1964, the first of many long, hot summers.

Harlem, 1964

The death of James Powell, a 15-year-old black youth from the Bronx, outraged Alcindor. On a sweltering July day in 1964, outside an apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Lt. Thomas Gilligan, a white off-duty cop, shot and killed James, piercing the ninth-grader’s chest with a bullet from a .38 revolver. Conflicting accounts grayed a story that many saw in black and white. Gilligan, a 37-year-old war veteran, claimed that James charged at him with a knife, but bystanders insisted that James was unarmed.

Two nights later, on July 18, in the heart of Harlem, a peaceful rally organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) turned into a march against police brutality. Demanding justice for Powell, hundreds of demonstrators surrounded the 123rd Street precinct, some threatening to tear the building apart “brick by brick.” Incensed by decades of racial profiling and violent policing, the angry crowd began hurling rocks and bottles at officers. Suddenly, a scuffle broke out and the cops rushed the protesters, cracking their nightsticks against a swarm of black bodies. In a matter of minutes, violence spread through Harlem like a grease fire in a packed tenement kitchen.

That same night, Alcindor, an extremely tall, rail-thin 17-year-old, emerged from the 125th Street subway station, planning to investigate the CORE rally. Climbing up the steps toward the street, he could smell smoke coming from burning buildings. Angry young black men took to the streets and tossed bricks and Molotov cocktails through store windows. Looters grabbed radios, jewelry, food and guns. The sound of gunshots rang like firecrackers. Trembling with fear, Alcindor worried that his size and skin color made him an easy target for an angry cop with an itchy trigger finger. Sprinting home, all he could think about was that at any moment a stray bullet could strike him down.

For six days, Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant burned. The “Harlem race riots” resulted in 465 arrests, hundreds of injuries and one death. When the smoke cleared, Martin Luther King Jr. visited New York and encouraged black residents to demonstrate peacefully. But Alcindor, like many black youths, had grown impatient with King’s pleas for nonviolence and began questioning the direction of the civil rights movement. That summer, writing for the Harlem Youth Action Project newspaper, he interviewed black citizens who were tired of segregated schools, dilapidated housing, employment discrimination and wanton police violence.

The Harlem uprising fueled his anger toward white America and convinced him more than ever that he had to turn his rage into action. “Right then and there, I knew who I was, who I had to be,” he said a few years later. “I was going to be black rage personified, Black Power in the flesh.” Silence was no longer an option. In the future, he vowed, he would speak his mind.

If there was a moment that awakened Alcindor’s political consciousness and his gravitation toward Black Power, it happened in Harlem in July 1964. Three years later, when he was the biggest star in college basketball, he made good on his promise.

Westwood, 1967

When Alcindor joined the UCLA varsity team as a sophomore for the 1966-67 season, he was already the most publicized college player in America. Hundreds of schools recruited him, including segregated Southern teams that were willing to break the color line for his services. As the most coveted prospect since Wilt Chamberlain, he garnered national magazine features in Sports Illustrated, Sport, The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Look, Time and Newsweek. Photographers treated him like an object, Rex Lardner of The Saturday Evening Post wrote, “stalking him as though he were a skittish giraffe.” Sensitive and self-conscious, the introverted basketball prodigy sought privacy, but his talent could never afford it. Soon, he would realize too, his desire for privacy conflicted with his inclination to become more active in the Black Power movement.

He arrived in Westwood, California, carrying unprecedented expectations. Rival coaches and sportswriters predicted that the Bruins would never lose a game with him. Anything less than perfection would have been considered a failure.

Immediately, Alcindor proved an unstoppable force on both ends of the court. He cut an imposing presence: “long, long legs raddled with whipcord muscle; a looming torso,” and, a Newsweek reporter wrote, “a lordly head with soft brown eyes that peer calmly well above other men’s line of sight.” Towering over Lilliputians, he controlled the space near the basket, swatting basketballs into the stands. Smooth and agile, he possessed a unique array of skills, balance and quickness. Alcindor tossed hook shots into the hoop the way ordinary men flipped a wad of paper into a wastebasket. No single player could guard him alone. Opponents tried double-teaming and triple-teaming him, but Alcindor, a deft passer, hit open teammates for easy buckets. So defenses pushed, pulled, tugged, elbowed and kneed him, sending Alcindor to the brink of explosion.

Yet he exhibited poise and grace under pressure, leading the Bruins to an undefeated season (30 straight wins) and the school’s third national championship in four years. Throughout the season, coaches complained that Alcindor was too good. As long as he reigned at UCLA, the college basketball season would end with predictable results. No other school could imagine winning the national title. Some coaches even suggested raising the basket to neutralize him. The Saturday Evening Post asked the one question weighing on the minds of coaches everywhere: “Can Basketball Survive Lew Alcindor?”

The NCAA didn’t think so. A few days after UCLA beat Dayton for the national title, the NCAA’s National Basketball Committee banned the dunk. The committee argued that too many players got injured stuffing the ball through the hoop or trying to block a player attacking the basket. Coaches were concerned, too, about players breaking backboards and bending rims. Curiously, the committee also claimed, “There is no defense against the dunk, which upsets the balance between offense and defense.” But the truth was that Alcindor threatened the sport’s competitive balance. He upset the balance between offense and defense.

Immediately, critics deemed the dunk ban the “Alcindor rule.” In a time of white backlash against black advancement, the UCLA star interpreted the rule through the lens of race. He could not help but feel like the lily-white committee had targeted him. “To me the new ‘no-dunk’ rule smacks a little of discrimination,” he told the Chicago Defender. “When you look at it … most of the people who dunk are black athletes.”

During the 1960s, as black athletes became more visible on college basketball teams, dunking appeared to be a largely black phenomenon. At the same time, college basketball reflected the power structure of America: It was an institution controlled mostly by white men — coaches, athletic directors, administrators and boosters. Not only did the growing presence of black players threaten whites’ place within the game, but so too did the way they influenced the sport. Coaches imposed a rigid, patterned style of play, discouraging improvisation, plays that undermined their authority or attracted individual attention. “Showboating” was strictly forbidden, and that included dunking. But in the age of Alcindor, as black players increasingly ruled the sport, they gained greater power on and off the court. For them dunking became an expression of strength, authority and freedom — an act of defiance. Dunking on a white man could embody a politics of resistance.

Not even the dunk ban could stop Alcindor from dominating the game. In fact, the new restriction made him even better. It forced him to expand his offensive arsenal and develop a devastating signature move: the “skyhook.”

He made it look so easy. With the cool confidence of Miles Davis, Alcindor transformed his game. The skyhook became an innovative expression of individuality and empowerment, a reflection of his intelligence and creativity, an active mind that could see the ball falling through the net like a raindrop the moment the leather sphere touched his fingertips. Over and over again, he pivoted toward the basket, extended his arm toward the sky and gracefully flipped the ball over the outstretched arms of any player who dared to guard him. “Of all the weapons in sports,” Sports Illustrated’s Gary Smith wrote of his skyhook, “none has ever been more dependable or unstoppable, less vulnerable to time, than that little stride, turn, hop and flick from far above his head.”

Cleveland, 1967

Alcindor refused to let the white world define him as a basketball player and as a man. He no longer considered himself a “Negro.” He was black and proud. As he became more politically self-aware, he identified with the most successful, outspoken black professional athletes in America: Muhammad Ali, Bill Russell and Jim Brown. He admired their political activism and their courage to confront white supremacy.

In June 1967, Brown invited Alcindor, Russell and six other black professional athletes to Cleveland to meet with Ali, who had recently been stripped of his heavyweight title for refusing induction into the U.S. military. They met at the headquarters of the Negro Industrial Economic Union, a black empowerment organization founded by Brown to determine whether they would support the champ’s protest against the Vietnam War. Some of the men in the room were military veterans who disagreed with Ali’s position, and they wanted to understand why he objected to fighting for his country. Facing intense scrutiny from the press and charges of draft evasion, Ali convinced the group that he was sincerely opposed to what he viewed as an imperialistic and racist war.

The summit proved an important turning point in Alcindor’s life and in the revolt of the black athlete. In a demonstration of Black Power and solidarity, it marked the first time that black athletes unified across various sports to rally behind a single cause. It also inspired Alcindor to see himself in the same light as Ali, Brown and Russell. Although he was the only college athlete who attended the meeting in Cleveland, he realized that day that he too had a responsibility to use his platform to speak out against racism and injustice, even at a cost. Years later, he wrote in Becoming Kareem: Growing Up On and Off the Court, “Being at the summit and hearing Ali’s articulate defense of his moral beliefs and his willingness to suffer for them reinvigorated my own commitment to become even more politically involved.”

Alcindor’s coach, John Wooden, disagreed with Ali’s anti-war stand. A Navy veteran, Wooden opposed anti-war demonstrations, believing that such protests undermined the military’s efforts in Vietnam. For the conservative coach, social order, loyalty to country and national unity trumped civil disobedience. And he certainly didn’t want “Lewis,” as he called him, to get caught up in any controversy with Ali. “It’s a privilege, not an obligation, to fight for your country,” Wooden said. “Can’t he see he’s hurting the country?”

Yet Alcindor also opposed the war. And like Ali he was inspired by the teachings of Malcolm X. Although he never met the Muslim minister, Malcolm’s autobiography influenced him more than any other book. A voracious reader, he absorbed Malcolm X’s every word, discovering a model of self-determination, the archetype of Black Power. Internalizing Malcolm X’s message of racial pride, self-help and political independence, Alcindor searched for an identity outside of basketball.

Los Angeles, 1967

Alcindor belonged to a new generation of black college athletes, one who believed they had an obligation to contribute to the freedom movement beyond their athletic achievements. They had come to realize that civil rights legislation had not cured the country’s disease of racism and that their accomplishments in the sports world had done little to change the conditions in black America. For a variety of reasons, previous generations of black collegians were controlled and constrained, prohibited and discouraged from speaking out or engaging in political movements. But in 1967, Alcindor, Tommie Smith, John Carlos and dozens of other black amateurs questioned the ideals of integration and the value of Olympic participation.

In Los Angeles, on Thanksgiving Day, San Jose State University professor Harry Edwards organized a workshop on the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR). A skillful and provocative orator with a sharp mind, Edwards emerged as the architect of an Olympic boycott movement designed to protest racism in America and apartheid abroad. He argued that the sports establishment, including the U.S. Olympic Committee, exploited black athletes as symbols of democracy while the masses of black folks were relegated to second-class citizenship. He also understood that black athletes possessed real power in America and collectively they could challenge the status quo.

During the meeting, Alcindor expressed support for boycotting the Mexico City Games, giving what Edwards later described in The Revolt of the Black Athlete as “perhaps the most dynamic and moving statements in behalf of the boycott.” Standing in front of about 200 people at the Second Baptist Church, Alcindor said, “Everybody knows me. I’m the big basketball star, the weekend hero, everybody’s All-American.” But on the streets of Harlem, he said, he was just another black man who could easily become the victim of police brutality. He didn’t want to become another Cassius Clay, who returned home to segregated Louisville, Kentucky, wearing a gold medal around his neck but was still denied service at a lunch counter. “Somewhere each of us has got to take a stand against this kind of thing,” Alcindor declared. “This is how I make my stand — using what I have. And I take my stand here.”

His powerful speech elicited a standing ovation. After the meeting, Edwards told the press that black athletes in attendance had unanimously voted to boycott the Olympics. But the following day, when reporters pressed Alcindor about his plans, he seemed less committed about the boycott, claiming that he was not bound by anything Edwards said. “I haven’t made up my mind,” he explained to a Los Angeles Times reporter. “All I can say is that everybody agreed that it would be a good idea to boycott,” but, he insisted, “there is no boycott as of now.”

Alcindor suddenly found himself at the center of a national controversy. Critics called him a disgrace, unpatriotic and much worse. If he did not play for the U.S. Olympic team, then UCLA should revoke his scholarship, they charged. Many white Americans opposed the boycott because they believed that sports were meritocratic and immune to racism. But their objections also revealed discomfort with assertive black athletes who challenged the power structure of American sports, a plantation culture that valued black bodies more than black minds. New York Times columnist Arthur Daley couldn’t imagine Alcindor thinking for himself and suggested that Edwards was exploiting the UCLA star’s fame for personal gain. “I think that charge is sheer idiocy,” Edwards told the San Jose Mercury News. “How can you manipulate anybody like Lew Alcindor?”

But Alcindor was his own man, and his revolt emanated from the deep history of African-American activism and the burgeoning Black Power movement on campus. What the sports establishment failed to recognize was that his experience in Harlem, his identification with Malcolm X and his connection to Ali had transformed the way he viewed protest, patriotism and American sports. How could he stay silent while police brutality, poverty and prejudice afflicted the black community? How could anyone expect him to represent the United States when the moment he confronted the nation’s racism bigots deluged him with hate mail and death threats? How could they expect him to love America when America didn’t love him back?

New York, 1968

Alcindor had made up his mind. He wouldn’t play for the USA. Although the boycott movement lacked widespread support and ultimately stalled, he and his UCLA teammates Mike Warren and Lucius Allen refused to attend the Olympic trials. His explanation, however, complicated his image as a Black Power hero. Alcindor said that if he participated, then he would miss class and delay his graduation, which was true, but only part of his rationale. He also told a reporter from Life magazine that he and his UCLA teammates “don’t want to get caught in the middle of anything.” He had principles, but discussing them publicly only brought more stress. It was much easier to distance himself from Edwards and the OPHR.

In the summer of 1968, he worked for Operation Sports Rescue, a youth program in New York City. Leading basketball clinics, Alcindor mentored African-American and Puerto Rican youths, encouraging them to get an education. In July, he appeared on NBC’s Today show to promote the program. Co-host Joe Garagiola, a former professional baseball player, began the interview by asking Alcindor why he refused to play in the Olympics. During a heated exchange, Alcindor said, “Yeah, I live here, but it’s not really my country.” Then Garagiola retorted, “Well, then, there’s only one solution, maybe you should move.” It was a common reply among white Americans who demanded accommodation and gratitude from black athletes — a refrain that still exists today.

Alcindor’s comments echoed Malcolm X, who said, “Being born here in America doesn’t make you an American.” If black people were Americans, he argued, then they wouldn’t need civil rights legislation or constitutional amendments for protection. Alcindor recognized that while he was fortunate because of his basketball ability, he couldn’t celebrate his privileged status as long as racial inequality persisted. Only when black citizens enjoyed true freedom could he call America his country.

Although we remember the 1968 Olympics for John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s demonstration on the victory stand, Alcindor was the most famous athlete who avoided the games. More than any other college basketball player, he defined his times, proving also that black athletes could speak their minds and win. No one could tell him to shut up and dribble.

When Jim Brown ran on the football field, he moved with power, grace and speed. During his career, he rushed for a then career-record 12,312 yards and starred on the Cleveland Browns’ last NFL championship team in 1964, one of eight years he led the NFL in rushing during a nine-year career.

But it was the way he walked on the field between plays that defined him in my eyes. He walked with the determined purpose of a man making his way to a roll of sheet metal, a bale of cotton or a cord of wood. Wasn’t no need to hurry. Nobody paid him for hurrying. He got paid to get things right.

He got paid for being the best NFL running back of his era. And when it looked like the Browns wouldn’t respect him as a man, he left the NFL before the beginning of the 1966 season. He left for Hollywood, where he performed in movies such as The Dirty Dozen, a World War II action drama.

Throughout his public life, Brown has been a man of action. He’s worked to end gang violence in California, for a time helped Richard Pryor produce the movies that would present a worthy showcase for his comedic genius, campaigned for Barack Obama and then gave the nation’s first black president only a “C” for his performance.

He’s the kind of man you’d want to agree with. Indeed, I join Brown in not wanting to see the American flag disrespected. That’s why he says he doesn’t support the movement that former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick fostered of protesting police misconduct and societal inequality during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” before NFL games.

But for me, the American flag is disrespected most when it is carried by braying bullies who see no dangerous contradiction in waving the American flag with one hand and the Nazi or Confederate flags in another. For me, the flag is disrespected when scoundrels and grifters cloak their disdain for people unlike themselves in the flag and supposed patriotism. It’s disrespected when ceremony and pageantry appear to be more important to some in honoring the flag and America than prompting the nation to live up to its highest ideals.

When I was a child, I looked up to men like Jim Brown, whether they earned their money on the football field or the factory floor. They were strong and honest. They worked for everything they got. And they strived to help others, too.

Indeed, I believe that black America has paid a withering cost because so many factories have closed. The jobs that helped generations of young black men earn their living and support their families and communities are long gone.

Jim Brown is in his 80s. But he has not gone away. He continues to help communities do things he believes must be done. He has a right to his opinion and a right to express it, just as Kaepernick and current NFL players do. And it’s up to today’s players to decide whether, when, where and how they will protest, what role they will play in improving America.

A half-century ago, Jim Brown was among a group of black athletes, intellectuals and activists who talked about using a proposed boycott by American black athletes of the Olympics in Mexico to make a point about racial injustice in America. In those days, many of Brown’s elders thought he and his cohorts were wrong. There was no mass boycott of the games by star black athletes. But sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith‘s black-gloved protest from the medal stand during the games endures as an act of strength, courage and patriotism.

Sometimes right and wrong get seen more clearly with hindsight.

As time passes, Kaepernick and those who have followed him remind us that protest, sometimes controversial and condemned, has been the forerunner of needed change in America. Kaepernick and his NFL cohorts have again put the American flag in the firm and proud grasp of those who understand something real and unassailable: Our nation’s flag is just a piece of cloth with stars and stripes on it, our national anthem, just a song that’s hard to sing, unless we’re willing to struggle to get things right in America.

The black power salute by American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos on a Mexico City medal stand at the 1968 Summer Olympics is one of the most iconic images in the history of sports activism. Even though the majority of Americans alive today weren’t born yet, it’s a part of our collective consciousness. We remember it, even if we didn’t experience it.

But with many people comparing the media coverage and public perception of Colin Kaepernick to the precedent set by Smith and Carlos, it’s important to ask how things really went down that night 50 years ago and how it was covered by the American media at the time.

The answers are different from what one might believe.

First of all, it didn’t take place in the summer at all, but on Oct. 16. The Mexico City Games had begun four days earlier, an autumn concession to the Mexican heat and the American viewing public, which was preoccupied with the World Series until Oct. 10, when the Detroit Tigers beat the St. Louis Cardinals in Game 7.

The 200-meter final easily could have taken place without either of the famous protagonists. In the semifinals, ABC television cameras captured Carlos, who won his heat, stepping on the line separating his lane from the next, an automatic disqualification that the judges simply missed. Smith, meanwhile, strained a groin muscle during his semifinal, yet still went on to win gold in a world-record time of 19.83 seconds (besting his own mark of 20.0 set two years earlier).

It wasn’t until the day after the 200-meter final, during an ABC Evening News broadcast hosted by first-year anchor Frank Reynolds, that many American television viewers saw the protest by Smith and Carlos. Reynolds, a World War II veteran and Purple Heart recipient, covered the story in an empathetic fashion, giving no airtime to critics of the gesture, a significant difference from coverage of today’s NFL protests.

In the immediate aftermath, Americans weren’t confronted with the image of Smith and Carlos wherever they turned. The photo didn’t appear at all in the succeeding issues of Sports Illustrated, let alone on the cover, and Newsweek buried it on Page 78. Many newspapers carried the photo, but often as a small sidebar next to images of the victorious Smith crossing the 200-meter finish line in record-breaking time. At the time, many considered Smith’s athletic feat the bigger story. Now we struggle to remember whether it was Smith or Carlos who won the gold medal, and mistakenly believe the other won silver, not bronze.

On its Oct. 17 newscast, ABC, the Olympics’ rights holder, started with coverage of Jackie Kennedy’s wedding to Aristotle Onassis, an update on casualties in Vietnam and reports from the presidential campaign trail. (In El Paso, Texas, Alabama Gov. George Wallace trolled hecklers by claiming there were two four-letter words they did not know: w-o-r-k and s-o-a-p.) Midway through the show, Reynolds broke the news out of Mexico City in understated fashion.

“The United States leads the Olympics in medal awards and is just about supreme in the sprint races thanks to men like Tommie Smith and John Carlos,” he said. “Yesterday, they came in first and third in the 200-meter dash and then stood on the victory platform with bowed heads, wearing black socks and gloves in a racial protest.”

The screen then cut to footage from the previous night’s medal ceremony, not just a brief clip but the entire “Star-Spangled Banner.” Gold medalist Smith stood center-screen, head bowed and right arm straight up in the air. Carlos appeared to the right, his left arm up and slightly bent, with silver medalist Peter Norman of Australia to the left, staring straight ahead. Between close-ups of Smith and a wide shot of Carlos, the camera followed the American flags as they were hoisted into the night sky.

Reynolds came back on screen to provide context. “Before the Olympics there was a furor in this country over a threatened boycott by Negro athletes,” he said. “Then most of them decided that participation in this Olympics would further the cause of civil rights in this country and abroad. The Negro athletes wear buttons reading ‘Olympic Project for Human Rights.’ (Norman did, too, but Reynolds made no mention of this.) There were some boos in the stadium last night. ABC sports editor Howard Cosell spoke to Tommie Smith after he accepted his gold medal.”

The 50-year-old Cosell was shown seated next to Smith in a studio with legs crossed and arms resting comfortably by his side. Cosell asked a simple question that gave Smith a platform to say whatever he wanted.

“Tommie,” he asked, “would you explain to the people of America exactly what you did and why you did it?”

“First of all, Howard, I would like to say I’m very happy to have won the gold medal here in Mexico City,” Smith said. “The right glove that I wore on my right hand signified the power in black America. The left glove my teammate John Carlos wore on his left hand made an arc, my right hand to his left hand, also signifying black unity. The scarf that was worn around my neck signified blackness. John Carlos and me wore socks, black socks, without shoes, to also signify our poverty.”

Just as Kaepernick’s protests came during a time of heightened racial tensions, the rationale Smith outlined for Cosell fit squarely into the context of contemporary events in the U.S. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated just six months earlier in the midst of organizing his Poor People’s Campaign. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, running for president on a platform focused on racial equality and economic justice, had been shot and killed five months earlier. Segregationist presidential candidate Wallace was on the way to winning five Southern states. Sports Illustrated had devoted the month of July to examining the plight of the black athlete.

Cosell’s second and final question — “Do you think you represented all black athletes in doing this?” — would likely draw criticism today. So many land mines: Are white athletes asked if their political statements represent all white people? Was Cosell playing to white audiences who differentiated between “good” blacks and militant ones? Was he goading Smith into creating a divide among black athletes in Mexico City who didn’t want to be pulled into the controversy? Smith looked uncomfortable as he answered, leaning away from Cosell, crossing his arms in front of him. In his response, he elevated the discussion beyond the track or the Olympic Village and explained that the gesture sprung from deep within. It was at once universal and intensely personal.

“Ah, I can say I represented black America,” he said. “I’m very proud to be a black man as I said earlier, and also to have won the gold medal. And this, I thought, I could represent my people by letting them know that I’m proud to be a black man.”

The segment lasted 3 minutes and 40 seconds, an eternity for a national news broadcast. All ABC had done was show what happened and ask Smith to talk about it. No talking heads, no hot takes, no contrived debate.

The next night, after the U.S. Olympic Committee had evicted Smith and Carlos from the Olympic Village and ordered them to leave within 48 hours, CBS and NBC finally picked up on the story, but only with brief reports, read by Walter Cronkite and Chet Huntley, respectively, on the athletes being sent home. ABC’s newscast, however, returned to the story for nearly five minutes, looking for reactions in the village. Jesse Owens, a four-time gold medalist in track and field, declined to comment, as did sprinter Lee Evans and Carlos’ wife, Kim. U.S. boxing coach Patrick Albert was frustrated by the attention. “There is no movement, there is no nothing,” he said. “We abide by the rules. And I wish everybody would go home.” American middleweight boxer Al Jones skirted the subject through humor. Asked how he would accept a medal should he win one, he deadpanned, “Over my neck, you know.” (He won bronze.)

When a scrum of reporters found Carlos at the athletes village, ABC viewers could hear the agitation in his voice. Where Smith had appeared calm and welcomed the chance to explain his actions in the televised interview the night before, Carlos projected a different attitude. “Next man who come up and puts a camera in my face or a speaker up in my face, I’m going to knock them down and jump on them, you hear? Believe me, I’m telling you. If you know what’s good, go out and talk to one of the coaches and just leave me alone, all right?” (At the previous night’s news conference after the medal presentation, Carlos had struck an equally forceful tone. “I’d like to tell white people in America and all over the world that if they don’t care for the things black people do, then they shouldn’t sit in the stands and watch them perform.”)

Reynolds then turned the newscast over to Cosell in Mexico City for his “comments on the controversy,” signaling to viewers they were about to hear an opinion, not straight reporting. Standing behind a podium in his familiar ABC Sports sports coat, holding a pair of glasses in his right hand and with a wide view of the Olympic track visible behind him, Cosell blasted Olympic officials and expressed sympathy for activist black athletes.

“Doubtless the preponderant weight of American public opinion will support the committee, but nothing is solved, really. The U.S. Olympic Committee, in the manner of the famed village of Brigadoon, appears on the scene once every four years. It is in the main a group of pompous, arrogant, medieval-minded men who regard the games as a private social preserve for their tiny clique. They view participation in the games as a privilege, not as a right earned by competition. They say the games are sports, not politics, something separate and apart from the realities of life. The black athlete says he is leading a revolution in America, a revolution designed to produce dignity for the black man and that he is a human being before he is an athlete. He says his life in America is filled with injustice, that he wants equality everywhere, not just within the arena. He says he will not be used once every four years on behalf of a group that ignores what happens to him every day of all the years. He says he earns participation, wins fairly, and that he will use his prominence earned within the arena to better his plight outside of it. He says don’t tell me about the rules, the U.S. doesn’t dip its flag in front of the reviewing stand and that’s a rule all other nations follow. He is aware of backlash but says he’s had it for 400 years. And, so, the Olympic Games for the United States have become a kind of America in microcosm, a country torn apart. Where will it all end? Don’t ask the U.S. Olympic Committee, they’ve been too busy preparing for a VIP cocktail party next Monday night in the lush new Camino Real. Howard Cosell reporting from Mexico City.”

Cosell had predicted a backlash, and he was right. But there was also support. And in contrast to today, where Twitter would be ablaze with commentary before the rockets’ red glare, in the age of weekly newsmagazines and days-later letters to the editor, reaction to Smith and Carlos “unrolled really slowly,” said College of New Rochelle professor Amy Bass, author of Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete, a book about black athletes and activism. “It’s hard for our modern brains to wrap around. It wasn’t an instant shock, which is what we assume it was.” Further, Bass says, much of the American press covered the 200-meter race and the medal stand gesture as separate events, often with one story and photo on Smith’s record-breaking athletic performance and another package on the raised fists. The Los Angeles Times treated the protest as the bigger story; The New York Times did the opposite.

At the Olympic Village, white American pole vaulter Bob Seagren told reporters that “if [Smith and Carlos] don’t like the United States, they can always leave.” But white decathlete Tom Waddell said black Americans had been discredited by the American flag more often than they had sullied it. “Let a Russian try that and see what happens,” hammer thrower Hal Connolly said in support of the political protest.

In contrast to the support from many Olympians, the reaction from white sportswriters at major news outlets was mostly negative. Time magazine complained that Smith and Carlos had transformed the Olympic motto of Faster, Higher, Stronger into Angrier, Nastier, Uglier. In the Los Angeles Times, John Hall wrote that he was sick of apologizing for the likes of Smith and Carlos, who he said had a “whining, mealy-mouthed, shallow view of the world.” Others were less harsh. In the Los Angeles Times, Hall’s colleague Jim Murray cracked, “Our secret is out. We got race problems in our country.” In Newsweek, Pete Axthelm wrote that “judged against some of the alternatives that black militants had considered, the silent tableau seemed fairly mild.”

Many national publications provided space to readers with varying opinions. In Newsweek, a reader from Redondo Beach, California, wrote that Smith and Carlos should “seek residence elsewhere. Being of African descent does not license an American to act like an ass, either abroad or at home.” But a letter-writer from Austin, Texas, asked, “Did we expect black athletes to bring just their talents and not themselves to the Olympics? The black protest was fitting because it pointed up the fact that Negroes were asked to represent a nation that does not yet fully represent them. To expect any man to live in a vacuum (Olympic or otherwise) is as naïve as it is unfair.”

Just as there has not been a monolithic reaction to Kaepernick’s actions among black Americans today, the black press was divided in 1968. At the Baltimore Afro-American, 64-year-old sports editor Sam Lacy, who had been instrumental in pushing Major League Baseball to integrate two decades earlier, said he was embarrassed by the Nazi “heil-like salute,” which he found to be “childish and in extremely poor taste.” (Comparisons to the Hitler salutes in Berlin 32 years earlier were frequent. The Los Angeles Times also called the raised fists a “Nazi-like salute,” and in the Chicago American, young reporter Brent Musburger dubbed Smith and Carlos “black-skinned stormtroopers.”) The Pittsburgh Courier, on the other hand, ran a front-page photo of the medal stand scene with the caption “BLACK AND PROUD.”

In some cases, opinions were split even at the same black newspapers.

Los Angeles Sentinel reporter Booker Griffin called the protest “one of the greatest moments for the Afro-American in the 400 years of colonialization in this country,” while his colleague Brad Pye Jr. wrote that it was out of place at a sporting event. “All countries and all people have a multitude of problems,” he said. “The Olympic Games is not a problem-solving platform.”

But an Oct. 24 CBS Evening News segment showed just how positively Smith and Carlos’ gesture was received by many younger blacks. After being kicked out of Mexico by white Olympic officials and fielding questions from a white press corps, Carlos was comforted by the support he received from the black community on his return home. Flanked by Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown at an outdoor news conference in Washington, D.C., and surrounded by 2,000 cheering Howard University students, Carlos felt and heard the love.

“From this day forward,” Carmichael proclaimed, “black people will pick their own black heroes.”

Carlos told the crowd how much their support meant to him.

“There are so many white people telling me that I was a fool,” he said, “and I was standing up on that platform, that Tommie Smith and I were standing there alone, and I was very honored and pleased to come home to the black community and find that everyone was there with us.”

Fifty years later, Kaepernick has emerged as the successor to Smith and Carlos, both in his visual, national anthem-staged protest of racism (though there is no single, iconic image associated with him) and in the range of public and media responses to his actions. Now as then, nearly all of the traditional sports media members who have interpreted Kaepernick’s actions for the American public are white, even though the non-Hispanic white population in the U.S. dropped from 84 percent to 64 percent between the 1970 and 2010 censuses. But thanks to Twitter, blogs and other forms of social media, says Lou Moore, a professor of African-American history and sports history at Grand Valley State University, more voices, especially black voices, are being heard this time around. Still, he says, in the cases of both Smith and Carlos, and Kaepernick, critics have taken the easy way out when they harp on style and ignore substance. “It’s very similar in the sense many people are blatantly and willingly missing the point,” said Moore. “When people go straight to, ‘They’re being disrespectful,’ they’re willingly ignoring what [Smith, Carlos and Kaepernick] were actually talking about. All the naysayers want to do is talk about the flag or the anthem because they don’t want to be having these real conversations about racism.”

A May 2018 study by San Jose State graduate student Jack Hunter echoes Moore’s point. Analyzing media coverage of protests by Kaepernick and other NFL players between August 2016 and February 2018, Hunter found that coverage of the underlying reason for the protests (police brutality) has been overshadowed by coverage of opposition to the protests — and protesters.

A lot has changed since those days in Mexico City. Back then, one could walk on a plane without going through security and then light up a cigarette on board. No woman had ever served on the Supreme Court, seat belts weren’t mandatory and man had yet to walk on the moon.

But when it comes to American attitudes toward politically active black athletes, Bass says we’re still where we were on Oct. 16, 1968.

“Literally nothing has changed,” she said. “It’s the exact same story.”

Revolutions in the age of social media are rarely fought in private.

Disputes are ugly, public affairs waged across multiple platforms: in chat rooms, at White House press briefings, and now in the middle of a football field.

On Sunday, Eric Reid of the Carolina Panthers confronted the Philadelphia Eagles’ Malcolm Jenkins at midfield after the ceremonial coin toss.

Reid never threw a punch. He didn’t have to — the sheer bold act of confronting Jenkins at midfield before the game was punch enough. The last thing Jenkins might have expected was to see Reid, who broke pregame protocol to confront Jenkins, in public, before millions.

They exchanged words, tempers flared and Reid, who knelt with Colin Kaepernick when they both played for San Francisco, had to be restrained.

This was dramatic theater, and bonus coverage for fans who thought they were coming to simply watch a football game. What unfolded was raw political theater on a football field.

Last year, the Players Coalition, which Jenkins co-founded, and Reid initially supported, agreed to accept an offer of nearly $90 million from NFL owners to fund various social initiatives. What the owners wanted desperately was for players to stop protesting during the national anthem.

Whether he meant it or not, Jenkins compromised Reid and Kaepernick when the Players Coalition accepted nearly $90 million from NFL owners. Jenkins then announced, publicly, that he was finished protesting during the national anthem.

Reid was unemployed until two weeks ago, and Kaepernick continues to be unemployed.

Christopher Bracey is vice provost for faculty affairs and professor of law at George Washington University. He is also the author of Saviors or Sellouts: The Promise and Peril of Black Conservatism, from Booker T. Washington to Condoleezza Rice. Bracey said Reid’s use of the term “sellout” was accurate.

“Reid is entirely correct to assert that Jenkins attempted to ‘sell’ the position initiated by he and Kap [kneeling during the anthem] to the NFL in exchange for concessions that Kap presumably had no involvement in negotiating,” Bracey said.

“This is a classic attempted co-opting of a movement. It is also a tragic reflection of the politics of a racial co-opting of what we all thought was a bygone era.”

The NFL payout would come out to about $2.8 million per team, a pittance to pay to get potentially volatile black NFL players to fall in line. A small price to keep the White House off the NFL’s back, to reassure a predominantly white fan base that politics would be removed from the stadium experience.

The pent-up anger Reid expressed Sunday was justified. He wanted the world to know that he felt Jenkins had betrayed a cause.

After Sunday’s game, Reid doubled down and called Jenkins a sellout.

Jenkins attempted to take the high road, saying he was happy Reid was back in the league, that he was not going to bad-mouth someone he knew was committed to a cause, “especially another black man.”

My initial thought to that last thought was an old-school reaction: Black folks shouldn’t publicly fight with black folks.

Problem is, that ship officially sailed decades ago. In 1903, the scholar W.E.B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk, which took on the conservatism of Booker T. Washington and laid a foundation for radical blackness.

Marcus Garvey subsequently took on Du Bois, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. challenged each other, Shirley Chisholm challenged black male political hegemony, Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson have famously and publicly collided.

What made Sunday’s confrontation between Reid and Jenkins notable is that it was the first time I remember a clash of ideology around black liberation breaking out on an NFL playing field.

Reid believes passionately that commitment to a cause requires unwavering commitment. He believes it should be public: Stake out your position and compel your opponent to be equally passionate about staking out his. Let the world know where you stand. Create a dialogue.

Jenkins initially raised his fist in protest. He stopped after receiving what his critics called hush money from the NFL. And Jenkins did exactly that. He hushed. In a statement issued last year, Jenkins said he took offense at being called a sellout for taking the contribution: “For the Players Coalition and I, it was never about the money or having our voices bought. To hear people call me or anyone else a sellout is insulting. It has always been, and will always be, about lifting the voices of the people and the work of those that fight for them.”

That may not make Jenkins a sellout, but the optics make him look co-opted and compromised.

In the long run, these internecine disagreements will make the whole stronger.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the victory stand demonstration during the Mexico City Games by Tommie Smith and John Carlos.

Smith and Carlos have enjoyed a consistently odd 51-year relationship, dating to 1967 when they became Speed City teammates at San Jose State University. Carlos once told me he and Smith loved each other but didn’t necessarily like each other.

About 10 years ago, I was with them in New York City when simmering tensions came to a head over claims and counterclaims each man had made about the other. Smith released a book, Silent Gesture, in which he said Carlos needed him more than he needed Carlos. Carlos claimed he let Smith win the gold medal in the 200 meters in Mexico City.

In the intervening years, they have made peace, realizing that commercially, politically and athletically they are joined forever at the hip. They were together last week in San Jose, California, appearing at a dinner and on a panel, posing for photographs and basking in the glow of creating one of the most dramatic moments in Olympic history.

They have separate lines of clothes with logos that reflect one, not both, of them on the victory stand.

Last week during an interview, I asked Smith about his and Carlos’ relationship. “I love John and respect him,” he said. “We’re different people.

“Sure, John Carlos and Tommie Smith are joined forever by that action. He likes certain things. I like certain things. We have our own separate ways of doing certain things, just that simple.”

What advice would he give to younger activist athletes like Jenkins and Reid who find themselves at odds with one another.

“You don’t have to have dinner together. You don’t have to have that to accomplish a goal,” Smith said. “We don’t even have to think the same way. Just have a plan and be ready to sacrifice, when you’re fighting against something. The status quo has another agenda.”

The dispute between Reid and Jenkins, Kaepernick and the National Football League is far from over.

On Monday, an arbitrator denied Reid’s collusion claim against the Cincinnati Bengals.

Kaepernick’s collusion case is ongoing. The issues Jenkins and Reid care about — police violence, injustice, debilitating mass incarceration — are front and center, as Reid was front and center last Sunday. Even as he plays in Carolina, Reid continues to kneel and protest. He remains unbowed. That’s a good thing.

George Foreman, a Texan by birth and girth, has been a fascinating, sometimes bewildering slice of the American culture for five decades.

Puncher, preacher, pitchman — Foreman has worn many hats and belts, including that of oldest world heavyweight champion in history when he was 45. During a troubled youth, Foreman dropped out of high school and joined the Job Corps. By 1968, the pulverizing puncher was a member of the U.S. Olympic boxing team in Mexico City. Foreman won a gold medal when his bout against Jonas Cepulis of the Soviet Union was halted by the referee in the second round. What Foreman did next always has been the subject of some speculation.

Foreman’s medal-winning bout, occurring only days after a controversial medals-podium protest by U.S. track teammates Tommie Smith and John Carlos, ended with him patriotically parading around the ring clutching a U.S. flag.

Foreman, 69, spoke to The Undefeated about that moment a half-century ago, Colin Kaepernick and more.

U.S. track stars John Carlos and Tommie Smith defiantly stood on the medals stand in Mexico City with heads lowered and black-gloved fists raised to protest racial discrimination and social injustice in America. Days later, you paraded around a boxing ring proudly clutching a tiny American flag after winning a gold medal. Some suggested that the International Olympic Committee persuaded you to defuse the controversy. What’s the truth?

Was there a backlash for you?

I went home and wore the gold off that medal. It was 1968, and it really fit well with my Nehru jacket that was in style. I proudly walked down Lyons Avenue in the 5th Ward [in Houston] wearing my medal. A guy I thought was a friend walked up, looked me in the face and said, ‘How could you do what you did when the brothers [Smith and Carlos] were doing their thing?’ It … broke … my … heart. I didn’t expect that. I didn’t know what he was talking about. I looked at him kind of funny. He walked away. I guess he thought, I’d better go.

Did the moment he regarded you as a race traitor change you?

From then on, anyone who came up to me and might say the same thing, they were only seconds away from getting [the glare], man. I carried a chip on my shoulder. It turned into anger. I changed, my face changed into a sword. It was fierce, I wasn’t playin’. Across a room, I would hear people say, ‘Ask him for his autograph.’ Someone would say, ‘No, you ask him.’ Or: ‘Send your kid.’ I was not going to let anyone hurt me like that anymore, like an old turtle in a shell. Then, like a banana, I peeled off [the look] during my metamorphosis [decades later].

Do you find it interesting that President Trump pardoned turn-of-the-century black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, but that President Barack Obama did not?

It’s a wonderful thing [for Johnson], a clean slate. He was a special guy [and a fellow Texan]. The novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was more persuasive [regarding racial attitudes] than any book. Then comes Jack Johnson. He tore down the Cabin, log by log. That’s all he was guilty of. (Johnson was convicted of violating the Mann Act for transporting white women across state lines for “immoral purposes.’’) Trump, more than any, saw what boxers can really do. We had boxing promotions in his hotels, and he built a dynasty. I can see him easily doing that more than President Obama and other presidents because there was nothing earthy about them. President Trump is the most down-to-earth guy.

Unlike Muhammad Ali, you never seemed to be vocal regarding racial injustices. When former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem in 2016, what was your immediate reaction?

It bothered me. Then, it rolled off my back like water off a duck. But it was nice to see young people still thinking. People of my generation often wonder if anyone’s thinking anymore. This young man is still thinking. What I lived through was John Carlos and Tommie Smith. They were trying to say, ‘We are Americans!’ That’s all they were saying. They weren’t trying to make another statement. These are Americans expressing themselves. It’s inbred for Americans — we make statements. To live in this country, you should try to make a statement about something [important] before you die.

After Kaepernick’s stand, other NFL players took up the mantle of civil disobedience. Did that disrespect U.S. war veterans?

There always will be a place for protest. Once you find a country that does not have protests, then you just need to get on a boat and go somewhere else. When you don’t have protests, or people making statements, get out. There is a place for those guys. But, understandably, I am in love with the national anthem, and wavin’ that flag. I love that stuff. But I also love the fact that I live in a place where my kids tell me some of the most foolish stuff I’ve ever heard [and are permitted to do so]. Sooner or later, if we are the country we say we are, we can handle it.

Commissioner Roger Goodell and the NFL continue to be criticized for their handling of the issue. How would George Foreman resolve it?

With so many young, rich guys, you have to understand that, like us farmers, you cannot herd bees. With rich comes a big tongue. You try to herd bees, you will get in trouble. Sooner or later, they always come back to the box. If you let players kneel, they’re going to get mad at you for that and start standing. You just don’t say anything — put the best teams on the field and go about your business. Let the media tell their stories. You cannot win.

Why does Kaepernick, a Super Bowl quarterback, remain unsigned by any team?

Let me give you a little history. I loved ‘The Bullet’ [Hall of Fame receiver] Bob Hayes. When the Cowboys traded him [to the 49ers], I stopped watching them for 10 years. I was so upset. After I met [Cowboys owner] Jerry Jones, my warmth for the team returned. If Kaepernick had been a Dallas Cowboy during the ‘knee era,’ I would say he could have done no wrong. But [if I am Jones], I am not going to say a 49er should have a job, and beat the Cowboys.

But do you think the NFL is blackballing him?

Hopefully, this will illustrate it: I was in the Job Corps in 1965. First thing they taught us dropouts was to look recruiters right in the eye, shake their hands firmly, make sure you are dressed well and answer politely. Ten guys can be qualified, but the one they like will get the job. If you want people to give you a job, you have to make them love you. If you want people to do right, you’re going to have to dedicate yourself to protesting and demonstrating. That does not mean people are going to like you and say, ‘Here is a job.’

Ali temporarily lost his boxing career when he stood up for religious principles. How did you feel when your longtime friend and foil died two years ago?

To this day, I still have not gotten over it. That is one person I’ve known, and loved, more than someone who wasn’t in my family. He was like a brother. I have moments where I cry a little bit. I didn’t realize what a blessing he was.

OAKLAND, Calif. — More than 50 years ago, Tommie Smith extended his black-fisted glove to the heavens during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. On Tuesday, the iconic track and field star talked about his unforgettable stand with the NBA champion Golden State Warriors.

“It’s kind of sad, and I might be wrong, but from my eyes and my point of view he doesn’t get the credit he deserves for what he has done for African-American athletes,” Warriors center DeMarcus Cousins told The Undefeated.

On Oct. 16, 1968, Smith and teammate John Carlos won medals in the 200-meter dash; Smith won gold, while Carlos took home bronze. During the medal ceremony, both stared downward from the podium with fists raised for the national anthem — a silent protest during the end of the civil rights movement in America. The two African-American runners were joined by Australian silver medalist Peter Norman, and they all wore human rights badges. With the whole world watching, it was arguably the boldest statement in Olympic history.

Smith and Carlos were suspended from Team USA and kicked out of the Olympic Village. The two Olympians and their family members received death threats once they returned to the States.

On Tuesday, the Warriors watched a video of Smith’s story at their practice facility and listened to him speak about his experience. Smith also told the story of the late Norman, who was blackballed in Australia and not sent to the 1972 Munich Games despite qualifying 13 times and being ranked fifth in the world in the 200 meters.

“My message was about perseverance,” Smith told The Undefeated. “Do not ‘shut up and dribble,’ but understand what you are doing.”

A source said Warriors players asked Smith questions, including several by a very intrigued Andre Iguodala and one by Warriors All-Star Stephen Curry, who asked Smith about being banned from USA Track & Field while at the top of his game.

Cousins described Smith’s visit as “incredible” and said he felt a connection with him.

“I feel like we might be related, the way with his demeanor, the way he carries himself and the way he speaks,” Cousins said. “The realness about him. I like that a lot about him.

“He’s paved the way for a lot of athletes like myself. He’s definitely a guy I consider iconic. … He basically said to ‘stand for something or fall for anything.’ He encouraged us to use our platform, no matter how big it is. As long as you have one, you could use it. It’s obvious he used his.”

Kerr called the meeting with Smith “a really special day.”

“There were little details of the story that I didn’t know,” Kerr said. “It was fun to see the interaction between the group. Tommie is also really funny, a great storyteller.”

Smith’s presentation with the Warriors lasted about 30 minutes. Warriors assistant coach Ron Adams, who played basketball against Smith in high school, also talked about their longtime friendship and his respect for Smith.

Afterward, Smith went on the floor to take a couple of shots and pass the ball to Warriors players during shooting drills.

“I even got to pass Steph the ball,” Smith said. “He missed the shot, but it was probably because of my bad pass.”

Smith’s wife, Delois, also filmed Curry and forward Draymond Green giving a message of encouragement to their 12-year-old granddaughter Daniel Singley, who plays on her junior high basketball team in Ontario, California.

The Warriors are joining the NBA’s 29 other teams in celebrating Black History Month in February. On Wednesday, the Warriors will celebrate Smith when they play the San Antonio Spurs. Smith was a track and football star locally at San Jose State.

Smith has been making the speaking rounds in recent days, with stops at Virginia Tech, Columbia University, the Super Bowl and a middle school in his hometown of Atlanta before coming to the Bay Area.

“They wanted to know about Mexico in ’68 and why it happened, the Olympic Project for Human Rights and what was that,” Smith said of the Warriors. “The biggest part of today was how I lived yesterday.”

What are we willing to die for in the age of Donald Trump?

This was the overarching question that repeatedly came to mind Tuesday afternoon as I listened to an impressive panel of journalists, former and current athletes celebrate the launch of the Institute for the Study of Sport, Society and Social Change at San Jose State University.

The Institute is the creation of Harry Edwards, professor emeritus at the university and a renowned sociologist who is most associated with the study of political activism in sports beginning in the late 1960s.

A nearly full house at the Hammer Theatre heard a fascinating array of perspectives, from Jim Brown explaining why he met with then-President-elect Donald Trump, Chris Webber discussing the exploitation of young athletes, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar calling for economic cooperation among athletes, and Takeo Spikes and Anquan Boldin explaining why they played the violent game of football.

The overarching theme of the conference was Words to Power and what are we willing to risk.

My question after all the words and all the applause was what are we willing to risk. What in 2017, with so many African-Americans doing well, are we willing to die for?

Not necessarily a literal death, but career death, economic death or political death that comes with actively resisting.

“The issue of what I am willing die for at this point is simply the reverse side of what is it that I am fighting for in life,” Edwards said.

“It’s not being scared and saying, ‘Oh, my God, if it comes to that, am I willing to die?’ That’s not the question,” Edwards said. “Am I willing to forgo my responsibilities in terms of life , not to die?”

Edwards, who turns 75 in November, reconsidered the question of what he would die for and referenced his two grandchildren, ages 3 and 1 1/2. “What makes me more committed than ever is making sure that the world that I leave them is the best possible world that I can help to create,” he said. “In that process, I lose my house, I lose my money, I lose my life, that’s the price that has to be paid.

What I hope it will do is facilitate a plan of action for African-Americans gaining power and control in an industry which, in many ways, is there for the taking except for lack of unity and cohesion.

During an hourlong panel discussion, the need for unity and concerted action came up several times and was expressed in a number of ways. Achieving that unity has been elusive, except in team locker rooms, where athletes are trained to put aside differences that hinder the pursuit of a common goal.

In many ways, the negative reaction to Brown’s meeting with Trump is emblematic of the dilemma of a team — the Black Team — moving forward. Abdul-Jabbar, like Brown, supported Hillary Clinton. Unlike Brown, Abdul-Jabbar has been a vocal critic of Trump and could not bring himself to meet with him. But there they were, side by side on stage, respectful, cognizant of the mission at hand: how to move beyond words into action.

The object of Tuesday’s summit, and perhaps the signature of Edwards’ new institute, will be the creation of a veritable locker room space that will accommodate wide-ranging, far-reaching opinions. Perhaps it will also help answer the question: What does it mean to be an African-American and an African-American athlete in the age of Trump?

This was my first time seeing Brown since he took the meeting with Trump shortly after he was elected president.

After the panel, I asked Brown about that decision, and more pointedly, how do each of us, as African-Americans, avoid being water boys and water girls for white interests. How do each of us avoid being the person white folks point to as they attempt to deflect charges of racism?

Brown surprised me when he asked: “Who are your white people?”

Flippantly, I replied that I didn’t have any white friends.

First, that was not true. Secondly, he did not say friends. He was asking who had helped me get to this point in my life.

In fact, they have been an all-star cast of races, creeds and colors and of all political persuasions, some I liked, some not.

That was Brown’s point and this was the honest dialogue.

Brown, who operates the Amer-I-Can program, said that he wasn’t looking at black and white when he accepted the meeting. He was looking at power and access.

“I’m not astute in that,” Brown said. “I know people who have been good to me and I know people who have furthered my goals.”

Brown repeated that he did not vote for the president but as soon as his candidate lost “I began to look at how to deal with the new president.”

“While other people were sitting on their butts complaining, I was putting together a plan, so if I had an opportunity to talk to these people, I could solicit them to buy into my concept. They haven’t asked me to buy into any concept. They know that I voted for Hillary but they are willing to work with me because I brought something to them that made sense,” Brown said.

“We need jobs, badly,” Brown added. “We need to continue education, badly. We need to eradicate the violence, badly. That does not have a lot to do with Trump, it has to do with all of us.

“I don’t always know their politics, what they do behind closed doors. I speak for myself. I can withstand any kind of criticism because I’m 80 going on 81 years old and I’m interested in helping people, helping my family, helping my kids, leaving here with some dignity and to be my own man.”

The Institute for the Study of Sport is only the latest university-based think tank created to study issues related to the explosive field of sport and play.

The study of racism and sport has become a new cottage industry. Institutes have been created throughout the United States. They tend to look at statistics, at how many women or how many African-Americans are in this position or that position. The institutes tend to focus on how to develop better education classes in areas such as sport and gender.

Like the sports industry itself, the institutes also tend to be run and operated by non-African-Americans.

“We want to look at how sports interfaces with issues, structures, processes and dynamics in society to contribute to, if not create, social change,” Edwards said after Tuesday’s event.

Edwards was among the first scholars to chart how the evolution of African-Americans in sport has mirrored the evolution of African-Americans in society — from being locked out to being begrudgingly allowed in to demanding respect to changing how games are played to using the visibility of sport and the money generated by sports to create an unprecedented dynamic.

“Now, we’re into a struggle for power,” Edwards said. “The athletes are exercising that power.”

We have witnessed the phenomenon of athletes on professional sports teams joining protests outside of the arena, college athletes adding their voices to student protests, demanding airtime on networks to make statements. The black presence in sports is becoming an organized power surge.

“That power is even greater than ever, but the challenge is even greater than ever,” Edwards said. “Now it comes down to how do we negotiate those challenges, how do we manage those responses, how do we project those responses in the age of the internet. How do we manage what we can neither avoid nor eliminate.”

San Jose State is the university that produced John Carlos and Tommie Smith, whose demonstration at the 1968 Mexico City Games remains the most iconic image of protest in sport history.

Carlos and Smith are on the institute’s advisory board.

“This is what will distinguish this institute from all of the others that are counting bodies, doing things about developing classes on gender, sport and social issues in the university,” Edwards said. “We will be specifically looking at how, why and what are the dynamics, what are the projected outcomes of these developments at the interface of sport society and social change.

My concern with these institutes is that they often forge affiliations with sports leagues and teams, which they advise [and grade] — on issues of diversity. How harshly will you grade an organization that is funding your center to the tune of millions of dollars per year?

If you are a paid consultant to a team, is your role to get to the root of player uprising or to quell them. Are you a consultant or are you a management spy.

As we wrapped up our conversation Tuesday evening, Edwards said that, among other things, he wanted the institute to facilitate the convergence of a powerful black sports presence with the ongoing struggle for African-American survival and prosperity.

They are, in fact, intertwined. To make his point, Edwards recited a stunning statistic: “From 1882 until the end of 1968, the United States averaged 40 lynchings of black people every year,” he said. “From 2000 to 2015, the country has averaged 147 police shootings of black people every year, most of them unarmed.

“This is where we are,” he said. “That’s why we’re in worse shape.”

Tuesday’s event was ceremonial and only the beginning, a star-studded cast of athletes and scholars called together to make the point that the struggle continues and athletes’ informed voices are more critical now than ever.

“Why?” Edwards asked, “Because they have a megaphone, they have a forum and now there is a felt obligation because of the history.”

The theme of Tuesday’s inaugural event, indeed the imprimatur of Edwards’ Institute for the Study of Sport, Society and Social Change, is transforming words into power.

Never has there been a more important imperative.

The list is complete. The 50 Greatest Black Athletes have been determined by the public — 10,350 adults whom SurveyMonkey polled to decide who should be considered the best of the best in black athletic supremacy based upon four factors: overall ranking, dominance, inspiration and impact on society.

For months, debates have swirled in The Undefeated newsroom about who should be higher than whom, which athlete deserves to be No. 1 and, most importantly, who was left off the list. Below are The Undefeated’s picks of the top 10 omissions, with five more athletes receiving honorable mentions.

Allen Iverson

Arguably the greatest basketball player of all time — pound for pound — is none other than Allen Ezail Iverson (and don’t even think about @’ing us). During his 14-year NBA career, the point guard nicknamed “The Answer” took the hardwood at 165 pounds soaking wet while listed at 6-foot-1, although his true height is one of the most debated tall tales in NBA history (“There’s no way. He’s like 5-11,” a fellow NBA player once said.) Iverson, the No. 1 pick in the 1996 NBA draft, made the most of his size en route to 11 All-Star selections, four scoring titles, an NBA MVP award and his No. 3 jersey being retired by the Philadelphia 76ers. In 2016, he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, more than two decades after a four-month jail sentence in high school nearly derailed his hoop dreams. Oh, yeah, and he crossed up Michael Jordan … as a rookie.

Alice Coachman

Let’s play a quick three-part game of “Did you know?” First, did you know that Alice Coachman was the first African-American woman to win an Olympic gold medal? At the 1948 Olympics in London, Coachman leaped her way to gold with a high jump of 5 feet, 6 1/8 inches, an Olympic record that stood for nearly 20 years. Second, did you know that Coachman was the first African-American woman in history to earn an endorsement deal, when she became a spokeswoman for Coca-Cola in 1952? And last, the most prolific fun fact of Coachman’s career — did you know Coachman was inducted into nine halls of fame in her life? Her list includes the National Track & Field Hall of Fame and the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame. Long before Simone Biles, Gabby Douglas and Simone Manuel, Coachman showed the world #BlackGirlMagic on the Olympic stage.

Althea Gibson

On July 6, 1957, while wearing all white on the outdoor grass courts at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, Althea Gibson defeated Darlene Hard, 6-3, 6-2, to become the first African-American player to win a Wimbledon title. Gibson also earned the distinction as the first black player to win titles at the French Open and U.S. Nationals, which led tennis great Billie Jean King to refer to Gibson as the “Jackie Robinson of tennis.” Gibson was the ultimate trailblazer for the African-American stars who followed her, such as Arthur Ashe and Venus and Serena Williams. Also, don’t forget that Gibson played golf too. In the 1960s, she emerged as the first African-American player on the women’s pro golf tour.

Barry Bonds

Barry Bonds is, without question, the most decorated slugger in the history of major league baseball. He holds the record for home runs in a career (762), single season (73) and single postseason (eight), and he also boasts records for the highest single-season on-base percentage (.609 in 2004) and slugging percentage (.863 in 2001) in history. But even before Bonds allegedly began taking steroids in 1998, as detailed in the book Game of Shadows, he was a bona fide hitter. From 1986-98, Bonds hit 411 home runs, with 1,216 RBIs and a .996 (on-base plus slugging). Being linked to steroids, however, has marred Bonds’ legacy while keeping him out of the Hall of Fame with five more years of eligibility left, as well as off this list.

Deion Sanders

1. Play in both a Super Bowl and World Series
2. Suit up for both an NFL game and MLB game in the same day.

Those feats take a special breed of athlete.

Kobe Bryant

One of the most mind-boggling questions surrounding this list: How were both Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant picked ahead of Kobe Bean Bryant? In May, when The Undefeated and SurveyMonkey announced the 50 Greatest Black Athletes project, Nos. 60-51 were revealed. Westbrook, a month shy of being named the 2017 NBA MVP, and Durant, a month shy of winning his first NBA title, were ranked No. 54 and No. 51, respectively. As for Bryant? No. 58. Straight blasphemy — and that’s no disrespect to Westbrook and Durant. They just aren’t the Black Mamba, who has five championship rings, 18 All-Star selections, two scoring titles and an NBA MVP award, and he dropped a 60-piece in the final game of his career. Yes, he broke the record for most missed shots in NBA history. But he’s still top three all-time in scoring, behind only Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Karl Malone. Bryant might not be the greatest of all time, but even Jordan ranks him above LeBron James (No. 29 on our list) in the “who’s the best of all time” conversation. Mamba deserved better, y’all. Foreal.

Lawrence Taylor

Not a single defensive football player made the list of 50 Greatest Black Athletes. Not even Lawrence Taylor, the man who’s widely regarded to be the greatest defensive football player of all time. The way the Hall of Fame linebacker for the New York Giants played the game was instinctive. His motor ticked at a different, and higher, level, and the force of his rushes made it impossible for him to be blocked by a single player. In short, Taylor was a bad man. Before Houston Texans defensive end J.J. Watt, Taylor was the only player in history to win the NFL Defensive Player of the Year award three times. He also notched 10 Pro Bowl and 10 first-team All-Pro selections, with two Super Bowls and an NFL MVP award. It’s a travesty that he didn’t make the list.

Lisa Leslie

On July, 30, 2002 — six years, three months and six days after the WNBA was founded — 6-foot-5 Lisa Leslie became the first woman in league history to dunk in a game. Three years later, she became the first WNBA player to dunk in the All-Star Game. That distinction, being the first, became a staple of Leslie’s 12-year career, spent entirely with the Los Angeles Sparks. Leslie became the first player in league history to reach 3,000 points, 4,000 points and 6,000 points and the first to achieve the career milestone of 10,000 PRA (points plus rebounds plus assists). It’s hard to think of women’s basketball without Leslie, a three-time WNBA MVP and four-time Olympic gold medalist. Legendary University of Connecticut and Team USA women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma once called Leslie “a once-in-a-lifetime player” — and for good reason. For quite some time, before retiring from the game in 2009, Leslie was the queen of the WNBA — the queen of basketball.

Tiger Woods

Tiger Woods’ life and golf career have never been the same since Nov. 27, 2009, the day he crashed his Cadillac Escalade into a fire hydrant after news of his infidelity broke. But how can we forget the Tiger Woods who preceded that infamous night — the one who completely changed the athletic and cultural landscape of professional golf with his fist pumps, red-collared shirts on Sundays and sheer dominance on the course? At 24, Woods became the youngest player to complete a career Grand Slam by winning all four of the PGA’s major tournaments (the Masters, British Open, U.S. Open and PGA Championship). At 30, he became the youngest player to reach 50 career PGA wins. Woods’ 14 career major wins ranks second all-time, behind only Jack Nicklaus. At one point in his career, the question was when, not if, Woods would break Nicklaus’ record. Now, the question is whether he’ll ever play again. Besides not having won a major since 2008, Woods has only played in one tournament in the past two years. His majestic rise, and painful fall, is one of the most perplexing stories in sports. Regardless, he remains one of the greatest athletes of all time, warranting a spot high on this list — even though he might not fully consider himself black, but rather “Cablinasian,” a mixture of Caucasian, black, (American) Indian and Asian.

O.J. Simpson*

There’s an asterisk next to O.J. Simpson’s name because of the obvious — even though he was found not guilty in the criminal case for the June 12, 1994, murders of his former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. Here, though, we’ll make the case not for O.J. Simpson, the man off the field, but for O.J. Simpson, the athlete whose unparalleled talent in football has become a distant memory. Simpson is certainly in the conversation for the distinction of the greatest running back of all time. In 1973, he became the first player to rush for 2,000 yards in a single season. Only seven players in NFL history have achieved the milestone, and Simpson started the trend. Simpson was also a five-time Pro Bowler, five-time first-team All-Pro selection, NFL MVP, four-time league rushing yards leader, two-time league rushing touchdowns leader, a Heisman Trophy winner at the University of Southern California and Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee. His ability to run the football was so powerful that it earned him the nickname “The Juice.” Leaving him off the list is somewhat of an elephant in the room. But maybe he didn’t make the cut because, in his own words, he’s not black, he’s O.J.

Honorable Mentions

Tommie Smith and John Carlos

• No single moment in black sports history is more important than the stand taken by Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. After Smith won gold, and Carlos claimed bronze, in the 200 meters, the two men raised their fists in silent protest of racial discrimination in the United States. Smith and Carlos’ contributions to history go far beyond their athletic performance and instead lie within their everlasting Black Power salute, which reshaped the concept of athlete activism eternally.

Jack Johnson

• In 1908, Jack Johnson knocked out Tommy Burns to become the first African-American heavyweight boxing champion of the world. Because of Johnson’s dominance in the sport, and more importantly the color of his skin, many people in the country called for a “Great White Hope” to defeat the black champion and strip him of his title. He shook up the world with his flamboyant character while spending money excessively, driving fancy cars and dating white women. In 1912, he was convicted of violating the Mann Act by bringing a white woman across state lines before marriage. If a white boxer couldn’t stop Johnson, Jim Crow segregation could.

Sheryl Swoopes

• Sheryl Swoopes, a former four-time WNBA champion, three-time WNBA MVP and three-time Olympic gold medalist, was the first player to be signed by the league on Oct. 23, 1996. In 2016, to celebrate its 20th anniversary, the WNBA announced the league’s top 20 players of all time, with Swoopes making the cut.

Harrison Dillard

• With four gold medals from the 1948 London Olympics (100 meters and 4×100 relay) and 1952 Helsinki Olympics (110-meter hurdles and 4×100 relay), Harrison Dillard is the only man in Olympic history to win gold medals in both sprinting and hurdle events.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is known as one of the greatest basketball players in history. During his 20-year professional career with the Milwaukee Bucks and Los Angeles Lakers, he appeared in 19 All-Star Games, won six championships and collected six MVP awards. In retirement, he has become a prominent cultural commentator and writer, a leading voice on the intersection between sports and politics. Recently, he published a memoir about his collegiate career at UCLA, Coach Wooden and Me: Our 50-Year Friendship On and Off the Court.

Fifty years ago he was the most dominant college basketball player America had ever seen. Between 1967 and 1969, he led UCLA to three consecutive national titles and an 88-2 record. Yet, his legacy transcends the game; in the age of Black Power, he redefined the political role of black college athletes. In 1968, when black collegians debated boycotting the Olympics, Lew Alcindor, as he was then still known, emerged as the most prominent face in the revolt on campus.

Why did Alcindor refuse to play in the Olympics? To answer that question we have to return to Harlem, New York, in July 1964, the first of many long, hot summers.

Harlem, 1964

The death of James Powell, a 15-year-old black youth from the Bronx, outraged Alcindor. On a sweltering July day in 1964, outside an apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Lt. Thomas Gilligan, a white off-duty cop, shot and killed James, piercing the ninth-grader’s chest with a bullet from a .38 revolver. Conflicting accounts grayed a story that many saw in black and white. Gilligan, a 37-year-old war veteran, claimed that James charged at him with a knife, but bystanders insisted that James was unarmed.

Two nights later, on July 18, in the heart of Harlem, a peaceful rally organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) turned into a march against police brutality. Demanding justice for Powell, hundreds of demonstrators surrounded the 123rd Street precinct, some threatening to tear the building apart “brick by brick.” Incensed by decades of racial profiling and violent policing, the angry crowd began hurling rocks and bottles at officers. Suddenly, a scuffle broke out and the cops rushed the protesters, cracking their nightsticks against a swarm of black bodies. In a matter of minutes, violence spread through Harlem like a grease fire in a packed tenement kitchen.

That same night, Alcindor, an extremely tall, rail-thin 17-year-old, emerged from the 125th Street subway station, planning to investigate the CORE rally. Climbing up the steps toward the street, he could smell smoke coming from burning buildings. Angry young black men took to the streets and tossed bricks and Molotov cocktails through store windows. Looters grabbed radios, jewelry, food and guns. The sound of gunshots rang like firecrackers. Trembling with fear, Alcindor worried that his size and skin color made him an easy target for an angry cop with an itchy trigger finger. Sprinting home, all he could think about was that at any moment a stray bullet could strike him down.

For six days, Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant burned. The “Harlem race riots” resulted in 465 arrests, hundreds of injuries and one death. When the smoke cleared, Martin Luther King Jr. visited New York and encouraged black residents to demonstrate peacefully. But Alcindor, like many black youths, had grown impatient with King’s pleas for nonviolence and began questioning the direction of the civil rights movement. That summer, writing for the Harlem Youth Action Project newspaper, he interviewed black citizens who were tired of segregated schools, dilapidated housing, employment discrimination and wanton police violence.

The Harlem uprising fueled his anger toward white America and convinced him more than ever that he had to turn his rage into action. “Right then and there, I knew who I was, who I had to be,” he said a few years later. “I was going to be black rage personified, Black Power in the flesh.” Silence was no longer an option. In the future, he vowed, he would speak his mind.

If there was a moment that awakened Alcindor’s political consciousness and his gravitation toward Black Power, it happened in Harlem in July 1964. Three years later, when he was the biggest star in college basketball, he made good on his promise.

Westwood, 1967

When Alcindor joined the UCLA varsity team as a sophomore for the 1966-67 season, he was already the most publicized college player in America. Hundreds of schools recruited him, including segregated Southern teams that were willing to break the color line for his services. As the most coveted prospect since Wilt Chamberlain, he garnered national magazine features in Sports Illustrated, Sport, The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Look, Time and Newsweek. Photographers treated him like an object, Rex Lardner of The Saturday Evening Post wrote, “stalking him as though he were a skittish giraffe.” Sensitive and self-conscious, the introverted basketball prodigy sought privacy, but his talent could never afford it. Soon, he would realize too, his desire for privacy conflicted with his inclination to become more active in the Black Power movement.

He arrived in Westwood, California, carrying unprecedented expectations. Rival coaches and sportswriters predicted that the Bruins would never lose a game with him. Anything less than perfection would have been considered a failure.

Immediately, Alcindor proved an unstoppable force on both ends of the court. He cut an imposing presence: “long, long legs raddled with whipcord muscle; a looming torso,” and, a Newsweek reporter wrote, “a lordly head with soft brown eyes that peer calmly well above other men’s line of sight.” Towering over Lilliputians, he controlled the space near the basket, swatting basketballs into the stands. Smooth and agile, he possessed a unique array of skills, balance and quickness. Alcindor tossed hook shots into the hoop the way ordinary men flipped a wad of paper into a wastebasket. No single player could guard him alone. Opponents tried double-teaming and triple-teaming him, but Alcindor, a deft passer, hit open teammates for easy buckets. So defenses pushed, pulled, tugged, elbowed and kneed him, sending Alcindor to the brink of explosion.

Yet he exhibited poise and grace under pressure, leading the Bruins to an undefeated season (30 straight wins) and the school’s third national championship in four years. Throughout the season, coaches complained that Alcindor was too good. As long as he reigned at UCLA, the college basketball season would end with predictable results. No other school could imagine winning the national title. Some coaches even suggested raising the basket to neutralize him. The Saturday Evening Post asked the one question weighing on the minds of coaches everywhere: “Can Basketball Survive Lew Alcindor?”

The NCAA didn’t think so. A few days after UCLA beat Dayton for the national title, the NCAA’s National Basketball Committee banned the dunk. The committee argued that too many players got injured stuffing the ball through the hoop or trying to block a player attacking the basket. Coaches were concerned, too, about players breaking backboards and bending rims. Curiously, the committee also claimed, “There is no defense against the dunk, which upsets the balance between offense and defense.” But the truth was that Alcindor threatened the sport’s competitive balance. He upset the balance between offense and defense.

Immediately, critics deemed the dunk ban the “Alcindor rule.” In a time of white backlash against black advancement, the UCLA star interpreted the rule through the lens of race. He could not help but feel like the lily-white committee had targeted him. “To me the new ‘no-dunk’ rule smacks a little of discrimination,” he told the Chicago Defender. “When you look at it … most of the people who dunk are black athletes.”

During the 1960s, as black athletes became more visible on college basketball teams, dunking appeared to be a largely black phenomenon. At the same time, college basketball reflected the power structure of America: It was an institution controlled mostly by white men — coaches, athletic directors, administrators and boosters. Not only did the growing presence of black players threaten whites’ place within the game, but so too did the way they influenced the sport. Coaches imposed a rigid, patterned style of play, discouraging improvisation, plays that undermined their authority or attracted individual attention. “Showboating” was strictly forbidden, and that included dunking. But in the age of Alcindor, as black players increasingly ruled the sport, they gained greater power on and off the court. For them dunking became an expression of strength, authority and freedom — an act of defiance. Dunking on a white man could embody a politics of resistance.

Not even the dunk ban could stop Alcindor from dominating the game. In fact, the new restriction made him even better. It forced him to expand his offensive arsenal and develop a devastating signature move: the “skyhook.”

He made it look so easy. With the cool confidence of Miles Davis, Alcindor transformed his game. The skyhook became an innovative expression of individuality and empowerment, a reflection of his intelligence and creativity, an active mind that could see the ball falling through the net like a raindrop the moment the leather sphere touched his fingertips. Over and over again, he pivoted toward the basket, extended his arm toward the sky and gracefully flipped the ball over the outstretched arms of any player who dared to guard him. “Of all the weapons in sports,” Sports Illustrated’s Gary Smith wrote of his skyhook, “none has ever been more dependable or unstoppable, less vulnerable to time, than that little stride, turn, hop and flick from far above his head.”

Cleveland, 1967

Alcindor refused to let the white world define him as a basketball player and as a man. He no longer considered himself a “Negro.” He was black and proud. As he became more politically self-aware, he identified with the most successful, outspoken black professional athletes in America: Muhammad Ali, Bill Russell and Jim Brown. He admired their political activism and their courage to confront white supremacy.

In June 1967, Brown invited Alcindor, Russell and six other black professional athletes to Cleveland to meet with Ali, who had recently been stripped of his heavyweight title for refusing induction into the U.S. military. They met at the headquarters of the Negro Industrial Economic Union, a black empowerment organization founded by Brown to determine whether they would support the champ’s protest against the Vietnam War. Some of the men in the room were military veterans who disagreed with Ali’s position, and they wanted to understand why he objected to fighting for his country. Facing intense scrutiny from the press and charges of draft evasion, Ali convinced the group that he was sincerely opposed to what he viewed as an imperialistic and racist war.

The summit proved an important turning point in Alcindor’s life and in the revolt of the black athlete. In a demonstration of Black Power and solidarity, it marked the first time that black athletes unified across various sports to rally behind a single cause. It also inspired Alcindor to see himself in the same light as Ali, Brown and Russell. Although he was the only college athlete who attended the meeting in Cleveland, he realized that day that he too had a responsibility to use his platform to speak out against racism and injustice, even at a cost. Years later, he wrote in Becoming Kareem: Growing Up On and Off the Court, “Being at the summit and hearing Ali’s articulate defense of his moral beliefs and his willingness to suffer for them reinvigorated my own commitment to become even more politically involved.”

Alcindor’s coach, John Wooden, disagreed with Ali’s anti-war stand. A Navy veteran, Wooden opposed anti-war demonstrations, believing that such protests undermined the military’s efforts in Vietnam. For the conservative coach, social order, loyalty to country and national unity trumped civil disobedience. And he certainly didn’t want “Lewis,” as he called him, to get caught up in any controversy with Ali. “It’s a privilege, not an obligation, to fight for your country,” Wooden said. “Can’t he see he’s hurting the country?”

Yet Alcindor also opposed the war. And like Ali he was inspired by the teachings of Malcolm X. Although he never met the Muslim minister, Malcolm’s autobiography influenced him more than any other book. A voracious reader, he absorbed Malcolm X’s every word, discovering a model of self-determination, the archetype of Black Power. Internalizing Malcolm X’s message of racial pride, self-help and political independence, Alcindor searched for an identity outside of basketball.

Los Angeles, 1967

Alcindor belonged to a new generation of black college athletes, one who believed they had an obligation to contribute to the freedom movement beyond their athletic achievements. They had come to realize that civil rights legislation had not cured the country’s disease of racism and that their accomplishments in the sports world had done little to change the conditions in black America. For a variety of reasons, previous generations of black collegians were controlled and constrained, prohibited and discouraged from speaking out or engaging in political movements. But in 1967, Alcindor, Tommie Smith, John Carlos and dozens of other black amateurs questioned the ideals of integration and the value of Olympic participation.

In Los Angeles, on Thanksgiving Day, San Jose State University professor Harry Edwards organized a workshop on the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR). A skillful and provocative orator with a sharp mind, Edwards emerged as the architect of an Olympic boycott movement designed to protest racism in America and apartheid abroad. He argued that the sports establishment, including the U.S. Olympic Committee, exploited black athletes as symbols of democracy while the masses of black folks were relegated to second-class citizenship. He also understood that black athletes possessed real power in America and collectively they could challenge the status quo.

During the meeting, Alcindor expressed support for boycotting the Mexico City Games, giving what Edwards later described in The Revolt of the Black Athlete as “perhaps the most dynamic and moving statements in behalf of the boycott.” Standing in front of about 200 people at the Second Baptist Church, Alcindor said, “Everybody knows me. I’m the big basketball star, the weekend hero, everybody’s All-American.” But on the streets of Harlem, he said, he was just another black man who could easily become the victim of police brutality. He didn’t want to become another Cassius Clay, who returned home to segregated Louisville, Kentucky, wearing a gold medal around his neck but was still denied service at a lunch counter. “Somewhere each of us has got to take a stand against this kind of thing,” Alcindor declared. “This is how I make my stand — using what I have. And I take my stand here.”

His powerful speech elicited a standing ovation. After the meeting, Edwards told the press that black athletes in attendance had unanimously voted to boycott the Olympics. But the following day, when reporters pressed Alcindor about his plans, he seemed less committed about the boycott, claiming that he was not bound by anything Edwards said. “I haven’t made up my mind,” he explained to a Los Angeles Times reporter. “All I can say is that everybody agreed that it would be a good idea to boycott,” but, he insisted, “there is no boycott as of now.”

Alcindor suddenly found himself at the center of a national controversy. Critics called him a disgrace, unpatriotic and much worse. If he did not play for the U.S. Olympic team, then UCLA should revoke his scholarship, they charged. Many white Americans opposed the boycott because they believed that sports were meritocratic and immune to racism. But their objections also revealed discomfort with assertive black athletes who challenged the power structure of American sports, a plantation culture that valued black bodies more than black minds. New York Times columnist Arthur Daley couldn’t imagine Alcindor thinking for himself and suggested that Edwards was exploiting the UCLA star’s fame for personal gain. “I think that charge is sheer idiocy,” Edwards told the San Jose Mercury News. “How can you manipulate anybody like Lew Alcindor?”

But Alcindor was his own man, and his revolt emanated from the deep history of African-American activism and the burgeoning Black Power movement on campus. What the sports establishment failed to recognize was that his experience in Harlem, his identification with Malcolm X and his connection to Ali had transformed the way he viewed protest, patriotism and American sports. How could he stay silent while police brutality, poverty and prejudice afflicted the black community? How could anyone expect him to represent the United States when the moment he confronted the nation’s racism bigots deluged him with hate mail and death threats? How could they expect him to love America when America didn’t love him back?

New York, 1968

Alcindor had made up his mind. He wouldn’t play for the USA. Although the boycott movement lacked widespread support and ultimately stalled, he and his UCLA teammates Mike Warren and Lucius Allen refused to attend the Olympic trials. His explanation, however, complicated his image as a Black Power hero. Alcindor said that if he participated, then he would miss class and delay his graduation, which was true, but only part of his rationale. He also told a reporter from Life magazine that he and his UCLA teammates “don’t want to get caught in the middle of anything.” He had principles, but discussing them publicly only brought more stress. It was much easier to distance himself from Edwards and the OPHR.

In the summer of 1968, he worked for Operation Sports Rescue, a youth program in New York City. Leading basketball clinics, Alcindor mentored African-American and Puerto Rican youths, encouraging them to get an education. In July, he appeared on NBC’s Today show to promote the program. Co-host Joe Garagiola, a former professional baseball player, began the interview by asking Alcindor why he refused to play in the Olympics. During a heated exchange, Alcindor said, “Yeah, I live here, but it’s not really my country.” Then Garagiola retorted, “Well, then, there’s only one solution, maybe you should move.” It was a common reply among white Americans who demanded accommodation and gratitude from black athletes — a refrain that still exists today.

Alcindor’s comments echoed Malcolm X, who said, “Being born here in America doesn’t make you an American.” If black people were Americans, he argued, then they wouldn’t need civil rights legislation or constitutional amendments for protection. Alcindor recognized that while he was fortunate because of his basketball ability, he couldn’t celebrate his privileged status as long as racial inequality persisted. Only when black citizens enjoyed true freedom could he call America his country.

Although we remember the 1968 Olympics for John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s demonstration on the victory stand, Alcindor was the most famous athlete who avoided the games. More than any other college basketball player, he defined his times, proving also that black athletes could speak their minds and win. No one could tell him to shut up and dribble.

When Jim Brown ran on the football field, he moved with power, grace and speed. During his career, he rushed for a then career-record 12,312 yards and starred on the Cleveland Browns’ last NFL championship team in 1964, one of eight years he led the NFL in rushing during a nine-year career.

But it was the way he walked on the field between plays that defined him in my eyes. He walked with the determined purpose of a man making his way to a roll of sheet metal, a bale of cotton or a cord of wood. Wasn’t no need to hurry. Nobody paid him for hurrying. He got paid to get things right.

He got paid for being the best NFL running back of his era. And when it looked like the Browns wouldn’t respect him as a man, he left the NFL before the beginning of the 1966 season. He left for Hollywood, where he performed in movies such as The Dirty Dozen, a World War II action drama.

Throughout his public life, Brown has been a man of action. He’s worked to end gang violence in California, for a time helped Richard Pryor produce the movies that would present a worthy showcase for his comedic genius, campaigned for Barack Obama and then gave the nation’s first black president only a “C” for his performance.

He’s the kind of man you’d want to agree with. Indeed, I join Brown in not wanting to see the American flag disrespected. That’s why he says he doesn’t support the movement that former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick fostered of protesting police misconduct and societal inequality during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” before NFL games.

But for me, the American flag is disrespected most when it is carried by braying bullies who see no dangerous contradiction in waving the American flag with one hand and the Nazi or Confederate flags in another. For me, the flag is disrespected when scoundrels and grifters cloak their disdain for people unlike themselves in the flag and supposed patriotism. It’s disrespected when ceremony and pageantry appear to be more important to some in honoring the flag and America than prompting the nation to live up to its highest ideals.

When I was a child, I looked up to men like Jim Brown, whether they earned their money on the football field or the factory floor. They were strong and honest. They worked for everything they got. And they strived to help others, too.

Indeed, I believe that black America has paid a withering cost because so many factories have closed. The jobs that helped generations of young black men earn their living and support their families and communities are long gone.

Jim Brown is in his 80s. But he has not gone away. He continues to help communities do things he believes must be done. He has a right to his opinion and a right to express it, just as Kaepernick and current NFL players do. And it’s up to today’s players to decide whether, when, where and how they will protest, what role they will play in improving America.

A half-century ago, Jim Brown was among a group of black athletes, intellectuals and activists who talked about using a proposed boycott by American black athletes of the Olympics in Mexico to make a point about racial injustice in America. In those days, many of Brown’s elders thought he and his cohorts were wrong. There was no mass boycott of the games by star black athletes. But sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith‘s black-gloved protest from the medal stand during the games endures as an act of strength, courage and patriotism.

Sometimes right and wrong get seen more clearly with hindsight.

As time passes, Kaepernick and those who have followed him remind us that protest, sometimes controversial and condemned, has been the forerunner of needed change in America. Kaepernick and his NFL cohorts have again put the American flag in the firm and proud grasp of those who understand something real and unassailable: Our nation’s flag is just a piece of cloth with stars and stripes on it, our national anthem, just a song that’s hard to sing, unless we’re willing to struggle to get things right in America.