Harry Edwards on Civil Rights

 

If you thought taking a knee was something new, a photo from the 1968 Olympics:

Emmanuel Felton at Buzzfeed:

So during some of the nation’s darkest days in recent history, I turned to three veterans of the civil rights movement for help: former president of Howard University Joyce Ann Ladner; Carlotta Walls LaNier, one of the Little Rock Nine; and Harry Edwards, who led a boycott of the 1968 Olympics. Being an activist, after all, is an inherently hopeful act, rooted in the belief that action can inspire change.

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In the lead up to the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, Edwards was the key architect of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, who advocated for a boycott of the games as a protest against racial segregation in the US and white minority rule in South Africa and Rhodesia. While the boycott largely failed to materialize, two of the group’s members, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, produced one of the most iconic images of the era. After winning gold and bronze in the 200 meters, Smith and Carlos stood on the Olympic podium, their fists raised in the air in a Black Power salute. The Olympic Project for Human Rights earned Edwards an FBI file thousands of pages long, but still Edwards says it was undoubtedly worth it.

“Look, we are the descendants of people who were in abject slavery, owned, raped, murdered, beaten, buried in unmarked graves,” Edwards told me. “Despite abject slavery of the most vicious, degenerate, immoral type, we stand taller, see further, and reach higher because we stand on the shoulders of giants, many of whom we will never know because they were enslaved over 250 years and buried in unmarked graves all over this country.”

He didn’t have patience for my hopelessness. “Frustration and despair? Are you kidding me?” he continued, sounding a bit exasperated. “They went through that and got us to this place... And we're going to cave in to despair, are you kidding me? No, we're made of better stuff than that.”

Edwards’s fundamental read of Black America’s 400-year-long history on this continent is that it has only been through periods of the greatest struggle and turmoil that society has advanced the cause of Black America.

“I'm extremely optimistic,” Edwards said. "Whether we're talking about the abolition movement, or the civil rights movement, which took more lives in America from the turn of the 20th century to Dr. King's assassination, than the terrorist attacks on September 11, we came out of all of these circumstances better.”