Appendix - Matrix - Michigan State University

"Knowing I live in a racist country, I must react in some
way-and this boycott is my way, my obligation to all Afro­
Americans." In taking his stand, Alcindor suffers the charge
that he is a fool, ingrate, and non-patriot. Up front among
the critics are California Governor Ronald Reagan, Roy
Wilkins, the docile NAACP spokesman, and Olympic president
Avery Brundage, who sized up the nonstarters as a
weird lot who illogically attack an ancient, laurel-wreathed
institution, nobly conceived in the principle of treating all
comers alike. Self-defeatists, we are led by "black Hitlers"
and "Muslim hate-mongers" who would sabotage an arena
overrunning with the very good will and status-making opportunity
we need most.
That's officialese for: "Sports and social chaos are strangers;
they are so entirely separate that what you do for your
country, on the public stage, has nothing to do with what
your country does to your beloved and to you."
To accord a carnival of fun-and-games a sanctity setting
it apart from the misery inflicted upon one U.S. segmentone
which supplies the carnival with much of its manpower
-is 200 per cent hypocritical. For a number of reasons. Of
nearly 40 nationally-uniformed youths who will participate
in the next Olympics, all are part of steaks-and-gravy
America-all except approximately one-seventh of that
number, No matter how many tapes they break, black
Olympians will revert, after the cheering and as they move
out in life, to their old, inherited status. Stop-watches, for
them, do just that-they stop. And with the growth of understanding
by these exploited cats that their good time
lasts only as long as the juice flows in their legs and arms
has come some soul-searching. The Olympic Project for
Human Rights meetings are filled with testimonials by such
old pros as Bill Russell, former Games gold-medal winner
and coach of the Boston Celtics. "Except for a few hundred
favored big stars," he tells us, "blacks lead sports leagues
all over the country in everything except hotel accommodations
and other equal rights. When they can't lead anymore,
sports biz and employers generally don't know they even
exist. He who voluntarily helps the political propaganda
aims of a society calling itself 'free' is a chump."
But far more sweepingly, such a volunteer is a cop-out,
The Revolt of the Black Athlete • 72
a traitor to his race. I am a college sociology teacher, age 25.
Before I gave up games and went academic, I set a national
junior college discus throw record of nearly 180 feet and
track coaches fell all over me, as a likely internationalist.
One Western coach called me (I'm 6-feet-8, 250 pounds),
"a terrific animal"-without a moment's concern that I
overheard his description. But discus-tossing in no way
dimmed my memory of the south side of East St. Louis,
Illinois, where I grew up. Like everyone else, the Edwards
family lived on beans and paste and watched neighbor kids
freeze to death. We used an outhouse which finally collapsed
in the hold and drank boiled drainage-ditch water. Young
mothers just flew out of the place. My own mother abandoned
us when I was eight years old, later showing up with
86 stitches in her body after a street brawl. Cops jailed me
for juvenile offenses. They jailed me when I was innocent. A
brother of mine, today, serves 25-years-to-life in the Iowa
State Penitentiary. Intelligent hearthside conversation didn't
exist-intergroup allegiance and family discipline died under
the weight of poverty. I was the first boy from my area to
graduate from high school. Until I was 17 I had never held
a meaningful conversation with a white adult and until
shortly before that I was unaware that one could vote in an·
election without first receiving pay-the $5 handed to a
"block nigger" for his preempted ballot being a postulate
of staying alive in East St. Louis.
One in tens of thousands of teen-agers has the muscle,
speed, and coordination to "escape" such scenes-that is,
physically leave the ghetto by signing with one of the universities
which hotly recruit, buy, and ballyhoo Negro high
school sport whizzes. And, once out of it and in a higheducation
environment, he's considered lucky. I was one of
these. Yet no medals I've won nor the B.A. and M.A. degrees
which follow my name [and the Ph.D that is coming]
can balance the East St. Louis I saw upon returning there
last year. Jobs in trade unions, in public utilities, behind
downtown store counters, remained blocked to 35,000 of
the city's 105,000 population. Rags plugged paneless windows
of tin shacks, children had been incinerated in firetraps,
riot had come and gone. A dungheap comatoseness
still ruled six square miles. "Are you still selling your vote
Feeding the Flame • 73