Los Angeles Student-Athlete Activism After Tommie Smith and John Carlos

In 1968, John Carlos and Tommie Smith stood on an international stage at the Olympics in Mexico City to protest violence being committed against blacks at home and abroad. Domestically, college athletes at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, embraced protests during a time of civil unrest.

Basketball reigned supreme at UCLA. John Wooden coached the Bruins to nine NCAA Tournament championship titles between 1964 and 1973. Wooden was a no-nonsense coach, who was born in Hall, Indiana.

Jeffrey Fellenzer, a professor of professional practice in sports, business, and media at USC, was a close friend of Wooden’s. Fellenzer spoke about the unique atmosphere present at the school with a majority-black basketball starting roster.

Fellenzer said, “Being a prominent state school in SoCal, there was notoriety in athletics. There was a culture where the tradition of athletics had been established at that point, it was a state school,” Fellenzer said, adding, “There was a strong core feeling that there was a voice emerging for black athletes at that time.”

Andy Hill was an outspoken figure on UCLA’s basketball team when he joined in 1968. He often voiced his disapproval of his lack of playing time, citing his feuds between him and Wooden regarding politics. Two years later, he would sign his name alongside his teammates in a letter to President Richard Nixon voicing their overall disapproval of the Vietnam War and the crackdown against student protests.

In the letter obtained directly from Hill, the team describes their overall “disapproval of the President’s policy of expansion of the immoral, genocidal and imperialistic war the United States is now waging in Southeast Asia.”

The letter reads: “We are not ‘bums’ as we college students have been so wrongly accused. Rather we are concerned with the well-being of America and its democracy which should function as a reflection of the will of the American people.”

Bill Sweek was also a member of UCLA’s 1968 basketball team. Sweek was a friend of Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), who was notable for his boycott of the 1968 Summer Olympics and his conversion to Sunni Islam.

Sweek said Abdul-Jabbar’s protest started the wave of black athlete activism in professional sports. Sweek said, “There are now more examples of successful athletes that have protested. This was at the outset of integration and blacks did not have the security to make protests.” Sweek said black athletes in the 1960s were “courageous” because they faced more than financial risks from protesting.

Across Los Angeles, USC’s football team was fully integrated by 1957, featuring the first black quarterback in the Pacific Coast Conference.

Sam Cunningham is a former USC fullback who was part of the first “all-black” backfield in NCAA history. In 1970, USC became the first fully-integrated team to play the Alabama Crimson Tide in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Cunningham, who grew up in Santa Barbara, California, was unlike his black teammates in feeling unwelcome in the South.

“For me, it was just a football game, and I didn’t look at it as them being all white. I looked at them being the opponent that evening. Whatever they were, we had to win, and we had to play well to win.”

In the Trojans’ 21-point win, Cunningham scored three touchdowns and rushed for 230 yards. After the game, Alabama coach Bear Bryant told assistants that Alabama had to recruit black athletes if they wanted to beat the Trojans. In the Showtime documentary “Against the Tide,” former Alabama assistant coach Jerry Claiborne is reported saying that Cunningham “did more to integrate Alabama in 60 minutes that night than Martin Luther King had done in 20 years.” One year later, Bryant would feature John Mitchell, the first black collegiate football starter in the state of Alabama, in their win over the Trojans in Los Angeles.

USC’s domination of Alabama in 1970 was a catalyst for the integration of college football in the south. On USC’s campus, the demographics of the football team did not reflect the demographics of the university as a whole. Fellenzer said, “When O.J. Simpson was on campus in the late 1960s, there were a lot of students who had very little contact with black athletes or even [black] students at that time.”

Cunningham admires those who do have the courage to speak up today. He says that civil rights will always play a role in sports and that “civil rights are never going to go away. It’s never going to go away. It will change. It will go from black to white to brown to gays, whatever cross-section of society that feels that they’re not being treated well, that’s civil rights.”

Nearly 50 years later, athletes can still face repercussion if they speak out on sociopolitical issues on a national stage. Hill frequently references Colin Kaepernick, who protested police brutality by refusing to stand for the National Anthem at NFL games starting in 2016. Hill said, “All Kaepernick wanted to do was to protest, not to disrespect, but to protest conditions that they thought needed to change to make the country as a whole get better.”

Fellenzer noted that athletes today “have to be cautious, they have tremendous platforms and great visibility. They can speak directly to their audience now, but with that comes tremendous responsibility and risk because if you speak out it could work against you as far as team and league management as well as sponsors.”

Fellenzer commented on the power of an athlete’s presence in the media today. “There’s a lot at stake that could be affected very quickly. We talk about the power of pressing ‘send,’ and we’ve seen many examples where its proven to be very important and impactful in a negative way. But some players will say it’s important they express their views like Kaepernick did, and you pay a price for that.”

The legacy of activism from members of the UCLA Bruins and USC Trojans lives on in today’s athletes who now have more tools than before to broadcast their messages of social justice.

The sporting arena is not immune to sociopolitical issues. Now, in another time of unrest, athletes can look to examples set forth 50 years prior. The courage of Abdul-Jabbar and the innovation of the 1970 USC football team were pivotal moments that shaped the face of collegiate athletics in America, and it all started right here in Los Angeles. Cunningham is reminded of his time at USC when he looks at the people at the forefront of movements today. He said, “for me, to watch the players of this generation speak up and be a part of something other than just their sport and whatnot, is very, very uplifting.”