Victory. Stand!: Raising My Fist for Justice

After Tommie and John leave the podium, they hear a mix of applause and jeers. They lift their fists again.

The president of the International Olympic Committee suspends them. The athletes don’t run in their other events. Before they leave, both Tommie and John do an interview with a reporter, and Tommie emphasizes that they did it so that the world would see that Black Americans are not treated like equals. At home, American journalists lambast the runners, and Tommie is fired from his job at North American Pontiac before he even lands back in the United States. Even though they receive some support from the president of San Jose State University, pressure from college staff members and alumni force the president to resign soon after.

Tommie works whatever jobs he can to take care of his family. He takes night classes to finish his degree, and he student teaches at his high school. Those at his alma mater don’t realize that he was “back as an educated man, a gold-medal-winning educated man” (185). In the spring of 1969, Tommie graduates from college, and his old roommate, Saint Saffold, is playing football for the Cincinnati Bengals. Saint vouches for Tommie with the coach, and Tommie plays mostly on the practice squad for three years, except for two regular season games.

The United States Olympic Committee makes it impossible for Tommie to compete in the 1972 Olympics in Munich. In 1970, his mother passes away, and his marriage ends. Tommie worries that the hate mail he received contributed to his mother’s heartbreak. Tommie feels alone.

In 1972, Jack Scott, the athletic director of Oberlin College, approaches Tommie. Scott offers him a job as a coach for the basketball and track and field teams. Tommie thinks it’s a fitting school for him, since Oberlin was both a place of sanctuary for enslaved folks escaping from the South and the first college in the United States to accept Black students.

Tommie eventually completes a master’s degree at Cambridge College through a correspondence course. He becomes the assistant athletic director and remarries. However, he is let go from his job in 1978, and his family moves back to California, where he works at Santa Monica College. He is there for 27 years. He has four children with his second wife, though they divorce.

In 1998, he meets a young woman named Delois, who helps him get new rings and plaques from his awards after many are stolen from his apartment. They marry in 2000.

Eventually, various groups start inviting Tommie to give talks and interviews. In 2005, San Jose State University installs a statue of him and John Carlos on their campus, and the two men receive the Arthur Ashe Award for Courage in 2008. They’re also invited to the White House in 2016 by Barack Obama, and in 2019, both Tommie and John are inducted into the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Hall of Fame.

Tommie recounts he and John Carlos are now called heroes who were “brave, courageous,” with an illustration that shows other Black athletes who stood up for Black lives, like Craig Hodges, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, LeBron James, The St. Louis Rams, Eric Reid, and Colin Kaepernick. Tommie says that if he had to do it again, he’d still raise his fist.