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On this day, October 16, there are two items to focus on: first, white abolitionist John Brown’s raid on Harpers, Ferry, Virginia; and second, the display of Black agency by Tommie Smith (and John Carlos) at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City.
John Brown is arguably the most religious person in American history of European descent who understood what it meant to practice one’s religious ideals. His total dedication to the abolition of the enslaved condition—by any means--led him to violently oppose pro-slave forces in the battle for Kansas in the late 1850s.
John Brown spent at least three years raising money for an army and weapons for a strike against American slavery. On October 16, 1859, he led his band of men and attacked the U.S. Federal Armory at Harpers Ferry. His plan was to take over the arms depot and instigate a rebellion of the enslaved. For two days Brown and his men held off federal troops, but were eventually captured. They were tried, found guilty of treason, and hanged! John Brown was uncompromising, and he paid the ultimate price for freedom.
On October 16, 1968, to celebrate his world-record 200 meters final in the Olympic Games, Tommie Smith raised his black-gloved fist. It was a defiant pose that drew attention to the human rights struggles in the United States, in South Africa, and in the then Southern Rhodesia.
The gesture earned him a ban from the Olympic village and outrage from the political class in the US. On the other hand, across the world people praised Smith and Carlos for raising awareness against racism and for human rights.
John Brown’s raid and Tommie Smith’s gesture, over 100 years apart, represent different aspects of the larger struggle for freedom and equality by people of African descent across the globe. That in 2021 the struggle for racial justice continues apace underscores the deep-seated, persistent nature of the racial hierarchy that was constructed to support the global exploitation of lands that began in the middle of the Fifteenth Century, and continues to define the current global dispensation.
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