Two U.S. athletes received their medals shoeless, but wearing black socks, to represent black poverty. Smith wore a black scarf around his neck to represent black pride, Carlos had his tracksuit top unzipped to show solidarity with all blue collar workers in the U.S. and wore a necklace of beads which he described "were for those individuals that were lynched, or killed and that no-one said a prayer for, that were hung and tarred.
2. Black September: The Munich
A group responsible for the kidnapping and murder of eleven Israeli athletes and officials, and fatal shooting of a West German policeman, during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, their most publicized event.
3. Muhammed Ali
Ali had won the World Heavyweight Championship, he was publicly vilified for his refusal to be conscripted into the U.S. military, based on his religious beliefs and opposition to the Vietnam War. Widespread protests against the Vietnam War had not yet begun, but with that one phrase, Ali articulated the reason to oppose the war for a generation of young Americans, and his words served as a touchstone for theracial and antiwar upheavals that would rock the 1960s.
4. Lynne Cox
American long-distance open-water swimmer and writer. In 1971, she and her teammates were the first group of teenagers to complete the crossing of the Catalina Island Channel in California. She was always the slowest swimmer in her swim classes. Cox is perhaps best known for swimming the Bering Strait in 1987, At the time people living on the Diomede Islands were not permitted to travel between them, although the Eskimo communities there had been closeldicky linked until the natives of Big Diomede were moved to the Russian mainland after World War II. Her accomplishment eased Cold War tensions as Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev both praised her success.
