As we walked around Kaino’s studio, Smith paused to look at one of the latest renderings of his arm. Hanging on a wall of the studio was a rectangular box, inside of which was an upright arm (painted gold, like all the others). A mirror at the back of the box created the illusion of a series of arms repeating into the distance. “I love those arms,” Smith said. “The continuation of things.”

The reverberations of Smith’s gesture are perhaps more evident today than at any other time in the past half century, thanks in large part to Colin Kaepernick, whose practice of kneeling during the national anthem rapidly spread across the NFL, prompting backlash from President Donald Trump, team owners, and many fans. Kaino helped arrange for Smith to meet Kaepernick last fall, an encounter that was filmed for a documentary portion of their collaboration. “He knew about the stand in Mexico City,” Smith told me proudly. “He was on his knee and I was on my feet, but we represent the same thing. The brutality, inequality.”

After the 1968 Olympics, Smith was called a militant and his act was labeled an expression of black power—descriptions he’s been trying to shake for decades. He bristles at the mention of the Black Panthers (though Edwards, the San Jose State activist, was a member), and he insists that his protest was about human rights broadly. “I never focused solely on blacks to the extent that everything else was secondary,” he has written. “I did not want my participation to be about only one kind of people.” In the 50 years since what he calls his “silent gesture,” Smith believes, society has made progress toward some types of equality—Americans did elect a black president. A lot, of course, still needs fixing: More than once Smith noted to me the frequency with which African Americans are subjected to inhumane treatment in the United States. But he is heartened by the attention that activists like Kaepernick and members of Black Lives Matter have garnered lately.

Which isn’t to say the attention has all been positive. Like Smith, Kaepernick has been vilified and unable to find a job (he’s suing the NFL for colluding against him). Nonetheless, Smith believes that Kaepernick’s actions could prove more impactful than shorter-lived protests by other African American athletes over the past 50 years—among them the basketball players Craig Hodges and Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf in the 1990s. “You just keep working, it will happen,” Smith told me. “I’m not broken to a point that I can’t move forward. Colin Kaepernick is going to be the same way.”

In the meantime, Kaepernick’s protest continues to spur renewed interest in Smith’s. “With Drawn Arms” will stay on display through February 3, 2019, when Atlanta hosts the Super Bowl. “I’m expecting the audience to be much broader than we typically see,” says Michael Rooks, the show’s curator, adding that he believes the exhibit “will allow our audience to see themselves in Tommie.” Literally: One of Kaino’s favorite pieces is a life-size sculpture of Smith cut in half vertically and finished with mirrored steel. It is titled Invisible Man (Salute).

Perhaps needless to say, Smith was not invited to the White House in 1968, as many Olympians are. But in 2016 (shortly before Kaepernick first took a knee), President Obama saw fit to belatedly honor Smith by having him visit; Kaino and Delois came along. As a gift, they brought Obama a drawing of Smith passing a baton during a world-record-setting 4x400-meter relay race. On the back, Smith wrote, in part: “Most importantly, the ‘Baton’ was not dropped.”

Smith returned to the White House again later that year with the U.S. Olympic team, but says that he won’t be visiting the current president. The baton has, in his view, been dropped. “But it didn’t roll out of the lane,” he added. “You can pick it up.”

This article appears in the October 2018 print edition with the headline “The Price of Protest.”

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