Tommie Smith and John Carlos are known around the world for their civil rights activism in the heat of the Black Power movement of the late 1960s, but little is known about the Black San Jose State athletes that preceded them just years before.
Bob Poynter, SJSU alumnus and former track and field athlete, and Chuck Alexander, SJSU alumnus and former football athlete, spoke to an audience at San Jose Museum of Art Wednesday afternoon about their experiences coming to SJSU.
“The two fastest men in the world should’ve gotten great recognition, but they got exploited,” Alexander said. “I remember that we were able to benefit from great athletes and while [Smith and Carlos] got the spotlight, we got the highlights.”
Both Poynter and Alexander made history with their successes as student athletes in the early ’60s, garnering nationwide attention.
Alexander, along with other Black athletes at the time, came to SJSU on scholarships in 1955, but were offered limited resources as students of color. With no stipend and no place to stay, Alexander and other student athletes came together to form a house of Black athletes known as the “Good Brothers.”
To pay rent, Alexander said the athletes took the opportunity to work together by doubling up on morning and night shifts, all while attending school. Soon after, Alexander and his fellow athletes began integrating other students of color and started working shifts in local canneries.
“It was a matter of making the best with that we were given,” Alexander said.
Wanting to set the example and be the first in his family to graduate college, Poynter was faced with a problem: University of Southern California, his top choice, was not yet integrated and had no Black athletes for track and field.
While going to junior college in his home of Pasadena, Poynter said he met a classmate who told him about SJSU.
“He told me he had been accepted to San Jose State, heck, I didn’t even know where it was,” Poynter said.
Despite good grades and being a great athlete, Poynter said he had little direction from administration as a student of color in the late ’50s. Poynter decided to risk it all on a city he knew nothing about and called the then-head coach of track and field, Lloyd “Bud” Winter.
Winter, who coached Olympic gold medalists including Lee Evans and Ronnie Ray Smith, convinced Poynter to come to San Jose State. Poynter and his classmate hopped on a Greyhound bus from Southern California, not knowing exactly where they were going.
“We rode all night to get to that point and when I got there I was shocked because I didn’t see any Black people, I immediately thought, ‘Uh oh,’ ” he said.
While at SJSU, Poynter met Chuck Alexander where he took him in as a “Good Brother”.
From the late ’50s into the early ’60s Poynter and Alexander set records, eventually helping SJSU get the nickname “Speed City.”
“Most people today, when they identify San Jose State, all they know is the statues,” Poynter said. “Much of the other history is lost, the history of what happened before ’68 and what happened after ’68.”
Poynter said that the actions of Black athletes in the late ’50s and early ’60s, put SJSU on the map and set the state for future history-making athletes, with help from Winter and fellow track star Ray Norton.
It was the attention of these early athletes which drew in later generations of Black athletes, including Smith and Carlos. Poynter said his picture was always in the mix, but no one really understood why.
“If you look at the state college, San Jose State sticks out, but why is that so? What makes it different?” he said. “The only reason [Smith and Carlos] came was because of the paths paved by previous Black athletes.”
Soon they said other athletes of color began to notice the strides being made at SJSU.
“Everybody knew San Jose, so everyone wanted to come to San Jose because of people like the ‘Good Brothers,’ we were the trendsetters,” Poynter said. “All most people know is the statues and ’68.”
Shortly after, other students of color who wanted to find a place they could feel comfortable took notice.
“I was in the Air Force sitting in the barracks at my base and I picked up a Sports Illustrated and went through it and there was a small article about the two best sprinters in the world being at San Jose State: Ray Norton and Bob Poynter,” San Jose resident William McConnel said. “That was in 1959 and in 1960, I got out of the Air Force and hitchhiked to California to come to San Jose State.”
Alexander said athletics at SJSU gave him a huge foot in the door, despite having limited opportunities as a Black student.
After the 1968 Olympics, Alexander said he decided to stay in San Jose because he saw the opportunities that became available in the area following Smith’s and Carlos’s activism.
He said the corporate world, which had once overlooked them, began to shift in the same way as the social culture was.
“Once it got on a world scale, we were able to progress on the local scale,” Alexander said. “These companies began to hire us and give us jobs because we were the ones who were the real educated ones and people overlooked the fact.”
“They were so conscious about the athletics, they forgot we were also students,” he said.
A couple decades after early steps were made by the track and field stars like Ray Norton, Poynter and Black athletes like Alexander, SJSU ended their track and field program in 1988.
“When track and field dismantled at San Jose State, track and field went down around the whole country,” Poynter said.
He said it became clear that there could not be Black athletes without Black coaches and Black administrators.
Despite the national recognition, it was not enough to keep the program alive although it was the program which he said garnered SJSU monetary success: a success still remembered through statues and art exhibitions.
“You have this worldwide attention, and then all of a sudden San Jose State, although it was poor and didn’t have any money, it became a powerhouse,” Poynter said. “Everybody wanted to come here and to this day people still don’t know why [Smith and Carlos] are so well known.”
