SPARTAN DAILY NEWS
by SELMA SKOKIC Staff Writer
Speed City, usually associated with John Carlos and Tommie Smith, has had impact on an entire era, and not just the two sprinters.
As an effort to commemorate the track athletes of the 1960’s and 1970’s, an exhibit about the Speed City era is currently on display at San Jose City Hall.
The exhibit was started by former SJSU student Urla Hill.
It has been at City Hall since June 16 and will be displayed until March 27, 2009.
According to the exhibit’s Web site, it includes historic photographs, multimedia presentations and three-dimensional objects relating to the SJSU track teams of years passed.
Hill, the curator of the Speed City exhibit, said she wants students to know that there were athletes who were involved in the struggle decades before Smith and Carlos.
“In 1996, John Carlos traveled with me, along with three other former athletes — Ray Norton, Bob Poynter and Ben Tucker — to an Association of African-American Museums’ conference in Birmingham, Ala.,” Hill said.
“Although Carlos said he had heard of Norton and Poynter, he didn’t realize the struggles undertaken by the pair while they were on campus competing as the No.1 and 2 ranked sprinters, respectively, in the world,” she added.
City Hall requested the exhibit be displayed there because the Olympic team passed through San Jose on its way to the Summer Olympics, Hill said.
The exhibit, though, concentrates on the experience of the athletes in the 1960s.
“The story of Speed City goes beyond the late ’60s,” Hill said. “It discusses the difficulties faced by countless numbers of Asian, Hispanic and black athletes over a 30-year period.”
Through research, she was able to discover that Speed City dates back to the mid-1950s, when Ray Norton became the “ World’s Fastest Human.”
In 1959 and 1960, Norton was a U.S. National Championship double winner at both 100-meter and 200-meter runs, and he also captured the NCAA 200-meter title for SJSU in 1959.
Andy Nguyen, a San Jose resident, said that seeing the exhibit is like reading up on the past and being able to see how far San Jose’s history stretches out.
Racism against minorities was spreading through the country in the 1960’s and San Jose was no exception. Hill said she hopes that when people see the exhibit, they will understand that racism was also here in San Jose.
“People don’t tend to think of California as a state that needed a Civil Rights Movement,” said Hill, who graduated from SJSU with bachelor’s degrees in journalism in 1987 and African-American studies in 1996.”
Ben Tucker, who competed on the Spartans’ NCAA championship cross country teams in 1962 and ‘63, has discussed what it was like being a black distance runner in the 1960’s.”
Hill said that Tucker talked about how people would shout racial epithets at them as they drove by.
Robert Griffin, vice president of student services and institutional research at DeAnza College and relay runner at SJSU in the late 60s said, “The exhibit means recognition of the significance of that time period … in one single location.”
He also added that he is reminded of how unfortunate it is that SJSU did not do this exhibit, and said the university did not want to be associated with the event.
The events that made up Speed City required a lot of thinking for many people, Griffin said.
“There was so much more behind it than what Smith and Carlos did,” Griffin said.
Spartan Daily 10/13/2008