ABSTRACT
This chapter applies a Marxist approach to two racial justice efforts by track-and-field athlete and human rights activist John Carlos: (1) his participation with Tommie Smith in the iconic “Silent Protest” on the Olympic medal stand in Mexico City in 1968 and (2) a public demonstration of resistance the previous year as a radicalized student of color at my own rural, conservative, then recently desegregated campus (East Texas State University, now Texas A&M-Commerce). Both events are instructive examples of what “taking the political turn” can look like beyond the academy. Throughout, the metaphor “pass the baton” emphasizes the local, embodied, material dimensions of activism—those moments of contact between individuals and physical, often mundane texts (Rivers 2014) through which rhetorical events emerge and circulate in larger political economic systems to reify or disrupt injustice. Just as sprinters must “pass the baton” in track and field, so too must activists rely on a figurative network of batons passed over space and time to challenge injustice.
