The men who famously raised their black gloves for racial equality might have been offended. Instead, Tommie Smith and John Carlos were pleased. Pleased because they believe Brandon Marshall's heart was in the right place. Pleased because 40 years after Mexico City there's a new statement a new generation can make that they once would never have dreamed possible.

Sure, Marshall may have stretched to connect the dots between a gloved protest on the Olympic podium and Barack Obama's election as president of the United States when he reached for a glove of his own after scoring the winning touchdown for the Denver Broncos the other night.

But count the two sprinters who shocked the world among those happy that he tried.

"I think he wanted people to understand that he understood what was going on," said Smith, a Lemoore High School graduate. "He wanted to make a mark in history and feel that he was a part of the change for the better."

Those were exactly the motives of the son of a sharecropper and a runner from Harlem when times were so very different and the idea of a black man becoming president of the United States was about as alien as black men being paid millions of dollars to play in the NFL.

But there's one big difference.

Football fans can laugh off Marshall as just another egotistical wide receiver trying to get some face time on national television with yet another outlandish end zone celebration.

Nobody was laughing when Smith and Carlos raised their gloves in protest.

It was 1968, a tumultuous time in America's racial past. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated just a few months earlier, there were race riots in major cities, and a man who once vowed to keep the South segregated forever was running a strong third-party campaign for president.

The United States and the Soviet Union were still locked in the Cold War, and their athletes would meet in the Olympics in Mexico City to battle for athletic supremacy. America almost had to do so without its black stars, who came close to boycotting the games after a young sociology professor, Dr. Harry Edwards, urged them to stay home because of worsening racial tensions.

"We're not trying to lose the Olympics for the Americans," Edwards told the New York Times at the time. "What happens to them is immaterial. But it's time for the black people to stand up as men and women and refuse to be utilized as performing animals for a little extra dog food."

There was no boycott, and Smith ran to a gold medal in the 200 in world record time. Carlos finished third, and the two were soon on their way to the medals podium.

Accounts vary between Smith and Carlos as to exactly who suggested what and how their silent protest came to be. But as the familiar strains of the national anthem began to play, Smith was at the top of the podium with a gloved right hand clenched aloft, while Carlos was behind him with his left arm in the same pose.

The images of the two black men in defiant poses struck fear in some. They might had been calmed if they had known Smith was furiously reciting the Lord's Prayer while his head was down.

"That was the longest national anthem in the world," he said. "I think they put a couple more verses in it. I just kept praying."

The repercussions came quickly.

Prodded by IOC chief Avery Brundage, the U.S. Olympic Committee expelled Smith and Carlos from the games and sent them home. Though many in the black community sympathized, they were vilified by most in the United States for being disrespectful to their country and to the national anthem.

But attitudes softened as the years went by and racial relations gradually improved. There's now a statue of the two men in their iconic pose at San Jose State University, and they were celebrated earlier this year on ESPN.

Smith, who went on to become a college professor, is now 64 and the man who looked so menacing 40 years ago is a doting grandfather of 11. Carlos is a high school counselor in Palm Springs and the grandfather of 16 himself.

Neither was watching Thursday night when Marshall began pulling out a white glove he had colored half black, only to be dissuaded from putting it on by teammate Brandon Stokley, who was afraid the Broncos would be penalized and lose the game.

Both, though, understood the gesture and appreciated what it meant.

"He had the right idea in terms of what he was attempting to do," Carlos said. "We've come full circle to the point where so many white people in America can say I put my trust in a black man for the presidency."

The fact Marshall could attempt a statement so different in spirit than the one made 40 years ago is a tribute to how far the country has come.

And the fact that America could elect a black president is a tribute to those who took a stand before him.

"I'm sure we both have a little smile that we may have encouraged him (Obama) in some way," Carlos said. "I would say the vision he saw as a young kid of us on the stand had to stay in his mind. He could say, yes, I can challenge the system to run for president and be successful."

Obama was successful, in an election that stirred deep emotions in the hearts of both men.

Meanwhile, 40 years later, a silent moment in Mexico City is still being heard.

Tim Dahlberg is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at tdahlberg@ap.org

(Nov. 9, 2008)