Victory. Stand!: Raising My Fist for Justice

Victory. Stand!: Raising My Fist for Justice is a graphic memoir telling the story of Tommie Smith’s life. In it, Smith recounts his earliest years in Texas through his decision to start running and his experiences into the 21st century. He explores in particular how key moments of the Civil Rights Movement affected his life and the lives of those around him. Victory. Stand! is cowritten by Derrick Barnes and Dawud Anyabwile. Smith himself is the author of Silent Gesture: The Autobiography of Tommie Smith, which he cowrote with David Steele (2007). Smith was an Olympic gold medalist and well-known athletic coach. Derrick Barnes is also the author of Like Lava in My Veins (2023), Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut (2017), and We Could Be Brothers (2010), among other titles. Anyabwile is a comic book artist who has worked on The Crossover (2014), Monster (2015), Booked (2016), Becoming Muhammad Ali (2019), and Clean Getaway (2020), in addition to the Brotherman: Dictator of Discipline series (1989-1996). Additionally, Victory. Stand! was a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and a National Book Award finalist and won the YALSA award for Excellence in Young Adult Nonfiction.

This guide is based on the 2022 edition of the text published W.W. Norton & Company.

Content Warning: This guide includes incidents of racial discrimination and violence present in the source text.

Summary

Tommie Smith begins his graphic memoir at the 1968 Olympics at the start of the finals of his race. Then, the memoir flashes back to his childhood growing up in Acworth, Texas, where Tommie is the seventh of twelve children. He and his family are poor, but they are all close to one another. Periodically, the narrative switches back and forth between Tommie’s childhood and the final race, though the results are not revealed.

Tommie’s father is a sharecropper in Texas until he and his family move to California. Tommie describes how the Great Migration brought many African Americans from the South to the North. Tommie and his family were part of a second wave that went to California. There, due to state truancy laws, Tommie and his siblings are required to attend school each day, and his father emphasizes the importance of the opportunity, since it’s not one that he had. It is an integrated school too, so Tommie has classes with white students. One day, a white student hits Tommie’s ice cream out of his hand, marking the first time that Tommie has been insulted because of his race. A couple of years later, Tommie competes informally in a race with his sister and a white boy, and he wins despite being younger than both of them.

Tommie decides to join the track team, and his father allows him to do so on the condition that he never finish in second place. Soon after, Tommie also competes on the basketball, baseball, and flag football teams. As he finishes high school, Tommie receives a scholarship to go to San Jose State College.

At school in San Jose, Tommie misses his family, but he appreciates the opportunities that earning a college degree will bring. He is one of only twenty or thirty African American students, but he finds comfort in getting to know the others. He also peppers in moments that shaped his experience in college. At one point, the Ku Klux Klan is complicit in the murder of three young men who wanted to help African American Alabamans register to vote.

During Tommie’s sophomore year, John Lewis and other activists participate in a March in Alabama. Many are beaten by law enforcement officers. After setting his first world record, Tommie goes to stand in solidarity with a local march against police violence in San Jose. When the organizer points him out as a world record holder, Tommie feels empowered and like he has found a place as an athlete and activist. As they march, however, white drivers insult them, and Tommie wonders if his existence is trouble to them.

While in college, Tommie joins the Olympic Project for Human Rights, which is founded by Harry Edwards and other African American athletes. They advocate for the fair treatment of Black athletes and start to discuss whether or not they should boycott the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City since they aren’t sure they want to represent a country that doesn’t treat them equally. Tommie, Harry, and many others begin to receive hate mail and threats as a result of their advocacy efforts.

Both Tommie and John Carlos—a teammate of his at San Jose—qualify for and decide to compete in Mexico. They both run the 200-meter dash, and Tommie places in first with John Carlos in third. On the podium, they adjust their clothes to symbolize the struggles African Americans have faced. Then, when the United States national anthem plays, they each hold up their fist.

Tommie and John are both immediately suspended and sent home from the Olympics. By the time that Tommie arrives in the United States, he has lost his job too. Both men receive threats in the mail, as people view their actions as disrespectful. Tommie graduates from college and then plays for the Cincinnati Bengals for a year. Soon after, his marriage comes to an end, and his mother passes away, leaving Tommie feeling alone. In 1972, he becomes the coach for the basketball and track and field teams at Oberlin College, and he later completes a master’s degree. When he is let go from Oberlin, he returns to California and finds work at Santa Monica College. He remarries and has four children, but that marriage ends, too. He marries his third wife, Delois, in 2000.

In the early 2000s, many organizations and groups start inviting Tommie to talk about his experience at the Olympics. A statue of him and John is installed at San Jose State, and, in 2019, they are inducted into the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Hall of Fame.

The novel closes with an image of Tommie saying that he’d hold still his fist up if he had to do it again.