Dave's interview on Democracy Now!

July 21, 2005
By: Dave Zirin

A 40 minute interview on Democracy Now! that chronicles a history of athletes who have stood up to war and racism in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: We are joined now in our studio by sportswriter David Zirin. His new book is called What's My Name, Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the United States. We welcome you to Democracy Now!

DAVID ZIRIN: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Let's talk about that history of Olympics past.

DAVID ZIRIN: Well, the starting point is understanding that sports is a trillion dollar business worldwide, and the Olympics is like the ultimate prize. I mean, for the people who run a city, when they make their Olympic bids, getting the Olympics is like Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa all rolled up into one for these guys. And when London got the Olympics for 2012, when they won that bid in a huge surprise over Paris, they were celebrating in the streets of London, particularly in the board rooms and the banks.

Also people in London wept when that occurred, because people in London had already started organizing about what they understand the Olympics coming to mean. Now, part of the reason why people have this idea about what it means for the Olympics to come to a given town is because of the history that does exist. I mean, when the Olympics come to an area, it may mean a corporate feeding frenzy, but what it also means is it means, as you put it, the utter emiseration of civil liberties, as well as attacks on working people and the poor. And history really does prove this out.

I mean, I’ll just give some of the lowlights here. In 1936, this was probably one of the most infamous ones, when the Olympics were awarded to Berlin, even though it was known at the time the extent of Hitler's crimes and the crimes of the Nazis, there was a cleansing of the streets of Berlin, as it was put, to make the city look hospitable, as if Germany had emerged from the Depression. And that, of course, meant locking up dissidents, sending people to concentration camps. In 1968 in Mexico City there was the infamous massacre of 500 workers and students by Mexican security forces as they attempted to make their city, quote/unquote, “hospitable” for an international audience.

In 1984 in this country -- it’s not just other countries by any stretch of the imagination -- in 1984 there were the infamous gang sweeps in Los Angeles, which involved people in the L.A. City Council reviving the 1916 Anti-Syndicalism Act, which was used in 1916 to go after the Industrial Workers of the World, which was a radical union at the time. And part of what this law said was that it outlawed certain hand signals and modes of dress that sort of denoted somebody as being in the I.W.W., and they just applied that to young black men in L.A. So if you were wearing certain colors or gave people a certain kind of high five, it was grounds to arrest people in 1984 in L.A. And those gang sweeps were immortalized in the NWA video “Straight Outta Compton,” which was like a reenactment of the ’84 gang sweeps, which people, you know, should check out. It’s interesting.

In 1996 in Atlanta, keep it in this country. You had, according to the ACLU, 10,000 black homeless men arrested without cause, and you had a scandalous situation that they swept under the rug where police were found to fill out arrest slips in advance of arresting people, of, you know, black male