He took a stance as a man, and the greatest thing about Peter Norman is when you sit back and think about Tommie Smith and John Carlos here in America, they could go beat up on Tommie Smith and get tired of beating up on him and go to the other side of town and find John Carlos and beat up on him, but when Peter Norman left and went to Australia, there was no switch-off on Peter.

I was a pallbearer. I felt, when I got the call that Peter had died, I didn't have any bank account, but I felt I needed to start walking then because there was no way in the world I would miss Peter Norman's service.

As a kid growing up and seeing so much strife taking place in society, and particularly on Blacks and people of color, I had an opportunity as a young man to witness the change that was taking place in Harlem, the exodus of white folks leaving Harlem, which I thought was a very cohesive situation. But they felt that they needed to leave.

Fortunately for me, I was able to see the newspaper and saw that they were hiring in a new program called the Cedar Program, and I recall going to one of my Olympic buddies and saying, "Hey, man, this might be a shot in the arm for us. Let's go down and apply for these Cedar jobs."I took a job as a gardener caretaker.

The beads around my neck [at Olympics in 1968] indicated that there were so many Blacks throughout the history of this country that have been maimed and killed by way of hangings.

I'm not too proud to do any job to support my family.

Let's start with the black glove. We felt it necessary being the fact that the Olympic Games, for the first time ever [in 1968], had been televised worldwide. The second thing is the fact that it was in Technicolor. Never had the games been shown in color before.We wanted it to be understood that we were representing America, but we were representing Black America in particular, so that's why we put the black glove on.