Tommie Smith - A Hard-working Childhood

Smith was the seventh of twelve children born to Richard and Dora Smith, migrant workers near Clarksville, Texas, a rural town close to the Oklahoma border. His family subsisted on what they could make by picking cotton, hunting, and fishing, but when Smith was six-years-old, his father decided they could make a better life in California, and piled the family into an old truck. Eventually, they made it to California, where, as Smith told John Maher in the Austin-American Statesman, the work was no better, but "there was more of it." Smith worked in the fields with the rest of his family.

Smith also attended school in the town of Lemoore, where during high school he was voted Most Valuable Athlete for three years in a row in basketball, football, and track and field. He particularly loved basketball, and eventually earned a scholarship to San Jose State University. The basketball court was too small for his long legs, though, and he kept crashing into the walls of the school's tiny gym. He eventually switched to track and field, where he starred, breaking thirteen world records.

At college, Smith also became politically active. Filled with an awareness of the huge gap in civil rights between African Americans and white Americans, Smith, like some of the other students, was aware that as a young African American man, he had fewer opportunities than white students. If he was successful, he could use that success to make a point on behalf of African American equality. As he told David Steele in the San Francisco Chronicle, "I had nothing [to lose]. I had God-given ability, but no place in society."