SEATTLE — While Erika Evans may not have gotten her grandpa’s speed on the track, she certainly inherited his winning ways and a passion to fight for what is right.
Erika, Seattle’s first Black city attorney, won the race for the office in November. It came 57 years after her grandfather, Lee Evans, made history of his own in the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City.
He broke a world record when he took gold in the 400-meter race, but what happened after has been immortalized in the history books, not just the record books.
Six months earlier, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated as the Civil Rights movement hit a precipice.
Then, at the Olympics, what’s widely regarded as the first protest at the Games’ international stage broke out. Tommie Smith took gold in the 200m, and John Carlos took the bronze. During the medal ceremony, they raised their black-gloved fists into the air as a sign of solidarity for the equal rights movement in the USA.
The two were expelled for their action. Two days later, Lee Evans faced a choice as he took the track for the 400m and 4x400m team relay.
“He was not going to race,” Erika said of her grandfather Lee, “John Carlos and Tommie told him, ‘No Lee, you go run that race, and you run it for all of us.”
He took gold in both races. As he stood on the podium, he held his gloved fist in the air with a beret to tout.
“The very morning of his 400-meter race, he received a telegram from the KKK saying that they were going to kill him, and they even said a specific time,” Erika recalls her grandfather told her, “One thing I recall him saying is how you can see during some of the protests when he has this black beret, some of the imagery, my grandfather is actually smiling, smiling while he’s on the stand. And he said he smiled because he thought it would be harder to kill someone who was smiling.”
Erika’s grandmother played a role in the protest. She and the other athletes’ wives had gotten the gloves and berets for the athletes to wear. She says she will always remember their bravery.
“It’s someone that doesn’t back down, someone that’s still going to give you everything you got, even when your life is on the line,” Erika said.
Erika keeps in touch with the other athletes, having lunch with John Carlos in Tacoma last fall. Carlos told her how proud of her he, Smith, and her grandfather are and would be for her to be elected to the office she now holds.
“He said, ‘Erika, some of the things we are seeing right now in this country are just as bad as what me and your grandfather are facing. And it is up to leaders like you to stand up and fight back to protect us.’”
Lee coached at the University of Washington for a few years in the early 2000s. He also coached track in Qatar, Cameroon, and Nigeria. It’s in Nigeria where he died in 2021 after having a stroke. Erika intends to carry on the legacy he began.
“It has guided everything.”
“Always using whatever podium, whatever stand that we have to stand up and fight back against what’s happening, even when it’s unpopular, because what they were doing at the time was extremely unpopular. But it stood the test of time,” Erika said.