Sport: A Black Boycott?

The row that erupted last week, virtually on the eve of the XX Olympiad in Munich, was potentially the most disruptive in the troubled 76-year history of the modern Games. The governments of eleven Black African nations, notably Kenya, Ethiopia and Uganda, declared that they would not permit their countrymen to compete if the Games remained open to athletes from white-supremacist Rhodesia.

Threatened or actual boycotts are not new to the Olympic Games. U.S. participation in the 1936 Berlin Games was in doubt for months as many Americans urged a boycott to protest the anti-Semitism of the Nazi hosts. In 1956 Egypt,...

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