LOS ANGELES — On Monday, the Dodgers celebrated the remarkable life and enduring impact of Jackie Robinson, the stories now handed down among the generations. Robinson died 52 years ago. With each passing year, we are increasingly fortunate to hear from someone who can tell firsthand stories of Robinson as a friend and mentor.

Harry Edwards is one of those people. The Dodgers gathered Monday to hear him talk.

His name lives forever in Olympic lore, and not in a way the International Olympic Committee would prefer. In the 1968 Olympic Games, when American sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised fists of protest on the medal stand, Edwards was the man who prompted the gesture.

Before the Games, when Edwards announced the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) amid talk of a boycott by Black athletes, famed broadcaster Howard Cosell called Robinson and asked him why the runners could not turn the other cheek, as Robinson had.

The next week, Edwards said, Robinson appeared on Cosell's show and endorsed the OPHR.

"Jackie built the bridge," Edwards told me. "We crossed it."

Carlos and Smith were vilified. Edwards received hundreds of death threats. He said that was the start of a 3,000-page file compiled on him by what he called "my presumptive biographer," former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

This was two decades after Robinson broke baseball's color barrier. In some corners of the country, however, the right to vote had not followed the right to play ball. The pushback was not peaceful.

"That's what Smith and Carlos were saying," Edwards said. "We are better than our presidents being assassinated. We are better than our churches being bombed. We are better than civil rights leaders being shot dead in broad daylight."

The civil rights movement led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was grounded in nonviolence. King often credited Mahatma Gandhi for inspiring that journey.

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