Sports and African Americans

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Sports and African Americans

Field in which African Americans have achieved notable success and which has been the stage for important racial dramas in American history.

Sports have played a major role in the lives of African Americans dating from their African roots to the present. From the earliest civilizations of Africa, common sporting activities included wrestling and Boxing, foot racing, jumping contests, stick fighting, hunting and fishing, and a variety of games of skill and chance, such as stones (marbles) and gambling. Thus Africans who were later enslaved and transported to the New World nevertheless brought with them a rich culture of sport.

Rise of Popular Sports among Blacks

Africans in America, from slavery to freedom, found sport a necessity for their physical and psychological survival. Enslaved Africans supplemented their diets through hunting and fishing. Treeing opossums and raccoons, snaring rabbits, and catching fish were art forms among blacks and the source of bragging rights and fuller bellies for one's self and family. Physical contests of wrestling and boxing were popular as well. Some blacks gained recognition as able prizefighters even during the days of slavery, winning great sums for their masters, and in rare cases, slaves such as Tom Molineaux even earned their freedom through boxing. Cockfighting was also a popular activity, and blacks were widely known for their skills at training and handling the fighting birds. Horse racing was popular among the white gentry, but the art of jockeying the horse was a role that the owners typically relegated to others, and by the mid-nineteenth century black jockeys dominated the profession. In the first twenty-eight years of the Kentucky Derby, from 1875 to 1902, black jockeys won the race fifteen times, including three victories by Isaac Murphy, the most celebrated jockey of the age. Blacks engaged in baseball as early as the 1860s, and numerous black teams flourished in local leagues and barnstorming tours by the turn of the century. From the 1920s through the early 1940s, black organized baseball reached its peak with the success of the Negro Leagues. Football burst onto the national scene in the 1890s at colleges and universities in the East and rapidly gained in popularity among African Americans as black athletes, such as William H. Lewis and William Tecumseh Sherman Jackson, won early national acclaim in the sport.

First Golden Era in African American Sports

The 1920s were in many respects the first golden era of sports in the United States. Virtually all sports grew and prospered during this period. Already well established, boxing, baseball, and football now rose to even greater stature. As a result of the efforts of organizations in the early twentieth century, including the Colored (later the Central) Intercollegiate Athletic Association, Track and Field emerged as a popular organized athletic activity among African Americans of all ages. The successes of the first African American professional Basketball team of note, the New York Renaissance, helped immensely to popularize the sport among all races. Tennis and golf were able to make modest inroads into the African American world of sports in the 1920s owing to the work in particular of two black athletic organizations: the American Tennis Association, founded in 1916, and the United Golfers Association, established in 1926.

Sports as a Racial Barometer

Sports, like the arts, literature, and politics, have been a mirror of American society. And in sports the contradictions between democratic principles and racial discrimination have been particularly glaring, because athletics have been considered a sanctum of sportsmanship and fair play. Despite those ideals, in every avenue of sport African Americans faced restrictions or were barred outright from participation because of the color of their skin. Blacks first made their marks in individualized sports such as boxing, but not without overcoming tremendous racial obstacles. In team sports, the overwhelming majority of African American athletes who competed prior to World War II (1939–1945) did so on all-black teams. Only a small number of white colleges and universities in the North allowed blacks to participate in their athletic programs. Even then, a so-called gentlemen's agreement was typically adhered to, under which those teams with black athletes on the roster would agree to leave them at home when they went to play an all-white team. Integrated teams and interracial sporting competitions were against the law in many Southern states until as late as the 1950s.

Black Athletes and the Struggle for Equality

Two black athletes dominated American sports in the years immediately prior to World War II—Jesse Owens in track and field and Joe Louis in boxing. Owens's four gold medals in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, Germany, were seen as a triumph for American democracy over Nazism, as was Louis's defeat of German boxer Max Schmeling in their second heavyweight fight in 1938. Owens and Louis made their statements for racial equality by proving themselves as athletes, but others turned to more direct forms of protest. Boxing great Henry Armstrong hammered away at discrimination in the 1930s and 1940s by refusing to fight in segregated arenas. Students at New York University launched a protest in 1940 against racial discrimination in collegiate athletics that gained national recognition and support for the eradication of the color line in intercollegiate sports.

America's entry into World War II, in December 1941, had a tremendous impact on the color line in sports as the diversion of American manpower to the war effort left a vacuum in professional and amateur athletics that African Americans helped to fill. During this period, Satchel Paige and his Negro Baseball All-Star Team were given the opportunity to play the major league champions of baseball, and the Negro Collegiate All-Stars of Football played successive games against the champions of the National Football League. The number of African American athletes in predominantly white collegiate conferences also increased.

The integration of sports continued after the war ended in 1945. In 1947 Jackie Robinson broke the color line to become the first black player in major league baseball. In professional basketball, Chuck Cooper and Sweetwater Clifton came into the National Basketball Association in 1950. That year also marked an important first in tennis when Althea Gibson became the first African American woman to compete in the National Championships (later the United States Open) at Forest Hills in Queens, New York, an event she would later win in 1957 and 1958. In the 1960s Wilma Rudolph and Wyomia Tyus won international acclaim for African American women in track. The brash boxing champion Muhammad Ali and his defiant stand against military induction during the Vietnam War defined the mood of the 1960s. Baseball outfielder Curt Flood's battle against the reserve clause, which bound individual players to their teams even after the end of their contracts, helped to define sports in the 1970s.

Athletic Success and the African American Dream

Despite its many barriers, sports stood as one of the early venues where blacks gained a foothold, and it remains one of the best publicized routes to success for African Americans. The high visibility of black athletes with multimillion-dollar contracts, however, feeds into the limited and unrealistic dreams of millions of young African Americans who pin their hopes for the future on becoming a professional athlete, usually at the expense of academic excellence and intellectual pursuits.

Race and Athletic Ability

Black success in athletics has created racial problems as it has helped to overcome others. Superior performances by black athletes over whites have been met with pseudoscientific speculation that people of African descent are more physically gifted and possess natural anatomical advantages (and corresponding mental deficiencies) relative to whites. Long-held racist views about the inborn attributes of blacks surfaced anew after Jesse Owens's spectacular performance in the 1936 Olympics. The speculation so outraged William Montague Cobb, an African American physician and physical anthropologist, that he devoted careful study to the subject. Cobb personally examined Owens and conducted numerous scientific tests and measurements on him, and he found the track star no different from other men. Despite the research and publications of Cobb and others, some continue to postulate about the physiognomy of African Americans as an explanation for their success in sports. The stereotype of black athletes as gifted in body but not in mind has contributed to the belated acceptance of blacks as coaches and managers and in on-field leadership positions, such as football quarterback. Only in the recent years have the successes of such coaches and managers as Dennis Green in football, Lenny Wilkens in basketball, and Cito Gaston and Dusty Baker in baseball, as well as those of star football quarterbacks Doug Williams, Warren Moon, and Randall Cunningham, begun to break that stubborn barrier.

See also African Americans and the Olympics; Baseball in the United States; Collegiate Football.

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