Abstract
During the early 1950s, Abe Saperstein, the Jewish owner of the all African-American Harlem Globetrotters basketball team, joined with the US State Department to promote improved perceptions of American domestic race relations abroad. The symbolic politics associated with the Globetrotters' worldwide tours were designed to give legitimacy to existing racial inequalities in American society by stressing ‘progress’ during the early cold war era, despite the social, political and legal barriers that hindered African-American advancement. In order to buttress its stature as an example of US race relations, the Harlem Globetrotters attempted to minimize its own troubling engagement with questions of race. This article therefore explores the Globetrotters' efforts to sanitize their history by obscuring the team's propagation of minstrel imagery, in hopes of serving as effective goodwill ambassadors.
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