Farewell to Sport: The Decline of the African American Athlete during the Age of the Collegiate Arms Race and Globalization

Abstract

Perhaps no one is better positioned than Professor Edwards to provide a critical assessment of the interconnection among sport, race and American culture. The man who organized the proposed boycott of the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City and has served for years as the conscience for an institution that has not always lived up to its professed ideals of fair play and equality, Professor Edwards has provided important insights into the racial realities of American sport through his many presentations, interviews, public pronouncements, articles, and such books as Black Students (1970), The Revolt of the Black Athlete (1969), The Struggle that Must Be: An Autobiography (1980), and Sociology of Sport (1973). In this plenary address Edwards furnishes an assessment of the status of African American athletes during the new age of globalization and current economic instability inflicting intercollegiate sport. Careful to put the topic in its proper historical context, Professor Edwards makes clear that the reintegration of sport in post-World War II America was motivated more by business and politics than brotherhood and that the selective one-way nature of the process has led to a plantation system in which whites control sport while African Americans are relegated to the less powerful position of athlete. The selective and one-way rather than two-way and structural process of reintegration successfully put an end to all black sports institutions while at once funneling a disproportionate number of African American male athletes into basketball and football and their female counterparts into basketball and track and field. Coinciding with the development of a plantation system in sport has been the outmigration of the more affluent members of the African American community that has led to the deepening material deterioration and resultant desperation and hopelessness of that community. No one has been more affected by this deterioration than young African American males who have increasingly been mired in poverty, limited in their access to a quality education, overrepresented in the criminal justice system, and with little hope of career success beyond that of dreaming of becoming a rap artist or professional athlete. Unfortunately, the chances of becoming an athlete at the highest level is severely limited and becoming increasingly so, especially now with more potentially great