Sports in African American Life: Essays on History and Culture

Abstract

This somewhat disjointed collection of essays on African Americans and sporting life exhibits the difficulties of weaving many pioneering individual and local studies into larger metanarratives and broader interpretive frameworks for a broad audience. The book is organized into four parts, with essays exploring African American sports history, their role in activism, the intersection of race and gender, and African American athletes in the visual arts.Part I explores episodes in Black athletic history. Of the three historical essays in the collection, only one fully demonstrates the possibilities of archival research. Derrick White's essay on the foundations of Black college football stresses the importance of community-building and public support to the rise of the game at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and emphasizes the significance of “congregation” created by the Black press, administrators, university presidents, and Black coaches. The essay follows White's excellent 2019 book Blood, Sweat, and Tears and hints at the complex and contradictory outcomes of desegregation for HBCU students and athletes explored further in the book. Stanley Keith Arnold provides a brief synthetic summary of the research done on Black women athletes and their breakthroughs in the Olympics from 1932 to 1948, with some contextualization pulled from Black newspapers across the United States. Focusing largely on the feats of individuals like Theodora “Tidye” Pickett, Louise Stokes, and Alice Coachman—as well as the programs at Tuskegee Institute and Tennessee State—Arnold aims to show that the early successes of Black women were important as real experiences and symbolic victories. A third essay by Kevin Hogg tidily organizes a litany of early Black professional wrestlers from the 1890s to the World Wrestling Entertainment.A timely collection of articles on social-justice activism makes up Part II. Demetrius W. Pearson briefly evaluates the two “godfathers” of Black basketball: Edwin Bancroft Henderson and John McLendon. Pearson neatly outlines their advocacy for the role of interracial sports competitions, which could play as a “racial equalizer” before the civil rights movement. At a time when Harry Edwards's ongoing scholarly examination of Black athletes in America should be revisited, a pair of articles use Edwards as a theoretical launching pad in their very brief reviews of African American athletes’ social interventions. Fritz G. Polite and Jeremai Santiago attempt to pressure the NCAA by applying a corporate responsibility model to the contradictions of the Black student-athlete. Joseph N. Cooper, Michael Mallery Jr., and Charles D. T. Macaulay set out a periodization of activism in seven distinct periods from antebellum to the Black Lives Matter movement, which may help other scholars in framing change and continuity in the various episodes of Black athletic resistance. A final essay by Miciah Z. Yehudah aggressively challenges the sports industry as a “tentacle” of modern colonialism and white supremacy. Readers will be curious to weigh his very critical interpretations of Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali, and others who have inhabited their activism “traditions” against the cloying infatuations that have been manufactured around athletic celebrities.Yehudah's essay contrasts immensely with the piece that follows it, the first of the third part of the book on gender and identity. F. Michelle Richardson and Akilah R. Carter-Francique outline the pioneering role of Black sportswomen and their historical activism to overcome limited access and multiple levels of discrimination. The editor, alongside Christina Kanu, returns volley by exhibiting that most Black male athletes suffer academically and personally after athletic dreams die. Together, these three essays constitute a formidable list to teach with or structure a debate about whether Black athletes should persist in the face of multiple modes of exploitation.A final, slightly ill-suited triad of articles centers on media and artistic analysis. The high school athletic recruiting process is a site of conversion for athletic aspirations, talent-hungry coaches at predominantly white institutions, and the commercial interests of websites that traffic in statistical information, notes Travis R. Bell. He suggests that the mediated construction of recruits further reifies student athletes without consideration for their bourgeoning identities and draws them away from their academic potential. The essay has little in common with the subsequent chapters on U.S. sports films and sports fetishism in African American art.The collection as a whole proves difficult to reconcile. On the one hand, many good articles seem extremely helpful as summaries of Black athletic histories and the critical engagement with narratives of Black achievement in sports. On the other, the collection can feel repetitive when each author outlines their engagement with similar theoretical frameworks, yet it can also feel disconnected as its authors’ arguments represent disparate modes of research and claims to argumentative certainty. In the end, readers of this journal will find the first two parts potentially useful at a time when sports history discussions cannot be disentangled from questions about race, especially in America.