‘That’s Jean Lowe’: On Being a Black Canadian Female Track Athlete in 1940s Toronto

Abstract

From the late 1930s through to the 1940s, Lowe remained a constant in the city’s sports pages. Yet, in 1946, she moved to the Southern United States to complete her education and did not reside in Canada again. Using Toronto’s White press media reports on Lowe, the present Black feminist analysis nuances a racialized woman’s tortuous journey to success, demonstrating that no amount of public acclaim could obfuscate raciality. Indeed, praise existed alongside othering discourse. Most prominent in this narrative is the notion that, no matter how valued an individual may have been as an integral member of a squad, they were and remained a ‘Black athlete’. This had sociocultural implications and tinted even the acclaims of her most enthusiastic supporters. Lowe also allows a juxtaposition of Canadian and American Black/White relational contexts. Her departure from her hometown is framed by conflicting, yet defining, characteristics of a Canadian society which nurtured an image of tolerance and openness, while firmly endorsing the colour line. Lowe’s athletic biography underscores that locating marginalized peoples within Western sport history is necessary to appreciate how individuals with multilayered subordinate identities fit into, reorganize, and disrupt White/Euro centric grand historical narratives of sport, nation, and settlement.