Sports and the Racial Divide, Volume II: A Legacy of African American Athletic Activism

By Michael E. Lomax

Contributions by Amy Bass, Ashley Farmer, Sarah K. Fields, Billy Hawkins, Kurt Edward Kemper, Michael E. Lomax, and David K. Wiggins

In Sports and the Racial Divide, Volume II: A Legacy of African American Athletic Activism, Michael E. Lomax and Billy Hawkins draw together essays that examine evolving attitudes about race, sports, and athletic activism in the US. A follow-up to Lomax’s Sports and the Racial Divide: African American and Latino Experience in an Era of Change, this second anthology links post–World War II African American protest movements to a range of contemporary social justice interventions.

Athlete activists have joined the ongoing pursuit for Black liberation and self-determination in a number of ways. Contributors examine some of these efforts, including the fight for HBCUs to enter the NCAA basketball tournament; Harry Edwards and the boycott of the 1968 Olympic Games; and US sporting culture in the post-9/11 era. Essays also detail topics like the protest efforts of San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick; the link between the Black Power movement and the current Black Lives Matter movement; and the activism of athletes like Lebron James and Naomi Osaka. Collectively, these essays reveal a historical narrative in which African Americans have transformed the currency of athletic achievement into impactful political capital.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Jan 18, 2024
• ISBN: 9781496848550

Book preview

Cover: Sports and the Racial Divide: A Legacy of African American Athletic Activism, Volume II, Edited by Michael E. Lomax and Billy Hawkins, Published by University Press of Mississippi

Sports and the Racial Divide

Volume II

Sports and the Racial Divide

Volume II

A Legacy of African American Athletic Activism

Edited by

Michael E. Lomax and Billy Hawkins

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

Publication of this work was made possible in part due to a subvention from the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Houston.

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

www.upress.state.ms.us

An earlier version of Michael E. Lomax’s essay Revisiting the Revolt: Harry Edwards and the Revolt of the Black Athlete was published in Sports and the Racial Divide: African American and Latino Experience in an Era of Change, edited by Michael E. Lomax (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 55–89.

Ashley Farmer’s essay Black Women Athletes, Protest, and Politics: An Interview with Amira Rose Davis originally appeared in Black Perspectives (the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society) on October 14, 2016, and is reprinted by permission of the AAIHS.

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.

Any discriminatory or derogatory language or hate speech regarding race, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, class, national origin, age, or disability that has been retained or appears in elided form is in no way an endorsement of the use of such language outside a scholarly context.

Copyright © 2024 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lomax, Michael E., editor. | Hawkins, Billy Joe, editor.

Title: Sports and the racial divide, volume II : a legacy of African American athletic activism / Michael E. Lomax, Billy Hawkins.

Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023041744 (print) | LCCN 2023041745 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496848536 (hardback) | ISBN 9781496848543 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781496848550 (epub) | ISBN 9781496848567 (epub) | ISBN 9781496848574 (pdf) | ISBN 9781496848581 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: African American athletesm—History. | African American athletes—Social conditions. | Racism in sports—United States—History. | Discrimination in sports—United States—History. | African Americans—Sports. | Sports—United States—History. | United States—Race relations.

Classification: LCC GV706.32 .S7452 2024 (print) | LCC GV706.32 (ebook) | DDC 796.089/96073—dc23/eng/20230928

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023041744

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023041745

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

In Loving Memory of Donald and Ollie Scott

Contents

Prologue: The Paradox of Race and Sport

—Michael E. Lomax

1. No Colored Athletes Allowed: The Historically Black College Challenge to the NCAA

—Kurt Kemper

2. Revisiting the Revolt: Harry Edwards and the Revolt of the Black Athlete

—Michael E. Lomax

3. The Activist Athlete: Contextualizing the Collision of Politics and Sports in the Twenty-First Century

—Amy Bass

4. The Decompartmentalization of the Political Voice: The Conversion of Athletic Capital and Political Capital

—Billy Hawkins

5. Doomed: Colin Kaepernick’s Collusion Claim against the NFL

—Sarah K. Fields

6. Black Women Athletes, Protest, and Politics: An Interview with Amira Rose Davis

—Ashley Farmer

7. For the Movement and Not for the Moment: Harry Edwards’s Persistence, from the Revolt of the Black Athlete to Black Lives Matter

—Billy Hawkins

Epilogue

—David K. Wiggins

About the Contributors

Index

Sports and the Racial Divide

Volume II

Prologue

The Paradox of Race and Sport

—Michael E. Lomax

On May 31, 2017, one day before the NBA finals, Cleveland Cavaliers superstar LeBron James’s Los Angeles home was vandalized with graffiti containing a racial slur. James was not at home when the reported incident occurred. At a news conference in Oakland, California, James stated: No matter how famous you are, no matter how many people admire you, being black is tough in America. He added that US society had a long way to go until African Americans would feel equal in America.¹

LeBron James represents the African American athlete who has become increasingly outspoken on social and political issues. He has used his fame and platform to criticize police mistreatment of minorities. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, in December 2014, James and several other NBA players wore T-shirts with the caption I Can’t Breathe to honor Eric Garner, a New York African American who died after a police officer put him in a chokehold. Video captured Garner saying I can’t breathe in his last moments.²

I had just completed Charles Ross’s book on the history of the American Football League (AFL). Ross tested the unfounded assumption that the AFL opened additional opportunities for African Americans to play professional football in the United States. He raised an insightful issue regarding the plight of several African American players at the 1965 East-West All-Star Game in New Orleans. When these minority players arrived in the Bayou City, they found the doors of the city’s leading social clubs closed in their faces. Led by San Diego Chargers defensive linemen Ernie Ladd and Earl Faison, the African American players quickly agreed to boycott the game. Their efforts prompted AFL commissioner Joe Foss to move the game to Houston, Texas, which was complying with the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s prohibition of racial discrimination in public accommodations. Moreover, much like LeBron James’s plight fifty-two years later, the predicament of these African American players embodied the complexities of race and sport in the United States.³

In 1963, another incident involved four African American players during an exhibition game in Mobile, Alabama. The New York Jets were scheduled to play the Oakland Raiders at Ladd Memorial Stadium. Before the game, the four players, all Raiders—Clem Daniels, Art Powell, Bo Roberson, and Fred Williamson—told their head coach, Al Davis, they would not play if the seating were not integrated. In the 1960s, in a practice known as block seating, African American fans in sports stadiums in the South were restricted to seats in the end zone, regardless of whether they had the funds necessary to pay for better seats. To further add to their humiliation, African American fans sat in folding chairs provided for them. In addition to the Raiders’ Black players, the Jets had seven African American players on their roster.⁴

Instead of fining or suspending these players, Al Davis supported them. I’m speaking as a man rather than their coach when I say I don’t blame them for what they believe. As a coach, Davis added, I can say only I won’t penalize them. In addition to the proposed boycott, Davis asked that guaranteed nonsegregated seating be included in the contract with the sponsors. Although Jets owner David Sonny Werblin was under the impression there would be no segregated seating, he later pressed for the game’s cancellation. A week before the game, Davis received a phone call confirming that the sponsors could not honor the ban against block seating. Since the promoters could not guarantee a fully integrated seating arrangement, Werblin and Raiders magnate F. Wayne Valley decided to relocate the game to Oakland.⁵

The boycott by the Oakland Raiders’ African American players exemplified how these young athletes conceived, planned, and conducted the desegregation battles of the 1960s that became so prominent. They represented a generation whose impatience and idealism, which characterize youth, were an organic and integral aspect of this campaign for racial justice. They viewed the legalistic maneuvers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) with a politely hidden contempt. The National Urban League was perceived as the enemy’s camp, and they knew little, if any, of the earlier efforts of civil rights activists like W. E. B. Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph. More important, the desegregation battles of the 1960s were not a rejection of the American Dream. They were a necessary, albeit ambiguous, step toward its culmination.⁶

The Oakland Raiders’ boycott reflected the mind and mood of African American youths who participated in the desegregation battles of the 1960s. These star players acknowledged their advantageous position. The AFL was on the brink of stability. In 1964, the league signed a lucrative TV contract with NBC for $42 million. The following year, the AFL sold $5 million worth of season tickets before the first regular-season game kickoff. Viewed within this context, AFL owners would be reluctant to allow African American star players like Art Powell and Clem Daniels to defect to the NFL.⁷

The African American athletes of LeBron James’s generation know little if any of the boycott efforts of the Black athletes of the 1960s. However, one common theme links these present-day athletes with the Oakland Raiders of the 1960s. No matter how rich you are, no matter how much others may admire you, being Black is challenging in the United States. It is a paradox of race and sport in America.

A Legacy of Silent Activism

On July 28, 1917, approximately ten thousand African Americans assembled at Fifty-Seventh Street in New York City to embark on one of the largest protest marches of the early twentieth century. The Negro Silent Protest Parade was in response to the violence directed at African Americans, including race riots, lynching, and other outrages, that had occurred in several US cities such as Waco, Texas, and Memphis, Tennessee. On May 15, 1916, Jesse Washington, a seventeen-year-old African American farmhand, was lynched in Waco, county seat of McLennan County. Washington had been convicted of raping and murdering Lucy Fryer, the wife of his white employer in Robinson, Texas. He was chained by his neck and dragged out of the county court by observers. They paraded Washington through the street before castrating him. He was lynched in front of Waco’s city hall.⁸

On May 22, 1917, Ell Persons was accused of raping Antoinette Rappel, a fifteen-year-old white girl in Memphis. Persons was arrested, and while awaiting trial, he was captured by a lynching party, who burned him alive and scattered his remains around the town. A large crowd attended his lynching, which had a carnival-like atmosphere. No one was arrested as a result of the lynching.⁹

The East St. Louis riots catalyzed the Negro Silent Protest Parade. In late May and early July 1917, a series of labor- and race-related violent outbreaks led to the murder of at least 40 and as many as 250 African Americans. Another 6,000 Blacks were left homeless due to burning and vandalism, costing approximately $400,000 in property damage. St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Carlos F. Hurd wrote an eyewitness account of the domestic terror. The East St. Louis affair, as I saw it, was a manhunt, conducted on a sporting basis, though with anything but the fair play which is the principle of sport, he wrote. There was a horribly cool deliberateness and a spirit of fun about it…. ‘Get a n-----r’ was the slogan, and it was varied by the recurrent cry, ‘Get another.’¹⁰

Within this context, NAACP field secretary James Weldon Johnson worked with civil rights and community leaders at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in New York to determine the best way to protest the riots. Most civil rights activists agreed that a silent protest through the city streets would serve as a platform for racial reform and an end to the violence. They decided that the parade should be composed of African American citizens rather than a mass protest with a racially mixed gathering. As African Americans were the primary victims of violence, activists also decided that they had a special responsibility to participate in the parade. The Reverend Hutchens C. Bishop, pastor of St. Philip’s, and the Reverend Charles D. Martin, founder of the Moravian Church, also in New York, served as the president and secretary of the parade, respectively. Dr. Martin wrote the Why Do We March call to activism.¹¹

The march began at Fifty-Seventh Street, proceeded down Fifth Avenue, and ended at Twenty-Third Street. Marchers carried signs highlighting their discontent. Children dressed in white led the protest, followed by women also dressed in white. Men brought up the rear wrapped in dark suits. During the parade, white people stopped to listen to African American people explain the reasons for the march. Dr. Martin’s Why Do We March was published in the pages of the New York Age. Excerpts include:

We march because we want to make impossible a repetition of Waco, Memphis, and East St. Louis, by rousing the conscience of the country and bring the murderers of our brothers, sisters, and innocent children to justice.

We march because we want our children to live in a better land and enjoy fairer conditions than have fallen to our lot.

The onlookers witnessed a protest unlike any they had seen in the city. There were no chants, no songs, just silence. In his 1938 autobiography Along This Way, James Weldon Johnson wrote that the streets of New York have witnessed many strange sites, but I judge, never one stranger than this; among the watchers were those with tears in their eyes.¹²

Challenging the Unwritten Protocol

During the 2017 professional football season, President Donald Trump’s outburst against NFL athletes, and the inflammatory response of NFL teams, brought a renewed focus on political demonstrations during the playing of the national anthem. Such acts of protest, essentially carried out by African American athletes like San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick and others who knelt for the anthem at NFL games, have had a long history in the United States and simultaneously a tradition of angering primarily white fans, sports officials, and politicians.

Since World War I, The Star-Spangled Banner has been played before most professional and collegiate sporting competitions in the United States. When a US athlete wins a gold medal in an Olympic event, the national anthem is played in the medal ceremony. In what can best be described as an unwritten protocol, an athlete is supposed to stand at attention with their right hand over their heart and, in some cases, sing the first stanza of the anthem. In this way, professional, collegiate, and Olympic athletes express a sense of patriotism by honoring the flag and anthem.¹³

During the medal ceremony for the 200-meter running event at the 1968 Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City, Tommie Smith and John Carlos each raised a black-gloved fist while the national anthem played in the background. Smith was timed at 19.8 seconds in the event, an Olympic record. Australia’s Peter Norman finished second with a time of 20.0, while Carlos finished third with a time of 20.1 seconds. Smith and Carlos intended to bring black gloves to the event; however, Carlos left his gloves at the Olympic village. Norman suggested that Carlos wear Smith’s left-hand glove. Thus, Carlos raised his left fist instead of his right, differing from the traditional Black Power salute.¹⁴

In his autobiography, Silent Gesture, Smith declared that the gesture was not a Black Power salute in the traditional sense. Instead, it symbolized a human rights salute. Smith and Carlos received their medals shoeless but wearing black socks to represent Black poverty. Smith wore a black scarf around his neck to symbolize Black pride, whereas Carlos had his tracksuit top unzipped to show solidarity with all blue-collar workers in the United States. The bronze medalist also wore a necklace he described as for those individuals that were lynched or killed and that no one said a prayer for, that were hung and tarred. It was for those thrown off the side of the boats in the Middle Passage. All three athletes wore Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) badges after Norman, a critic of Australia’s former White Australia policy, expressed support for their ideals. The Chicago Tribune printed the now historic photograph of the three athletes on the medal podium with the subtitle, In Silent Protest. The athletes were booed when they left the podium.¹⁵

On October 17, the US Olympic Committee (USOC) formally apologized to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Mexican organizing committee for what they called the discourtesy displayed by two of its athletes in an Olympic victory ceremony. The USOC warned that it would not tolerate any repetition of a display like Smith and Carlos had exhibited on the medal stand. The supposed threat served as a strong deterrent for US athletes performing in future events. The statement indicated that no action would be taken against Smith and Carlos, but disciplinary action would be taken if there were further demonstrations.¹⁶

IOC president Avery Brundage declared the athletes’ activism as a political demonstration unfit for an apolitical international forum, as was the Olympic Games’ intent. He ordered Smith and Carlos suspended from the US team and evicted from the Olympic Village. When the USOC refused, Brundage threatened to ban the entire US team. The threat led to Smith’s and Carlos’s expulsion from the games. Much as with the Silent Protest Parade of 1917, Tommie Smith and John Carlos provided an ideological justification for why they had protested during the medal ceremony. Moreover, Smith’s and Carlos’s activism went against the unwritten protocol and was perceived by some as disrespecting the flag and anthem.

Another challenge to the unwritten protocol occurred on the medal stand during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. In the men’s 400 meters, US athletes Vince Matthews and Wayne Collett won the gold and silver medals, respectively. Matthews was timed at 44.7 seconds, while Collett finished at 44.8. During the ceremony, both runners refused to stand at attention for the US national anthem. (Bronze medalist Julius Sang of Kenya did stand properly.) Moreover, Collett stepped up to the top of the podium on the winner’s level alongside Matthews. Both runners stood sideways to the flag; Matthews had his arms folded, and Collett placed his hands on his hips. The boos and catcalls began when they left the podium. When Collett returned to pick up his tracksuit, he received boos and whistles as he raised his fist to salute the crowd.¹⁷

The gesture at the podium was supposedly not a protest of injustice against African Americans. According to the Los Angeles Times, Matthews stated in a press conference: The reason Collett came on the stand with me was not a protest. We considered ourselves the best quarter-milers in the world—Wayne Collett, John Smith, Lee Evans, and myself. When asked why he was fidgeting during the national anthem, Matthews replied, Those who know [me know] I’m hardly ever still, and after running 400 meters I was tired. Regarding the salute, the gold medalist said, If you were in the Village at all, you would see us giving the sign to each other, the same as other people say, ‘Hiya.’ Collett said the Black Power salute was not directed at the crowd. Instead, it was directed at a group of other Black athletes, who returned the greeting. Collett added that he could not stand at attention with a clear conscience. When asked for clarification, he stated, My acts probably mirror the attitude of white America toward blacks, totally casual.¹⁸

Matthews’s and Collett’s actions were directed at the US coaching staff, not the flag or the national anthem. The Chicago Tribune reported that both runners were just mad about many things; they said, We didn’t think it would blow up like this. The runners were asked to apologize, although they were not sorry for their actions. What I tried to get across to the Olympic Committee, stated Matthews, as if it [were] pre-meditated, I could have done something better than that. It was just something that happened. We didn’t realize the implications to the people in the stands. Nevertheless, both runners were banned by the IOC, resulting in the United States dropping out of the 4 × 400 meters.¹⁹

On January 15, 1973, on the final night of the Knights of Columbus Indoor Track and Field Meet at Nassau Coliseum, Eastern Michigan University’s mile relay team was disqualified from the competition. The disqualification was in response to some team members failing to stand during the national anthem. EMU’s relay team consisted of three African American runners—Carlos Woods, Willie Sims, and Stanley Vinson—and one white athlete, Mark Timmons. The anthem preceded the mile run, and according to the New York Daily News, at least two of EMU’s runners were lying down in the infield. The Games Committee voted unanimously to disqualify EMU from the event. When the announcement was made, the crowd of 8,551 spectators cheered.²⁰

However, the cheers turned to boos when Woods, Sims, and Vinson jogged around the track and into the infield with clenched fists while Timmons trotted before the mile relay. The New York Times reported that one EMU runner claimed they were not protesting. I was just stretching out, preparing for my race, the runner reportedly said. I didn’t mean any protest, and I’m sorry I caused such a commotion. The commotion led to some pushback from the Organizing Committee. One official said that if Eastern Michigan was not disqualified from participating, "all the meet officials—judges and timers—were going to