The Black Athlete in Big-Time Intercollegiate Sports, 1941-1968

Abstract

THE FAILURE of the scholarly community to look seriously at the history of blacks in big-time intercollegiate sports is a missed opportunity to understand an important dimension of African-American intellectual history, the nature and development of the modern civil rights struggle, and the black protest movement. Protest is synonymous with the experience of black people in the United States from slavery to the present. In the immediate years before America's advent into World War II, important challenges were made, from a variety of perspectives against the status quo of racial discrimination. The pre-war years were a period of intellectual vitality and social and political activism among blacks. Sports reflected the protest sentiment in the arts, literature, and politics. Two blacks were nationally prominent in sports in these years: Jesse Owens and Joe Louis. Their emergence as national symbols and sport heroes involved political and psychological dimensions as well as physical feats. Jesse Owens' four gold medals in the 1936 Olympic Games were a triumph for American democracy over Nazism. They were also Owens' personal protest statement through athletic performance. Much the same can be said of Joe Louis' defeat of Max Schmeling in their second fight in 1938. Owens and Louis were not inert, unthinking objects, as they have often been portrayed. Their way of protesting against the racism that they and other blacks experienced was through proving themselves as black men and as Americans. They offered victory after victory as their statements for racial equality and the rights of full citizenship.1 Other black sports figures took their own approach to protest. Boxing great Henry Armstrong hammered away at discrimination on numerous occasions. Several times he refused fights in segregated arenas such as the American Legion Hall in Indianapolis. Canada Lee, the former boxer, demonstrated his protest spirit in playing the title role, Bigger Thomas, in the stage production of Richard Wright's Native Son. And Paul Robeson, the former Rutgers All-American, continued his assertion of selfhood through acting, singing, and political protest. Although overlooked by scholars in their examinations of the civil rights movement, big-time intercollegiate sport as represented by the Big Ten, Big Eight, Pac Ten, Southeast, Southwest, and Ivy League conferences, for example was an important arena of protest in the pre-war years. Black athletes at predominantly white universities had been both

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