Black Collegiate Athletes and the Neoliberal State. Albert Y. Bimper Jr.
to the full human dignity of mankind.
(Foner, pp. 17–18)
Robeson later made similar comments concerning the contradictions and societal quandaries that black Americans faced by serving in the war and returning home to continued discrimination. These comments did not represent a harmonious sentiment about military service across the black community nor that of the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, Robeson’s comments did reflect the feelings of a significant cross-section of the black Americans troubled by the pervasiveness of Jim Crow that made continued discrimination permissible and tolerable despite edicts of racial equality and freedom heralded throughout WWII. And to the point that Robeson was making, President Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” of human rights deemed worthy of universal protection seemed nothing more than an obscure fantasy unintended for black Americans living in a nation suffering beneath Jim Crow.
As the Double V campaign faded, racial justice and civil rights efforts were not wholly quelled. Rather, the war inspired and facilitated the reinforcement of deliberate capacity building to take shape within black communities demonstrated by the advancements of the National Urban League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, as well as the Congress of Racial Equality. Hence, an uplifting byproduct of the demographic migrations, racial justice discourse, political resource gains, and community organizing was that black Americans were developing the ground work for newfound infrastructure and strategic faculties to spur a movement that would undo Jim Crow. The renovated positionality of black churches, influenced by racial and economic sociopolitical shifts of their surrounding communities emerged as cornerstone institutions to the sustainability of a nascent grassroots civil rights movement.
Institutions of American sport, specifically the National Football League and Major League Baseball played a significant role in complimenting the aforementioned anteceding factors gradually altering public opinion on race and a fluid American political climate. In March of 1946, the Los Angeles Rams signed Kenny Washington to a contract in the National Football League (Ross, 1999). Just two months later, the Rams would also acquire Woody Strode. The signings of the first black players, Washington and Strode reflected an indication of the slow, yet progressive shift in the racial climate happening in this era. But American football, at the time, was only a fledgling version of the sporting enterprise and cultural influence on society that exist today. When it came to sports, it was baseball that sat atop the throne of influence over America. The signing of Jackie Robinson by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1946 has been chronicled in great length, as has his debut in the major leagues in 1947. The significance of Robinson’s appearance on the baseball diamond extends far beyond the narrative of desegregation of major league baseball. In its broadest sense, and at a time when the American society was undergoing multilayered processes of post-war recovering, the attentions of the country remained captivated by imaginations of race and the encumbering presence of Jim Crow. But most importantly, the country was captivated by the microcosmic world of sport to explore new possibilities of progressive race relations.
As the country entered the decade of the 1950s, the ferocity of Jim Crow took on an increasingly appalling stigma in correlation to the shifting polity among a burgeoning population of white Americans. By the onset of the decade, the NAACP mounted a tactical legal strategy challenging state-mandated racial segregation leading to the decision of Brown v Board, 1954. The Supreme Court’s unanimous landmark decision in the Brown case overturned provisions set by 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson. State-mandated segregation on the basis of race was institutionalized by Plessy v. Ferguson, which legalized segregated public facilities, including schools as long as they were deemed equal (Ficker, 1999). However, the realities of Plessy were that the schooling of black Americans and most other segregated facilities were not only separate from whites, but exceptionally unequal. The Brown decision offered legal standing to alter public schooling policy, opening school doors, as well as sporting arenas to blacks.
The optimisms of the civil rights movement were witnessed in the gradual racial integration of black athletes across professional and collegiate sports occurring throughout the 1950s. This particular decade brought about an incremental degree of integration across collegiate institutions as the talent pools of black athletes were increasingly recruited to white teams (Lumpkin, 2013). Despite the federal decision of the Brown case, the curtain of segregation would not completely fall in intercollegiate sport for years to come into the following decade (Wiggins, 2007). Counter to commonly distorted or oversimplified historical narratives about sport desegregation, racial integration in white organized sport was not attained simply because of altruistic views of valiant individuals. On the contrary, sport scholars have noted that economic interests and the pursuits to achieve athletic success eclipsed motivations of noble white altruism to accomplish racial equity (Davis, 1995; Wiggins, 2007).
Similar to the Double V campaign, black sport columnists were instrumental in elevating a national consciousness of the possibilities of desegregating major league baseball. Sport beat writers, such as Sam Lacy, played a critical role in marshaling the debut of black players into major league baseball. Following Jackie out of Negro league baseball to the Brooklyn Dodgers in the late 1940s was the catcher Roy Campanella and pitcher Don Newcombe. Athletes of this caliber, like today, garnered many fans, both young and old. Some of which they would get to meet in person overtime, and many more that they would never know. But one of the many young fans of who saw Newcombe above all others as his hero was a young boy named Emmett Till (Tyson, 2017). Sadly, Newcombe along with rest of the nation would soon know of young Emmett in the most unimaginable way. Nearly a year after the Brown decision, Emmett Till, only fourteen years old, was brutally killed while visiting family relatives in Mississippi. His beaten and mutilated body was cast into a river and eventually recovered from the muddy waters days after being kidnapped. The disturbing images of young Till’s open casket were widely circulated across the nation and cast an appalling and lurid face on the brutality of current racial conventions and individuals’ racial prejudice (Harold & DeLuca, 2005). Images of the grotesque condition of Till’s corpse served as a political catalyst for the twentieth century civil rights movement as they removed the possibility of indifference about racial injustice across mainstream publications and white communities.
In response to the not-guilty verdict delivered to the accused killers of the fourteen-year-old Till, there was a call for mass demonstrations by prominent civil rights headship. Of these esteemed spearheads calling for such demonstrations was A. Philip Randolf, whom had organized and was leading the first predominately black American labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. In a telegram sent to Randolph, Paul Robeson expressed his disagreement of the acquittal verdict of Till’s murder trial and his commitment to the cause of racial justice and civil rights. On September 24, 1955, Robeson wrote:
Extend wholehearted support your initiative in calling mass meeting protesting lynching of Emmett Till. Outrageous acquittal of lynchers is grim warning that our people must unite as never before in the militant resistance to terror and oppression. In this hour of crisis I stand as always with my people and offer all that I have, my heart, my strength, my devotion to our common cause. (Library of Congress, 2014)
The telegram sent by Robeson illuminates his state of critical consciousness, not simply focused on the unfolding devastation of Till’s death and subsequent trial, but equally a broader perspective interconnecting the crisis of Till to threatening systems of terror and oppression toward black Americans.
As America juggled the aftermath of WWII and the onset of the Cold War against the backdrop of race relations in the mid-twentieth century, historian Jennifer Lansbury reveals how the world-class tennis talent, Althea Gibson, intersected with U.S. restoration efforts regarding an enhanced race relations image profile under attack from communist antagonists. She notes a comment made by Gibson after her experience of accepting a 1955 State Department invitation to join three other tennis players on a tour of Southeast Asian countries. In recognition of the racial climate and wider inferences to be made of her participation, Gibson spoke:
I’ve never been exactly sure why I was selected to make the tour in the first place . . . I know it happened soon after the killing of Emmett Till in Georgia and world opinion of the racial situation in the United States was at a low ebb. So I suppose that was the main reason why I, a colored girl, was invited to help represent our country in Southeast Asia. I certainly wasn't