Out of the Shadows: A Biographical History of African American Athletes

III. The Fight for Civil Rights through Athletic Performance, Persuasion, and Protest

III The integration of American sport following Jackie Robinson’s entry into Major League baseball was a difficult and slow and uneven process. There were a number of sports that were especially resistant to integration and continue to be so to this very day. Tennis, swimming, golf, and other sports associated with private clubs and characterized by close informal contact between men and women both on the playing field and off have been very slow to desegregate. The sports that have seen more rapid integration have typically been those in which winning and commercial interests served as a stimulus to recruit the best players regardless of race or ethnicity. A disproportionate number of African American athletes have found their way into professional basketball and football as well as other revenue-generating sports at the intercollegiate level of competition. Irrespective of the sports in which they have participated since Branch Rickey launched his noble experiment, African American athletes have experienced various forms of racial discrimination and inequality. Those African American athletes in the vanguard of the integration process during the 1950s and 1960s were confronted with humiliating discriminatory practices, including racial taunts from opponents and segregated accommodations in housing, transportation, and eating establishments. These more blatant forms of discrimination would gradually be eliminated as a result of relatively more liberalized attitudes toward race and civil rights legislation. In today’s world African American athletes are still exposed to insensitivity and deep-seated stereotypical notions about the connections between race and both athletic and academic performance, but the more obvious forms of racial inequality are now found off the playing field and in the coaching profession as well as in the front offices of intercollegiate athletic departments and board rooms of professional sports franchises. The Fight for Civil Rights through Athletic Performance, Persuasion, and Protest 2WIGGINS_pages_133-262.qxd 9/12/06 12:00 PM Page 181 African Americans have, with some notable exceptions, been largely excluded from coaching, managerial, and other powerful administrative positions in sport. Two of the more talented and important athletes of the second half of the twentieth century were Althea Gibson and Wilma Rudolph. Although they achieved fame in different sports and were quite opposite in temperament and personality, Gibson and Rudolph were similar in that they both hailed from the South, attended historically black colleges, and garnered worldwide athletic fame that resulted in their election to the International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1980. Gibson, born in Silver, South Carolina, became a legend in the African American community by capturing ten straight American Tennis Association (ATA) National Championships. In 1956 she became the first African American to win a grand-slam title by capturing the French Open. The following year she captured the Wimbledon and United States Lawn Tennis Association National Championships and in 1958 repeated the feat by once again winning both tournaments. In 1963 she launched her professional career in golf by joining the Ladies Professional Golf Association tour. Although never capturing a professional tournament in a nearly fifteen-year career, Gibson performed admirably on the tour with her best finish being a second-place tie in the 1970 Immke Buick Open in Columbus, Ohio. In her essay “’Jackie Robinson without the Charm’: The Challenges of Being Althea Gibson,” Mary Jo Festle describes how difficult life was for Gibson and places the career of the great tennis champion in the context of other women athletes and the racial realities of both sport and the larger American society. Although Gibson spent her formative years in Harlem with her mother and abusive father, she eventually found a modicum of normalcy and the first real family she had ever known when as a teenager she moved in with Dr. Hubert Eaton and his wife in Wilmington, North Carolina. Festle speculates that this tough and disruptive childhood of Gibson perhaps helps explain her “notoriously difficult personality.” Variously described as arrogant, aloof, insecure , moody, temperamental, tactless, and uncommunicative, Gibson seemingly had confrontations with almost everyone she encountered during her career. Gibson’s difficult personality was combined with a reluctance to serve as a representative of her race. She wanted to be rec182 THE FIGHT FOR CIVIL RIGHTS 2WIGGINS_pages_133-262.qxd 9/12/06 12:00 PM Page 182 ognized for her athletic skills with the color of her skin being irrelevant to her success and was, to paraphrase from a passage in one of her autobiographies...