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B I B L I O G R A P H I C A L N O T E The athletes profiled in this book all realized great success in their respective sports and gained national, and in some cases, international acclaim for their exploits. They have not, however, received an equal amount of attention from either academicians or more popular writers. Some of them have had their lives and careers recounted in a seemingly endless number of articles and books. Others have hardly received any attention and the result is that their athletic accomplishments have been largely forgotten and lost to historical memory. The reason for the disparity in the amount of attention given to these athletes is complex and not always easily understood, but it certainly had something to do with the sport in which they participated, whether they spent most of their careers competing behind segregated walls, and whether their athletic successes were combined with a willingness to speak out on larger societal issues and took place either during world conflict or in connection with the new global economic market. Jimmy Winkfield, Marshall “Major” Taylor, and William Henry Lewis, the first three athletes profiled, have all received relatively scant attention. Winkfield, who has always been overshadowed by another great black jockey, Isaac Murphy, has recently been accorded the recognition he deserves. He was one of the fifteen athletes included in Henry Louis Gates and Cornel West, The African-American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Country (2000). Even more details about Winkfield’s life and career are provided in Edward Hotaling, The Great Black Jockeys: The Lives and Times of the Men Who Dominated America’s First NationalSport (1999) and Wink:TheIncredibleLifeandEpicJourneyof Jimmy Winkfield (2005). Information on Marshall “Major” Taylor can be gleaned from his modestly titled autobiography, Fastest Bicycle Rider in the World (1928). The only biography of Taylor is Andrew Ritchie’s nicely researched, informative, and insightful Major Taylor: The Extraordinary Career of a Champion Bicycle Racer (1996). Readers interested in William Henry Lewis will have to search far and wide for information about the great football player, coach, lawyer, and politician because he has yet to have a biographer. Some information about him, however, can be found 4WIGGINS_pages_373-460.qxd 9/12/06 12:06 PM Page 429 in such diverse sources as Ronald Smith, BigTimeFootballatHarvard,1905: TheDiaryof CoachBillReid (1994); David K. Wiggins and Patrick B. Miller, The Unlevel Playing Field: A Documentary History of the African American Athlete (2003); Edwin B. Henderson, The Negro in Sports (1939); Harold Wade Jr., Black Men of Amherst (1976); Ocania Chalk’s, Black College Sport (1976); and Arthur Ashe, A Hard Road to Glory (1988). Readers interested in Jack Johnson have plenty of sources to consult . The controversial heavyweight champion penned his autobiography Jack Johnson Is a Dandy, which is, as many historians have pointed out, an interesting mix of fact and fiction. Various aspects of Johnson’s life can be gleaned from such articles as Richard Broome’s “The Australian Reaction to Jack Johnson, Black Pugilist, 1907–09,” in Richard Cashman and Michael McKerman’s, eds., Sports in History: The Making of Modern Sporting History (1979), 343–63; Al-Tony Gilmore’s “Jack Johnson and White Women: The National Impact,” Journal of Negro History 58 (1973): 18–38; Raymond Wilson’s “Another White Hope Bites the Dust: The Jack Johnson-Jim Flynn Heavyweight Fight of 1912,” Montana: The Magazine of History 29 (1979): 30–39; and William H. Wiggins’s “Jack Johnson as Bad Nigger: The Folklore of His Life,” Black Scholar (1971): 4–19. Perhaps the most insightful work on Johnson is still Randy Roberts, Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and the Era of White Hopes (1983). Roberts’s book is fascinating to read and astutely ties Johnson’s career to larger racial issues and the sport of boxing. Other biographies of Johnson include Finis Farr, Black Champion: The Life and Times of Jack Johnson (1965); Danzil Batchelor, Jack Johnson and His Times (1956); Robert H. deCoy, The Big Black Fire (1969); Al-Tony Gilmore, Bad Nigger! The National Impact of Jack Johnson; and Geoffrey C. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (2004). Additional information on Johnson can be gathered from Gail Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (1995); Thomas Hietala’s dual biography, The Fight of the Century: Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and the Struggle for Racial Equality...

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