Sports and the Racial Divide: African American and Latino Experience in an Era of Change

6. Title IX and African American Female Athletes

  Title IX and African American Female Athletes —Sarah K. Fields On June , , President Richard Nixon signed Title IX, a law stating that “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” At the time, the law seemed to be about opening opportunities for women and girls in the classroom, and almost no one anticipated the impact that Title IX would have on athletics. Title IX, by force of cultural rather than legal will, did change the gender of school- and college-aged athletes. Sports went from being a purely masculine preserve to one in which American females were tolerated, if not always accepted. What has been less clear, however, is what role Title IX has played in increasing the sporting opportunities for African American women and girls. Although African American women and girls have benefited from Title IX, they have not gained as much as their white counterparts largely because of a combination of sociological, economic, and historical factors. Too frequently African American female athletes have fewer sporting options, and scholars, politicians, and activists ignore these women and girls because they are either classified by their gender or their race, and rarely are they recognized as a distinct group. Perhaps in part because the language of the law focuses solely on gender, black women and girls have been overlooked in athletics and as a result have not received the full benefits Title IX promised all women. Title IX and African American Female Athletes  A Brief Sporting History of Black Women and Girls Although comparatively few white women participated in sports prior to the enactment of Title IX, black women and girls seem to have found more athletic opportunities earlier. These openings expanded dramatically in a variety of different sports between  and  for both collegiate and high school athletes. For example, black women played competitive basketball, frequently full-court rather than the feminized version of sixon -six that white women played, and in  the Georgia-South Carolina Athletic Association representing seven historically black schools offered a conference championship for the women’s collegiate teams. As early as the s black girls could compete for a high school state championship in North Carolina even though no parallel tournament existed for white girls. Black women were also welcomed into the American Tennis Association (ATA), which was founded in  as an alternative to the all-white United States Lawn Tennis Association. The very first ATA tournaments included women’s singles competitions as well as men’s, and a girls’ division was added in , two years before the creation of a boys’ division. Ultimately the girls’ division of the ATA produced the great Althea Gibson. The history of black women’s success in track and field is perhaps more widely recognized because of their achievements both nationally and internationally. In , the Tuskegee Institute women’s team won the track and field championships of the Amateur Athletic Union for the first of fourteen times. In the s, the Tennessee State University TigerbellesjoinedTuskegeeasoneofthenation’smostdominanttrackand field teams, training Olympians like Willye White and Wilma Rudolph. The dominance of black women on the track was such that throughout the s, two thirds of the Olympic track and field teams were African American women, a dominance which continues to the present day. The opportunities and the success of these early African American female athletes seem to stem both from a different ideal of femininity than that in white America as well as a greater support for physical activity from the African American community as a whole. Sport scholar Cindy Hines GissendannerarguesthatphysicalstrengthwasmorevaluedinblackAmerica than in white America and as a result, “beauty, personality, and athleticism were not considered to be mutually exclusive qualities.” Historian Susan Cahn notes that although black women athletes were subordinate to their male counterparts, the black press did report regularly on women’s sports and “only rarely hinted of condescension.” She adds that regular reporting Sarah K. Fields  allowed these female athletes to become well-known personalities which in turn increased interest and support of female athletics. Rita Liberti’s work, however, is careful to emphasize the effect of class on the female African American athlete, noting that many elite black women’s colleges restricted female athletic involvement in the middle of the twentieth century. Scholars in general...