Race and Sport: The Struggle for Equality On and Off the Field

Race and Sport is a collection of essays. All relate to the topic, but because the area is so extensive, the essays do not form a cohesive body of work. Topics, approaches, and quality vary from one essay to the next. Together, the essays constitute a collection that will provide useful reference and starting points for whomever would understand the subject.

Perhaps the most useful essay of the collection (at any rate, useful to me as I am interested in the long-term integration of professional baseball) is "Major League Baseball's Separate and Unequal Doctrine" by Michael Lomax. Lomax traces the action by some major league teams to cope with racial discrimination in Southern spring training settings in the early 1960s, long after the original integration of baseball. It is one thing to say the teams "did something" about the segregation practices that nettled black and Latino players. It is another to depict the action by powerful (read good) players to pressure teams to refuse to allow discrimination against spring training players. One wonders whether segregated housing, dining, and entertainment would have ever been corrected had certain players and, consequently, clubs taken decisive action.

Three essays take up subjects of which most of us are blissfully unaware: the important role of Fritz Pollard in the early development of professional football, the existence, and impact, of women's basketball in small black colleges during the first half of the twentieth century, and the socially conscious business practices of the great boxer, Sugar Ray Robinson, and a few contemporary, wealthy athletes as well. Patrick Miller discusses the forlorn efforts of black commentators to change white attitudes about black people by pointing to the virtues of black sportsmen.

Gerald Gems attempts to connect the expansion of American sports to the expansion of American power and influence in the Pacific region, along with cultural resistance to such influence. A quotation illustrates the vulnerability of broad claims about culture: "Cerefino Garcia developed his famed 'bolo punch' to symbolize his Filipino sentiments" (112). Whatever Garcia may have said, he used the bolo punch to win matches, not to make cultural statements for future historians!

The remaining two essays are about a current issue, the student-athlete. Earl Smith presents some realities about black students in "white" colleges. Most of them are athletes and many have been handicapped by a variety of serious social problems. Institutions must heed reality if they are to provide a good education to this population. Keith Harrison and Alicia Valdez provide an idea on how colleges might improve the academic performance of black athletes. The "scholar-baller" model takes these young men and women where they are at and attempts to inculcate an academic side to the "athlete role" which is ordinarily seen as involving little beyond "staying eligible."

Any scholar who is serious about the subject of race and sport will find this volume useful.