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  • MEN’S COLLEGE ATHLETICS AND THE POLITICS OF RACIAL EQUALITY: Five Pioneer Stories of Black Manliness, White Citizenship, and American Democracy by Gregory J. Kaliss
  • Anthony O. Edmonds
MEN’S COLLEGE ATHLETICS AND THE POLITICS OF RACIAL EQUALITY: Five Pioneer Stories of Black Manliness, White Citizenship, and American Democracy. By Gregory J. Kaliss. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2012.

A number of historians of African Americans and American sports have used biography as a lens through which to view their topic. Some, like Randy Roberts in his biographies of Jack Johnson and Joe Louis, focus on single individuals. Others, like David K. Wiggins (ed.) in Out of the Shadows (2006), bring together several briefer biographical studies of different athletes by a number of experts in the field. Gregory Kaliss, a Research Associate in American Studies at Franklin and Marshall College, adopts a third variation of this approach by discussing several black athletes who played roles in integrating college athletics.

Kaliss’s analysis spans the years between 1915 and 1973, with specific chapters on Paul Robeson at Rutgers; Kenny Washington, Jackie Robinson, and Woody Strode at UCLA; Wilt Chamberlain at Kansas; and Charlie Scott at North Carolina. He concludes with an analysis of the integration of Alabama’s football team by John Mitchell and Wilbur Jackson, including a lengthy discussion of Coach Bear Bryant’s role.

At the outset, Kaliss asserts that his study differs significantly from other accounts of these athletes and integration because his emphasis “is less on what individual athletes and coaches did and more on what people said about their actions and performances” (4). To this end, his major sources are local newspapers, both mainstream “white” and African American.

At the risk of oversimplifying this complex and nuanced study, Kaliss clearly shows that there were significant regional and chronological variations in the reactions to integration. More importantly, “there were competing models of sports as a blueprint for how [racial] equality might be achieved” (5).

Generally speaking, the “white” media did not see integration of sports program as a path to wider national integration. However, integration of sports programs were [End Page 98] roughly positive, assuming that African American athletes behaved themselves—and, of course, helped teams win. The black press, on the other hand, for most of this time period, enthusiastically trumpeted integration in college sports as a transferable social change that could encourage a wider arena for racial equality beyond athletic fields. This enthusiasm became more problematic among many African American commentators in the 1960s and 1970s who saw the limitations in college sports as a broader model. Indeed, some specifically worried that integration would have a negative impact on historically black institutions of higher education, while giving false hopes to young African Americans.

By and large, Kaliss makes his case convincingly, although much of what he contends is nothing new to most sports historians. Also, he sometimes simply stretches credulity when he tries to tease out of sources meanings that simply aren’t there. For example, he discusses a photograph in a Tuscaloosa, Alabama, newspaper in 1971 in which white running back Johnny Musso and African American defensive lineman John Mitchell are talking to three African American young boys, reportedly urging them to “stay in school.” While the photograph seemingly represents racial harmony and good will, Kaliss adds a layer of meaning when he notes that Musso is standing behind a seated Mitchell, with his white hand resting on the shoulders of Mitchell and one of the youths. The “image,” Kaliss suggests, “portrayed a paternalistic message” since the white athlete “stood in a position of authority, benevolently guiding the proceedings”—clearly an example of paternalism (166). Such over-reaching mars an otherwise interesting and useful addition to the field of sports and race in America.

Anthony O. Edmonds
Ball State University
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