Abstract
A number of scholarly monographs, especially in the form of biographies, have recently explored the lives of twentieth-century male African American athletes navigating segregated collegiate and professional athletics (Satchel Paige or the Harlem Renaissance basketball team), breaking the color lines in their respective sports (Jackie Robinson) or using sports as a stage for political protest (John Carlos or Muhammed Ali). Presenting five case studies, spanning from World War I to the post–Civil Rights era, of black athletes gaining access to previously segregated spaces in collegiate athletics, Gregory J. Kaliss's Men's College Athletics and the Politics of Racial Equality. Five Pioneer Stories of Black Manliness, White Citizenship, and American Democracy is an addition to this literature on the intersections of racism and sports in African American's lives. On a deeper level, however, by analyzing newspapers (stemming both from local and national news outlets as well as white and black presses), Kaliss puts his emphasis less on what these athletes accomplished individually but rather on how they were perceived by their contemporaries and on how their achievements were ascribed meaning by different stakeholders in the struggle for (and against) racial justice.
Kaliss's argument is that athletics have served as a powerful metaphor for notions of justice, equality, and equal opportunity. For African American men, sports have long represented a potential avenue toward full citizenship, equality and acceptance as men, especially since alternative ways toward embodying full masculinity were barred by racism; for instance, through workplace discrimination and the denial of the right to vote. The black press therefore celebrated successful African American athletes as “race men” who were furthering the struggle for equality by disproving negative stereotypes about black men and by demonstrating the potential for an integrated society through their cooperation with white teammates toward collective goals. White sportswriters on the other hand were reluctant to explicitly take on questions of race, and instead insinuated that the sports field already represented a meritocratic and egalitarian space removed from politics and social tensions. At the same time, they also relied on racial stereotypes when describing black athletes, ignored instances of overt racism toward them, or downplayed the significance of the race of their sports stars.
Through his case studies ranging from the 1910s to the 1970s, Kaliss finds both continuity and change in the public's response to these athletes and in the ways in which they were pulled into different directions by opposing stakeholders. The case of Wilt Chamberlain's career at the University of Kansas in the late 1950s, for instance, serves as a prime example for some of these tensions. Being a celebrated player for the men's basketball team in a segregated state, both white liberals and black activists framed Chamberlain as an ambassador for racial justice, albeit based on fundamentally divergent assumptions. The black press hoped that Chamberlain would disprove racist stereotypes and lead white society to acknowledge the injustice of segregation; by contrast, white commentators considered Chamberlain a role model for African Americans regarding how to succeed in US society. According to their view, black men simply had to acquire a strong work ethic and a positive demeanor to overcome injustice. In other words, although critical of the institution of segregation—a clear change to earlier white writers—these whites favored a form of equality that demanded nothing from themselves and placed the burden completely on African Americans, requiring them to integrate into a system of white privilege.
Despite its title and some references to the connection between masculinity and full citizenship, Kaliss's work falls short of connecting his case studies conceptually to research on masculinities. To be sure, the story he tells is implicitly one about masculinity and some of his findings are highly consistent with major theoretical insights from the field of masculinity studies. For instance, his argument that despite previous hopes, successful black athletes have not been able to uplift other African American men as a group can serve as a textbook example of R. W. Connell's conceptualization of marginalized masculinities. However, the gendered significance of his research remains somewhat underexplored.
Nevertheless, Men's College Athletics and the Politics of Racial Equality is a highly engaging and insightful study that situates these black athletes in a wider cultural context and that is able to demonstrate what they represented for different sections of society. Kaliss thus steers clear of the pitfall of framing their lives as individual success stories of overcoming adversity and instead situates them in broader historical struggles and frames of meaning, while at the same time not taking away their agency. His study shows that sports have been an important place for social chance, while at the same time progress within this arena does not necessarily and easily translate into more general societal transformations.