45 years in sports; color barriers fall for Black athletes, but big hurdles to the front office and "club" sports remain - Looking Back - 45th Anniversary Edition

Ebony, Nov, 1990 by Arthur Ashe

45 Years in SPORTS

Color barriers fall for Black athletes, but big hurdles to the front office and "club" sports remain

Not entirely coincidentally, the inaugural issue of Ebony in November 1945 was published on the eve of Jackie Robinson's first at-bat in major league baseball. Not only was this brilliant pigeon-toed pioneer the first Black player in organized baseball since 1899, but his presence signaled the beginning of an almost complete racial transformation of American sports participation. In the five-year period from 1945 through 1950, baseball, basketball, football, tennis, golf and bowling were irrevocably changed by Black athletes who brought speed, daring and creativity to the fields, courts and diamonds.

These new opportunities did not arise without social and legal battles. Two years after Alice Coachman became the first Black woman to win an Olympic Gold Medal (long jump) in 1948, Althea Gibson finally played at Forest Hills, New York, in the United States National Tennis Tournament. Intense lobbying by the predominantly Black American Tennis Association in the summer of 1950 effected Gibson's eventual acceptance. Similar jawboning enabled Earl Lloyd, Chuck Cooper and Nathaniel (Sweetwater) Clifton to enter the National Basketball Association in 1950, which came just after the integration of professional football. But only the prospect of losing courtroom confrontations forced the Professional Golfers Association, the American Bowling Congress and the Women's International Bowling Congress to capitulate.

A toehold in these once-forbidden sports was enough to encourage aspiring Black sportsmen to seek fortune, fame and whatever fate awaited them. Though the 1950s were, in truth, years of tokenism, they also marked the last decade of the pre-television era. People read and heard about Jackie Robinson, Bill Russell, Jim Brown, Rafer Johnson and Charles Sifford, but fewer than 1 in 100 Black families owned a television in 1950. The smallest 11-inch screen cost about $400, a month's salary for a school teacher in the 50s.

Unfortunately, this initial acceptance of sports integration hastened the demise of many traditionally Black organizations and teams. The Negro Leagues, which had showcased Black talent since 1920, were doomed, and were gone by 1962. The Harlem Globetrotters, for example, once a serious contender for international basketball honors, could not place its franchise within the NBA, so it switched to choreographed clowning and was very successful.

If the decade of the 1950s was characterized by tokenism, the 1960s forced Black athletes to take domestic and international political stands because of the Black Social Revolution. Television exposure made household names of people like Wilma Rudolph, Elgin Baylor, Willie Mays and a brash young pugilist from Louisville named Cassius Clay. Varsity players at Black colleges were willing volunteers for sitins across the segregated South; track and field performers quickly became knowledgeable about apartheid in South Africa and team sport athletes were subject to intimidation at predominantly White colleges and in the professional ranks. While the general attitude in the 1950s was "I'm just glad I got a chance to play," the feeling by the late 1960s was more like "I'm still catchin' hell out here."

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 included a public accommodations section which affected amateur sports. Few Black sports administrators, however, expected immediate compliance. After all, the Supreme Court had outlawed school segregation back in 1954, and America was just as segregated as ever. White coaches and athletic officials still assumed Blacks were not smart enough to play certain positions on the field. The result was a new phenomenon known as "stacking," a term first used by professor Harry Edwards of the University of California at Berkeley. Coaches "stacked" or piled up their quota of Black football players in just a few positions, and left the other so-called "thinking" positions like quarterback, center and middle linebacker reserved for Whites.

Black athletes soon railed against this sort of blatant discrimination on and off the field in the late 1960s. In 1967 Muhammad Ali (he had changed his name from Cassius Clay) refused induction into the U.S. Army on religious grounds, and eventually won his case in the Supreme Court. A year later, there was the soon-to-be famous defiant thrusting of black-gloved fists by Tommie Smith and John Carlos during the playing of our national anthem at the Mexico City Olympics. Both were ejected from the Olympic Village. Concurrently, Spencer Haywood of the University of Detroit successfully sued to have the option of turning professional when he pleased rather than when White college basketball officials said he could. and Curt Flood of baseball's St. Louis Cardinals lost a Supreme Court case when he attacked the dreaded reserve clause which bound a player in perpetuity to his original team. Though Flood lost his suit, his sacrifice paved the way for all team sport athletes in America to bargain with the owners for their compensation.