The unpopular voice of black realism - interview with Harry Edwards - interview

TWENTY YEARS ago, Harry Edwards was considered one of the most hated men in America when as a Cornell graduate student completing his Ph.D and teaching part-time at San Jose State, he tried to organize, with Ken Noel, a boycott of the Mexico City Olympics by black athletes to protest the condition of blacks in the U.S., continued U.S. support of the regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia, and the ongoing Vietnam War. The boycott failed, but an offshoot of their effort provided the world with one of the sixties' most dramatic images: two medal-winning sprinters, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, raising their fists in black power salutes from the Olympic podium and turning away from the American flag as the national anthem played.

Today, though, activist-scholar Edwards, age 45, is wildly successful, one of the most popular lecturers at the University of California at Berkeley and a consultant /mentor to the San Francisco 49ers and the Golden State Warriors advising players on a range of problems from drugs to personal finances to race relations; in the wake of the Al Campanis fiasco (the former Dodgers executive remarked on Nightline that "blacks lack the necessities" for management positions], he was named special assistant to the commissioner of baseball, Peter Ueberroth, with the task of assembling a pool of minority applicants for managerial positions.

And if the ironies of his life aren't enough for him, he is perfectly capable of manufacturing his own, turning right around and hiring the fired Campanis to work for him in putting together the minority pool. And, he insists, he hasn't changed one bit in those twenty years.

Michael Covino: In your textbook Sociology of Sport you wrote of how the black athlete is accepted in some circles of American society in which black people are generally not accepted. His role status as athlete surpasses his role status as black person. Ironically, it seems to be your status as scholar - and your rejection years ago of the role of athlete - that has now made you acceptable in the management circles of sports where blacks generally are not accepted.

Harry Edwards: I don't think it's a matter so much of my being acceptable as my being needed, and there's a big difference. In fact, that's the whole situation with the black athlete. He's needed in many circles. The people I work for I respect a great deal as human beings. But I don't think it's just an issue of them all ofa sudden just liking black people as distinguished from athletes.

I'm not sure whether you've traveled a long way since 1968 or whether the world has, but now it seems the sports establishment, which once loathed you, is inviting you in, seeking out your advice. Why? What's happened in the interim?

I think that the problems I discussed twenty years ago are now evident to everyone. In twenty years we've moved from a discussion of whether or not there is a problem to a discussion of how to solve the problem. And increasingly there are those inside the sports establishment who are convinced that my perspective is the best perspective in terms of effectiveness and the most rational and judicious way to proceed, and that's how I wound up working with the 49ers and the Golden State Warriors and major league baseball and pretty soon the NCAA [National Collegiate Athletic Association]. If you go back and look at The Sociology of Sport, The Revolt of the Black Athlete, the lectures I gave back in '67, '68, '69, you see I'm saying the same thing today .

With regard to the Al Campanis/ Nightline ruckus: What flashed through your mind at the All-Star party at the Kaiser Center when someone tapped you on the shoulder and said, "I want you to meet somebody - Al Campanis"? Was there a moment's hesitation in shaking his hand?

No, none at all, because I didn't see him as the enemy Al Campanis represents literally tens of millions of Americans whose basic problem is not so much racism as it is being locked into a tradition of seeing blacks in a particular way, a tradition which happens to be racist. They're afflicted with the disease and don't even know it. It's a disease that's afflicted black people, too; they'll go to a white doctor instead of a black doctor, a white restaurant when they're really ready to dress up and spend some money, and prefer a white mechanic to fix their car. They too have been afflicted with this pervasive and infectious disease of racism. They too have come to believe that blacks do not have the necessities.

And it's not just in sports. It's across the board. We have about 24 black professors on this campus out of some 1,400 teaching staff. Somebody in the University of California system doesn't believe that blacks have the necessities, and that's crystal clear.

So I was glad to hire him.

So what's he doing for you? First of all, he's working in terms of getting jobs for blacks who should be in baseball. His first assignment - and one he has carried out admirably - was to get Tommy Harper back into baseball. Tommy Harper was the coach at the Boston Red Sox who during spring camp had protested the fact that in Arizona there was a country club that gave passes to white Red Sox players but not to the black Red Sox players. And when he protested that the Red Sox team position should be that if black players can't go in, then no Red Sox should go in, he was summarily fired. AI Campanis' first job was to get Tommy Harper back in baseball, and he has gotten him a number of interviews, and Tommy's now talking to a couple of franchises that are very interested in hiring him if they can get the money right.