Sidelined (5 page)

It could be argued, therefore, that the direct action of those who physically engaged white opponents was not a form of protest at all. They were simply playing the white man's game. What is crucial is that the leaders of the black athletic revolt wanted the black sportsman to do more than participate in his chosen activity. Interestingly, Harry Edwards, chief among those who criticized black athletes who did not engage in the athletic revolt, acknowledged the irony of black athletes who played the game being viewed as submissive. “Black men, engaged in violent, aggressive, competitive sports actually were regarded as … non-violent.”
⁵³
Black athletes who physically confronted white opponents in integrated sporting contests were regarded as moderate.

The focus on male athletes and masculine responses to racial injustice further intersected with the freedom struggle. That struggle was regularly framed in a gendered way. The history of African American repression has come to be seen through the lens of challenges to black masculinity and therefore the story of liberation and struggle gives men a privileged and central position.
⁵⁴
So black athletes' response to racial injustice was dominated by black male athletes. Black sprinter Wyomia Tyus, who won gold at the Mexico City Olympics, described being on the periphery of the black athletic revolt. Some black female athletes did offer their support and spoke to journalists about the situation surrounding Smith and Carlos, but they were not fully involved in the revolt.
⁵⁵
Just as the Black Power rhetoric of the era had a masculine tone and spoke of a desire to reclaim African American manhood, so the black athletic revolt was heavily male
dominated in both its aims and its leadership. Female athletes were in the process of pushing for greater gender equality in the world of sport and as such racial activism was relatively limited among female athletes.

The patriarchal assumptions of many Americans during the 1960s had a profound impact on the course of the black freedom struggle, and the centrality of manhood in the discourse of that struggle was significant for black and white athletes. Malcolm X continually taunted King and other leaders of the mainstream Civil Rights Movement by suggesting that their stance of nonviolence was unmanly.
⁵⁶
This conception of black manhood, which was further highlighted by the Black Power Movement, intersected with mainstream sporting conceptions of manhood. Playing the game hard and fair, especially in contact sports like football, was seen as an important element of American masculinity. When Ivy League schools distanced themselves from big-time football in the late 1950s, they were criticized by many in the South and the West for being “effete” and unmanly.
⁵⁷
African American leaders in the early twentieth century advocated black sporting excellence as a vehicle through which to improve their race. This “muscular assimilation” was advanced as a way to prove the black man's worth and his manhood.
⁵⁸

The leaders of the black athletic revolt, however, were not satisfied with confrontation and competition on the pitch; they wanted a more aggressive engagement with the freedom struggle off the field of play. Edwards sought to encourage black athletes to do more than simply play the game. It was this demand that antagonized many white athletes. Conrad Dobler, a white teammate of Melvin Hamilton at the University of Wyoming, argued that black athletes could prove their equality on the field of play. There was no need to take their fight for equality any further.
⁵⁹
While relishing physical confrontation on the field, Hamilton was one of those black athletes who engaged with the civil rights struggle after the final whistle. He was cut from the team in 1969 when he and his black teammates attempted to protest against the racial discrimination of Brigham Young University. Hamilton argued that “kicking ass” on the field was not enough.
⁶⁰

The black civil rights activist who stood motionless as a policeman beat him for attempting to register to vote received sympathy from many in white America. His contemporary who fought against the police in response to discriminatory treatment was looked upon with more suspicion as an angry black man and a possible danger to society. The black football player who pummeled white opponents and sacked the opposing
quarterback was lauded as a fine sportsman and a credit to his race. Yet if he stepped off the field and complained of the racial injustices he faced, wearing a black armband or black glove to register his nonviolent protest, he was criticized for ingratitude and for perverting the sporting ideal.

The sports world provided a unique landscape for the tactics of protest in the freedom struggle. Although the actions of Edwards, Smith, Carlos, and others have often been cited as an expression of Black Power by historians and were certainly connected to that movement by contemporaries, the reality is more complex. Furthermore, the tactics and aims of other protest incidents during the black athletic revolt reveal a nuance that simple categorization and interpretation neglects.

This is not to say that the major features of the Black Power Movement did not have a significant impact on the black athletic revolt. The black athlete who faced the dilemma of how to conduct himself in light of this relationship between sport and civil rights activism confronted pressure from within the black community as well as from white America. Harry Edwards explained that the black athletic revolt grew out of a wider cultural and social awakening in the black community.
⁶¹
This movement, defined as Black Power, was given voice by radical young men like Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver. Cleaver warned white America that unless things changed, “the sins of the father [would be] visited upon the heads of the children.”
⁶²
Cleaver was one of the main spokesmen for the Black Panthers, a militant group formed in Oakland, California, in 1966. They were armed activists who demanded a radical change in the way the black community was policed and an immediate end to all forms of discrimination. With reference to the failed promise of the first Reconstruction, their party platform stated, “We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules.”
⁶³
The movement was, however, about more than demands for political and economic change; it represented a powerful cultural expression. The Black Power impulse allowed the black community to build for the future and it contributed to a rise in black self-esteem.
⁶⁴
Indeed, continually frustrated by the problems of the ghetto, for many Black Power was mainly an expression of pride and dignity.
⁶⁵

The Black Power Movement had a significant effect on black athletes' response to the athletic revolt. The psychological transformation
in the black community put a great deal of pressure on African American athletes. They had to maintain loyalty to their coach as members of a team and as athletic performers but were pressured to engage in the political activism of other black students, often on predominantly white campuses. The most overt symbols of this new militancy were Afro haircuts and facial hair; there were seventy-three different cases surrounding these issues in athletics departments across the country from 1967 to 1971. “The black athlete could conform to the dictates and expectations of the coach and be castigated as an ‘Uncle Tom' by his black student peer group, or he could conform to the demands of the peer group and be dismissed from the team.”
⁶⁶

Nevertheless, leaders of the black athletic revolt were able to combine the popularity of sports in the 1960s and 1970s with the Black Power impulse. Muhammad Ali provides the most symbolic example of a black sportsman who connected the sporting arena with a new and potent black consciousness. Ali's verbose declaration of black beauty and his boasting predictions of when his opponents would fall were part of the fusing of Black Power and the sporting arena. Ali's dispute with the white establishment reflected Edwards's conflict with the Olympic movement. As Van Deburg argues, “With remarkable speed, their dispute with the status quo spread beyond traditional sports world boundaries, promoting psychological wellness within black communities.”
⁶⁷
The black athletic revolt challenged black communities to reexamine their perception of the role of sport in the construction of race relations. In so doing it provoked conflicting responses among black athletes.

The revolt also confronted white America by raising fears that the Black Power Movement—particularly troubling because of its radical and confrontational calls for racial justice—was encroaching upon the sacred world of sporting competition. The movement's activities reinforced the belief among many in white America that blacks were calling for an unrealistic revolution in society. In the 1968 election Richard Nixon gained support for criticizing protesters whose revolutionary desires offered headaches and heartache for the majority of Americans.
⁶⁸
A
Newsweek
special report on the “White Majority” in 1969 argued that the “President presides over a nation nervously edging rightward in a desperate try to catch its balance after years of upheaval.”
⁶⁹
Many white working people were uneasy about the extent of African American protest and social change during the 1960s.

This “white backlash” was not simply a response to the Black Power
Movement in the late 1960s. Its roots went much deeper and are part of the story of the rise of the New Right. What is crucial is the role played by the black athletic revolt in this backlash. Sport had for so long been seen as a site in which blacks could achieve equality and make advances ahead of developments in wider society. When black athletes—and, importantly, some prominent white athletes—challenged this notion and tried to use the sporting arena to engage in the freedom struggle, the white response was particularly critical and angry.

The black athletic revolt and the reaction to it form part of this white backlash, but we can trace its roots to well before the late 1960s. White reaction to civil rights advances was evident in postwar Detroit, for example. Public housing schemes that had been welcomed in the early New Deal were opposed from the 1940s and 1950s onward. In these decades whites throughout the city founded at least 192 neighborhood organizations with the express intent of protecting their property and resisting any move toward integrated housing. Entitlement to racially homogeneous neighborhoods became a fundamental belief of white Detroiters in the immediate postwar period.
⁷⁰

The example above serves to illustrate that the rise of conservative feeling in response to civil rights advances was not confined to a specific period of reaction to the Civil Rights Movement. George Lewis has explained that in the South “massive resistance” to desegregation programs cannot be defined as a reaction to a single event. He argues that massive resistance “must be seen as a phenomenon too sprawling and simply not sufficiently obedient to have been ushered into existence by a single landmark event.” Lewis asserts that resistance by white southerners against the advances of the civil rights agenda can be categorized into three main phases. The last of these phases ended in 1965, when the passage of voting rights legislation saw the reduction of public demonstrations of white supremacy.
⁷¹

Lewis argues that after 1965 southern leaders who opposed racial equality and possessed sufficient subtlety were able to “encode any racist appeals in such a way as to make them palatable to a broader, nonsectional audience.”
⁷²
The receptiveness of this audience grew alongside the rise of a New Right conservatism that flourished as the 1960s drew to a close. This conservatism had deep roots, and the story of its development has often been overlooked as historians have preferred to focus on the left-wing political movements that dominated the sixties. As Students for a Democratic Society and SNCC were heavily influencing the political
agenda, Young Americans for Freedom, formed in 1960, was developing a new conservative leadership that would help shift the Republican Party to the right.
⁷³
Lisa McGirr has explained how grassroots conservatism developed as the 1960s progressed and came to have a significant and lasting influence on the national political landscape as the decade ended.
⁷⁴

Proponents of the New Right ideology criticized Kennedy's New Frontier and the social and economic excesses of Johnson's Great Society. Young Americans for Freedom activist Robert Schuchman attacked the Kennedy administration in 1962 and warned that America faced a choice between “liberty and equality.” He added that the rise of government power would cost Americans their liberty “in the search for a chimera of equality.”
⁷⁵
Although the party was defeated heavily in the 1964 presidential election, the Republicans had already in 1963 begun to plan a shift in their ideology and tactics in order to win back the White House and defeat the New Deal coalition. This effort would pull the Republican Party increasingly rightward.
⁷⁶
This ideological shift was intertwined with the emerging backlash among many white Americans against the advances of the Civil Rights Movement. Economist Eliot Janeway used the term
backlash
in 1963 when he warned of potential racial conflict between white and black blue-collar workers. Black political advances in the South led many whites to vote for ultraconservatives like Lester Maddox, the Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia in 1966. By the middle of the 1960s this white backlash extended well beyond the Deep South, and Republican Party strategists attempted to tap into a rising tide of conservatism.
⁷⁷

Many less-privileged Americans felt that the drive for black advancement was being achieved at their expense.
⁷⁸
In his study of the Jews and Italians of Brooklyn, Jonathan Rieder found working-class whites who felt threatened by the African American assertiveness of the sixties. The communities vehemently resisted the busing schemes of the early 1970s. The Brooklynites also criticized elements of modern culture that threatened traditional values of family and hard work. Others among them were disturbed by the very process of change itself.
⁷⁹
In the late 1960s conservatives focused their efforts against government attempts to remedy the legacy of racial discrimination. These conservatives resisted plans to equalize opportunity when it affected their own schools and neighborhoods.
⁸⁰