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Sport and race in American culture The original essays in this comprehensive collection examine the lives and sports of famous and not-so- famous African American men and women athletes from the nineteenth century to today. Here are twenty insightful biographies that furnish perspectives on the changing status of these athletes and how the changes mirrored the transformation of sport, American society, and civil rights legislation. Out of the Shadows shows us athletes struggling to make it in a Jim Crow society—Jimmy Winkfield in horse racing, Marshall Taylor in bicycling, William Henry Lewis in football, and Jack Johnson—and those achieving success on an international stage while suffering segregation at home—Ora Washington (tennis), Satchel Paige, Jesse Owens, Joe Louis, Alice Coachman (track and field), and Jackie Robinson. In the twentieth century athletes saw opportunities to fight for civil rights through their performances as was the case with Althea Gibson (tennis), Wilma Rudolph, Bill Russell, Jim Brown, Muhammad Ali, and Arthur Ashe. Today’s successful African American athletes, such as Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Venus and Serena Williams, deal with issues of race and celebrity culture. The contributors to this collection are some of today’s best authors of sports history, including Gerald Early, Anthony O. Edmonds, Gerald R. Gems, and Donald Spivey. Together, these biographies not only provide insightful analyses of the athletes’ careers, they tell a fascinating two-hundred-year-long story about the complex relationship between race and sport in America and how some gifted individuals achieved success on the playing field despite difficult living conditions and economic circumstances. “Edited by the US’s foremost historian of African
American athletes, this book has only one rival when it comes to comprehensive
treatment of black athletic achievement from the 19th century onward:
Arthur Ashe’s three-volume A Hard Road to Glory. But though
Ashe’s opus is readable and informative, as social history it is
less satisfying than the present title. Summing up: Essential. All readers;
all levels.” “Wiggins has done a splendid job of rounding up first-rate historians. . . . As probably the foremost authority on African American sports, Wiggins has provided the connective tendons to hold the body of essays together. . . . Job well done.” —Randy Roberts, author of Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and the Era of White Hopes “Highly recommended. . . . The diversity in terms of time periods and personalities should help attract a broad readership. . . . Strongly grounded in research, with a mixture of historical facts and scholarly analysis. . . . It will be well received.” —Charles K. Ross, author of Outside the Line
and editor of Race and Sport November 2006 David K. Wiggins, a leading authority on African American sport, is a professor and director of the School of Recreation, Health and Tourism at George Mason University. He is the editor of a number of books in the field, including The Unlevel Playing Field and Sport and the Color Line, both edited with Patrick Miller, and the author of Glory Bound: Black Athletes in a White America. |
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