A Level Playing Field

African American Athletes and the Republic of Sports

Gerald L. Early, Gerald Lyn Early

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780674050983
• eBook ISBN: 9780674253810
• Subtopic: African American Studies

As Americans, we believe there ought to be a level playing field for everyone. Even if we don't expect to finish first, we do expect a fair start. Only in sports have African Americans actually found that elusive level ground. But at the same time, black players offer an ironic perspective on the athlete-hero, for they represent a group historically held to be without social honor.

In his first new collection of sports essays since Tuxedo Junction (1989), the noted cultural critic Gerald Early investigates these contradictions as they play out in the sports world and in our deeper attitudes toward the athletes we glorify. Early addresses a half-century of heated cultural issues ranging from integration to the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Writing about Jackie Robinson and Curt Flood, he reconstructs pivotal moments in their lives and explains how the culture, politics, and economics of sport turned with them. Taking on the subtexts, racial and otherwise, of the controversy over remarks Rush Limbaugh made about quarterback Donovan McNabb, Early restores the political consequence to an event most commentators at the time approached with predictable bluster.

The essays in this book circle around two perennial questions: What other, invisible contests unfold when we watch a sporting event? What desires and anxieties are encoded in our worship of (or disdain for) high-performance athletes?

These essays are based on the Alain Locke lectures at Harvard University's Du Bois Institute.

PART I

Leveling the Playing Field

1

When Worlds Collide: Jackie Robinson, Paul Robeson, Harry Truman, and the Korean War

I didn’t know everything I should have known about the cold war.

—Brooklyn Dodgers baseball star Jackie Robinson, speaking years later about his HUAC testimony

BROOKLYN DODGERS second baseman Jackie Robinson woke up at 5:30 a.m. on Monday morning, July 18, 1949, to catch an early plane to Washington, D.C., where he was to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) at 10 that morning.¹ He was to testify on the subject of black loyalty or, put another way, on how attached black Americans felt to a country where they had been methodically and thoroughly excluded from its centers of power and ruthlessly persecuted for the color of their skin. How did Robinson wind up having to do this? In April 1949, singer/actor, former collegiate and professional football player, and noted communist sympathizer Paul Robeson, along with two thousand delegates from fifty nations, attended the Congress of the World Partisans of Peace in Paris, a leftist gathering fraught with tension as the cold war had escalated over the last few years since World War II. American officials were calling Robinson to answer what Robeson had said to this gathering in Paris. It was no ordinary time; rather, it was a crisis moment for the American racial caste system, an extraordinary moment for the United States as the leader of something called the Free World.

Almost immediately after World War II the cold war struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union began to escalate. In most respects this was inevitable, as both America and Russia were expansionist powers with opposing ideologies, neither took the United Nations seriously as a place to settle disputes but only as an international forum to be politicized, and both essentially chose to pursue the geopolitical approach of “spheres of influence” as a way of neutralizing each other as a threat. The 1946–1949 civil war in Greece, in which thousands of Greek leftists and rightists savagely killed each other in what many consider the start of the cold war, pitted the Soviet Union against the United States, as each supported opposing factions. President Harry Truman, speaking to a joint session of Congress in March 1947, “spoke in sweeping, apocalyptic terms of communism as an insidious world menace that lovers of freedom must struggle against at all times and on all fronts” in an effort to gain popular support for backing a corrupt, brutal Greek regime.² For the Americans communism had replaced fascism as the new international evil. “A faint odor of fascism emanated from the reactionary Greek government” that America backed, the first of many instances in the cold war when a bad government was supported because the alternative seemed even worse.³ The United States also provided aid to Turkey to hold off the pressure that the Soviet Union was applying against Turkey to its north. The U.S.-led Berlin airlift to thwart the Soviet blockade of Berlin that occurred in 1948 and did not end until the spring of 1949 was, in some ways, an even more troubling standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. The split between Soviet-backed North Korea and U.S.-backed South Korea became official in 1948 (which would be the basis of a shooting war in 1950 that directly involved American troops), the same year of the Alger Hiss case (which made the career of Republican California Congressman Richard Nixon), where editor Whittaker Chambers testified before the HUAC that Hiss, a State Department official, had been a Soviet spy and made the public think that the government might be riddled with communists, especially so after Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950, the same year Senator Joseph McCarthy became a demagogic force for anti-communism by heightening the fear of the enemy “burrowing from within.” Many in the United States felt threatened both from without and within by a rigid, emotionless, tightly programmed enemy that lied ruthlessly and hated “freedom.” In 1948 Gallup found that 77 percent of Americans felt that there would be another war within ten years, and 43 percent thought it would happen in three or four years. In 1949 Gallup found that 70 percent of Americans opposed their country making a formal pledge not to use the atomic bomb in a first strike.⁴ On September 24, just two months after Robinson’s testimony, the United States would announce to the public that the Soviet Union had successfully tested its first atomic bomb, constructed, in part, on information supplied by American spies, and in October, the Communist Party of China would announce their victory by declaring that henceforth their country was to be known as the People’s Republic of China;—the question “Who lost China?” would echo accusingly in American diplomatic circles for years.

It could be argued that the cold war began on March 12, 1947, when Truman announced to a joint session of Congress his containment policy, designed to make the United States not simply an antagonist to the Soviet Union but to represent America as a role-model state. America was not to be merely a counterforce but a counterexample: open instead of secretive (like the Soviets), forthright instead of duplicitous, encouraging dissent instead of iron conformity, fair instead of partial, and decisive instead of merely coercive.⁵ If America had any especial weakness in its attempt to be the role-model state, it was its race problem. It had just concluded fighting a war against fascism, racism, and ethnic genocide with a racially segregated military, among whose leadership it was generally believed that blacks did not make either good combat soldiers or good officers, an irony not lost on a good deal of America’s leadership, its allies, and its enemies, and certainly not lost at all on most African Americans. “America has its Achilles heel and . . . the heel is quite black,” a Greek newspaper of the period proclaimed.⁶ How was America prepared to define the nature of its leadership in regard to its race problem, and what was it to do with its black citizens in this new age of international engagement? America had to create a new liberal narrative denouncing white supremacy as in any way informing its policies either domestically or abroad if it wanted the moral stature to denounce the Soviet Union in this age of the decline of European colonialism.

Paul Robeson was probably among the closest that black Americans came to having among their ranks a true Renaissance or representative man. Born in New Jersey in 1898, Robeson not only excelled academically, earning a bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University with Phi Beta Kappa honors (he was not a straight-A student by any means, but he did earn a solid overall B average) and a law degree from Columbia University, but he was also one of the finest collegiate athletes of his time, lettering in football, basketball, track and field, and baseball. He paid for his law education by playing professional football. He was known for his powerful bass-baritone voice, which gave him distinction as an orator. He became a noted singer of Negro spirituals and folk songs, was featured on Broadway in plays by Eugene O’Neill and Shakespeare (Othello), and also appeared in several feature films, including Body and Soul, by African American director Oscar Michaeux, and Sanders of the River, directed by Zoltan Korda. (Korda would later direct a young Sidney Poitier, a great admirer of Robeson, in the 1951 version of Cry, the Beloved Country.) Robeson’s films were never especially satisfactory from either an artistic or a political point of view, and after 1942, frustrated by his roles, he ceased to appear in them.⁷ Robeson, always outspoken about racism and colonialism, became particularly so after his first visit to the Soviet Union in 1934. He opposed South African apartheid, the fascists in the Spanish civil war, and management in nearly any labor dispute. He became increasingly enamored of Russia during World War II and of Africa and negritude as he became more interested in African affairs; in so doing he became, increasingly, an object of concern for the U.S. government and even for mainstream civil rights organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which saw his radical politics as a threat. After World War II both the U.S. government and anti-communist black leaders became strange bedfellows in a campaign to discredit Robeson.

And so it was that the charismatic, uncompromising Robeson, a compelling anti-American presence at a strikingly tense time in world history, as the Soviets and Americans waged ideological and proxy war, said or allegedly said in Paris, among other things, that the wealth of the United States had been built “on the backs of the white workers from Europe . . . and on the backs of millions of blacks. . . . And we are resolved to share it equally among our children. And we shall not put up with any hysterical raving that urges us to make war on anyone. Our will to fight for peace is strong. We shall not make war on anyone. We shall not make war on the Soviet Union.”⁸ The Associated Press, in reporting the speech, quoted Robeson:

We colonial peoples have contributed to the building of the United States and are determined to share in its wealth. We denounce the policy of the United States government, which is similar to that of Hitler and Goebbels. . . . It is unthinkable that American Negroes would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against a country [the Soviet Union] which in one generation has raised our people to the full dignity of mankind. . . . ⁹

Clearly the second statement was at least as incendiary as the first, and maybe more so. But neither was going to go over very well in the United States of 1949, particularly if uttered by a black. Roger Kahn, in his account of Robinson’s testimony before the HUAC, writes about a speech Robeson gave in Harlem on June 19, 1949, in which he said, “I love the Negro people from whom I spring. . . . Yes, suffering people the world over—in the way I intensely love the Soviet Union. We do not want to die in vain anymore on foreign battlefields for Wall Street and the greedy supporters of domestic fascism. If we must die, let it be in Mississippi or Georgia.”¹⁰ (The last sentence echoes the famous poem by Jamaican writer Claude McKay, “If We Must Die,” written in response to the terrible race riots of 1919 and read by Winston Churchill before the U.S. Congress in the early days of the Second World War as a rallying cry for support against the Nazis. Kahn noted that the following day all thirty-seven of the Hearst newspapers ran an identical editorial headlined “An Undesirable Citizen,” castigating Robeson.) Robeson’s speech was delivered at a welcome home rally given in Robeson’s honor by the Council on African Affairs and was held at the Rockland Palace. About forty-five hundred people attended, half of them white. This would only seem to have fanned the flames of the controversy, which was probably Robeson’s intention, as he threw down the gauntlet that he was not going to be intimidated by the United States or by mainstream black leaders who did not like his radicalism: “And I defied—and today I defy—any part of an insolent, dominating America, however powerful; I defy any errand boy, Uncle Toms of the Negro people, to challenge my Americanism because by word and deed I challenge this vicious system to the death.¹¹ What a travesty is this supposed leadership of a great people! And in this historic time, when their people need them most. How Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass must be turning in their graves at this spectacle of a craven, fawning, despicable leadership.” One of his most telling observations about American Negroes and their leadership was “They’re not afraid of their radicals who point out the awful, indefensible truth of our degradation and exploitation.”¹²

Martin Duberman, Robeson’s biographer, notes that even if Robeson had said in Paris what the Associated Press said he had said, it would not have been the first time a prominent black would have questioned black participation in American foreign wars.¹³ He gives the example of black labor leader and socialist A. Philip Randolph’s opposition to World War II and black participation in it.¹⁴ The problem here is that Randolph never opposed World War II. As Randolph said late in his life in commenting on the Vietnam War while it was still raging, “I have always been opposed to wars in principle— though, as in the case of World War II, I am able to support those that are vital to the survival of our democratic institutions.”¹⁵ Randolph opposed black participation in World War I. However, Duberman is surprised that the contemporary press treated Robeson’s words as if a prominent black had never said anything of the like before—but he should not have been surprised. To be sure, the political situation for blacks at the end of World War I and World War II bore some similarities: intense concern on the part of the government about black disloyalty and radicalism—socialism, black nationalism, and Bolshevism—and vigorous measures to stamp out the latter, the belief that blacks were not effective as combat soldiers and could not be trusted to execute commands on the field of battle.¹⁶ The major difference, though, was that white supremacy was still a viable and defensible political belief and practice in 1919, an unbowed hegemony, whereas it was clearly discredited by the late 1940s. Its loss of legitimacy as a social and political philosophy that informed the structure of institutions cast the entire race question and the government’s relationship to it in a different light.

There is also a significant difference in A. Philip Randolph, a name little known outside of the black American community, where he was a powerful and respected leader, and a relatively small circle of political radicals saying that blacks should not fight in World War I in black or socialist publications or at labor union or political gatherings than a Paul Robeson, well known among both blacks and whites, saying what he supposedly said before a large international gathering during the escalation of the cold war. The American government and the white mainstream press would have been doing Randolph a favor by publicizing his remarks widely, as they doubtless realized. Moreover, Duberman takes the remarks a bit out of their historical context. Randolph led the March on Washington movement back in 1941 to not only force the government to desegregate defense industry hiring but also to desegregate the army. If Roosevelt did not comply, then Randolph threatened a march on Washington, throwing out the number of ten thousand blacks converging on the nation’s capitol, although the popularity of the idea grew as Randolph campaigned for it, and he probably would have attracted in excess of twenty-five thousand blacks and perhaps even the one hundred thousand he was calling for if he had actually held the march.¹⁷ The thought of such a march in segregated Washington terrified Roosevelt, so he issued Executive Order 8802 in the summer of 1941, which established the Fair Employment Practices Commission and discouraged, to some degree, though by no means came close to eliminating, racially biased hiring in the defense industry. Roosevelt did not integrate the military, did not even really consider doing such a thing. A world war was raging, and America’s entry was only a matter of time; Roosevelt asked himself a pressing question: What if whites objected to fighting in an integrated military? How could he wage war with such internal dissension in his own armed forces? Randolph did not bother to press the issue during the war because, as his biographer Jervis Anderson stated, Randolph felt that “in arousing public feeling—black feeling, at any rate—against the military, [it] might tend to embarrass the nation’s war effort.”¹⁸ Anderson might have added that Randolph would have virtually stood alone among black leaders if he had pressed a civil disobedience campaign against the military during the war. The last thing the vast majority of black leaders wanted was for the black population to be viewed as disloyal.

Randolph, however, revived his campaign to integrate the armed services after the Second World War. In 1947, the same year that Jackie Robinson began his career with the Brooklyn Dodgers, playing first base for the team on opening day in April, a peacetime draft bill was passed by Congress that contained no mention of segregation in the military. Randolph and Grant Reynolds formed the League for Nonviolent Civil Disobedience against Military Segregation by early 1948, which advocated that black men resist the draft. On March 22, 1948, Randolph, with a number of other black leaders, met with Truman at the White House. Among those invited was Lester Granger, head of the National Urban League. At the meeting, Randolph told Truman, “Mr. President, after making several trips around the country, I can tell you that the mood among Negroes of this country is that they will never bear arms again until all forms of bias and discrimination are abolished.”¹⁹ Truman did not like being told this. Randolph’s statement certainly bears some similarity to what Robeson said, but it is different in several respects. There is no mention of the Soviet Union, or of a particular disinclination on the part of blacks to fight against that country.²⁰ Randolph is also implying in his statement that if discrimination in the military were abolished, then blacks would fight. There is no mention in Randolph’s statement of any larger issues such as colonialism or larger concerns about racism in other institutional forms. Randolph, being a socialist, union organizer, and man of broad political awareness, may have been thinking about such things, but he did not hinge his civil disobedience campaign against the military on them. It was simply presented as a trade: get rid of segregation in the military and blacks will serve. That is fundamentally different from either version of Robeson’s statement.²¹

But Truman had been thinking about desegregation of the military before this meeting with Randolph and the other black leaders. On December 5, 1946, nearly a year and a half before the meeting with Randolph, Truman had issued Executive Order 9808, which estab...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Leveling the Playing Field
• PART II Heroism and the Republic of Sports
• Notes