Sport in Capitalist Society, chapter 8.

Race, Racism and the Origins of Modern Sport

‘Two negroes are reported killed and a white man was shot in Arkansas and a negro was fatally wounded at Roanoke, Virginia. … Seven negroes were reported killed in various parts of the country and scores wounded. There were disturbances in eleven large cities, from New York, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia in the Northeast, to New Orleans, Atlanta, St Louis, Little Rock and Houston in the South and South West.’

If anything, this report in the New York Tribune underestimated the scale of the agony that was inflicted on black communities across the United States on the night of 4 July 1910. Racist mobs rioted across fifty U.S. cities. An estimated twenty-three black men and two white men were left dead and hundreds more injured. What could provoke such an outpouring of fury?

Two men fighting in a ring, something that had been taking place for centuries.

Only this time, a black man had defeated a white man to become the heavyweight boxing champion of the world. His name was Jack Johnson, and his victory had dealt a knock-out blow to myths of white athletic supremacy.

Sport, Race & Capitalism

The development of modern sport was defined by a belief in the superiority of the white ‘race’. Sport, believed the Yorkshire Post, the daily newspaper of the northern English industrial bourgeoisie, had ‘done so much to make the Anglo-Saxon race the best soldiers, sailors and colonists in the world’. Across the Atlantic, Harvard football coach, future U.S. governor-general of the Philippines and subsequent ambassador to Japan, W. Cameron Forbes, declared that ‘football is the expression of the strength of the Anglo-Saxon. It is the dominant spirit of the dominant race’.

The belief that specific ‘races’ of people are inherently inferior to others is rooted in the development of slavery and colonialism in the seventeenth century. But the concept of race is itself a scientific nonsense. As the Human Genome Project confirmed, regardless of cosmetic differences of skin tone, there are no consistent patterns of genetic similarity that can distinguish one ‘race’ from another and no genetic basis for ethnic divisions. However, while ‘race’ is a scientifically worthless category, under capitalism it has become an intensely powerful social concept. And there are few places where it is more culturally significant than in sport.

The modern concept of race did not exist before the emergence of capitalism. Although slavery existed in classical civilisation, racism did not. Although there was undoubtedly antipathy between nations and peoples, this was not based on skin colour or physical characteristics. Indeed, the slave-owning society of ancient Egypt was at one point ruled by a dynasty of Nubian pharaohs and the Roman Empire governed by a North African emperor, Septimius Severus. Prejudice was directed against those who were believed to have allowed themselves to be captured as slaves, and were thus perceived to be weak and inferior. Indeed, in classical times slaves generally shared the skin colour of the slaveowners.

But the growth of the slave trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - in which British ships took slaves from West Africa to the Caribbean, and returned to Britain with cash crops such as cotton or sugar - meant that the skin colour of African slaves became a justification for enslaving them. For slave traders and owners, to have a black skin was to be inferior to those with a white skin, and a torrent of pseudo-scientific, anthropological and biblical scholarship poured forth in order to justify the enslavement of Africans.

Yet, as Frederick Douglass, the most important black abolitionist of the nineteenth century, wrote: ‘we are then a persecuted people, not because we are colored, but simply because that color has for a series of years been coupled in the public mind with the degradation of slavery and servitude’. A similar point could also be made about the attitudes of the rulers of the British Empire. The conquest of India, Africa and the Far East was justified by imperialist spokesmen on the grounds that people with a darker skin colour were inherently inferior to the pale-skinned inhabitants of Britain. In Rudyard Kipling’s words, they were ‘the white man’s burden’. The ideology of white supremacy arose directly from the need to defend slavery and colonialism.

Modern sport was born at precisely the time that the issue of race had become central to the development of capitalism. The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw the expansion of imperialist domination over almost every corner of the globe and growing tensions between the imperialist powers, as they rushed to acquire territories in Africa and Asia. In the British Empire, imperial rule in key colonies was consolidated through a series of wars that began in the mid-nineteenth century and lasted into the latter decades of the Victorian era: the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879 and the New Zealand land wars against Māori peoples, to name just three in countries that were to be seen as part of the British sporting world.

In Australia, more than a century of genocide against Aboriginal peoples and racism towards Chinese and other Asian peoples was crowned by the introduction of an official ‘White Australia‘ policy in 1901. Moreover, between 1861 and 1865 the United States had fought the bloodiest war in human history over the question of slavery in its southern states. As capitalism sought to expand around the globe, the need for cheap labour and colonial possessions reinforced the racial hierarchy of slavery, in which those with darker skin pigmentation where classified as inferior to those with a white skin.The newly emerging mass commercial sports were not merely products of this period, they were active participants in maintaining this white supremacist world order. 

Baseball and the ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’

This can be most clearly seen in baseball. Following the end of the Civil War in 1865, the Reconstruction era’s attempts to reform the former slave-holding southern states on the basis of legal equality for both black and white had been attacked by white terrorist organisations such as the Ku Klux Klan. The issue of race became a blood line in American politics - and baseball was firmly in the racist camp.

In 1867 the National Association of Base Ball Players barred black players from its teams, a stance that was repeated by successive major baseball leagues. In 1884 catcher Moses Fleetwood Walker became the last black player in the major leagues for over sixty years when his career with the Toledo Blue Stockings in the American Association was ended by injury. A year earlier, Chicago White Stockings’ hall of famer ‘Cap’ Anson had refused to take the field against Toledo because of Walker’s presence on the team. Like fellow hall of famers Tris Speaker, Rogers Hornsby and reputedly Ty Cobb, Anson was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. 

From the 1880s black players were excluded from major and minor league baseball due to a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ between owners and managers. The severity of racism in baseball rivaled anything seen in the ‘Jim Crow’ states of the segregated south, a fact that was cheerfully admitted by the Sporting Life in 1891: ‘probably in no other business in America is the color line so finely drawn as in baseball. An African who attempts to put on a uniform and go in among a lot of white players is taking his life in his hands.’

The sickening reality of the ‘gentleman’s agreement’ was shown in 1908 when, before a New York Giants’ exhibition game in Springfield, Illinois, the Giants’ manager (and another future hall of famer) John McGraw was presented with a piece of a rope used to lynch two black men three days previously. The previous weekend a racist mob had burned down the town’s black district, forcing its residents to flee for their lives. When McGraw was handed the piece of the murder weapon, he told his audience that it would ‘replace the rabbit’s foot as his team’s good-luck token’.

British sport and the imperial hierarchy

In the sporting world of Britain and its empire, a rigorous racial hierarchy was enforced. In 1867 a team of Australian aboriginal cricketers visited England. They played high quality cricket yet were treated as anthropological curiosities, with the press more interested in their dancing and boomerang throwing than their mastery of the sport. In 1888 a ‘New Zealand Native’ rugby team, all but five of whom were Māori, toured the British Isles. Widely acclaimed for their innovative play, their refusal to defer sufficiently to the English Rugby Football Union inflamed their hosts racial sensibilities: 'as long as [the tourists] were losing they were jolly good fellows in the eyes of the crowd. But as soon as they commenced to win they were hooted and the papers were full of the weakness of the home side and the rough play of the visitors,’ remembered Māori tour manager Joe Warbrick. It was to be seventeen years before another overseas rugby side was invited to tour Britain.

When James Peters was selected to play rugby union for England in 1906 - the sport’s only black English international between 1871 and 1988 - it was remarked that ‘his selection is by no means popular on racial grounds’. The British relationship to racial hierarchy was complicated by the obsessions of its upper- and middle-classes with class and social status. Whereas in America, the overwhelming majority of black people were working-class or, in the south, impoverished sharecroppers, the British Empire also contained members of local aristocracies and ruling elites. This was particularly true in India, where the British mission to educate Indian princes in the superior ways of British life, including its sports, led to the emergence of talented Indian princely cricketers. K.S. Ranjitsinhji and his cousin K.S. Duleepsinhji, both of whom played for England because Indian cricket being thought of as too inferior for men of such status. 

By the early 1900s sport was explicitly seen as a confirmation of the racial ideologies of the imperialist world. As part of the 1904 Olympic Games in St Louis, ‘Anthropology Days’ were staged in which so-called ‘primitive’ peoples - such as Japanese Ainu, Patagonians, Eskimos, Native Americans and Philippine Moros - took part in athletic contests. The purpose of the events was to compare their performances with those of white athletes, although they were not allowed to compete alongside whites. One hardly needs to note that almost all were peoples subject to U.S. colonial rule or influence. The often unwilling 2,000 participants were no more than humiliated exhibits in a human zoo that served no purpose other than to demonstrate the racist self-satisfaction of the organisers. According to the president of the American Anthropological Association, William McGee, this exhibition proved that ‘the white man leads the races of the world, both physically and mentally, and in the coordination of the two which goes to make up the best specimen of manhood’. 

Jack Johnson and boxing’s ‘colour bar’

More than any other sport of the period, boxing was the lightning rod for the issue of race. The back boxers Bill Richmond and Tom Molineaux, both former slaves, had been prominent in bareknuckle prize-fighting’s golden age of the 1790s and 1800s. Molineaux had narrowly lost to world champion Tom Cribb in controversial circumstances in 1810. But the highly charged racial atmosphere of the imperialist era in the early twentieth century meant that black boxers were no longer viewed as cultural curiosities or benign exceptions to the general whiteness of the ring.

Boxing had been reinvented in the last third of the nineteenth century under the so-called 1867 Marquess of Queensberry rules, although these were actually developed by J.G. Chambers in 1865. It slowly regained its former popularity, having fallen from its Regency heights to become a marginal sport by the start of the modern mass spectator sports boom. Although ostensibly a way to teach moral values to fighters, the Queensberry rules repackaged boxing as a new commercial mass spectator sport. The size of the ring was regulated, rounds were standardised to be three minutes in length and gloves became compulsory. As a consequence, the sport became faster, more athletic and considerably more brutal. It was also unique in being the only major individual sport of the period that was open to urban working-class males - unlike the generally exclusive golf and tennis - and which could also offer significant riches to its champions. For black athletes, it offered opportunities that were otherwise closed to them in most team sports.

One such athlete was Galveston longshoreman turned boxer Jack Johnson. Johnson’s rise to boxing prominence began as a teenager in the last years of the nineteenth century. In 1903 he won the world ‘coloured’ heavyweight title. Although he fought both black and white boxers, he was forbidden from fighting for the world heavyweight title, like all black boxers. But on Boxing Day 1908, after two years of stubborn campaigning for the fight, he defeated the Canadian Tommy Burns to be crowned heavyweight champion of the world. It was perhaps the most significant single contest thus far in the history of modern sport.

Indicating the global importance of the race question, the fight took place in Sydney, Australia, after negotiations for the fight to take place in Britain broke down. As the poet Claude McKay pointed out, ‘in the United States there is not room for a Negro, even in the area of sports. Only in the national American sport called lynching is he assigned the first place’. Such was the shock of Johnson’s win that an immediate call for a ‘great white hope’ to take the title from Johnson was raised by journalists. In 1910 the call proved too strong for former champion Jim Jeffries who came out of retirement ‘for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a negro’.

It was to no avail. The fight in Reno on 4 July resulted in Jeffries throwing in the towel at the end of the fifteenth round. The resulting celebrations by black communities across fifty American cities were attacked by rioting racist mobs, leaving twenty-three black citizens dead. Johnson would not relinquish the title until he was defeated aged thirty-seven by Jess Willard in round twenty-six of their fight in Havana. 

Johnson was not the first black world title holder. Black Baltimorean Joe Gans had won the lightweight title in 1902. But the heavyweight title was the supreme achievement in boxing. The fact that boxing’s most prestigious title could be held by a black man challenged the racial orthodoxies of the time. In Britain, the mere fact that Johnson’s victory over Jeffries could be seen on newsreel film was seen as a threat to the imperial order: ‘the authorities evidently dread its effect on the relations between the white and coloured population. Of course, this will not be confined to South Africa but may be duplicated in every part of the Empire and elsewhere’, complained the Reverend F.B. Meyer in The Times.

Johnson himself was an extraordinarily courageous man, merely seeking to live what would be an ordinary life for a white celebrity of equivalent fame. He was proud of his talents and saw no reason to defer to racist objections to his relationships with white women. In 1912 he was the first man arrested for violating the Mann Act - an anti-sex piece of legislation that forbade the ‘transportation’ of women across state lines for so-called immoral purposes that would later be used to ensnare Charlie Chaplin and Chuck Berry, among many others. The fact that the woman concerned, his future wife, refused to testify caused the case to be dropped. The following year Johnson was charged again and sentenced to a year and a day in prison. The judge, who ensured the champion’s conviction by neglecting to tell the jury that the alleged offence took place before the Mann Act became law, was Kenesaw Mountain Landis. From 1920 to 1944, Landis would be the commissioner of Major League Baseball and oversee the the last decades of baseball’s Jim Crow policies. 

Johnson’s success had an impact around the world, not least because his rise to fame coincided with the development of the motion picture industry. Not only were Johnson’s fights staged around the world, but the new medium meant that he could now be watched by millions who could not see him in person. He became the first global star of sport.  Faced with such a clear rebuff to its accepted hierarchy, boxing’s authorities sought to reinforce the racial order of imperialism. In Britain, an attempt in 1911 to stage a fight between ‘Bombardier’ Billy Wells and Johnson was banned by Home Secretary Winston Churchill. Cape Town-born ‘coloured’ boxer Andrew Japhet won the British welterweight title in 1907 but was the last black boxer to hold a British title until 1948, thanks to a ‘colour bar’ introduced in response to Johnson’s success that banned black boxers from fighting for British titles.

Boxing became an arena in which racist fantasies of re-asserting white supremacy would lie permanently below the surface, contradictorily merging with dismissals of the ‘primitivism’ of the sport. But most importantly, Jack Johnson himself became a permanent symbol of pride, not just for black Americans but for all those who sought self-respect and freedom from oppression, a feeling captured by Harlem Renaissence poet Waring Cuney: ‘O my Lord/What a morning,/ O my Lord,/What a feeling,/When Jack Johnson/Turned Jim Jeffries'/Snow-white face/to the ceiling’. A similar sense of elation was felt twenty-seven years later when Joe Louis knocked out James J. Braddock to win the world heavyweight title in June 1937. It was, said Malcolm X, ‘the greatest celebration of race pride our generation had ever known’.

The changing nature of racism

Johnson’s victory also began to undermine contemporary pseudo-scientific justifications for racism. Throughout the nineteenth century, racist ideologues had claimed that dark-skinned athletes were inferior to whites because they were lazy, indolent and lacking in stamina. This was explained supposedly by their origins in the heat of Africa. Yet within forty years, a period which saw not only Johnson but also heavyweight champion Joe Louis and athlete Jesse Owens dominate sport, the racist narrative flipped into its very opposite. Owens’ historic four-gold medal haul in the 1936 Berlin Olympics was not seen as demonstrating racial equality but as proof that black athletes had ‘natural’ athletic abilities which made them superior in certain physical, but not mental, activities. Now it was claimed that their African origins gave them an advantage over white athletes. ‘It was not long ago,’ wrote Dean Cromwell, the USA track coach in the 1948 Olympics, ‘that [the black athlete’s] ability to sprint and jump was a life-and-death matter to him in the jungle’. 

This shift in attitude, which nonetheless upheld the supposedly innate intellectual superiority of whites, was not merely a response to the success of black athletes. It was also a reflection of the changing economic position of the black population in the USA and the British Empire. The 1930s and 1940s saw a growth in the demand for industrial labour in America’s northern states, much of which was met by black workers from the southern states. In Britain, a similar labour shortage in the late 1940s and 1950s was met by workers from the West Indies. Moreover, the granting of independence to India in 1947 signaled the  beginning of the break-up of the British Empire.

Rising political consciousness among black and colonial peoples, sharpened as a result of the allies’ often hypocritical rhetoric against Nazi racial policies in World War Two, also meant that overt racial exclusion was increasingly difficult to defend publicly. Formal legal equality for black people was thus gradually achieved through a combination of economic exigency, political struggle and, in the case of America, sensitivity to the USSR’s highlighting racism in the USA during the Cold War. In sport this change from overt discrimination to legal, if not social, equality can be seen in Jackie Robinson’s debut for the Brooklyn Dodgers in Major League Baseball in 1947, the first black player in the majors for over sixty years, the NFL’s abandonment of its Jim Crow policy in 1949 and the lifting of British boxing’s colour bar in the late 1940s.

Despite the end of overt racial exclusion, the old racial hierarchies continued to prevail in sport. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that all formal and informal exclusion of black athletes ended, with the exception of apartheid South Africa. Those who thought that the integration of black players into baseball meant the end of racism in the sport were disappointed. Hall of Famer Frank Robinson joined the Cincinnati Reds in 1956 and was shocked. ‘I didn’t know anything about racism or bigotry until I went into professional baseball,’ he later stated. Playing in Greensboro in the minor leagues early in his career, Leon Wagner found himself threatened by a gun-toting racist while he was fielding during a game. Moreover, the sight of a black pitcher or quarterback was a rare event in big-time American sports until the latter decades of the twentieth century.

The same could be said of professional soccer players, at least in the Anglophone world. In France, Portugal and Latin America, where the imperial relationship with the colonies was less segregated, black players appeared at the higher levels of soccer from the early decades of the twentieth century. Uruguay’s José Andrade was perhaps one of the most notable, playing in the 1924 Olympic and 1930 World Cup finals. Yet, even when on the field, racist perceptions of black athletes restricted their opportunities. So-called ‘decision-making’ positions, such as soccer midfielders or rugby half-backs, as well as quarterbacks and pitchers, were usually deemed to be beyond the intellectual ability of black players, who found themselves disproportionately represented in those positions that required speed or strength, a self-fulfilling confirmation of racist stereotypes that sociologists came to label as ‘stacking’.

By the late twentieth century formal integration and an ostensibly level playing field for all athletes regardless of skin colour appeared to have been achieved. Yet this supposed meritocracy concealed the survival of the racial hierarchy of modern sport that had been established in the nineteenth century. But as Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith, John Carlos, Colin Kaepernick and countless others would discover, being allowed to compete on the sports field was an entirely different matter from being considered an equal off it.

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Sport in Capitalist Society, chapter 13.

Taking sides in the 1960s

On 16 October 1968, the Olympic 200 metres gold medal was won in a world record time of 19.83 seconds. Broadcast live and in colour - the first time the summer Olympics had been generally available in this format - viewers witnessed the most extraordinary event in  the history of the Olympics, if not modern sport itself. As the U.S. national anthem played at the medal ceremony, the gold and bronze medalists bowed their heads and raised their clenched fists in protest against racism and poverty in America. Those viewers who looked closely at their screens would also notice that the Australian silver medalist was wearing a badge of solidarity with his brother athletes. Thanks to television, not only sport but politics had been brought into tens of millions of living rooms around the world, ensuring that the protest of Tommie Smith and John Carlos would be seared into the global memory.

Politics had been at the forefront of international sport since the 1950s. One common accusation that the West regularly levelled against the Soviets was that they had made sport political. Of course, as we have seen, nationalist and conservative politics had always been part of modern sport. But the Russians brought a different type of politics. In particular, the USSR campaigned for greater representation in the Olympic movement of the newly independent states of Africa and Asia and for the expulsion of South Africa for its apartheid policies.

To a large extent this was because Soviet officials were aware of the growing radicalisation that was taking place around the world and sought to take diplomatic advantage from it. The late 1950s and early 1960s saw the rise of the civil rights movement in the United States, independence struggles in Africa, and the Cuban Revolution. The Sixties became a decade of revolutionary fervour and social change that inspired new generations to challenge the established authorities. And for the first time, sport was not immune.

It is a remarkable fact that before the 1960s there had been no significant internal challenge to the orthodoxies of sport. The workers’ sport movement had attempted to build an external alternative to amateur and commercial sport. Those who had suffered at the hands of the leadership or the ideology of mainstream sport had simply accepted it and made the best of their situation. Jack Johnson was not a revolutionary but simply believed in his right to live his life as he chose - and was persecuted for it. But he was not interested in politically challenging the racism of boxing. Jesse Owens, driven out of amateur athletics days after his triumph at the Berlin Olympics by Avery Brundage’s demand that he compete in fund-raising exhibition races for the United States Olympic Committee, never questioned Brundage’s right to govern athletics.

But as the radicalisation of the 1960s gathered pace, sport became inextricably caught up in its gears. Its inherent nationalism, which had served the Western imperial powers so well, now became a weapon in the hands of the national independence movements, whether in power or aspiring to power, of the former colonies of European empires. One of the earliest examples could be seen in the Algerian struggle for independence from France. In 1958 the Front de Libération Nationale organised a national football team in exile - ‘l’onze de l'indépendance’ - to represent Algeria composed of Algerian players active in the French soccer league and captained by ‘footballer of the revolution’ Rachid Mekloufi. In the West Indies, the demand that its cricket team have a black captain, a position hitherto occupied only by whites, became a reflection of and a conduit for the demand for self-government and an end to British rule.

If the axiom that the first governmental decisions of every newly independent country in the 1960s was to join the United Nations, the IOC and FIFA was an exaggeration, it was only a slight one. The creation of the shortlived ‘Games of the New Emerging Forces’ in 1963 as an alternative to the Olympics - initiated by Indonesia after it had been expelled from the Olympic movement for excluding Israel and Taiwan from the 1962 Asian Games that it hosted - was an attempt to create a sporting equivalent of the Non-Aligned Movement, an association of states formed in 1961 by newly independent and developing nations outside of the Western and Soviet blocs. In a similar vein, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah led African nations in a boycott of the 1966 soccer world cup in protest at their lack of representation in the finals. 

Sport and the struggle against Apartheid

The lightning rod for much of global political campaigns around sport was South Africa. The coming to power of the Nationalist Party in 1949 had codified the racial segregation introduced by the British over the previous century into the system of apartheid. The races were zealously segregated to maintain white supremacy. Sport and other social contact between whites and non-whites was strictly forbidden. This was not so different from other parts of the British Empire nor, in particular, the southern states of the U.S.A. but the collapse of the empire and the civil rights struggle of black Americans had left white South Africa as one of the last bastions of legalised racial segregation. Protests had been raised against sporting contacts with the apartheid regime as early as the mid-1950s but it was the viciousness of the government’s repression against the non-white population, most notably when in March 1960 police shot dead sixty-nine unarmed demonstrators and injured 180 others, that sparked an international campaign. 

Most sports were highly resistant to breaking their links with apartheid. In 1966 the International Amateur Athletics Federation voted against a Soviet proposal to expel South Africa. Despite withdrawing its invitation to South Africa to the 1964 Olympics, the IOC invited the apartheid state to the 1968 Games, only to rescind the invitation when African nations threatened a boycott. Both the IAAF and the IOC finally broke their ties in 1970. In 1968 the England cricket selectors initially refused to select  Basil d’Oliviera, a ‘coloured’ South African player who had qualified to play for England, for their tour to South Africa, despite his outstanding feats for England against Australia earlier in the same year. Eventually they were forced to backtrack, and his inclusion in the touring squad lead to the South Africans canceling the tour because they refused to play with non-white cricketers.

Two years later, faced with international protests, the international cricket authorities banned official tours to and from South Africa - although ‘unofficial’ tours of high profile international players took their place. It was not until 1976 that the all-white Football Association of South Africa was finally expelled from FIFA after years of suspension. Rugby union tours continued until 1984 and South African rugby officials played a leading role on the International Rugby Board throughout the apartheid years. South African golfers such as Gary Player competed as individuals in world golf without sanction.

The reluctance of sports’ governing bodies to oppose racial discrimination put them in direct opposition to the international protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The 1969 Springbok rugby union tourists to Britain were met with ferocious opposition and two years’ later in Australia the South Africans found themselves under siege from demonstrators, while the Queensland leg of the tour led to the government declaring a state of emergency. In New Zealand - traditionally an ally of the regime and which had refused to pick Maori players for tours to South Africa until 1969 - massive protests against the Springboks in 1981 caused a governmental crisis that almost forced the National Party government to fall. New Zealand’s strong rugby links with apartheid also led to an African boycott of the 1976 Montreal Olympics, following the IOC’s refusal to bar the New Zealand team because of its rugby tours to South Africa. With the exception of two British and six Australian players, not a single international rugby union player refused to play against the whites-only, apartheid era South African team.

It was not a coincidence that the question of race came to the forefront of international  sporting political protests in the 1960s. The experience of black athletes clashed discordantly with the idea that sport was a level playing field, a haven of equality regardless of class or colour. Moreover, the contrast between the prominence of black athletes in the sporting arena and their powerlessness outside of it could not be sharper. Even when black and other minority athletes had  overcome segregation and achieved formal equality with whites, they were still confronted by the racism of team-mates, officials and  supporters, together with stereotypical assumptions about the physical and intellectual abilities of those whose skin was not white. 

Civil Rights and sport

In the United States, the trail blazed in baseball in 1947 by Jackie Robinson when he became the first black player in the major leagues in the twentieth century had been tightly policed. It was no secret that Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey had chosen him not merely because of his outstanding athletic gifts but also because he agreed not to retaliate when faced with racism from team-mates, opponents or fans. Robinson was acutely aware of racism all through his life - ‘I know that I am a black man in a white world’, he wrote in his autobiography - but decided that the historical opportunity to lead the integration of baseball was more important than confronting individual instances of racism. Rickey himself thought that the biggest threat to Robinson’s success was ‘the Negro people themselves’ who may not appreciate his willingness to turn the other cheek.

But baseball was slow to integrate on the field and did little to integrate black managers, coaches or journalists into its structures. When frustration with the economic and social injustices boiled over into riots across American cities in the mid-1960s, one black Philadelphia resident remarked about the Phillies, the local baseball club team: ‘The only thing I regret about the riot ... was that we didn’t burn down that goddamn {baseball] stadium... They had it surrounded by cops, and we couldn’t get to it. I just wish we could’ve burned it down and wiped away its history that tells me I’m nothing but a n----r.’

These same feelings of anger and rebellion animated the founders of the Olympic Project for Human Rights. Inspired by the militant Black Power movement that emerged from the civil rights movement in the U.S., the O.P.H.R. was founded in 1967 by the sociologist Harry Edwards to organise a boycott of the 1968 Mexico Olympics in protest at the inequality and injustice faced by black American athletes. Although its call for a boycott dissipated, two of its supporters, the sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, made the most courageous and inspiring protest ever seen at a sports event, a statement of pride and rebellion that was seen in every corner of the globe. 

The two sprinters had been inspired by the example of Muhammed Ali. Under his birth name of Cassius Clay, Ali had won the world heavyweight boxing championship in 1964 but in early 1966 he became eligible to be drafted in the U.S. Army, which was engaged in an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. Ali refused to be drafted, declaring that ‘I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong ... They never called me n----r’. He knew that in all probability this meant that he would be stripped of the title and possibly imprisoned. Sport had never seen anything like this. Here was an athlete, one of the finest ever to practise his art, who put his political principles before sporting glory. This abrogation of the sporting code annoyed his critics almost as much as his opposition to the Vietnam war. This was a man who understood through his very existence that sport and politics were inseparable. He was a sportsman who knew that there were more important things than ‘playing the game’.

This is a slightly edited version of chapters 8 and 13 of my 2013 book ‘Sport in Capitalist Society’, in which you can also find the references and footnotes. It is available to buy from the publishers Routledge.