ABSTRACT
Knowledge of the unique circumstances African-Americans encountered as athletes at a predominantly white university is largely missing from Iowa’s institutional memory. The caption to Jack Bender’s cartoon echoed an interpretation of Iowa athletics written by the historian Leola Bergmann in 1949. Leola Bergmann’s The Negro in Iowa surveyed African-American history and life in Iowa. Duke Slater is arguably the most influential and enduring legend of all African-American athletes at Iowa. In the South the major universities and colleges were mostly off-limits to African-Americans well into the 1960s. The memory of Calvin Jones lives on in the hearts and minds of Iowa sports fans long after his death. Sources close to the Iowa athletic department have put forth the idea that the university was a forerunner in the participation of black athletes in college sports. Autobiographies and biographies of sports figures have always been an important genre of sportswriting.
