“We Were Ladies, We Just Played Like Boys”

THROUGH THE EFFORTS OF a handful of sport history scholars, in recent years our knowledge and understanding of the collegiate athletic experiences of African-American women has grown significantly. Although in its infancy, this scholarship has moved beyond the analytic categories of race and gender to engage the complexities of class, helping to bring about an end to the mythical notion of a monolithic black female sport history. The conclusions drawn in these studies suggest that among elite black colleges and universities the tendency throughout the 1920s and 1930s was to abandon an earlier commitment to women's intercollegiate basketball. ¹ School leaders at Howard, Fisk, Morgan, and Hampton believed that women's participation in competitive intercollegiate basketball ran counter to a middle-class feminine ideal grounded in refinement and respectability. Thus, support once given to intercollegiate basketball was channeled to less competitive structures, such as intramurals and play-days, with emphasis placed on activities that were deemed more suitable for female involvement including badminton, archery, and table tennis. ²