ABSTRACT
The black athlete is such a vital part of the modern sporting landscape that it is difficult to believe that for much of the twentieth century non-white athletes found themselves marginalized and denied access to the highest level of competition across virtually the entire sporting landscape. For most of the century black athletes had to deal with not only the wide reach of Jim Crow in the South but with racism, exclusion, and acquiescence to Jim Crow in the supposedly non-segregated North. When minority athletes were granted participation, many excelled. In the nineteenth century, horse racing, “the sport of kings,” saw black participants prosper. African Americans provided both the most successful trainers and prominent jockeys for several decades, but by the second decade of the twentieth century black jockeys and trainers found that their licenses had not been renewed and that whites had taken their places in the stables and on the saddles. This followed larger trends – for example, by the 1890s an informal but iron-clad agreement among the owners and league officials removed black players from Organized Baseball. This lasted until after the Second World War. This chapter explores the obstacles African American athletes faced from about 1900 to the present with particular emphasis on the interplay between demands for civil rights and those who would maintain white supremacy in American sport. It also looks at some of the significant trends in the literature on the intersection of race, politics, and sports in the United States with an emphasis on the black athlete.
