Howard Bryant - The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism

BEACON PRESS
Boston, Massachusetts
www.beacon.org

Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

2018 by Howard Bryant
All rights reserved

Text design and composition by Kim Arney

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bryant, Howard, author.
Title: The heritage : Black Athletes, a divided America, and the politics of patriotism / Howard Bryant.
Description: Boston : Beacon Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Description b
Identifiers: LCCN 2017053716 (print) | LCCN 2018009066 (ebook) | ISBN 9780807027004 (ebook) | ISBN 9780807026991 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: African American athletesHistory. | African American athletesSocial conditions. | SportsPolitical aspectsUnited States. | SportsSocial aspectsUnited States. | Discrimination in sportsUnited States. | BISAC: SPORTS & RECREATION / Sociology of Sports. | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Civics & Citizenship. | SPORTS & RECREATION / History.
Classification: LCC GV583 (ebook) | LCC GV583 .B735 2018 (print) | DDC 306.483dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017053716

For Stephen Downes,
who told us so

Other Books by Howard Bryant

Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston

Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball

The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron

The LEGENDS Series for Young Readers

Legends: The Best Players, Games, and Teams in Baseball

Legends: The Best Players, Games, and Teams in Football

Legends: The Best Players, Games, and Teams in Basketball

Sisters and Champions: The Story of Venus and Serena Williams

PROLOGUE

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT COLLISION . It is a book about collision in sports. For all the clichs about sudden death and there being no tomorrow, sports is just entertainment, offering the illusion of being important. Red Sox-Yankees, Cowboys-Eagles, and Lakers-Celtics made us feel as if the fate of our universe hung on the final two minutes of the game, but sports was always supposed a substitute for reality, where Americans could fight for three hours and hug it out afterward. The newspapers used to call the sports pages the toy department for a reason. It was, after all, only a game.

But sports was always more than that for the black athlete. Despite its obvious legal and extralegal barriers to equality, in sports, the scoreboard served as a metaphor for the meritocracy America always considered itself, and sports was the barometer for where African Americans stood in the larger culture, how American they would be allowed to be. Of all black employees in the history of the United States, it was the ballplayers who were the most influential and most important, the ones who made the money. The black thinkersthe doctors, lawyers, scientists, and intellectualswere roadblocked by segregation. Entertainers were a close second, but the athletes were different. Being a ballplayer was the first black occupation allowed in the mainstream, to attend the overwhelmingly white universities and join the white professional sports leagues. Ballplayers would be the first black professionals to integrate white neighborhoodsand have a chance at the full promise of the American Dream. Musicians were never proof that America was fair, because Lena Horne and John Coltrane didnt have a scoreboard, a final buzzer that told you coldly and definitively if you won. America liked that. Ballplayers were the Ones Who Made It.

And being the Ones Who Made It soon came with the responsibility to speak for the people who had not made it, for whom the road was still blocked. The responsibility became a tradition so ingrained that it hung over every player. The tradition became the black athletes coat of arms, and the players who upheld itJackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith, John Carloswere the ones who one day would be taught in the schools. The ones who did notO. J. Simpson, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woodsno matter how great they were and how much money they made, could never escape the criticism that they shrank from their larger duty to the people. The tradition was so strong that it even had an informal nickname, the Heritage, exemplified that day in June of 1956, when Paul Robeson, the Rutgers All-America who played in the NFL in 1921 before the league barred black players from 1933 to 1946, the man who was once the most famous black man in America walked straight into hell.

Hell was the Eighty-Fourth Congress, where the House Un-American Activities Committee held hearings titled Investigation of the Unauthorized Use of US Passports. The afternoon was going to be hell because so many of the years previously had been, when America actively sought to break him. Robeson appeared before the committee requesting a reissue of the passport the government had taken from him six years earlier.

The revoking of the passport wiped out Robeson financially, taking him from a person who would be a millionaire in todays dollars to one making about $60,000 annually. Jackie Robinson, the man who one day would replace Robeson as the most famous black man in America, had already testified against him years earlier to this same committeean act Robinson would later come to regret. It was Robesons commitment to black people, both in the United States and around the world, combined with his popularity in Russia and his belief in anti-capitalist economic systems that drew the suspicion of the committee.

The reason I am here today, you know, from the mouth of the State Department itself is: I should not be allowed to travel because I have struggled for years for the independence of the colonial peoples of Africa, he told the committee. I stand here struggling for the rights of my people to be full citizens in this country, and they are not. They are not in Mississippi. And they are not in Montgomery, Alabama. And they are not in Washington. They are nowhere, and that is why I am here today.

The committee asked if he was Communist. Robeson invoked his Fifth Amendment rights six times.

Robeson addressed the committee with the recklessness of the condemned. He was, as the kids like to say today, out of fucks to give. He laughed at them, these nine white men who had already made up their minds that he was the enemy of the state. They told him his appearance was not a laughing matter. It is a laughing matter to me, Robeson said. This is complete nonsense. They were disdainful of him (The witness talks very loud when he makes a speech, but when he invokes the Fifth Amendment I cannot hear him.), and he was disdainful back (I invoked the Fifth Amendment very loudly. You know I am an actor, and I have medals for diction.). The chairman was Francis E. Walter, the Pennsylvania Democrat. You, Robeson said, are the author of the bills that are going to keep all kinds of decent people out of the country.

No, Walter responded. Only your kind.

Robeson told the committee that while visiting the Soviet Union, he had never faced the type of discrimination he faced in Mississippi, or the type of hostility he now faced from them. The Ohio Republican Gordon Scherer, known for his racism, for being a committee pit bull, threw the old