Before Jackie Robinson

Gerald R. Gems

Before Jackie Robinson is a cooperative effort to recover a significant part of the past. It attempts to fill a significant hole in the literature of our American history. Why does that matter? Our personal histories make us who we are as individuals, and our collective histories provide us with a national identity as Americans. One of the characteristics of American culture that differentiates it from so many others in the world is the influence of race in American history. The genre of new biography that has emerged in the twenty-first century places greater emphasis on the socially contested nature of identity constructions, so that it treats biography as acts of identity politics in the social struggles of a time, a method that allows social groups to reach an understanding about who they are and who they want to be. This volume makes a distinct attempt to incorporate the factors of race and race politics over a transitional period in American history that eventually transformed the nature of American society and American history.

The choice of subjects provides a sense of chronological change and the incremental transition in race relations in American culture over approximately a half century. Sports provided a very visible means of that process. While many Americans might be familiar with Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and Jesse Owens, all of whom operated on an international stage, we chose to examine the lives of no less important athletic pioneers, once well known but increasingly forgotten, who pushed the social boundaries on other levels in their quest to dismantle racism.

Slavery commenced with some of the earliest colonial settlers in 1619 and held a central role in the American economy and society for the next 250 years. The Civil War, which pitted Americans and even families against one another, is attributed to the enslavement of African Americans. It cost more than six hundred thousand American lives, the greatest disaster in the history of the nation.

With the end of the Civil War and the reorganization of the defeated Confederate states, a period known as Reconstruction, the undertaking offered hope and promise to the newly liberated slaves. That optimistic expectation proved illusory and temporary. When the presidential election of 1876 resulted in a stalemate, the two political parties reached an agreement that gave the presidency to the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, but allowed the Democrats to resume their previous control of the southern states. Restrictive suffrage qualifications, complete disenfranchisement, Jim Crow segregation laws, and the sharecropping system quickly returned blacks to a state of peonage, reinforced by widespread lynchings, the ramifications of which still beset the American society today.

A former slave, Booker T. Washington, founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1881; it taught vocational skills and provided black teachers for the segregated schools. Rather than social equality Washington preached the acquisition of skills for the workplace. His accommodationist and non-threatening philosophy won him support from white leaders and recognition as the top black spokesperson of the late nineteenth century. Under such guidance athletes found some limited opportunity in the dominant white culturebut not equality. Blacks faced continual denigration and stereotyping and were often depicted as cartoonish minstrels or Sambo figures in the white media, incapable of full inclusion in the white mainstream society.

Jockeys such as Isaac Murphy, Willie Sims, and Jimmy Winkfield won numerous Kentucky Derby races from 1884 to 1902 and earned considerable sums for their skills, but they were only the employees of wealthy owners who garnered the larger prizes and national acclaim.

Lewiss ascendance represented a black invasion of the white power structure, but his talents overcame prejudice. Other northern blacks began to test white assumptions of superiority in other forms of sport. Like in horse racing, blacks were expected to serve wealthier golfers as caddies in an employer-employee relationship. When John Shippen, who had learned to play golf as a caddie for whites, entered the sacrosanct U.S. Open in 1896, the other entrants arranged a boycott. Only the courageous efforts of U. S. Golf Association ( USGA ) president Theodore Havemeyer, who supported Shippen, saved the tournament. Shippen represented a challenge to the white concept of the self-made man, presumably reserved for white males. A loss to a non-white could damage the perception of white racial superiority, a basic tenet of the racist society that upheld white privilege. Shippen continued to challenge white hegemony, entering the tournament repeatedly in 1899, 1900, 1902, and 1913. The USGA would eventually adopt a whites-only policy. Such exclusionary tactics resulted in black golfers

Cyclist Major Taylor personified another such provocation as his abilities clearly surpassed that of his white opponents as he set numerous world records in head to head competition and won the world championship by 1899. His success fostered the animosity of white cyclists and their collusion to hinder his efforts forced him to seek his fortune abroad, where he earned as much as $10,000 annually. Such physical prowess offered one means of social mobility when other avenues were denied.

Such head-to-head individual competitions challenged the dominant Social Darwinian beliefs in white superiority. Boxers had already confronted that awareness by the late nineteenth century. White perceptions of blacks as physically inferior, weak-willed, cowardly, lacking in toughness and personal discipline, and unable to withstand a stomach punch enabled black fighters to enter the professional ring. White audiences expected to see and enjoyed watching black boxers being pummeled by white opponents. White men organized battle royals in which black youth were thrown in a ring, sometimes blindfolded, to fight until the last one standing was awarded with cheers or coins. At the professional level John L. Sullivan, who held the heavyweight championship from 1882 to 1892, instituted a ban on black challengers to ensure that the symbolic title of physical supremacy remained in white hands.