Name: The Revolt of the Black Athlete
ISBN: 9780252041075

Harry Edwards

The Revolt of the Black Athlete

Kay so Queso

On these questions there seems a curious reality: the concept of history has a great deal in common with concepts such as "profit" and "progress"—at some level it comes down to who is keeping the books. (xii)

… (in much the same way that Whites who knew few Blacks often assumed that all Blacks must know each other, meaning that if you were Black and from California, you had to know their "Black friend from California") (xxi)

I soon found out, as do most black athletes at white schools, that white "teammates” can practice with you five days a week for hours on end yet at night refer to you as “coon”, "nigger" and "jiggaboo" and then jump all over you on Saturday afternoons talking about team spirit.

Reminds me a decent bit of what is still going on in European soccer today

Black athletes breaking into other professional sports also took it, accepted the insults and humiliations that inevitably confronted them at every step.

"Everybody knows me," big Lew [Kareem Abdul-Jabaar] began. "I’m the big basketball star, the weekend hero, everybody's all-American. Well, last summer I was almost killed by a racist cop shooting at a black cat in Harlem. He was shooting on the street—where masses of black people were standing around or just taking a walk. But he didn't care. After all we were just niggers. I found out last summer that we don't catch hell because we aren't basketball stars or because we don’t have money. We catch hell because we are black. Somewhere each of us has got to make a stand against this kind of thing. This is how I take my stand—using what I have. And I take my stand here."

Grinning black faces atop an Olympic victory stand only mock kids smothering in slums, old women dying of malnutrition, bombed-out churches, the bodies strewn along the path of riot.

Victory for the slave depends not necessarily upon winning the battle. By the very act of revolting, he has cast doubt on the absolute authority of his oppressors.

For in a very real sense he is the saint of this revolution in sports. He rebelled at a time when he, as an athlete, stood alone.

 He lost almost everything of value to any athlete—his prestige, his income, and his title. But he maintained and enhanced the most crucial factor in the minds of black people everywhere—black dignity.

For the black man in America, the national anthem has not progressed far beyond what it was before Francis Scott Key put his words to it—an old English drinking song. For in America, a black man would have to be either drunk, insane, or both not to recognize the hollowness in the anthem’s phrases.

This wasn’t what I was expecting, but it was a solid read nonetheless. I thought it was going to be a broad perspective on social activism through sports throughout the years, but it was really focused on the author’s experiences leading the Olympic Project for Human Rights in the 1960s and the collective work of athletes in that era. 

That’s not to say the book wasn’t good. It was definitely an interesting perspective and the foreword and afterword of the 50th Anniversary Edition help place the author’s initial writing in a more modern context. However, I personally didn’t find the reading all that gripping or revealing (although I do wish I’d read it before writing a thesis about the effect of race on quarterback evaluation haha), but I was happy to glean insights from this era of history and its athletes’ activism. A good read for anyone interested in the topic.

This wasn’t what I was expecting, but it was a solid read nonetheless. I thought it was going to be a broad perspective on social activism through sports throughout the years, but it was really focused on the author’s experiences leading the Olympic Project for Human Rights in the 1960s and the collective work of athletes in that era. 

That’s not to say the book wasn’t good. It was definitely an interesting perspective and the foreword and afterword of the 50th Anniversary Edition help place the author’s initial writing in a more modern context. However, I personally didn’t find the reading all that gripping or revealing (although I do wish I’d read it before writing a thesis about the effect of race on quarterback evaluation haha), but I was happy to glean insights from this era of history and its athletes’ activism. A good read for anyone interested in the topic.

The Revolt of the Black Athlete

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