For Harry Edwards, Sports Is A crucible for social justice
Story by Rochelle Lefkowitz (Board Member; Co-Chair Arts & Culture)
Some elders shrink into frustrated invisibility. At 6’8”, with white beard and flashing dark eyes, Dr. Harry Edwards doesn’t enter a room unnoticed.
Yet from his first words, until our last standing ovation, it was the world-famous, pioneer sports sociologist’s powerful stories that caught and kept our attention on April 7 at the Ashby Village Arts & Culture Series at Berkeley’s Northbrae Church Sanctuary.
His profound presentation was a fast-paced, riveting ball game. Interspersed with mesmerizing, three-point shots of history, it gave many of us new ways to understand our world.
No article could do it justice. For the beautiful, powerful experience, please watch the video (link to video), including his replies to our questions. Short of that, here’s a recap.
After A&C member Betty Webster’s gracious welcome, AV Co-Founder Shirley Haberfeld read A&C Co-Chair Rochelle Lefkowitz’s brief, evocative introductory remarks.
“When I was growing up, pro-sports were seen as a refuge. Society’s problems had no place at the game. Or did they?”
Dr. Edwards, the leading authority on the intersection of race, sports and society, quickly upended that myth. He showed us how sports are infused with society’s cultural and political issues, and how that affects our political and social climate.
As founder of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, he’s best known for inspiring the “most well-known sports image of the 20th century”, the Black Power salute by U.S. athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Mexico Olympics.
On Sunday 4/7, he introduced us to four intergenerational waves of black athletes prompted to activism within and beyond the sports arena.
He started with the odious 1896 U.S. Supreme Court landmark case, Plessy V. Ferguson, that upheld the constitutionality of segregation under a “separate but equal” doctrine (often in quotes, but, as Edwards emphasized, those words were never in the decision itself). The Negro Leagues, he observed, were the first wave, “a resistance movement,” a struggle by athletes from Joe Lewis to Paul Robeson for legitimacy.
In the second wave, in the years after WWII, when blacks fought for democracy they didn’t get at home, black athletes found segregated eating and living accommodations where their teams traveled. Theirs was a struggle for access. “I’m convinced”, said Edwards, “that Jackie Robinson’s early greying and his early death was due to the stress of that struggle”.
The third wave, Edwards said, revealed a preview of the civil rights movement in its call for respect of blacks in sports.
“Black folks in the U.S. didn’t know Gandhi, but they knew Jackie Robinson a decade before Martin Luther King and the Montgomery bus boycott,” Edwards said. Long before ‘60s civil disobedience, he described how Robinson “was so proud” to have trained black people to react nonviolently in the stands when people spit at him or tripped him on the field. Robinson, said Edwards, explained, “If there was a race riot, no guys would want me to play.”
“Jackie Robinson primed the pump for Dr. King,” Edwards told us. “Jackie Robinson was our Gandhi”.
Edwards said by the mid l960s, the third wave of black athletes’ activism was about respect. Framed by the emergence of the Black Power movement, young athletes saw they were unequal in access to endorsements, free agency, and coaching and general manager positions. “Ali was asking for ‘respect for my name and for my religion’” he noted. Jim Brown said, “I play football for respect”. As Arthur Ashe focused on South Africa, another top athlete asked “Why should we play where we can’t work?”.
By 1972, Edwards said the Civil Rights movement had declined, leaving a leadership vacuum. Even by 1966, Stokely Carmichael had seized the bullhorn and Martin Luther King had gone beyond civil rights to human rights and opposition to the Vietnam War. The Black Panther party, which Edwards credits for starting the Head Start movement, disbanded in 1982.
Edwards called 1972-2012 “the era of athlete compliance”. He highlighted some notable exceptions, like nine-year NBA veteran Mahmoud Abdul Rauf, who refused to stand for the national anthem “…because my people are not free.”
Then in 2012, the Miami Heat wore hoodies in tribute to slain black teenager Trayvon Martin. He said, “When Colin Kaepernick talked with me about taking a knee…I went into the locker room, got his shoes, got him to sign them and set them to the Smithsonian, saying “you need to put these next to Ali’s, because that’s where they belong”.
Edwards predicts the fourth wave, now underway, will be about gender. He talked about the three black women who founded #BlackLivesMatter, about the #MeTooMovementand how $5 of each ticket sale at Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) games now goes to Planned Parenthood. He spoke about the importance of women’s reproductive rights to athletes, saying that “it’s not just women who are affected, it’s men, too.” Saying that we now “face an existential threat to women’s sports”, he added, “as women cheerleaders have begun to take the knee, men have a role in the WNBA’s issues, too.”
When asked whether women were active in the Olympic Project for Human Rights, Edwards replied, “they did the hard work—staffing phones, drawing posters…women have been there for men; men, we have some issues;”.
He went on to say, “We men cannot be everything we can be until women can be everything they oughta be. There’s nothing in sports that women have not touched in some fundamental way, from the mothers who take their kids to soccer practice, make their lunches, keep their kids in school and those who coach young women.”
He was asked “Should college athletes be paid as professionals?” (“Yes!”) and about concussions (“…the NFL’s Division 1 football will be all black; black families don’t hear about concussions, don’t trust the apartheid U.S. medical system and football is a way out, not just for players, but for the whole family.”). He said the National Football Players Association doesn’t deal with the demands on the athlete’s body, as kids today are choreographed into one sport, how athletes now weigh over 300 lbs, and how “owners have a role and an obligation, but organized players have an even greater obligation, yet say they represent active, not retired players.”
Edwards called Venus and Serena Williams “…the greatest sibling athletes in human history…If the Williams sisters were white, there’d be a Williams Tower in midtown Manhattan”). And he said Serena “is walking evidence of why women are the most creative forces on this planet, second only to Mother Earth itself”.
Asked about wealthy parents arrested for buying their children’s college admissions, he repeated how “Sports reflects society. Money makes a difference. There’s the back door for legacy admissions, the side door where they bring in the athletes. And their kids? They came up through a trap door from the basement…and knocked somebody out of a place when they did it.” He cited his 1981 article “The Collegiate Athletic Arms Race”.
Asked how he stays positive with “the insanity at the top”, Edwards said “In the end, it’s We the People. It may take a couple of generations to recover, but I have tremendous faith in our capacity to do that. It’s what we do.”
He then advised us, “Never shut down your conversation with people who don’t agree with you.”
Finally, Dr. Harry Edwards urged us to remember, “The most important saying that came out of the ‘60s wasn’t “We shall overcome” or “No justice, no peace”, but “Keep the Faith”—in each other and in We the People!”