Althea Gibson, U.S. and Wimbledon tennis champion, gives some pointers on the game which has brought her international fame, December 1957. Source: World Telegram & Sun photo by Ed. Ford via Library of Congress

Making the Team

Sports and Equality in American History

07.26.19

This month, the US Women’s Soccer Team won the Women’s World Cup for the fourth time since the tournament was established in 1991. But alongside the celebrations were calls for female players to be paid the same as their male counterparts. So, on this episode of BackStory, we’re revisiting past segments that explore the issue of sports and equality throughout American history.

activism; activist athletes; sports

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Segments

A Hop, Skip, and a Jump

Former BackStory producer Kelly Jones and archivist Jane Tuttle bring us the story of trailblazer Lucile Godbold’s participation in international athletics in the 1920s, which brought pressure to reform women’s sports back in the US.

Music:

Pigalle by Jahzzar
Bliss by Podington Bear
So It Goes by Podington Bear

competition; female athletes; gender inequality; reform movements

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Brian Balogh: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, The National Endowment For The Humanities, and The Robert and Joseph Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Ed Ayers: From Virginia humanities, this is BackStory.

Ed Ayers: This is BackStory. I’m Ed Ayers. If you’re new to the podcast each week, my colleagues, Brian Balogh, Nathan Conley, Joanne Freeman, and I explore an aspect of American history that’s been in the news.

Ed Ayers: This month, the US women’s soccer team won the World Cup in France. At the championship game against the Netherlands, there were cheers of victory, but there was also protest, particularly regarding the issue of equal pay. Now, the US Women’s Team have won four, count them, four World Cups since the tournament started in 1991. During that time though, they’ve been paid significantly less than their male counterparts.

Ed Ayers: Now, the American women’s team is taking the issue of equal pay to federal court. They filed a complaint against the US Soccer Federation, what’s known as the USSF, alleging that they receive about a quarter of what their male counterparts are paid. No matter what happens in the lawsuit, the women’s victory in France has reignited a heated debate about how athletes use sports to protest inequality on and off the field.

Ed Ayers: So on this episode of BackStory, we’re revisiting segments that have explored the issue of sports and equality throughout American history. We’ll look at the famous Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics, and revisit a story from 2018 on how sporting events have opened up discussions about Puerto Rican sovereignty.

Ed Ayers: But first, I want to take you back to the 1920s. Many American women could vote thanks to their long and determined campaign for suffrage. Women were going to college and a booming economy had opened up new and exciting opportunities for them outside of the home, except that is, when it came to sports.

Ed Ayers: And so in 1922, a group of female track and field athletes set out to change that. With limited training and a complete lack of national support, a team of 15 women sailed across the Atlantic to France to participate in the first-ever international track meet for women. Here’s former BackStory producer Kelly Jones with the story.

Kelly Jones: At 21, Lucile Godbold stood just over six feet tall.

Jane Tuttle: I think she probably looked more like her father than she looked like her mother.

Kelly Jones: This is Jane Tuttle, a Librarian at Columbia College in South Carolina. Lucile Godbold wasn’t especially beautiful by 1920 standards, but that didn’t matter; she had a wicked arm.

Jane Tuttle: At a track meet in her senior year, she broke the American record for the shot put, and so she was invited in May to take part in the tryouts for the first international track meet for women that was going to Paris in August.

Kelly Jones: That track meet was a scheme designed by the French to establish women’s track and field as an official Olympic event. In the early ’20s, there were no standard Olympic sports for women. Some years, there would be golf or tennis, others there might be swimming or archery. There weren’t any track and field events.

Kelly Jones: At home, the American Physical Education Association, the APEA, discouraged women from track and field because they believe that lots of running and jumping could knock women’s reproductive systems out of whack, making them unable to fulfill their primary social role as mothers. Competitive sports were thought to be too intense for educated ladies.

Jane Tuttle: They thought emotionally, it was very tough on women to lose, and if you were in the elite of society who were actually going to college, track and field was not something that you needed to to get involved in.

Kelly Jones: But Dr. Harry Eaton Stewart, an American physiotherapist, didn’t buy those claims. He wanted to prove the APEA wrong. He asked for help from a group called the Amateur Athletic Union who governed sports outside of schools, but they refused him. So, he held his own tryouts and his athletes organized bake sales to fund the trip.

Kelly Jones: On August 1, 1922 Lucile Godbold and 14 other women set sail for Paris

Jane Tuttle: This is Lucile talking about the meet: “Just before it began, each team marched around the field with one member carrying her nation’s flag. I was chosen to carry old glory, and believe me, I was proud to lead that American team around the track.”

Kelly Jones: Five teams competed that day: Great Britain, France, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, and the American underdogs.

Kelly Jones: Though the other teams had all competed internationally before, the women on the US team had hardly any practice competing at home. In front of a crowd of 20,000 people, Lucile Godbold earned six medals in seven events, and set a new world record in shot put, unseating the French champion.

Jane Tuttle: She says, “The announcer took me around and introduced me to all those thousands of people in French. He might’ve been cussing me out for all I know, but as everybody clapped, I reckoned it was all okay. I can see those Americans yelling now. They open their mouths so wide, I was scared to death; I feared the sun would warp their ribs or blister their tonsils.”

Kelly Jones: The US team came in second overall, losing only to Great Britain. The team’s successes should have convinced the APEA that women could achieve more than society had planned for them, and that women handle competition.

Jane Tuttle: But actually, it went in the opposite direction.

Jane Tuttle: The fiscal education directors sort of dug in their heels even more. A lot of high schools and colleges suspended their track and field programs, and they sort of set out to put and end to track and field.

Kelly Jones: The team’s successes in Paris did prove their point to the AAU, the group that governed sports outside of schools, who began to fund women’s track and field teams the very next year. That paved the way for athletic superstars like Babe Didrikson and Stella Walsh in the ’30s and ’40s to rise to fame without the help of college programs.

Kelly Jones: And the French scheme eventually worked. Six years after the meet in Paris, five track and field events for women were included in the Olympics in Amsterdam.

Kelly Jones: But what should have been a no-brainer was a struggle. Instead of catapulting American women into the international sports arena, participating in the first international track meet for women was a small hop, step, and jump on the road to equal play.

Ed Ayers: That was former BackStory producer Kelly Jones. You also heard from Jane Tuttle, a librarian at Columbia College in South Carolina.

Independence through Sport?

Puerto Rico may be a territory of the United States, but on the international sports field they are anything but. Brian sits down with historian Antonio Sotomayor to talk about how sports sovereignty allows Puerto Rico to compete under its own flag, while also continuing the colonial relationship with the U.S.

Music:

Nature Kid by Podington Bear
Lope and Shimmer by Podington Bear

Puerto Rico; U.S. Terrorities; basketball; competition

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Ed Ayers: Next up, I want to take you back to 2004. It’s summertime and the Olympics have come home to Athens, Greece. The American men’s basketball team, known as the Dream Team, was stacked with talent. NBA superstars like Allen Iverson and LeBron James were there, and the US was looking to defend its title as the gold medal champions of men’s basketball.

Ed Ayers: Then, they played Puerto Rico.

Brian Balogh: South Florida Sun Sentinel, August 18, 2004.

Brian Balogh: “Puerto Rico stunned the United States 92 to 73 in the opening game of the Olympic Men’s Basketball Tournament. The loss was a huge blow to whatever basketball ego Uncle Sam has left. People knew the world was catching up to the United States. Now, one of its own territories has zoomed past.”

Ed Ayers: Last year, Brian spoke to scholar Antonio Sotomayor about the historic upset. Here they are, along with some help from Nathan and me, recounting the game and what it meant for Puerto Ricans.

Antonio S.: We organized a party at the graduate apartments.

Brian Balogh:

Antonio S.: And everybody brought food from their countries, and we were playing, and then the game started, and a lot of attention. Of course, the Mexicans were rooting with us for Puerto Rico, and we were there, and you know, all of a sudden, basket and basket and steal, and they were missing, we were making the shots, and we were up by 20-something points at the end of the half.

Ed Ayers: Oh my goodness!

Antonio S.: It was crazy. There was a lot of jumping, screaming. There was hugging, there was some crying, pulling hairs even. It was just an unbelievable scene. At the end of the game, we were extremely tired, exhausted, the energy, but exhilarated at the same time.

Ed Ayers: Wow. That’s inspiring stuff. It almost makes me want to lace up my old basketball shoes and get back out on the court.

Brian Balogh: That’s a lot of laces, Ed, because as I recall, you were still wearing high-tops. At any rate-

Ed Ayers: That’s true.

Brian Balogh: I wouldn’t advise it. These were highly trained athletes representing their countries on the world stage.

Nathan Connolly: Now wait a minute, I just want to get this straight. Now, Puerto Rico, a territory of the US, could compete against the United States?

Brian Balogh: I don’t blame you for being confused Nathan, but you’re correct. It’s all down to this thing called sports sovereignty. It dates back to 1948 when Puerto Rico was first invited to participate in the Olympics by the International Olympic Committee. The invitation was part of a larger effort to express anti-colonial sentiment and expand the Olympic movement. Puerto Rico has competed internationally as an independent nation ever since, but before 1948, that wasn’t yet the case.

Antonio S.: Early on in the 1930s when they started participating in the Central American Caribbean Games, the delegation was composed of Spanish Caribbean peoples with a history of plantation society, with a history of the Spanish empire economy, mainly Catholic society. They brought those things to these events, but they did it back in the 1930s holding the US flag, not the Puerto Rican flag.

Antonio S.: So technically, the delegation was a United States delegation at the Central American Caribbean Games where the US officially doesn’t play because they’re not in the Caribbean, but they did have that possession, that territory, and they send to these games as a way to be present.

Antonio S.: So, Puerto Rico’s first incursion into the Olympic movement was not necessarily out of an intrinsic motivation like, “Oh, we need to participate, we have to get there.” No. There were multiple instances where Puerto Ricans themselves didn’t want to participate, and wanted to participate with the US.

Brian Balogh: Well, you know that the Olympic stage is a very big one. Are there any examples of Puerto Ricans using that stage to enhance political agendas?

Antonio S.: The best example is the 1966 Central American and Caribbean Games held in San Juan. And at that time, 1966, you had in Puerto Rico around, the sources vary, 18,000, 20,000, 26,000 Cuban exiles living in Puerto Rico. Very tied close to the political leadership, and who were putting pressure to the organizers of the games to not invite the Cubans because, of course for them, Cubans were war dictators, Castro was a dictator, it was a dictatorship. And You bring, let’s say, 200 Cuban athletes, which back then were claimed to be an export of the Cuban revolution and soldiers of the revolution, the athletic soldiers of the revolution.

Antonio S.: So, the Puerto Rican leadership, the political leadership, didn’t ask for the visas for the Cuban government, so that they said, “We are not going to invite the Cuban delegation to these games.”

Antonio S.: Now, the problem is that according to the IOC’s rules, you have to invite every delegation in the region for these games, for this regional games. Otherwise, you are in risk of losing the right to host those games because then you’re not following the principles of Olympism. Everybody should get together and celebrate these things. So it was a very tense few months where the Cubans were attacking both the Puerto Rican government and the US government of mixing politics and sport. Everybody was calling everybody for mixing politics and sport.

Antonio S.: So what happened then, at the end, is that the US says, “Okay, we’re gonna issue the visas because Puerto Rico is part of the US and if we don’t allow those visas, then the IOC can then say, ‘Well no, you are going against the Olympics’ rules US, so you are not allowed to host anymore Olympic Games.'” Right there, even though Puerto Rico had Olympic sovereignty, and supposedly an autonomous government, they US imposed the permission and the visas to the Cubans to go to the island.

Brian Balogh: It sounds like their one hand is shaped as a fist and the other is a handshake. It sounds like one step forward, two steps back in terms of real independence.

Antonio S.: It’s a true negotiation. They don’t know. It’s not a delegation that is trying to seek independence through sport. It’s not a delegation that is saying, “Hey, we are here. We want independence.” It’s a delegation that is saying, “We are here, we exist as a nation, we are proud of being Puerto Ricans, and we do it being US citizens, by being US citizens, and by having all the benefits of being within the US political system.”

Brian Balogh: So when you step back and look at that strategy, Antonio, would you say that’s been successful?

Antonio S.: Well, it depends on what you consider success. You know, in terms of reproducing the structures of consent to our subordinated political relation or colonialism, it is successful. Puerto Rico’s Olympic delegation allows for the reproduction, allows for the fueling, the nurturing of a national identity, but by doing so as US citizens, by doing so without the need of having an independent republic, you allow for that escape valve of that nationalistic sentiment, and then continue with the political relation, whatever it is.

Antonio S.: And so it’s been successful in those regards, and I say it’s successful in helping to maintain a colonial relation.

Ed Ayers: That was Brian speaking with Antonio Sotomayor. He’s the author of The Sovereign Colony: Olympic Sport, National Identity, And International Politics In Puerto Rico.

Black Power Salute

Brian talks with sociologist Harry Edwards, founder of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, about the iconic moment at the 1968 Olympic Games: when African-American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in silent protest on the winners’ podium.

Music:

Wild Ones by Jahzzar

1948 Summer Olympics; John Carlos; Olympic Games; protest

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Ed Ayers: I want to finish today’s show by looking at one of the most iconic images in American sports history. It’s one that’s been in the news as part of the debate surrounding former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s silent protest during the National Anthem.

Ed Ayers: I’m sure you’ve seen it. The photo is from 1968 and the Summer Olympics held in Mexico City. It features American runners Tommy Smith and John Carlos, who had just won the gold and bronze medals in the 200-meter race. They’re on the victory stand, their medals around their necks, their heads down, and their fists, sheathed in black gloves, held up high to the sky.

Ed Ayers: It was what many recognized at the time as the symbol for Black Power. It was a silent yet powerful protest.

Ed Ayers: The symbolism didn’t stop there. Perched on the victory stand in their stocking feet, Smith and Carlos had abandoned their shoes to represent the poverty afflicting black Americans. Smith donned a black scarf as a nod to black pride, while Carlos unzipped his USA tracksuit revealing a necklace of beads that memorialized victims of lynching. Both men, as well as their fellow medal winner from Australia, wore buttons for an organization called the Olympic Project For Human Rights.

Ed Ayers: Brian spoke to Harry Edwards, who had been a scholarship athlete with Tommy Smith at San Jose State. Edwards returned there to teach in 1968 and he spearheaded the Olympic Project For Human Rights. Here he is talking about Smith and Carlos’s famous act of protest on the victory stand.

Harry Edwards: Well, the immediate result was a tremendous buoying cat calls. There were a lot of a United States citizens at the Games in Mexico City, an easily accessible Olympic Games, and they took tremendous exception at the gesture by Thomas Smith and John Carlos.

Harry Edwards: They were banned from the Olympic Village and then shipped out of Mexico a day and a half later by the United States Olympic Committee. Once they got here, the death threats and so forth began to roll in.

Harry Edwards: I mean, it’s very, very difficult to understand the kind of courage that it took for these two men to do what they did, and there was even some confusion in the African-American community about the appropriateness and so forth of what they did. Many African-Americans assumed that sport was this citadel of interracial harmony and brotherhood, and so when Smith and Carlos began to demonstrate and to protest, not just what was going on in society, but in sport itself, many black Americans did not understand.

Harry Edwards: Of course over the years, as more and more discussion and so forth came on about how black athletes were often used and exploited to project and present one image while black people in this country were living another type of experience, more and more black people came to understand that not only was the gesture that Smith and Carlos did from the Olympic podium appropriate, it was absolutely necessary.

Brian Balogh: I’m curious to know whether what Smith and Carlos did in ’68 differed in any way from what other athletes had done before them.

Harry Edwards: I think we have to understand that every generation of athletes protests within a context of their circumstances.

Harry Edwards: At the turn of the 20th century, African-American athletes received virtually no coverage, much less adulation and applause, for their athletic prowess in this country. They were in a constant struggle for legitimacy. And so it was the international arena that this legitimacy typically was demonstrated, and that was a profound form of protest, whether it was Jesse Owens winning four gold medals in the ’36 Olympics, Joe Lewis winning the Heavyweight Championship.

Harry Edwards: In the immediate post-World War II era, the struggle was for access, fighting for desegregation, becoming involved in a struggle for access. And of course, you saw Jackie Robinson at the Brooklyn Dodgers being really the face of that struggle for access.

Harry Edwards: By the 1960s, the struggle was for dignity and respect and equity of outcomes beyond the sports arena. So every generation’s struggle is different and it’s within the context of the [inaudible 00:22:35]

Brian Balogh: You know, the prominent athletes today who say, “We shouldn’t be mixing sports and political protests, and we definitely shouldn’t be mixing them in huge venues like the World Cup or the Olympics,” in light of your own history, what would you say to those people?

Harry Edwards: We thought the Olympics were not just an appropriate but a preferable form because it is the second most political forum outside of the United Nations itself in the international arena. Also, the Olympics had long been political, not just going back to the Nazi Olympics of 1936, but going back to the racial Olympics in St. Louis in 1904 where there was an effort to demonstrate white superiority over the non-white peoples of the world by literally cataloging, scientifically, the outcomes of races and so forth involving whites who competed against non-white people.

Harry Edwards: So, the games have long been political. George Foreman, who was the Heavyweight Boxing Champion of the 1968 Olympics, walked around the ring waving an American flag, which was a totally political gesture, and no one in the United States Olympic Committee or in the International Olympic movement accused him of engaging in politics when it was crystal clear that that gesture was in response to Smith and Carlos.

Brian Balogh: So celebratory politics is just fine. It’s only the oppositional politics that draws a kind of attention and criticism that Smith and Carlos did.

Harry Edwards: Absolutely. I mean, this notion that somebody told me, “Well, Dr. Edwards, I understand what you were trying to do, but we shouldn’t expose our dirty laundry to the world.”

Harry Edwards: Well, every time someone was lynched, it was on the front pages of newspapers all over the world. When Dr. King was shot, it was on the front pages of newspapers all over the world. That was airing our dirty laundry. And we weren’t protesting America, we were protesting racism and discrimination in America, and demonstrating that we have the freedom and the right to protest for right, which is what America was supposed to be about.

Harry Edwards: They should have been proud to have that on the front pages of newspapers around the world as opposed to the deaths of three civil rights workers trying to register black people to vote in Mississippi, or the pictures of a church that had been bombed where four little black girls were killed while they were praying. They should have been proud to have Smith and Carlos on the front pages instead of that. That was the airing of our dirty laundry as a nation and as a society.

Ed Ayers: That was Brian speaking with Harry Edwards in 2014. Edwards is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He’s written numerous books about African-American athletes, including The Revolt Of The Black Athlete.

Ed Ayers: That’ll do it for us today. Thanks for joining me on this dip into the BackStory archive. There are hundreds of other shows available at our website, BackStoryRadio.org.

Ed Ayers: And you can keep conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. Send us an email to BackStory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Ed Ayers: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, The National Endowment For The Humanities, The Joseph And Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, The Johns Hopkins University, and The Arthur Vining Davis Foundation. Additional support is provided by The Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts and humanities and the environment.

Announcer: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University.

Announcer: BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.