African American Sports

Isaac Murphy, born enslaved in 1861, still reigns as one of the greatest jockeys in American history. Black jockeys like Murphy were at the top of the most popular sport in America at the end of the nineteenth century. They were internationally famous, the first African American superstar athletes—and with wins in three Kentucky Derbies and countless other prestigious races, Murphy was the greatest of them all.

On the street, every ballplayer has a story. Onaje X. O. Woodbine, a former streetball player who became an all-star Ivy Leaguer, brings the sights and sounds, hopes and dreams of street basketball to life. He shows that big games have a trickster figure and a master of Black talk whose commentary interprets the game for audiences. The beats of hip-hop and reggae make up the soundtrack, and the ballplayers are half men, half heroes, defying the ghetto's limitations with their flights to the basket.

A tale of ambition, victory, love, and sports, 'This Game Thing' grabs your attention from the start. It's a high-quality erotic story with a solid plot. After putting in tons of effort, she reached a respected role. Ashley Davenport, a 33-year-old African American woman with light brown skin, has reached the pinnacle of her career. Back in her college days at Springfield University, she clinched her first national championship, and now she’s a legendary coach for the top NCAA women's college basketball team. No one embodies the concept of 'climbing the ladder' like Ashley. Thus, when the...

Shawn Harrington returned to Marshall High School as an assistant coach years after appearing as a player in the iconic basketball documentary film Hoop Dreams. In January of 2014, Marshall's struggling team was about to improve after the addition of a charismatic but troubled player. Everything changed, however, when two young men opened fired on Harrington's car as he drove his daughter to school. Harrington was struck and paralyzed. The mistaken-identity shooting was followed by a series of events that had a devastating impact on Harrington and Marshall's basketball family.

In Heavyweight, Jordana Moore Saggese examines images of Black heavyweight boxers to map the visual terrain of racist ideology in the United States, paying particular attention to the intersecting discourses of Blackness, masculinity, and sport. Looking closely at the "shadow archive" of portrayals across fine art, vernacular imagery, and public media at the turn of the twentieth century, she demonstrates how the images of boxers reveal the racist stereotypes implicit in them, many of which continue to structure ideas of Black men today.

Love can cross any distance. Including a football field. Tiana Brown is a model student. Meticulous, driven, and hardworking, the last thing she expects when she arrives at the VBU campus for her freshman year, is to be schooled in love. Sure, she doesn’t have a lot of experience in the field, but that’s what college is for, right? She’ll meet new people, go to a party or two, and spend the rest of her time focused on her studies. That’s where she’s wrong. When Tiana meets Quay Thompson, local college football star and heartthrob extraordinaire, any plans she had before fly out ...

In 2016, amid an epidemic of police shootings of African Americans, the celebrated NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick began a series of quiet protests on the field, refusing to stand during the US national anthem. By "taking a knee", Kaepernick bravely joined a long tradition of American athletes making powerful political statements. This time, however, Kaepernick's simple act spread like wildfire throughout American society, becoming the preeminent symbol of resistance to America's persistent racial inequality.

The hardening of racial lines during the first half of the 20th century eliminated almost all African Americans from white organized sports, forcing black athletes to form their own teams, organizations, and events. This separate sporting culture, explored in the 12 essays included here, comprised much more than athletic competition; these “separate games” provided examples of black enterprise and black self-help and showed the importance of agency and the quest for racial uplift in a country fraught with racialist thinking and discrimination.

Discover the inspiring story of Jesse Owens - African American track-and-field athlete and Olympic gold medalist - in this fascinating kids' biography. Jesse Owens is one of the most famous athletes of all time, but he experienced discrimination throughout his athletic career, such as having to stay at a different hotel to his teammates, because of the color of his skin. However, he went on to win an incredible four gold medals at the Berlin 1936 Olympic Games.

Three months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, prizefighters Charles "Sonny" Liston and Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr. stepped into a boxing ring in Miami to dispute the heavyweight championship of the world. Liston was a mob fighter with a criminal past, and rumors were spreading that Clay was not just a noisy, bright-eyed boy blessed with more than his share of the craziness of youth, but a believer in a shadowy cult: the Nation of Islam. Instead of a hero and a villain, boxing had served up two bad guys.

Serena Williams began playing tennis when she was just a child and is now an Olympic champion who's won more Grand Slam singles titles than anyone else. Throughout her life she's battled many things, from life-threatening illnesses and sports injuries, to sexism and racism in the tennis world. Now she's an icon in sport, fashion and activism, an inspiration to every young person who has dared to dream big. Extraordinary Lives is a bold, inclusive biography series shining a light on modern and historical figures.

According to Martin Luther King, Jr., Jackie Robinson was “a sit-inner before the sit-ins, a freedom rider before the Freedom Rides.” According to Hank Aaron, Robinson was a leader of the Black Power movement before there was a Black Power movement. According to his wife, Rachel Robinson, he was always Jack, not Jackie—the diminutive form of his name bestowed on him in college by white sports writers. And throughout his whole life, Jack Robinson was a fighter for justice, an advocate for equality, and an inspiration beyond just baseball.

Former collegiate star, sports agent, and NFL executive Michael Huyghue recounts his journey in professional sports and the challenges that remain for minorities to succeed as front office executives in the multibillion-dollar sports industry. The author's journey as an athlete and lawyer provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse of what goes on behind closed doors in the world of professional sports and collegiate athletic programs. It is also a chronicle not often told of growing up Black and male in white suburban America.

This is the inspiring story of an African American whose athletic and entrepreneurial achievements - from being the first Black quarterback and head coach in the National Football League to founding one of the first all-Black investment securities companies - were equaled by his courage in confronting racial barriers.

Links the history of race relations to the history of basketball by reviewing the era of the first Black teams, the first integration of teams, and the innovations that Black players have brought to the game.

From her start playing paddle tennis on the streets of Harlem as a young teenager to her eleven Grand Slam tennis wins to her professional golf career, Althea Gibson became the most famous Black sportswoman of the mid-twentieth century. In her unprecedented athletic career, she was the first African American to win titles at the French Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open. In this first full-scale biography, Ashley Brown narrates the public career and private struggles of Althea Gibson (1927–2003).

Emilia Cruz has a crush on her best friend, Drake Johnson. They’ve been friends for over fifteen years, and through that time, Emilia always struggled to find a way to explain how she truly felt about Drake, until she learns that she might lose a chance to express her feelings for him when he takes a job in London. To keep Drake in her life, she challenges him to a race. If she wins, he stays, if he wins, he leaves. With the rules set, can she win the race for her chance at love? Running for Love is a short interracial romance story. It is only 2,800 words.

Tackling the Everyday shows how college football particularly harms the young Black men who are overrepresented on gridirons across the country. Although coaches and universities constantly invoke the misleading "football family" narrative, this book describes how a brotherhood among Black players operates alongside their caring mothers, who support them on and off the field. With a Black feminist approach—one that highlights often-overlooked voices—Canada exposes how race, gender, kinship, and care shape the lives of the young athletes who shoulder America's favorite game.

For nearly 15 years NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture has been a leading scholarly journal of baseball history. Covering the cultural and historical implications of America’s national pastime, NINE has explored baseball from the earliest matches and little-known players of the 1800s to the modern billion-dollar industry and its superstars of today. Here, gathered for the first time, are the best essays from NINE that center on the complex and multifaceted topic of African Americans in baseball.

As star players for the 1955 World Champion Brooklyn Dodgers, and prior to that as the first black players to be candidates to break professional baseball's color barrier, Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella would seem to be natural allies. But the two men were divided by a rivalry going far beyond the personality differences and petty jealousies of competitive teammates. Behind the bitterness were deep and differing beliefs about the fight for civil rights.