The economic infrastructure of Jim Crow required a widespread and systemic exploitation of black agricultural labor. Additionally, the political climate of Jim Crow advocated for racial segregation and discrimination to support the racially exploitive economy, in order to legitimize and actualize cultural beliefs of white supremacy, as well as protect perceived properties of whiteness (e.g. white family assemblies, women, communities, shared cultural values). The dominant racially motivated cultural belief that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites was paradoxically buttressed by the successes of several elite black athletes during this time. Biological race theories furnished by Jim Crow ideology gave way to the belief that black athletic successes were evolutionary derivatives of blacks exhibiting a closer ancestral relationship to beasts, more so than human. Thus, narratives of black athletic successes were often used to reinforce ideas of white intellectual superiority.
Racial theories used to frame and rationalize athletic performances of African American athletes, while maintaining ideas of white supremacy (i.e., white intellectual superiority) were introduced in the latter nineteenth century and carried over to the twentieth century (Wiggins, 1989, 2007). Members of scientific communities, from around the world, took great interest in elite African American athletes such as cyclist, Major Marshal Taylor to test the racial stereotypes paraded as scientific evidence of the period. Jack Johnson, was once again, a target of the biology debates focused on racial difference concerning his physiological build and psychological dispositions. Due to racial segregation and its impact on sport, the volume of this debate was less audible in the latter part of the first couple decades of the twentieth century. That was, until the world-class talent of Jesse Owens and several other elite black track athletes at the 1932 Olympic Games sparked a resurgence of public and scholarly fascinations with black athleticism, including prominent social scientists of the decade.1 Proclamations made in support of black athletic superiority attracted many critiques to dismantle the oversimplified race-based logic neglecting any accounts for more complex understandings of the phenomena. Despite a history of strong critiques of biological racism peddled as scientific research to justify the successes of black athletes, the debate over black athletic superiority represents a persisting relic of Jim Crow racist ideology lingering among mainstream beliefs today.
Erosion of Jim Crow
How American society has comprehended racism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the present day has been all but stagnant. While unenlightened narratives of black athlete superiority as consequence of biology experienced periodic resurgences across the decades and often in harmony with major athletic events such as the Olympic Games, American attitudes concerning race, specifically Jim Crow ideology, underwent a progressive mid-century shift. A myriad of explanations has been proposed to rationalize the trending decline of Jim Crow racism. Such linkages in the shifting of American twentieth mid-century racial attitudes have been hypothesized by intergroup contact, white guilt, and the evolution of white ambivalence toward race and racial inequities (Alport, 1954, Bobo et al., 1996, Stouffer, 1949; Myrdal, 1944). A historical account of sequential events alongside social scientific and psycho-analysis of American attitudes and behaviors offers a robust illustration of why and how the departure from Jim Crow racism transpired. To take stock in the historical events, both socio-politically and socio-culturally, and understanding how they collectively played a role in igniting, as well as facilitating a more progressive shift of the nation’s racial conscious departing from and eroding Jim Crow racism is critical to gaining greater perspective of American comprehensions of racism.
By the early 1940s, America was deeply engrossed rapid escalations of WWII. Despite the blitz of racial harmony propaganda efforts on the home front for the sake of America’s presence in the war, of which significantly leveraged the status and imagery of the champion boxer, Joe Louis, committing himself to military service, Jim Crow was well established at home and abroad (see Burns, Burns, & McMahon, 2016). Black Americans, by volunteering or through the military’s draft, accounted for more than a million enlisted soldiers over the course of WWII. Consequently, American military operations were executed in parallel to its undertaking as a social relations laboratory, most particularly on the frontlines of race (Cripps & Culbert, 1979). In 1942, the Pittsburg Courier, holding rank as the mostly widely read black newspaper at the time, published a letter to the editor from James G. Thompson that bid a galvanizing effort around American patriotism across races while also fighting against racial discrimination on American soil. The letter outlined a vision for the Double V Campaign calling specifically for a victory at home and abroad for black Americans. Simultaneously, the “Great Migration” of black Americans from southern states to the north and west was well underway and gaining considerable momentum (Tolnay, 2003). Several factors such as economic deprivation, political subjugation, racial violence, and undesirable educational opportunities across the south have long been identified as a melding of catalysts for one of the greatest demographic transferences in U.S. history. The need for black American labor was growing in the industrial north since WWI. But the hopeful prospects of northern urban life did little to deliver absolute refuge from black suffrage in southern states. Accompanying the migrant convoy to urban settings across the north was the persistence of racism and the delineations of housing and community living set by racial segregation and concentrated poverty. The combination of condensed economic strains and an escalating migrant population whose housing options and general mobility were systematically inhibited by northern Jim Crow racism formulated a disparaging experience uniquely impacting black Americans (Tolnay).
WWII, to a certain degree, initiated a watershed moment in history where the polity of American society experienced shifting racial attitudes and thus an incremental, yet arguably a progressive, complex shift in its racial consciousness. And the tone and tenor of the discourse regarding racial progress continued its shift by the mid-1940s with the ambitious efforts of the Double V campaign as well as evidence by baseball’s greatest experiment—the desegregation of America’s most hallowed sport. On the basis of racial justice, WWII revealed significant contradictions between American rhetoric and the maltreatment of black Americans serving in the war and those living in the states. However, racial justice reform efforts of the Double V campaign began to wane in 1945. Although the campaign germinated national attention and racial justice dialog, the symbolism of shifting the focus from a duality of issues of the Double V campaign to a predominate concern for military victory abroad mirrored the material climate of a nation’s reluctance to renounce institutional endorsements of Jim Crow. The continual reluctance to dismantle Jim Crow as WWII neared its end and as black soldiers returned home to racial discrimination and racial violence contributed to a deepening cynicism toward racial injustices targeting black communities.
Paul Robeson ascended as a symbol of resistance inspired by the growing contempt. In his earlier years, he had earned top debate and oratory honors, collected fifteen varsity letters in four sports, and was elected Phi Beta Kappa as well as class valedictorian while attending Rutgers. He is revered as an early black athlete pioneer in the sport of American football. After his collegiate years, he went on to amass a stellar professional career as a singer and actor by the late 1940s. But his heightened popularity, was further bolstered and complicated by the regularity of his public speeches and activities as a civil rights activist. Along with his support of Pan-Africanism, participation in anti-Nazi demonstrations and multiple humanitarian efforts, Robeson steadily grew disenchanted and infuriated by the contradictory dilemmas of WWII facing black Americans and black soldiers, alike. Backed by his global status and platform granted before the Partisans of Peace at the World Peace Congress in Paris in 1949, the Associated Press reported that Robeson said in a speech:
It is unthinkable that American Negroes would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generation against a country [the Soviet Union] which in one generation