While we all develop an increasingly intimate relationship with the dream each day of our lives, there has always been a significant cost paid to pursue and defend it. The American dream has never been free. The debts paid for some to realize their imagination of the dream has come at the price of exploiting black labor and dehumanizing black bodies.1 The debts paid to pass the dream from one generation to the next has been spent in efforts and energies to inscribe and normalize black oppression as part of the disguised privileges of whiteness. The material costs of financing white flight and the marginalizing displacement of black bodies from defined and refined white spaces in order to manufacture ideas of happiness and comfort have heralded the dream. The dream has come at the cost of tracking young black youth out of underfunded and under-resourced schools into a dysfunctional and failing criminal justice system. The cost of the dream has been to invest in the subtle transformation of every black body into a likely statistical, market-driven product of their environment. And when one of these statics, formerly known as a black child, finds their way out the climate and conditions for which the dream has created, we audaciously label them, the American dream.
Like Super Bowl XLI, led by two black coaches, the black athlete is a manifestation of the dream. The costs paid to realize the dream of MLK as well as the dream of those that systematically subjugate black generations, past and present, has constructed the black athlete and their experiences frequently labeled as the American Dream. They are a paradoxical figure through which radiates the complex fragility of the dream. But it is this dream that lives on as a perpetual paradox for the black athlete. To make sense of the black athlete in the twenty-first century requires us to recognize the paradox of the dream that continuously bounds that which it liberates.
A Struggle Not Ours Alone
The unrelenting saga of black struggle has been the central source of deep thought for the black intellectual. This saga has, likewise, been ink for the black poet, the sacred scripture of prophetic sermons for the black pastor, and the resolve of the black athlete. This saga is the bookshelf of stimulation for the black educator, the lungs of the black liberator, and the womb of the black mother. It too, even fills the footprints of the black father. And if it takes such a village as this to raise a child, then, as well, the black struggle is the village of black sons and daughters. But we cannot lose sight of the entirety of truth regarding the saga of black struggle; that it is not ours alone.
The brilliant writings of American literary giant, James Baldwin, remind us that “the story of the Negro in America is the story of America—or, more precisely, it is the story of Americans” (Baldwin, 1955/2012, pp. 25). In the last chapter of his book, Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin shares a foretelling story of his visits to a small, remote village in the higher elevations of Switzerland. Despite his multiple stays in this village, his name well-known to the locals and that he is staying with a woman whose son he has befriended, he is forced to grapple with feelings of being a stranger. He uses this metaphor of the stranger to extrapolate a profound analysis of being black in America and the struggle for definition of black identity within the context of our historic saga burdened by race. Nonetheless, Baldwin’s notes as a “stranger in the village” is a story of how black struggle is, moreover, a struggle for how our white counterparts must inescapably wrestle with and negotiate, even if behind the curtains of naiveté, their own humanity, identities, privileges, rationalizations of power, and moral reckoning; it too is their inheritance of the tears sold generations ago in Jamestown.
Black pursuits of social mobility and liberation have been long sought after through pathways of education, as well as sport, to advance our realizations of a life on the mountaintop unacquainted to the black struggle. Education has certainly been the cornerstone of black liberation to yield us from the depths of slavery. To be educated was a treasured privilege that was often forbidden to the enslaved African. It was not by accident that enslaved Africans and their many decedents were categorically excluded from the rights and privileges of reading, writing, and a robust education. Historians have long revealed and offered extensive evidence that, in days of slavery, most white Americans were principally opposed to the education of blacks with sometimes few better reasons than simply believing it unnecessarily (Brown & Davis, 2001). Such opposition was rooted in a belief and perverted fear that educating blacks could undermine not only the American social order, for which whites were supremely beneficiary too, yet also soon dismantle the viability of an economic engine on the backs of black labor (Aptheker, 1969; Ogbu, 1978). Succeeding the American civil war was a kinetic energy by way of constitutional amendments and federal legislation. These policy efforts were set in motion to erect a social contract that might tenably reconcile a nation from hundreds of years of racial tyranny that both institutionally and systematically deprived black persons of their humanity. But the unremitting, systemic efforts of a white antebellum society to categorically preclude and exclude blacks from the benefits of education did not completely vanish with the penning of reconciliatory constitutional amendments (i.e., thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth) and federal legislation (e.g., Emancipation Proclamation) in the aftermath of the American civil war.
While there were a handful of institutions of higher education that existed for black students prior to Emancipation, it was not until exertions of America’s social contract with black Americans that spawned sizeable investments and state headship to promote an educated citizenry, not excluding blacks (Murtadha & Watts, 2005; Ogbu, 1978; Watson, 2001).2 This era of American Reconstruction and ideological shifts regarding race, most particularly out of a post-civil war Congress, kindled a blossoming of black colleges across the nation, including southern states.3 But just as the story of America is that of our black struggle, American Reconstruction, in its brevity, would soon be victim to the deep-seated racism that had a stronghold on the maturation of our nation. The majority of colleges founded out of the funding provided by the First Morrill Act of 1862 enrolled white students exclusively.4 Concurrently, an organized resurgence of white supremacist beliefs and white resistance would eventually transport the nation from an era of Reconstruction to era subjected to Jim Crow laws. Thus, while federal law attempted to substantiate a new social contract, the spread of Jim Crow was not only undermining constitutional amendments, specifically the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments, yet also reinstating, for whites, a more agreeable social arrangement that distinguished the American citizenry along racial lines.
In the year of 1890, a pathway for public higher education for blacks was galvanized by the passage of the Second Morrill Act. This legislation prohibited federal funds to states that denied blacks admission to tax-supported colleges or otherwise refused to provide “separate but equal” facilities for blacks and whites (Redd, 1998; Watson, 2001). In simultaneous fashion, the Second Morrill Act of 1890 produced the promising establishment of black land-grant institutions in seventeen of nineteen southern states in addition to cementing sanctioned segregation of higher education beneath an umbrella principle of separate, but equal. I offer this historic backdrop, not superfluously, but to contextualize the black struggle to access educational privileges while perpetually confronted with systemic forces committed to equating black with being a stranger in the village, otherwise known as the democratic experiment of America. As the country purged its efforts to embolden and enfranchise blacks during Reconstruction, it shriveled beneath the social pressures and artificial race hate of Jim Crow. Evident, as such, was a cruel realism that Jim Crow’s torment manifested in sport alongside black education.
What the black college, the black teacher, and the black student of the nineteenth century have in common with black athlete pioneers, is that they all cannot fully be comprehended without a deep understanding of the obstinate struggle of their day. It is, without question, in the face of their struggle they were audaciously courageous in their response. The presence of the black athlete, from the period of Reconstruction to the late nineteenth century, could be found at the forefront of advances in American culture through sport. While Reconstruction gave rise to the impetus of black enfranchisement