What Ever Happened to the Conscientious Black Athlete?And is the Black community expecting too much from today's sports stars?
By Ronald Roach

Charles Thomas and Terrence Jason Welton came of age in the Michael Jordan era. As NCAA Division I-A basketball players during the 2001-02 season and in previous years, Thomas and Welton reached a pinnacle of athletic success that tens of thousands compete for and only a select few thousand ever attain from year to year. 
The two Arthur Ashe Jr. sports scholar nominees, one a senior at the University of Notre Dame and the other a senior at Drake University in Iowa, believe themselves fortunate to have come along as youngsters when Jordan reigned as basketball's most dominant player.
  "Jordan's been one of my role models," says Welton, who hopes to play professional basketball overseas and plans to be a sports agent.
Thanks to Jordan, academically gifted and talented basketball players, such as Thomas and Welton, readily see themselves as potentially successful in the corporate world because stars like Jordan have had tremendous success in making themselves acceptable to and marketable by corporate America.
While admiration for Jordan is a given for many young athletes who dream of stardom as well as upper middle-class success, the men recently have come to learn and think about previous generations of Black athletes, such as baseball's Jackie Robinson, basketball's Bill Russell and boxing's Muhammad Ali, in a manner that differs from the way more recent stars are regarded. Though Jordan gets high marks for his athletic dominance, charisma and professionalism, earlier athletes are seen as heroes as much for their social and political accomplishments as their athletic prowess.
"Those guys were trailblazers. They paved the way for Black athletes," Thomas says.
The status of Black athletes in American sports represents a vitally important social concern for many Americans, particularly African Americans who see sports as a barometer for social acceptance and Black participation in American society. In academia, sports sociologists, sports historians and others also pay serious attention to the position of Black athletes and study the evolving status of Blacks in American and international sports.
Scholars say one of the most persistent issues generating debate in academia, the media and among the public is how Black athletes use their public prominence to voice social and political concerns of interest to the Black community. From the barbershops to newsrooms to college classrooms, the issue of Black prominence in sports and social activism gets aired frequently, according to observers. 
"I don't know how many times I hear people ask why today's Black athletes don't speak out and use their clout more," says Dr. Jeffrey Sammons, a historian at New York University who has written extensively about race and sports.
In contemporary times, questions about activism by Black sports stars often center on Michael Jordan and on golf phenomenon Tiger Woods. The unprecedented success of these men in their respective sport have made them natural targets for high social expectations. It is these same expectations that previous generations of Black athletes strove to meet. And in a number of circumstances, Black athletes, using their sports fame, took leading roles in social issue protest, such as opposing the Vietnam War and apartheid in South Africa.
"Those select few showed that athletes could make a serious (political) contribution," says Dr. Richard Lapchick, executive director of the National Consortium for Academics and Sports in Orlando, Fla., and director of the sports management and business program at the University of Central Florida.