Following Jesse Owens’ spectacular record-breaking four-gold-medal performance at the 1936 Olympics and Joe Louis’s capture of the heavyweight boxing title in 1937, a number of African-American coaches and journalists argued that African-American colleges should increase their financial support of athletics in hopes of producing more athletes who demonstrated the ability of the race.
Typical of those calls were sentiments of James D. Parks, a respected track coach at Lincoln (Pa.) University, who criticized the fact that Black colleges had failed to ever produce an Olympian. He acknowledged the financial restraints of the schools, but decried their lack of tracks and track coaches. Parks concluded that Black colleges “do not seem to realize that the development of even a single Owens or (Ralph) Metcalfe would bring more national and international renown to their institutions than a thousand of their so-called football classics (they( play among themselves.” Parks believed that by training champion athletes, Blacks earned a patriotic reputation and that their failure to do so suggested that African-Americans were unable to produce cable patriotic men.
The call for Black athletes as a form of racial advancement would be issued in various ways throughout the remaining three decades of Jim Crow, as athletes like Jackie Robinson, Althea Gibson, Bill Russell, and Arthur Ashe staked claims as the best in their sports.
But then, as now, the emphasis on athletics as a strategy for racial advancement was controversial. A number of educators and school administrators in the Black community criticized the strategy because it challenged their belief that cultivating the character of the race was the first necessity for Black advancement. In the wake of the failure of Reconstruction, African-American intellectuals from the National Council of Negro Women to Booker T. Washington argued that instilling the value of hard work, morality and character in African Americans, in addition to liberal arts and manual skills, would propel the race to equality.
This traditional African-American uplift belief clashed with an emphasis on athletics as an advancement strategy.
In the late 1930s, this conflict dominated the annual meetings of the mid-Atlantic-based Colored Intercollegiate Athletic Association (CIAA). From its founding in 1912 through the 1970s, the CIAA was the largest sports association of African-American colleges, and Black college administrators, coaches, journalists and public intellectuals regularly attended its annual December meeting.
Speaking at the 1937 conference, Arthur Howe, the president of Hampton Institute, explained to an audience that “training students for participation in professional sports is not a matter of education.” Their contributions and earning potential, he argued, would be temporary, lasting only as long as their athletic careers.
