“The effects of racial terror perpetrated over hundreds of years don’t disappear simply because America wills them to. … They disappear with national reckoning, with an examination of our cultural norms and power structures, with dismantling and rebuilding our institutions. … In 1969 Black and Brown folks were fighting against social injustices that are no less pervasive today, the mode of delivery has just changed.”
– Basketball icon and civil rights activist Bill Russell, The Players’ Tribune, September 14, 2020
America, turning 250 years old on Saturday, has yet to morally come to terms with its sordid history of dehumanizing Black people. The unresolved affliction of the unfathomably baneful economic system of chattel slavery and calamitous Jim Crow laws remain prevalent in every strand of America society as the nation prepares to celebrate the formal adoption of The Declaration of Independence, consummated on July 4, 1776.
Sports has been a reflector, at once a measure of progress and repression. A transporter of opportunity, and paradoxically an illusory hope of acceptance and equality. A distortive mask that fleetingly conceals the deep scars of racism lashed into the bodies of African slaves and carved into the collective psyche of their progeny.
Sports has served as a temporary relief from the centuries of ongoing pain and suffering of the Black masses in America, and a reminder of the unspeakable acts of terror and oppression committed against those of the African diaspora. Sports is the Sander Parallelogram, a psychological study of perception versus reality.
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Bill Russell, left, speaks with boxer Muhammad Ali during a news conference of top African American athletes in support of Ali’s refusal to fight in Vietnam on June 4, 1967, in Cleveland. Credit:(Tony Tomsic via AP) -
Jackie Robinson, posing at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn in 1947, broke baseball’s color barrier. Credit: (AP Photo/John Rooney, File)
In 1875, the same year Oliver Lewis, a 19-year-old Black jockey, won the inaugural Kentucky Derby riding the legendary thoroughbred Aristides, becoming one of the country’s first Black sports heroes, the infamous Clinton Riot, also referred to as the Clinton Massacre, occurred in Clinton, Mississippi.
Dozens of Black people were killed at a Republican Party rally and its aftermath by organized white Democratic insurgents seeking to wrest the growing political power of the numerous free Blacks in Clinton. The Clinton Massacre was a catalyst of and through line to the undoing of Reconstruction and the establishment of the nation’s Jim Crow laws.
The crippling physical and socioeconomic harm of the notorious Springfield (Illinois) Race Riot of August 14, 1908 wasn’t placated by Jack Johnson becoming one of the most famous — and despised by countless whites — men in the world by defeating Canadian Tommy Burns four months later in Sydney, Australia, on December 26, making history as the first Black world heavyweight champion.
When Jackie Robinson, who served as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army during WWII, broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier on April 15, 1947 at Ebbets Field, starting at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers, a majority of the 1.2 million Blacks that soldiers that served in segregated WWII units were being denied the benefits of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly known as the GI Bill, which was the foundation of the generational wealth created by white veterans of The Greatest Generation, or the GI Generation, that exits today in the control of their children and grandchildren.
Muhammad Ali’s refusal to be inducted into the U.S. Army on April 28, 1967 during the Vietnam War on the basis of his religious beliefs garnered worldwide attention that inspired and emboldened millions of people to resist America’s expansive political and cultural campaigns through military action under the banner of freedom and democracy while it’s own Black citizens were being brutalized by law enforcement and targets of covert government operations such as the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) to undermine and dismantle civil rights and Black liberation organizations.
The summer of 1967 was aptly characterized as the long, hot summer of 1967 as protests and violent uprisings in over 150 cities across America primarily resulting from police brutality against Black citizens and the deleterious socioeconomic gap between Blacks and whites illuminated the injustices and inhumane treatment of those of African descent for the world to witness.
“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville (Ali’s home city) are treated like dogs and denied human rights?” Ali fearlessly argued.
“No, I’m not going 10,000 miles from from home to help murder and burn another poor nation osimply to continue the domination of white slave masters of darker people the world over. … So, I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.”
Ali’s unwavering stance had severe personal consequences. He was convicted of draft evasion, sentenced to five years in prison, stripped of the world heavyweight title, and banned from boxing as his license was revoked for more than three years. Ali did not serve prison time as his case was on appeal and eventually overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in June of 1971 by a unanimous 8-0 decision in the landmark Clay v. United States case.
The origins of America’s original sin of slavery is Point Comfort, Virginia, located on the Southern tip of the Virginia peninsula. The name belies its heinousness as Point Comfort was not a place of amenity for the 20 to 30 (an exact number has never been verified) Africans who arrived as slaves at the British colony on the English ship White Lion in late August of 1619.
Their fateful journey had begun in present day Angola on the San Juan Bautista before the Portuguese slave ship was intercepted in the Gulf of Mexico by the English privateers (privately owned armed ships) White Lion and Treasure. About 60 of the roughly 350 slaves on board the San Juan Bautista were forcibly taken by the crews of the White Lion and Treasure. They were the first documented enslaved Africans to touch the shores of this country.
Their spirit is still crying out for America to righteously make amends.
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