Legacy of African American Resistance and Activism Through Sport

"In recent years, there has been increased attention garnered towards activism in sport within the United States (U.S.). In 2016, Colin Kaepernick's activist act of taking a knee during the National Anthem before National Football League (NFL) games sparked a nationwide debate on the intersection of sports, race, and politics. Kaepernick's actions were a part of a long lineage of activism in and through sport (Brown, 2020; Bryant, 2018; Cooper, Macaulay, & Rodriguez, 2017; Cooper, Mallery, & Macaulay, 2020; Edwards, 1969, 2016a, 2016b, 2018; Hartmann, 1996, 2009; Henderson, 2013; Miller & Wiggins, 2003; Moore, 2017; Wiggins, 1997, 2004, 2018; Wiggins & Miller, 2003; Zirin, 2009). Prior accounts of African American activism in and through sport has been limited in the following eight areas: a) primarily focused on one type of activism (symbolic protests/boycotts), b) a lack of differentiation between activism and borderline activist actions (e.g., agency, pioneering, and advocacy), c) a lack of emphasis on hybrid resistance, d) a focus on athletes and teams versus sportspersons (a range of individuals connected to sport such as media, scholars, business leaders, community members, etc.) and institutions (i.e., historically Black colleges and universities (HBCU) athletic programs and conferences) more broadly, e) largely focused on one era of prominent athlete activism in the 1960s, f) principally excluded and marginalized the importance of women's role in resistance efforts such as activism for social change, g) primarily focused on activism at the intercollegiate and professional levels with less attention towards youth and interscholastic levels, and h) a lack of theoretically driven analyses of the resistance efforts exhibited by African American sportspersons, teams, groups, organizations, and institutions. As a result, there is need to account for the expansiveness and heterogeneity of African Americans' resistance actions against oppressive forces in a society grounded in the ideology of White racism capitalism (wrc). Instead of exclusively using of the term activism, I use the broader encompassing term of resistance as the focal framework for this text. Resistance is defined as intentional and/or unintentional actions by individuals, groups, organizations, and/or institutions that challenge oppressive systems and ideological hegemony. Using adaptive race- and ethnicity-centric typologies and interdisciplinary theories, the purpose of this book is to offer a critical analysis of African Americans' intra- and inter-generational resistance actions where, when, why, and how sport has been utilized to express their humanity, preserve their cultural heritages, empower themselves and their communities, project political views, and pursue freedom, equality, and justice"--