BEYOND THE BLACK POWER SALUTE

A scholarly study of Black athletes’ protests in the 1960s and ’70s and their complex legacy.

Casual sports fans are likely familiar with Muhammad Ali’s activism and how track stars Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised Black Power fists on the medal podium at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. History professor Kaliss expands on those moments and explores how they were part of a larger effort among Black athletes and women to improve their status during the era, both within their sports and American society. A constant challenge among those protesters, the author shows, was determining how much to work with the system and how much to push against it. For instance, the Black Economic Union, led by star NFL running back Jim Brown from 1966 to 1973, provided financial support for individual Black businesses but paid little attention to systemic racism and ultimately fizzled. In 1969, 14 Black football players at the University of Wyoming were dismissed because of their work pressing for broader change. (The school formally apologized for its actions in 2019.) Forward movement, Kaliss observes, could only be achieved via half-measures—Billie Jean King, for instance, could only win better pay for women tennis pros by softening feminist rhetoric (and partnering with cigarette brand Virginia Slims). The tension between competing visions of progress played out vividly in Ali’s first championship bout with Joe Frazier, where, Kaliss writes, the two became proxies for different ideas of Black manhood and social protest. “Racial politics,” writes the author, “lay at the heart of the impassioned responses to the fight.” The text is well researched and engaging for an academic book. Indeed, a chapter on the ABA, a street-wise counterweight to the stuffier NBA, and its role as a precursor to the hip-hop era, deserves expansion into its own book.

Valuable background reading for anyone interested in sports activism.