Race and Sport: The Struggle for Equality on and off the Field.

Race and Sport: The Struggle for Equality on and off the Field. Edited by Charles K. Ross. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, c. 2004. Pp. xiv, 232. Paper, $22.00, ISBN 1-57806-897-5; cloth, $46.00, ISBN 1-57806-657-3.)

This collection of eight essays is derived from the 2002 annual Porter L. Fortune Jr. History Symposium at the University of Mississippi. Five of the contributions explore historical topics concerning African Americans and sports, while three focus mainly on related contemporary issues. Specific topics covered include the struggle of black football star Fritz Pollard against discrimination, boxer Sugar Ray Robinson's business career as a model for black entrepreneurship, women's basketball at black colleges, segregation in professional baseball's spring training, the pursuit of racial reform through sports, the exportation of American sports to East Asia, and current challenges confronting the black college athlete.

Probably the most valuable essays for historians are those by Michael E. Lomax and Patrick B. Miller. Lomax examines the "separate-and-unequal" treatment of African American and Latino baseball players during spring training in Florida from 1946 to 1961 (p. 59). Although the outlines of Lomax's story are generally known, he makes a valuable contribution by comparing the experiences of Latinos with those of black ballplayers, thereby taking readers beyond the traditional black-white paradigm in sports. In a thoughtful essay, Miller introduces the concept of "muscular assimilationism" to explain how African American reformers and advocates of racial uplift saw the elimination of discrimination in sports as a pivotal battle in the larger struggle to win equal opportunity in American economic and political life (p. 148). Black reformers believed that if African Americans were permitted to display their talent on the allegedly level playing fields of sports, they would demonstrate their character and "fitness" and earn "entry [in]to the social mainstream" (pp. 157, 167). However, Miller cautions that the impressive gains made by black athletes in recent decades have not produced full inclusion, thereby demonstrating "that the principal sites of racial change lay beyond the playing fields" (p. 174).

Two essays in the volume deal with neglected aspects of American sports. Rita Liberti analyzes the role of sports for women at black colleges in the 1930s and 1940s. Unlike white colleges, black colleges embraced a broad view of preparation for adult womanhood that included competitive athletics for their female students. At such schools, "basketball was a game and a tool of a larger educational strategy" (p. 54). Educators believed that student athletes would learn valuable individual lessons from team sports, but they always linked individual advancement to community responsibilities. In the book's only essay that examines athletic developments outside the United States, Gerald R. Gems surveys the introduction of American sports, especially baseball, into China, Japan, and the Philippines. Protestant missionaries and other Americans hoped that these transplanted athletic activities would help westernize and modernize Asian cultures. Although Asians did embrace many American sports, they modified the values associated with them to serve their own agenda. According to Gems, Asians redesigned American sports to promote selected indigenous cultural traditions, encourage strong nationalist sentiments, and resist cultural domination by foreigners. Finally, essays by Earl Smith and by C. Keith Harrison and Alicia Valdez warn against the overemphasis placed on sports success today by many African Americans and suggest new strategies to promote academic achievement by black student-athletes.

The quality and cohesiveness of the eight essays contained in this book vary somewhat. Nonetheless, they collectively remind us that sports have usually reflected the values of the larger society and that the historical struggles of African American athletes are not yet finished.

CHARLES U. MARTIN

University of Texas at El Paso