Two black athletes dominated American sports in the years immediately prior to World War II: Jesse Owens in track and field and Joe Louis in boxing. Owens’s four gold medals in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, Germany, were seen as a triumph for American democracy over Nazism, as was Louis’s defeat of German boxer Max Schmeling in their second heavyweight fight in 1938 (see African Americans and the Olympics).
Owens and Louis made their statements for racial equality by proving themselves as athletes, but others turned to more direct forms of protest. Boxing great Henry Armstrong hammered away at discrimination in the 1930s and 1940s by refusing to fight in segregated arenas. Students at New York University launched a protest in 1940 against racial discrimination in collegiate athletics that gained national recognition and support to eradicate the color line in intercollegiate sports.
America’s entry into World War II in December 1941 had a tremendous impact on the color line in sports as the diversion of American manpower to the war effort left a vacuum in professional and amateur athletics that African Americans helped to fill. In this period, Satchel Paige and his Negro Baseball All-Star Team were given the opportunity to play the major league champions of baseball, and the Negro Collegiate All-Stars of Football played successive games against the champions of the National Football League. The number of African American athletes in predominantly white collegiate conferences also increased.
The integration of sports continued after the war ended in 1945. In 1947 Jackie Robinson broke the color line to become the first black player in major league baseball. In professional basketball, Chuck Cooper and Sweetwater Clifton came into the National Basketball Association in 1950. That year also marked an important first in tennis when Althea Gibson became the first African American woman to compete in the National Championships (later the United States Open) at Forest Hills in Queens, New York, an event she would later win in 1957 and 1958. In the 1960s Wilma Rudolph and Wyomia Tyus won international acclaim for African American women in track.
The brash personality of boxing champion Muhammad Ali and his defiant stand against military induction during the Vietnam War was a defining element of the 1960s. Baseball outfielder Curt Flood’s battle against the reserve clause, which bound individual players to their teams even after the end of their contracts, helped to define sports in the 1970s.
