The Unlevel Playing Field

A Documentary History of the African American Experience in Sport

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by David K. Wiggins and Patrick B. Miller

University of Illinois Press

Due/Published February 2005, 528 pages, paper

ISBN 0252072723

New in paper (S05)

This rich collection of primary sources charts the significant, intertwining histories of African Americans and sport. The Unlevel Playing Field contains more than one hundred documents ranging chronologically from a challenge issued by prizefighter Tom Molineaux in the London Times in 1810 to a forward-looking interview with Harry Edwards in 2000. Introductions and headnotes by David K. Wiggins and Patrick B. Miller place each document in context, helping to shape the narrative.

Readers will find dozens of accounts taken from newspapers (both black and white), periodicals, and autobiographies, by literary and sporting figures, activists, historians, and others. The contributors range from Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington, through Richard Wright, A. S. "Doc" Young, James Baldwin, Harry Edwards, and Eldridge Cleaver, up to contemporary observers such as Nikki Giovanni, Henry Louis Gates Jr., John Edgar Wideman, and bell hooks.

Tracing the participation by blacks in American sport from the days of slavery, The Unlevel Playing Field touches on nearly every major sport. Documents include discussions of the color line in organized baseball during the Jim Crow era and athletics in the American army, as well as portraits of turn-of-the-century figures such as the champion sprint cyclist Marshall "Major" Taylor and boxers George Dixon and Jack Johnson.Further selections tackle the National American Tennis Association championship, high school basketball, debates over participation of black athletes in the 1968 Olympics, and the place of African American women in sport.

Countless pioneering and modern- day African American athletes arehighlighted here, from pioneers such as Jesse Owens, Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, and Althea Gibson, to contemporary figures including Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Venus and Serena Williams.