African americans in sport: the color barrier and other discrimination
One hundred years ago today … The New York Age discussed two forms of barriers in sports.
The New York Age, 24 July 1920, p. 4. Newspapers.com.
James Weldon Johnson surmised in an editorial that the “wave of color prejudice which has swept over sport seems about to recede.” He cites boxing as his primary evidence; he also addresses baseball, which he notes is “increasing in popularity.” He goes on: “the time may return when the keen rivalry between clubs will induce managers to discard an inferior white player when he can easily secure a superior colored one.”
Johnson explains why he thinks the color line in sports generally will fade:
The most narrow-minded man must concede the absurdity of a white man proclaiming to the world that he is the greatest fighter or the fastest runner or the highest jumper on earth and refusing to compete with the colored man . . .
Johnson’s paper also reported discrimination plaguing the United States Olympic Committee, which was staging trials for the 1920 team.
The New York Age, 24 July 1920, p. 7. Newspapers.com.
Elsewhere in the Age, a column was devoted to discrimination within African American sports. The piece *(perhaps written by Ted Hooks, chief sportswriter for the Age) explains that the current tennis tournament at the Ideal Tennis Courts of West 138th Street had denied participation to “Miss Rae.”
This was May Rae, the Jamaican-born tennis star who had won national women’s championships the two previous years (in the American Tennis Association which was African American-only).
The New York Age, 24 July 1920, p. 6. Newspapers.com.
The paper notes that the Arrow Tennis Club did not provide an official explanation, and speculates that it was her Jamaican birth that prompted her exclusion. It bemoans the development:
We cannot well afford to draw birth lines, or any other kind of lines among ourselves for we are too busy breaking down those drawn by the other fellow.
Photos of Rae, and of the Ideal Tennis Courts, prove difficult to find. The New York Public Library owns the 1920 image, below, of 21 West 138th Street, between Lenox Avenue and 5th Avenue, showing Public School 100.
Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library. "Manhattan: 138th Street (West) - Lenox Avenue"
The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1920.
One can squint at the lot along Lenox Avenue (the street on the bottom left corner) and try to make out a single tennis court, or one can imagine courts on the east (far) side of the school building. Then there is this map, which places the Courts at West 133rd Street, though three years later.
WRITTEN BY JONATHAN GOLDMAN, JULY 24, 2020.
TAGS: sports, discrimination, African American history, tennis, Olympics, baseball, Jamaica