The Culture of Sports in the Harlem Renaissance by Daniel Anderson

Reviewed by: The Culture of Sports in the Harlem Renaissance by Daniel Anderson Ron Kates Daniel Anderson. The Culture of Sports in the Harlem Renaissance. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017. 209 pp. Paper, $35.00. Following the media’s coverage of Colin Kaepernick’s National Anthem protests, a public debate has arisen regarding whether professional athletes—professional athletes of color in this instance—have a right and/or [End Page 199] responsibility to use their platform as entertainers to address and/or protest social justice issues. The use of sport as a platform to address matters of social responsibility is by no means a contemporary phenomenon; nor is the media’s role in the debate—one need only consider the symbiotic relationship that Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell shared in the 1960s and 1970s. Within this context, Daniel Anderson’s The Culture of Sports in the Harlem Renaissance examines how sports writing and writing about sport closely intertwined with the social, political, and intellectual spheres of influence in Harlem—and indeed within black culture as a whole—during the first third of the twentieth century. Indeed, as Anderson notes in his conclusion, “writing and sports, like literature and popular culture, were intrinsically linked rather than diametrically opposed,” and sportswriters—Renaissance men themselves—“represented Harlem’s full range of culture on its most unlikely canvas: the newspaper’s sports page” (186). Anderson’s book provides an essential primer on early twentieth-century African American intellectual and literary life as seen through the lens of sport. While the chapters incorporate many of the major figures one would expect to encounter from the period—DuBois, Washington, McKay, James Weldon Johnson—readers are likewise introduced to journalist stars of the day like Romeo Dougherty, who “reigned supreme as the leading sportswriter in the Harlem press” during the Renaissance (141). Chapter 5, “‘Jazz Journalism’: Sportswriting and Popular Culture in the Black Press,” begins with a comparison of the 1922 Harvard-Yale football game with a contest played five days later between Howard and Lincoln Universities; here Anderson points out that the crowds attending the games were representative of the highest societal strata of each race, calling the former “‘a presentation of American civilization in its meridian splendor,’” and the latter as “‘represent[ing] the civilization of the American Negro at its highest water mark … colored society at its best’” (101). Indeed, as Anderson relates, for Dougherty and fellow sportswriter William H. Ferris, the “opulence on display in Washington [at the Howard-Lincoln game] exemplified not so much conspicuous consumption as cultural achievement and social progress’” (102), superlatives well in line with the tendency of the African American press, “whatever their political leanings,” to “promote sports as a vehicle for social change rather than a pleasant diversion” (103). While the literature and arts of the period remain the most visible representations of the Harlem Renaissance, one must also consider the period’s growing emphasis on sport—as reported in Negro newspapers across the country—as an agent and reflection of African American social consciousness and achievement. Anderson’s focus thus reinforces how the current cultural and political climate of the activist athlete—ESPN The Magazine dedicated an [End Page 200] entire issue to “The State of the Black Athlete”—is patterned after, and builds upon approaches presciently taken by Dougherty, Ferris, and their journalistic peers. While the book considers the influences of football, boxing, track, and basketball on both the Renaissance movement itself, as well as those participants, spectators, and writers who played and attended the contests, Anderson’s strongest point of emphasis comes when he considers the role that baseball in general—and the burgeoning Negro Leagues specifically—plays in melding sport with culture, politics, and society. While portrayals of the Negro Leagues mainly emphasize the play on the field and the presence of larger than life characters like Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and Cool Papa Bell, Anderson points out that “the Negro League baseball clubs collectively composed the second-largest black business interest in the country in the 1920s” (42). Unlike the general suspicion with which their white major league counterparts viewed college-educated teammates, “Negro Leaguers tended to have bourgeois aspirations that were rooted...

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