If it weren't for sports we probably wouldn't have had equal protection of law. Check the progression: 1619 a Dutch vessel arrives in the Chesapeake and sells a load of African slaves, a low value cargo as there's not a lot of need for slave labor yet. Things change when the settlers find out about Indian tobacco, which is labor intensive to cultivate and cure. It gets worse when cotton becomes profitable after Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s.
After that, our history is one of increasing slavery along with laws created to reinforce and perpetuate the system. Along the way, slavery goes, in the mind of the white south, from a peculiar institution to a necessary, evil to a beneficial way of life. The only way this can happen, of course, is to treat blacks as being in a separate human category, or worse, a non-human category, both of which were commonly done.
Matters become so entrenched that it takes a bloody civil war, 600,000 dead, both sides, plus civilians, before the slaves are freed, first in the south by Lincoln's famous emancipation proclamation, and then in the border states as well in 1865 by the end of the war and the adoption of the 13th Amendment. But the prejudice remains firmly fixed in the mind of the south and much of the north, 'til today. Why?
From Reconstruction (1865-1876) on through 1954 when the public school integration decision, Brown v. Board, was decided, blacks were subjected to legalized second-class citizenship, where their rights were fewer and lesser than those of whites. The leading example is that of Rosa Parks, who, in 1955, refused to take a seat at the back of the bus, reserved for blacks, and was arrested. To her support came Martin Luther King, Jr., a young minister, the son of a minister. Investing much energy and taking significant risk, the resulting civil rights movement produced a lasting change in the way this country deals with its many populations of differing ethnic groups.
The NYT article below tells the story of Robert Grier, a black football player who played center for the U. of Pittsburgh, which played the U. of Georgia in the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, Louisiana. The governor of Georgia, however, didn't want to see a black football player playing against his state's team in the Sugar Bowl against his all-white team. Adolph Hitler didn't enjoy seeing U.S. Olympic runner Jesse Owens, black, beat the master race at the Berlin Olympics in 1936, either. Hitler stormed out of the stadium rather than pin a medal on Owens, who became an instant hero in the U.S. among blacks and whites for showing up Hitler and allowing the U.S. to maintain the democratic fiction despite the racial suppression practiced everywhere. That was two decades earlier. Apparently we'd learned little, especially in the south. But much of the country had changed its lights. There have always been at least a few people who could see clearly through the cracks in the lens of racism.
Meanwhile two significant other developments on the race relations front were occurring. The Brown Bomber, as he was called in the white press, Joe Louis, became the heavyweight prize-fighting champion of the world, beating the German, and Hitler's propaganda favorite, Max Schmeling. Owens and Louis were making the U.S. look good against the master race championed by Hitler.
Then came the war, and Joe Louis was enlisted by the Army, which he joined, to sell war bonds used to pay for the war effort.
After the war, in which many black troops fought for America, they objected to being treated the way they'd been before the war after they'd fought Hitler in the name of democracy, freedom, and stamping out the racism that cost six million people, mostly Jewish, their lives under Hitler.
The leading example was Jackie Robinson, a UCLA star athlete in football who ran into difficulty in the Army during the war over his refusal of Jim Crow treatment at the hands of white southern superiors. Jackie Robinson, was, of course, the first player to break the color line in major league baseball, playing second base for the Brooklyn Dodgers. An excellent fielder and hitter, he drove opposing pitchers wild with his aggressive base stealing, including home -plate, when games were on the line.
The phenomenon was that white fans were cheering black athletes. Black athletes were the engine pulling the civil rights train in the public mind, while black lawyers such as Thurgood Marshall brought the lawsuits that cemented the victories legally.
The classic book on Marshall is Richard Kluger's "Simple Justice," the story of Brown v. Board.
Lawyers have an interest in the peculiarities of the human mind because this is where so much of our law comes from, if not all, good and bad.
In the NYT article today by Pete Thamel, the story is told of the black football player who was subjected to racial hostility when he played down south. But that's not what's so interesting. Yes, the governor of Georgia, Marvin Mitchell, objected in 1956. That was a matter of course for then and there, or at least that's the way it had been. Times were changing. Not fast, but changing nevertheless.
What is remarkable is that the Georgia governor's son, says, today, that his father was not a racist. He objected to blacks playing against whites in the south, yet is not considered by his son as a racist.
This is very interesting, don't you think?
How can objecting to a black football player playing in a bowl game against whites NOT be considered racism, you might ask.
Here's the report of the son's position. The son is a newspaper editor today and realizes, presumably, that racism is a terrible injustice, widely condemned today, to inflict on a person:
His son, Sam Griffin Jr., who was a student at Georgia Tech at the
time of the controversy, said in a telephone interview that his father
was not a racist. He said that his father ran as a segregationist and
his position was simply a political stance indicative of the political
hyperbole of the time.
Sam Griffin Jr. said his father was opposed to Georgia Tech's
playing in the game as a matter of upholding segregation laws. If he
had not, Griffin Jr. said, his father's critics would have panned him.
"It was a gotcha either way," said Griffin Jr., who edits and
publishes The Post-Searchlight newspaper in Bainbridge, Ga. "It was one
of those things like, 'Are you still beating your wife?' There wasn't a
whole lot he could do about it."
Griffin Jr. added: "No one was going to get elected back then who
didn't run on that type of a platform. He was not a racist. I don't
know if you can understand that or not. A segregationist believes in
segregation, equal but separate. It was the way things were. It had
been that way for 100 years."
Griffin eventually backed down from his stance, partly because of
the intense public reaction.
I've highlit the interesting rationalizations, justifications, excuses, etc., in reporter Thamel's interesting account.
Let's say those claims, of the son, are perfectly accurate. The governor probably had black hired servants that he treated civilly. Probably had a black maid at the governor's mansion and treated her respectfully, so long as she used the back door. Gave her leftovers from the kitchen and his used suits for her husband. I wouldn't doubt that. This was common in the complicated dance we do between races. These are not signs of hate. But they're not signs of respect, fairly speaking either. The respect was limited to those who knew and kept in the place that white convention assigned them, which in the case of blacks was in the second-class, at the back of the bus, literally as well as figuratively.
It seems hard to understand how people could behave one way yet maintain something else entirely.
Out of such schizophrenia societies are made, and ours was no exception.
The question to ask is, "What are the mindless, schizophrenic, crazy-making things that you and I are doing today that are neither different nor better?"
Lemme know when you've got it figured out, because it's going to play big in Conlaw.