I started the project asking, is there a long history of black women in sports . I found more than i expected to find quite frankly. There wasnt any archive labeled , this is the history of black sports. So i had to piece it together. I got started by finding three women who actually played baseball in the negro leagues in the 1950s. It was a remarkable story. They played with the men. One of the things that stuck out to me about that story was that the owner who had brought in these black women to play with the man said he had a file where women across the country were writing in to request tryouts. That stuck in my head as a young graduate student and i thought, is there a lot of black girls history trying to play baseball, maybe theres is a Hidden History here. So that made me go out to find other stories in the book, from track, to tennis, from baltimore to rome, really looking at black women in sporting history in the 20th century. Let me talk about two names, oe is quite familiar, hank aaron, and the other is tony stone. Guest yes. Like i said, those baseball women i stumbled upon were brought in in the negro leagues. Ae negro leagues had been huge institution in the black community. If provided ownership and upward mobility for Business Owners and an opportunity to play for black men at the time. A lot of sportswriters were always pushing for integration of the majors. We know that Jackie Robinson broke formally, the color line in 1947. What we see after that is the exodus from the negro league of the toptier talent. Going into the majors with no compensation back to their team. The negro leagues are in steady decline. A lot of people are looking around trying to figure out, how do you save this institution . And others are frankly asking, is it worth saving . That thethis moment manager of the Indianapolis Team hears about tony stone. He was barnstorming occasionally with males. He thinks, what if we brought her in . A lot of this is the same kind of market logic that happens in the Baseball League, which pitted women assuming the feminine in skirts and uniform, playing baseball in the war years. It was the same logic. Stone to thetoni indianapolis cloud, kind of like the harlem globetrotters. They had a lot of show we people in the team. She was absolutely the attraction. The crowds increased with her being in the lead. It led to two other women in the league. Toni is replacing hank aaron at inond base when she joins 1952. So you tea that the best you see that there is that story history that we know about Jackie Robinson and hank aaron, but within that history, you have hank aaron. Host when did catalan come about and what are its earlier origins . Guest title ix as it is usually referred to is the education amendments of 1972. An athletics amendment, it was an educational amendment with 37 small words that basically say you cannot discriminate on the basis of sex if youre getting federal money. It has wideranging effects but certainly in the world of athletics, it means that if if you are a high school or Public College and you are getting federal funds, you have to make sure there is equitable athletic opportunities on your campus. So this is largely thought about and correctly so, as the thing that opens the floodgates for women in sports. It certainly does. But there is a longer sporting history that goes way before title ix, in 1972. You have professional leagues for women in the early part of the 20 century, both black and white, but certainly within the black community. You have increased permissibility around athletics that led to quite a few competitive leagues and notorious women in sports before title ix was enacted. Host this year, the olympics is taking place in tokyo. They, of course, happen every four years. When did we first see women in the olympics and how did that all evolve . Guest especially when we are talking about women in the olympics, a lot of the focus has been on athletics. The track and field events where a large fork is about women being incorporated into the olympic movement. So, what you see in the 1920s is a lot of women pushing for inclusion of track and field events, athletic events inclusion in the Olympic Games, and the powers at be, the International Olympic committee, and the local federations from the United States, the amateur Athletic Union who govern this, said, absolutely not. Track will compromise your reproductive ability. It will make you more masculine. It is not fit for women, we will not have it. Around the world, women were not taking this lightly. In france, theres actually a movement to start what was called the world womens games in 1922. There was a feeling where, no one who is respectable do not want to go. Our women do not want to go to france to compete. Lo and behold, a lot of women did. It was not just ethnic immigrants or lowerclass women, but it was upperclass women who played tennis or wanted to swim. They also wanted to go to the world games. So, famously, the president of the aau said, the women have found the games. We cannot control it. We cannot bar them anymore. We only can control them. Two years later, you see womens athletic events being added to the stateside competition and into the Olympic Games by 1928. Host based on what you were talking about earlier, the idea of a negro league, was that a good thing or a bad thing from your perspective . Guest i think it is hard to say if it was good or bad. It just is what it was. It was a time of jim crow when we had statesanctioned violence and rampant segregation across the country. Black athletes had no choice. Negro league, like black businesses, black wall street, banks, schools, everything out out of segregation was born out of necessity. Are going to provide for ourselves since we are locked out of your league. The negro leagues were a source of business development, and just for the community, of games became a place to congregate. To show off your finest furs if you had that, to see role models that played, to cheer for teams who were coming in to barnstorm in that area. It was really a source of entertainment and pride, which resulted in a lot of the animosity shown toward the women who genderintegrated the league. Toni stone and amy johnson. Because a lot of people understood the negro leagues to be one of the biggest emblems of black masculinity and ingenuity. Like one sportswriter said at the time, it is a sad state of the negro leagues post integration that they have to tie them to the strings of a womans apron to survive. They considered it a mass killing. It was one of the reasons why the three women who they considered it a mas emasculating. It was one of the reasons why the three women who played last baseball received a very different reaction from the black press. Them playing against men was something different. It symbolized in many peoples opinions, is really bad moment in the black community, with the destruction of the negro league. Host did these individuals consider themselves to be role models or trailblazers . Guest i think there was a sense of it. A lot of them just wanted to play ball. They wanted to be considered as athletes and they understood that this was the way in the door. You see a negotiation of that. Id the allamerican Girls Professional Baseball League wanted to put tony stone in dress uniform. She said, absolutely not. I am a ballplayer. I am here to play ball in that way. In all of those stories, they have a narrative of seeing the girls who flood the stands to. Ee them toni stone, particularly. She was barnstorming with a bus full of men. They would roll into towns and sometimes she is taken for a sec sex worker because she is in a bus full of men. She was sent to sleep in a brothel. And within this space, she connects with the women who are working there. They teach her how to had her bra so the ball doesnt hurt her. They come to her games. They might be wrong women, but they were good girls. I think that is a way of connecting that women in nontraditional labor markets, whether sex workers or ballplayers. And you see that it was an interest to both of them that was doing was significant and have the ability to be role models to other girls. In the case of peanut johnson, she tried out for the american Baseball League when it was functioning, it was a segregated league. There is a 22nd clip where a of black to a sea women who throws it back into the field of play. She never says a word. The 21 seconds are meant to be a nod to the fact that the league was segregated. That is why you see them in the negro league and not in the allamerican Girls Professional Baseball League. Host and what was the age of jim crow . Can you explain for those who are not familiar . Guest the age of jim crow refers to a period of time where segregation being the law of the land. Pastically, it stretches brown versus the board of education when it is ruled that segregation is inherently unconstitutional. The way i use it and i am referring to an fall into line with many historians, who are looking at roughly the end of mid20th up into the century as a time where you have segregated institutions, you have a constitutionally upheld, and you have statesanctioned violence and vigilante violence that threatens anybody who seeks to circumvent that other line and avoid the hard and of jim crow, which say why to drinking fountains or colored drinking fountains, or you have to ride in the back of the bus. When i am talking about jim crow, i am talking about a time of intense state approved segregation that was held in place by white violence. That threatened the livelihood of black americans certainly, but anybody who dared to trouble this color line. Host i am curious as somebody who is now working on the book, what kind of primary sources are out there . Who are you talking to . What are you researching and where . Guest as i said, in the beginning, there werent a lot of dust there wasnt an era pointing to this history. A lot of the early histories i found were stumbling upon womens names in the files of man. So i spent a lot of time at the Baseball Hall of fame and found these women. I would go to historically black colleges and universities who desperately need attention and funding and resource allocation toward them, and had amazing repositories that chronicled such rich histories of black the 19ththrough century. I found in those repositories a lot of papers of young women who sports atlegiate historical black colleges and universities. That was a really rich find for me. And then, of course, i conducted someonetories with unlike the stored coach of Tennessee State university who question number of olympians. I talked with a number of olympians themselves, like one of them whose book, tiger bell which is out. She staged her own protest at 68 Olympic Games. And then of course, how could i forget black newspapers . The black press has a running chronicle of sporting events for black girls and women in the community. From the scores of local games, tell longform articles about their achievements on the International Stage and the Olympic Games. Press, lookingk at primary sources in hbcus and conducting oral histories gave me the primary source base i used to do this podcast. Host and what is your own background . Where did you study and how long have you been teaching . Guest so, i did my doctorate at Johns Hopkins university in baltimore. I came to penn state straight from there. I have been there for about four years. I have been living in happy valley, which is a great place, i must say, to study sports critically, because nobody can say there that sports dont matter. You already have a foot in the door to say, we are going to take sports seriously. We are going to have critical conversations around sports and power and race and gender and sexuality. So far it has been great. My classes with students on these topics are phenomenal. And there is a really vibrant intellectual Community Around sports studies on the campus. So i couldnt ask for a better place to be doing this work. Host Amira Rose Davis is joining us from new york. Participating in the conference theyerican historians, have an Association Meeting in new york city over the weekend. Thank you for being with us. Guest thank you for having me. [march music] announcer it is easy to follow the federal response to the coronavirus outbreak at cspan. Org coronavirus. Track the spread throughout the u. S. And the world with interactive maps and charts, watch briefings and hearings with Public Health specialists, anytime, unfiltered on cspan. Org rotavirus. Coronavirus. American history tv is on cspan tv every weekend featuring archival tours, historical films and programs on the presidency, the civil war and more. Heres a clip from a recent program. With one notable exception, humanitarian relief was not forthcoming from the federal government during the lifetimes of the founders. That exception was in 1827 when Congress Granted the city of alexandria 20,000 after a fire destroyed 53 buildings, leaving many people homeless. Now, we all know alexander is now in virginia, but back then, it was part of the district of columbia, and therefore, it was governed by congress. Even so, federal Disaster Relief for alexandria was considered controversial. Congressman and future president james k polk spoke for a sizable minority of legislators when he condemned the measure and argued that it set a dangerous precedent. In reality, though, it didnt. sstead, it was Congress Decision to protect the merchants and their business interests rather than to alleviate human suffering that set the precedent that injured in the United States until the postcivil war era. Merchants benefited from similar sgislation after portsmouth secondbiggest fire in 1806, and in new york in 1804 and 81835 when major fires occurred there. Togress took these steps help merchants in the aftermath of or fires because cities and airports, as sites of trade and sources of tax dollars, i. E. Customs duties, were deemed essential to the republics fiscal and economic health. Hurricanes, earthquakes, and other socalled natural inasters were also common the early republic, but relief, if it ever happened at all, was totally locally organized and privately funded. Like congress, state governments rarely allocated funds for Disaster Relief. Announcer s you can watch these and other American History programs in our website, where all of our video is archived. Thats cspan. Org history. Cspan, your unfiltered view of government. Created by cable in 1979, and brought to you today by your television provider. Next on the presidency, president ial rhetoric scholar Robert Rowland compares the speaking style and effectiveness of Ronald Reagan and barack obama. And details what they had in common. The Dole Institute of politics hosted this event