Pop Culture Text - St. Dominic High School

Building a Wartme Consensus in the 1940s and 1950s 287because the opposing Pittsburgh team included an African American. “TheSouth stands at Armageddon,” proclaimed Griffin. Many of the two thousandstudents who subsequently rioted, and many of the newspapers thatobjected to Griffin’s rigidity, perhaps cared more about playing a footballgame than striking a blow for racial justice. Still, Georgia Tech ultimatelyplayed Pittsburgh, and the Atlanta press concluded optimistically: “Insports at least there is no place for racial discrimination or prejudice.” 64During the postwar era, racial barriers were, indeed, slipping in sport. 65In the early 1950s, professional basketball signed its first black players. Intennis, which had been the domain of country-club whites, Althea Gibsonbroke the color barrier, participating in 1950 in the previously all-whiteU.S. Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA). A Harlem product who had spenttime in a home for troubled girls, Gibson became the decade’s celebratedfemale athlete. In 1957, after she won her first Wimbledon title, New YorkCity honored her with a ticker-tape parade, and the mayor awarded her thekey to the city. But, as was so often the case in the early Cold War, theseracial breakthroughs took on special ideological meaning. Not surprisingly,in 1955, the State Department sent Gibson on an extended internationaltour. And, in 1950, when a white former USLTA champion, Alice Marble,argued that the selection committee should allow Gibson to play in the nationaltournament at Forest Hills, she struck a patriotic note: “At this momenttennis is privileged to take its place among the pioneers for a truedemocracy.” 66This same awareness of how sport reflected national ideals and valueswas most famously apparent in Jackie Robinson’s debut in 1947 with theBrooklyn Dodgers, bringing down the decades-long segregation of majorleaguebaseball. Robinson encountered numerous expressions of racismand hostility. Some Brooklyn whites resented him along with the black fanswho came to Ebbets Field in growing numbers. “In the ’40s the crowds hadbeen all white,” remembered one white person, “but by the mid-50s, afterJackie Robinson had been there a while, you go to a Sunday doubleheader,and the dominant smell in the ballpark was bagged fried chicken.”Nevertheless, at the end of his first sensational year in the big leagues, pollsshowed him behind only Bing Crosby as the nation’s most admired man.His story, as the writer John Gregory Dunne later said, helped validate “thecomforting illusion that the nation is color-blind.” The Jackie RobinsonStory, Alfred E. Green’s 1950 movie, made exactly that point. At the film’sbeginning, Robinson, perhaps age twelve, asks if he can field a few groundballs during a practice that includes only white youths. The two whitecoaches not only let him do so but are so appreciative of the youngster’sability that they give him an old baseball mitt as a gesture of encouragement.Respect—not racism—marks the coaches’ and players’ reaction tothe black youth. 67