Beating Opponents, Battling Belittlement:
How African-American Female Athletes Use Community to
Navigate Negative Images

A Research Paper
by
The School of Global Journalism & Communication,
Morgan State University
For The Undefeated

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 ABSTRACT
Scholars have dedicated many hours of research to study the effects of negative media
images on girls and women in society. Many of these studies have revealed that African
American female athletes have received the brunt of much of this negative imagery, ranging
from being labeled as “mannish” for their excellence in track in the 1930s (Lansbury, 2001) to
the mostly African-American female basketball team at Rutgers University being called “nappy
headed hoes,” by radio host Don Imus for their excellence in basketball (Faber, 2007). Even
celebrity athletes, such as tennis superstar Serena Williams, haven’t escaped such labeling; she
has been likened to everything from a “man” to a “gorilla” (Desmond-Harris, 2016).
African-American female athletes, over the years, have seemingly employed two routes
toward honing their athleticism while navigating that treacherous terrain. In the early 1900s,
during a time when black communities were focusing on community building, these women
largely performed within the insular environments of their communities, where they were viewed
as symbols of black excellence (Lansbury, 2001). Borrowing from the example of
churchwomen, who formed clubs and societies to express themselves, black female athletes
joined clubs in which they competed against each other and celebrated each other’s
accomplishments under the banner of sportsmanship and respect (Abney, 1999). However,
beginning in the 1940s and throughout the present day, black female athletes and the entities that
elevated them to compete outside their communities in the Olympics and internationally began to

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 navigate that negativity by emphasizing their femininity and the steps they were taking to ensure
that their athleticism would be respected along with it (Lansbury, 2001).
Through the lens of social identity theory, this research paper examines how AfricanAmerican women athletes historically relied on the shelter of community to counteract racist
representations in media and in much of mainstream society as they continued to excel at their
sport. Additionally, this paper also examines, through individual interviews and their
participation in five sports – track and field, tennis, golf, swimming and basketball – how these
women are currently taking charge of their images to navigate the stereotypical environment that
they continue to encounter.

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 INTRODUCTION
The use of physicality as a vehicle to venerate and to, alternately, denigrate black
women’s bodies began during slavery (Withycombe, 2011). While white women were portrayed
– and treated as – delicate and as a civilizing influence, black women were viewed and treated as
deviant, savage and hypersexual (Withycombe, 2011). This perception did not abate after slavery
ended, and, as a result, the stereotype of the loud, immoral and aggressive black woman
extended into the area of sports (Withycombe, 2011). Withycombe (2011) notes in her article in
the Sociology of Sports Journal that “…in sports, just as during slavery, the Black body has
been marked as inherently different from other bodies…and thus blackness is used as a way of
othering male and female” (p. 480). It is often this “othering” that allows for the continuous
representation of the back female body as inherently “less” than the white female body.
Vertinsky and Captain (1998) continues this theme in their article in the Journal of Sport
History. According to them
White culture draws a direct correspondence between stereotyped depictions of black
womanhood and “manly” athletic and physically gifted females. Their racialized notions
of the virile or mannish black female athlete stemmed from a number of persistent
historical myths: the linking of African American women’s work history as slaves, their
supposedly “natural” brute strength and endurance inherited from African origins, and the
notions that vigorous competitive sport masculinized women physicality and sexuality
(p. 541 )
Those beginnings set the stage for African-American female athletes to not only be
portrayed as masculine and savage, but to also be ignored by the white press even when their
accomplishments should have commanded their recognition (Lansbury, 2001). Such neglect,

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 was mostly due to the fact that it was believed, at least in the 1940s, that the main sport that
black women were excelling in, track and field, would impact women’s reproductive abilities.
The black press filled that coverage void (Lansbury, 2001). However, when it did, it highlighted
the femininity of the women, i.e., their dressing and their grooming routines, more than it did
their athletic accomplishments (Lansbury, 2001).
Besides black female athletes being painted as masculine and aggressive, they are also
depicted as highly sexualized. For example, Serena Williams’ body, like that of many other
black female athletes, tends to be featured in the most extreme poses, e.g., the body exposed with
minimal uniform dress or pictured at the start of a stroke and/or midserve with arms and legs
spread widely (Schultz, 2005). In a study of media guide covers from 1977 to 2007 of black and
white female collegiate athletes, Withycombe (p. 481) found similar exaggerated portrayals of
African American athletes. She found that the ways Serena, her “cat-suit” outfit, and her body
were discussed represented the gender stereotype (“sexy”), but also drew from the racial
stereotypes (animalistic, strong). Interesting enough reporters tended to be a bit kinder to Serena
Williams in 2018, when she returned to major competition at the French Open in late spring,
following the birth of her daughter the previous fall. Williams wore a black compression catsuit
designed, she said, to prevent blood clots. But some reports couldn’t help likening the outfit to
warrior princess outfits in the film “Black Panther.”
While the stories of Serena William’s return to play were fairly balanced, the headlines in
a range of publications, including the Washington Post (May 2018) and the Huffington Post
(May 2018 ) focused on the outfit, rather than Williams’ return to the circuit sooner than
expected – before being forced to drop out due to injury.

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 It is this history and this backdrop that continues to fuel negative images of black female
athletes, regardless of their sport and regardless of their prowess in that sport. Nonetheless, these
African-American women managed to avoid developing distaste for sports and still gravitated
toward the sport of their choice– in spite of the risk of deepening negative perceptions. The
measures that they employed – and still do employ – toward doing what they love involves a
combination of community support and personal perseverance that keeps them in the game.
THEORETICAL APPROACH
The manner in which black women athletes have navigated stereotypes can be explained
through the prism of social identity theory. This theory, developed by Polish social psychologist
Henri Tajfel and his student, John Turner, in 1979, posits that a person’s sense of who they are
lie with the groups that they identify with (i.e., black women athletic teams), and that this sense
of identity compels them to enhance the status of the group (McLeod, 2008). Researchers,
however, have expanded on social identity theory to examine how those groups respond to
“stereotype threats” (Rydell & Boucher, 2009).
It was discovered that members of groups that are vulnerable to negative stereotypes, or
what is perceived as a negative stereotype (i.e., women who are aggressive and masculine) often
confront those stereotypes by identifying with those that represent what they view as a positive
stereotype (i.e., women who are fashionably dressed, coiffed and wearing makeup). Identifying
as an athlete and being proud of their athletic accomplishments, especially in the presence of
African-American social and religious clubs, and confronting the stereotypes about their athletic
prowess and their appearance by emulating women who are not athletes as a means of bolstering
the status of the group, embodies a process of social identity theory that explains how black
women athletes confront racism and stereotypes by focusing on multiple identities to empower

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 themselves (Shih, 2004). For Shih (2004) African American Women athletes who are
successful “… adopt an “empowerment” model as opposed to a “coping” model when dealing
with stigma. In other words, successful individuals view overcoming the adversities associated
with stigma as an empowering process, as opposed to a depleting process”

That empowerment model is prevalent in the ways in which African-American female athletes,
through the spaces of their communities and their own efforts counteract racism and have
prevailed in their sports.
REVIEW OF LITERATURE
In the 1998 article, “More Myth than History: American Culture and Representations of
Black Female Athletic Ability,” Vertinsky and Captain write that:
In addition to stereotypes that developed around the strength and masculinizing
tendencies of the African American woman, discourses of racism developed and reified
stereotypes of sexuality that demeaned her. Indeed, in no other area are there so many
myths and stereotypes than that of the black female body and her sexuality. Racist sexual
stereotypes of black womanhood propped up the white man’s sexual control over all
women, hence the racism that black people have had to suffer has almost always been
presented in peculiarly sexist terms (pp. 546-547).
This predicament has been explored by scholars such as Patricia Morton. In her 1991 book,
“Disfigured Images: The Historical Assault on Afro- American Women,” Morton indicates that
African-American women have, historically, been contextualized through the prism of white,
primarily Southern, femininity. She notes:
In contrast, patriarchy and the gentle workings of feminine wiles are not central to the
black woman’s image, but matriarchy and domination of men are…neither a magnolialike figure nor a shrinking violet, in her image she resembles more of the Venus’ flytraps
that entraps and devours its hapless victims.

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 Michele Wallace, author of the 1979 book, “Black Macho and the Myth of The
Superwoman,” raised the paradox that while black women may not meet American definitions of
womanliness because they are viewed as less feminine and less helpless, they also meet an allencompassing definition of womanliness because of their strength, “the quintessential mother
with infinite sexual, life-giving and nurturing reserves. In other words, she is a superwoman.”
(Wallace, 1979)
It is against this backdrop – one in which their strength, largely mythologized, makes
them both the objects of admiration and denigration – that African-American women have
struggled to pursue sports. It is also one that has governed American society’s reaction to their
efforts to
pursue sports; a reaction that was initially ensconced in isolating them as being disposable
enough to risk sacrificing their femaleness on the altar of competitive sports to attributing their
success at sports to them being, as Wallace pointed out, superwomen – a categorization that
oftentimes translates into them being mannish (Vertinsky & Captain, 1998).
Vertinsky and Captain (1998) also show how the paradox that Wallace pointed out was
used to fuel derogatory ideas about black women’s participation in sports. In the years leading up
to World War II, for example, as African-American women began to excel in track, white
women had largely withdrawn from the sport because of the admonishments of white physical
education instructors and amateur sports organizations that argued that track and field exacted a
toll on women’s physical, emotional and reproductive health. So, on the one hand, black
women’s success at track and field could be seen as them affirming their womanhood through
the lens of superwoman, while on the other hand, their excellence was also used as fodder to

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 bolster racist and sexist beliefs in which they were viewed as masculine and animalistic
(Vertinsky & Captain, 1998).
Historian Susan Cahn shows in the 1994 book, “Coming On Strong: Gender and
Sexuality in Women’s Sport,” how racism and sexism had, in the first part of the 20th century,
worked to keep black female athletes at the margins of life, and away from the greatness that
their excellence had achieved. Olympic official Norman Cox, for example, ridiculed black
female track athletes such as Tidye Pickett and Louise Stokes, who became the first black
women to represent the U.S. in the Olympics in 1936, by proposing that “the International
Olympic Committee should create a special category of competition for them-the unfairly
advantaged ‘hermaphrodites’ who regularly defeated ‘normal women,’ those less skilled ‘child
bearing’ types with ‘largish breasts, wide hips [and] knocked knees” (Cahn, 1994) According to
Vertinsky and Captain:
Such racist and sexist comments from the dominant male, white culture drew a direct
correspondence between stereotyped depictions of black womanhood and “manly”
athletic and physically gifted females. Their racialized notions of the virile or mannish
black female athlete stemmed from a number of persistent historical myths: the linking of
African American women’s work history as slaves, their supposedly ‘natural’ brute
strength and endurance inherited from their African origins, and the notion that vigorous
or competitive sport masculinized women physically and sexually (p. 545).
All of these charges were related in one way or another to slave womanhood stereotypes
involving the colonization of the black female body by the white master (Vertinsky & Captain,
1998). But African-American women athletes found means of persevering against the negativity
forged by slavery, sexism and racism that threatened to dampen their desire to participate in, and
to excel at sports and athleticism. During the time when white women were abandoning track
and field because of proclamations that it would damage their femininity and reproductive
abilities, black women continued to pursue the sport through the nurturing environs of African-

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 American communities, communities which were, in the early 1900s and through the 1930s, in
the process of community-building. Observes Captain in her 1991 article, “Enter Ladies and
Gentlemen of Color: Gender, Sport and the Ideal of African-American Manhood and
Womanhood During the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century.”

In the half-century following the Civil War, a growing articulate group of leaders of the
nation’s black communities gathered to black leaders worked, “to foster racial pride and
elevate the physical, moral and intellectual standards of their race. As did many members
of the post- Bellum larger society, they sought for their people advanced education,
preparation for (and entrance into) the ‘professions,’ and improved socioeconomic
standards (p. 81).
However, according to Captain, as African-Americans’ original hopes were dashed by
racism and stereotypes, they were forced to turn those hopes inward, toward their own
communities. The results were that African-Americans not only formed their own colleges, but
social clubs and other outlets to bolster educational opportunities and to participate in activities
that they deemed to be wholesome to them. Access to sports and recreation was seen as a part of
wholesome, community-building, and African-Americans created opportunities for black women
and men to participate within the safe spaces of their communities. From Captain’s perspective:
Among the most significant of the post-bellum social institutions that fostered health,
exercise and character development for members of the Afro-American community were
Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations…by 1924 there were more
than 160 YM and YWCA in the United States that catered to a predominantly black
clientele…“The Phyllis Wheatley YWCA in Washington, D.C., founded in 1905, had a
membership of more than 2,500 women and girls by 1925. Members participated in
activities such as fencing, gymnastics, basketball and tennis (p.96).
In 1999, physical education professor Robertha Abney furthered documented the efforts
of African-American communities to provide spaces for black women to participate in sports

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 outside of the stereotypical gaze of white society. In the Journal of Physical Education,
Recreation and Dance article, “African-American Women in Sport,” she wrote:
During these separate and unequal times, African Americans formed sports clubs. These
clubs provided African American women the opportunity to participate in sports. They
participated vigorously and excelled in sports. The Black culture generally encouraged
athletic participation and accepted female athletes. Black women could participate in
sports and not fear sacrificing their femininity. The Smart Set Club was the first club
team. Organized in 1905 in Brooklyn, New York, its athletic programs were built around
basketball and track. The Alpha Physical Culture Club was organized in 1908. These two
clubs also had girls' teams. Dora Cole and her sisters dominated the first Smart Set team
and soon had imitators who played their games in blousy knee-length bloomers and longsleeved shirts (p. 38)
Black women’s participation in sports was not entirely crafted in an atmosphere unfazed
by racist perceptions. Acutely aware of the manner in which black women’s athleticism exposed
them to denunciations of being unladylike and unclean, black sports organizations, oftentimes in
conjunction with the black press, worked obsessively to craft images to counteract such
perceptions, usually through feminizing them at the expense of downplaying their abilities.
According to author Jennifer Lansbury, in the 2001 article titled, “‘The Tuskegee Flash’
and the ‘Slender Harlem Stroker’,” when track and field athlete Alice Coachman was arriving in
London to represent the U.S. in the high-jump competition in July 1948, the Chicago Defender
ran a story in its sports section featuring Coachman and the U.S. women’s track and field team
entitled “Rush Carver Peanut Oil to Olympic Team Gals,” which focused on how much the
Coachman and her teammates needed the peanut oil to keep their skin soft and feminine, and
how their coach at Tuskegee University planned to get it over to them as soon as possible.
Lansbury believes that even though Coachman went on to become the first African-American
woman to win the gold, her contribution has been marginalized because both the white and black
press focused more on her gender and race than on her talent. She writes
It was not necessarily a lack of press coverage of black female athletes that led to their

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 marginalization, although this was certainly a contributing factor in the case of Alice
Coachman. Often more harmful was the type of coverage suggested by the
aforementioned “peanut oil” article. The story suggests a certain vibrancy surrounding
the coverage, but it also reveals a tendency to neglect the skills of the athletes and
identify them in nonathletic terms. The lighthearted tone of the article and the reference
to the athletes as “the gals” suggests that they were to be indulged but not taken too
seriously (p. 234).
Then there were the efforts by track coaches and others to emphasize the femininity of
black female athletes. Such efforts were necessitated by the fact that once they began to excel
and compete in sports outside of their communities, they would be exposed to the white gaze –
and subjected to the racism that would be used to denigrate their achievements even as they were
admired for them. Chief among them was Tennessee State University track and field coach
Edward Temple, who demanded that his women track athletes adhere to a strict dress code, and
who once told a reporter that they were, “young ladies first, track girls second.” (Vertinsky &
Captain, 1998)
What is apparent in the literature is that between the confines of their communities and
the desire to counteract stereotypes about their femininity, black women athletes across a
spectrum of sports have employed unique ways to continue to compete in a society that
alternatively praises and scorns them.

METHODOLOGY

We looked at African American female athletes in two categories since 1900. The
first category was as competitors within their communities, meaning those who had participated
in a sport on the club, college or professional levels among other black females. The second
category was as competitors within the mainstream community, meaning those who had

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 participated in a sport on the club, college or professional level against other races, primarily
whites.
In these categories, we raised specific questions to gather information about images.
How were black female athletes depicted by the media? How were black female athletes viewed
and supported by members of their communities? How were black female athletes viewed by
outsiders, onlookers and fans? How were black female athletes rewarded, honored or celebrated
by members of their communities? How were black female athletes rewarded, honored or
celebrated by mainstream society? How were feats by black female athletes recorded
historically?
We also looked at these two categories historically to determine participation growth
for African American female athletes in several sports: basketball, bowling, golf, swimming and
track & field.
We asked the athletes a set of basic case study research questions to gather knowledge
on how the current generation of black female athletes respond – or don’t respond – to negative
media portrayals, as well as to serve as a template for further study on efforts to mitigate
negative stereotyping. We asked:
1.

How do black women collegiate athletes describe their impressions of media

portrayals of black women athletes in their respective sports?
2.

How do black women collegiate athletes describe the impact that media portrayals

of black female athletes have had on how they pursue their sport?
3.

How do black women collegiate athletes describe the impact that other influences,

i.e., coaches, parents, peers, have had in how they present themselves outside of their sport?

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 4.

How do black female collegiate athletes describe the impact that media portrayals

of black women athletes had in their choice of a sport?

RESULTS

In examining the participation of black women athletes across five sports, through various
interviews and existing literature, it was discovered, through the lens of social identity theory,
that they continue to pursue sports through adhering to the African-American community support
that sustained them during the years after slavery, and by constructing their own sense of
feminine identity, usually through emphasizing wardrobe and glamorization efforts, or through
simple persistence, to counteract racist and sexist stereotypes.
In a number of brief interviews with black women in several collegiate sports, the athletes
said media portrayals had little to no influence on how they present themselves or on their style
of play. They tended to cite coaches and parents as their greatest influence. That said, however,
it was clear that if not the players themselves, those who influenced them were affected by
stereotypes and strove to ensure the athletes contradicted or were somewhat protected from
criticism.
They did it by establishing rules for dress and grooming. The other factor that stands out is
that they speak approvingly of overcompensating to demonstrate their femaleness, which was
only made necessary because of racist ideas that their excellence at a sport connoted that they
were animalistic or masculine.

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 BASKETBALL
There is no recorded history of black women participating in organized basketball until well into
the 20th century. By 1910, a number of all black women’s basketball teams had formed, in a
number of Northeast cities, including New York, Washington, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and
Philadelphia. Those teams were largely formed by The Black Fives, a group that was organized
around basketball and encouraged women to play alongside the men. (Johnson, 2012) In the safe
space of the Alpha Physical Culture Club in Harlem, teams such as the New York Girls, which
became the first all-black woman basketball championship team, was formed. Yet even then, the
emphasis on appearance more than skill was apparent. The New York Age, the nation’s leading
black newspaper of the day, described the game, won by the New York Girls 12-3 as “clever and
even scientific.” As for the women, the newspaper wrote: “The players, winsome and charming in
their dainty white blouses, showed up well in practice, but it was when the referee’s whistle started
the game that the real surprise came. These lassies demonstrated that they could play!”

Over the years – and through the assistant of Title IX programs – African-American women
began participating in basketball in school and in other spaces. And when the Women’s National
Basketball Association was formed in 1996, African-American women found a national space to
showcase the talents they had been honing in their neighborhoods, high schools and colleges.
Yet even so, WNBA stars such as Lisa Leslie, who was drafted by the Los Angeles Sparks
in 1997, paid careful adherence to softening their appearances. In addition to playing basketball,
Leslie worked as a fashion model and appeared on the cover of magazines such as Vogue. This
media focus on her good looks often overshadowed Leslie’s legendary athletic skills. By the time
she retired in 2009, Leslie was a three-time WNBA MVP, had two WNBA Finals MVP awards,

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 two Defensive Player of the Year awards, eight 1st Team All-WNBA selections, three WNBA
All-Star MVP awards, was a member of the WNBA All-Decade Team and was a Player of the
Week a league-best 15 times. She was the first player in WNBA history to record 5,000 points in
2006. The Sparks renamed its home court, "Lisa Leslie Court."
And that was just the WNBA. As an Olympian, Leslie finished with a 32-0 record and was
the first female basketball player to win four consecutive gold medals, (1996, 2000, 2004 & 2008).
By her final Olympic competition, she was the Team USA’s all-time leading scorer, rebounder
and shot blocker after compiling 488 points, 241 rebounds and 36 blocked shots in four Olympic
Games, while ranking fourth in assists (45) and sixth in steals (35).
Current WNBA players such as Maya Moore, Delisha Milton-Jones, Briann January and
Candice Wiggins have been featured on The Sportster website as being the Top 15 Hottest WNBA
Players of 2016. (Aliano, C). Black female athletes, it appeared, could not have it both ways. They
seemed forced to choose between recognition for their athleticism or confirmation they fit the
broader society’s definition of what it means to be a woman. But even when they choose to serve
the latter, black women basketball players, particularly, still found themselves demeaned for the
very thing that they excelled at: Their excellence on the court.
The most infamous example of that occurred on April 4, 2007, the 39th anniversary of the
assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., when radio host Don Imus referred to members
of the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos” the morning after the team lost to
Tennessee in the NCAA championship game. The slur touched off a firestorm of criticism aimed
at New York-based Imus, who has hosted the “Imus in the Morning” show since 1971, as the
remarks touched on the race and gender of the team. According to Media Matters (2007), Imus,
his executive Bernard McGuirk, and former Imus sports announcer Sid Rosenberg, made a

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 reference to a scene in a Spike Lee film, suggesting their remarks were based on a scene focusing
on tensions between dark-skinned and light-skinned black women.
Essence Carson, a team captain, said Imus’ remarks caused “great hurt” and “sadness”
(CNN, 2007). "I would like to express our team's great hurt, anger and disgust toward the words
of Mr. Don Imus," Carson said. "We are highly angered at his remarks but deeply saddened with
the racial characterization they entailed." (CNN, 2007)
In her 2008 memoir, “Standing Tall,” Rutgers head basketball coach C. Vivian Stringer
devoted an entire chapter to the aftermath of Imus’ remarks. She pondered why her team, which
had as many African-American starters as their championship game opponent, Tennessee, had
been singled out by Imus. Stringer pondered: “I couldn’t help but wonder if the fact that I was
black had made our team seem blacker (Stringer’s emphasis), and therefore more open to ridicule
and hatred”.
Indeed, Imus’ “nappy-headed hos” slur reinforced the treacherousness that Stringer and
other black women athletes continue to navigate. She had always stressed to her players the
importance of looking “like a lady. She said she required her Rutgers players to wear the same
color sweaters, turtlenecks and slacks whenever they traveled. Stringer wrote that she even brought
her own personal beautician on the team plane to the Final Four (Stringer, 2008).
Additionally, the negativity toward black women basketball players doesn’t always
emanate from white society. They continue to be plagued by a presumption that their game is rife
with lesbians. Former NBA All-Star Gilbert Arenas, for instance, claimed in 2015 that WNBA
players looked like “a bunch of chicks ng around looking like cast members” from the Netflix
series “Orange Is The New Black.”

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 TENNIS
For much of the late 19th and early 20th century, African Americans who enjoyed tennis
were excluded from white-owned country clubs and forced into a segregated society and
community. Within in that community, tennis-loving blacks created their own organization. The
American Tennis Association was founded in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 30, 1916, providing an
organization for doctors, lawyers, college educators and physicians who, as Jessie Carney Smith
wrote, “were determined to foster broad interest in a game for people of color, and they thus
formed their own circuit.” (Smith, 1994)
It was within that space that the ATA served as a valued community for those African
Americans who cherished tennis. It’s important to note that blacks from all over the country were
involved in the ATA’s creation. As Smith wrote, “Representatives of more than a dozen black
tennis clubs came together on Thanksgiving Day in Washington to found an organization that
would foster friendly relations among black tennis enthusiasts and players, improve the standards
of the existing tennis clubs, and promote game standards among black players.”
It was also within that space that black women such as Florence Brooks, Anita Gantt and
Ora Mae Washington began to master tennis. However, in later years Althea Gibson, who in
1956 became the first African-American to win a Grand Slam title and who would, in 1957 and
in 1958, win back-to-back Wimbledon and U.S. National titles, ultimately had to defend herself
against imagery that portrayed her as too masculine. (Lansbury, 2001)

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 While tennis was a sport that wasn’t as gendered as track and field – it was viewed as
being more appropriate for women to participate in – Gibson’s aggressive form of playing gave
way to the stereotype of the aggressive, black female. Jennifer Lansbury:
With her big service and powerful delivery, Gibson was often noticed in the white press
for the “masculine” way in which she played the game. Yet this was a fate common of
any woman who chose to play aggressive tennis, and many shied away from such
displays of power to avoid being labeled masculine by the press. In a bio-piece that
appeared in conjunction with her 1957 Wimbledon win, the New York Times noted that
Gibson, as early as her debut at Forest Hills, had been compared to another female tennis
great, Alice Marble, for her “mannish style of play.”
So, in other words, Gibson’s excellence at the sport of tennis earned her suspicion as
much as it earned her praise – and it positioned her to have to defend her femininity as well as
her titles. Gibson began to cultivate a more feminized version of herself, saying that, “I began to
understand that you could walk out on the court like a lady, all dressed up in immaculate white,
be polite to everybody and still play like a tiger and beat the liver and lights out of the ball.”
(Vertinsky & Captain, 1998)
That paradox exists today for black women tennis players – and no clearer example exists
than that of Serena Williams. The other half of the Williams’ sisters’ tennis playing powerhouse,
Williams has won more than Grand Slam titles than any of the current players, and her powerful
style of play is widely revered.
But Williams’ muscular form has also earned her derision not just from competitors, but
from spectators – who often marginalize her successes by alluding to her as animalistic or
savage, not strong or strategic. In 2017, for example, Russian tennis player Maria Sharapova
referred to Williams as “so intimidating” because of her “thick arms and thick legs.”
Sharapova, who defeated Williams in the 2004 Wimbledon finals, wrote in her 2017 memoir
“Unstoppable: My Life So Far,” that Williams’ body struck within her trepidation and respect.
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 She said she was intimidated when facing Williams for the first time, even though she is taller
than her opponent. Sharapova declared:
“She has thick arms and thick legs and is so intimidating and strong. And tall,
really tall. I looked across the net, and, no way to get around it, she was just there!
More there than other players, if that makes sense. It’s the whole thing — her
presence, her confidence, her personality.”
Sharapova concentrated on Williams’ physical presence, giving little credence as to the
other parts of the champion’s repertoire. “She was a grown woman, experienced, the best player
in the world. It still feels that way. Even now, she can make me feel like a little girl.” Sharapova
continued to refer to herself as “skinny” and “blond,” seeming to play on an age-old racist
societal creation of the other.
Nonetheless, it seems that Williams manages to navigate the racialized reactions to her
success and her appearance by not overcompensating on either measure. She has appeared in
Sports Illustrated and Vogue, and has also appeared on the court in colorful outfits, such as the
infamous cat suit. But unlike many of her predecessors, Williams doesn’t minimize her athletic
existence. As she said in 2016 at the U.S. Open Semifinals, “I’m a female and I’m an athlete.
And I’m an athlete first.” (Davidson, 2016)
TRACK AND FIELD
The arena of track and field did not necessarily carry with it the same set of unattractive
qualities for black women as it did for most white women. On the contrary, the elements of
survival, even victory, in the face of adversity and struggle fit nicely into the African American
woman’s concept of ideal womanhood. (Vertinsky & Captain, 1998)
Track and field fit in with an ideal black womanhood that was imbued with the positive
qualities of strength, morality, and family and community commitments that had been forged

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 through difficult circumstances as well as through the respect accorded them in the successful
assumption of these different roles. Because of that, in the 1930s, black female track stars such
as Louise Stokes and Tidye Pickett were being venerated in their communities because it was a
time of significant community building.
Yet by the time Alice Coachman became the first African-American woman to win a
gold medal in track and field in the 1948 London Olympics, black female track athletes had left
the safe confines and veneration of their communities to battle two forces: One that focused on
their femaleness to the extent where their athleticism was marginalized, and the other that
denigrated them for succeeding in a sport that men once ruled. This was an especially vexing
dichotomy for African-American women in track – because early in the 20th century, track and
field was viewed as an especially masculine sport. Because of that, it was abandoned by middleclass white women and the black women who participated became the stuff of suspicion.
…Racialized notions of the virile or mannish black female athlete stemmed from a
number of persistent historical myths: the linking of African American women’s work
history as slaves, their supposedly ‘natural’ brute strength and endurance inherited from
their African origins, and the notion that vigorous or competitive sport masculinized
women physically and sexually (p.541).
So, to stave off derogatory images, black women track athletes began to grapple with a kind of
duality that forced them, in many instances, to play down their athleticism to defend their
femininity. Some, like Olympic gold and silver medalist Chandra Cheeseborough, got a taste of
that duality even before she left junior high school. “I was one of the first girls [in junior high] to
wear dresses with Converses,” said Cheeseborough, who is now 58. “Our coaches always made
sure that we didn’t stop being young ladies because we were athletes…when I became a
Tigerbelle [the women’s track team at Tennessee State University] my coach, Ed Temple,
always emphasized the same thing, that we be athletes and young ladies.”

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 The drive to feminize track and field athletes, one that began with Coachman and the
story about her longings for peanut oil to soften her skin, has continued. Perhaps the most salient
example of a black woman track athlete overemphasizing femininity to navigate stereotyped
spaces can be found in Florence Griffith-Joyner, who, at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, became the
first American female in track and field to win four medals at one Olympics. But she was famous
almost as much for her six-inch, lacquered nails and one-legged ng outfits as she was for her
record-smashing speeds.
At one point, Griffith-Joyner, who died in 1998, remarked that she had brought 14 outfits
with her to the Olympics, and that she wanted to make track fashionable. Even today, articles
herald her more as a fashion pioneer than as an Olympian, as an excerpt from this 2016 Vogue
piece shows:
Long before athleisure, there was “Flo-Jo,” who blazed trails in fashion as she left
competitors in the dust. Dazzling crowds in her custom, asymmetrical one-legged track
suits and six-inch-long manicure (decorated with American flags or in the hopeful shade
of gold), the former hair-and-nail technician would take off sprinting down the stretch,
curls blowing in the wind. It was a true departure from the jocky, gym-bound look of her
fellow Olympians, a vibrant, fashion-forward take unlike any the sports world had ever
seen.
This notion that black female track prowess is, somehow, the antithesis of black
femininity was also on display at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, where it wasn’t enough
for Michelle Carter, who won a gold medal in shot put, to be a champion, but to be a “shot put
diva” (Jorgic, 2016). Said Carter: “I’m in a sport where people don’t look at us like women, they
don’t look at us like being girls, or feminine. But I’ve been girly all my life and so I couldn’t
separate…between the sport and being a woman. “I love hair, I love makeup, I love fashion and I
love throwing the shot put. (Jorgic, 2016)

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 Yet many times, embracing femininity – even in a way to ward off the racist denigration
and stereotypes that have, for generations, dogged African-American female athletes, isn’t
enough.
For example, Griffith-Joyner’s beauty, flashiness and talent wasn’t enough. During the 1988
Olympics, Brazilian 800-meter medalist Joaquim Cruz said that Griffith-Joyner looked like a
man, and accused her of using performance-enhancing drugs. To which her husband, fellow
Olympian Al Joyner, replied: “If Joaquim Cruz thinks my wife looks like a man, then evidently
he hasn’t seen my wife.” (Downey, 1988)
Sometimes, the denigrations come from other black female athletes, who have absorbed
stereotypes that don’t see beauty and athleticism existing in the same space for black girls.
Rochelle Stevens, who won a gold medal in the 4x400 meter relay in the 1992 Barcelona
Olympics, remembers how some fellow athletes reacted when she landed a “Shades of You,”
contract with Maybelline that year. According to Stevens, “Some of my colleagues came up to
me and said, ‘What’s this? You’re supposed to be beautiful or something?” Stevens, who is 50,
said. “But I was trying to change the stereotype.”
So black women track athletes continue to counteract imagery of being too masculine
through emphasizing their femininity. The issue, though, is whether they do it at the cost of
marginalizing their talent (Lansbury, 2001).

SWIMMING
Unlike the other sports, swimming was not a sport that black women could learn in the
safe spaces of their communities. For most of the 20th century, African-American communities

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 did not have public swimming pools, and the public pools that whites used routinely barred
blacks (Wiltse,2015).
In California, for example, which was unofficially Jim Crow before the modern civil
rights era, recreational swimming was possible, yet an exhaustive road to access. An AfricanAmerican woman told swimmer Jean Moule:
In Inglewood [California] where I grew up, there were no pools in which to swim, no golf
or tennis courts, only basketball courts and track fields. I learned to swim when I was 30.
My brother was a junior lifeguard at the closest YMCA. It took us forever to walk to the
pool in the summer because our poor neighborhood did not have the backyard swimming
pools or adequate funding for public facilities with pools. (Moule,2008)
So, as a rule, many black girls did not learn how to swim unless they found a way around
the segregated pools. One person who did that was Moule, who attended high school in Oregon,
where swimming was a physical education requirement. Yet even then, as it is today, the fear of
being negatively cast as primitive or unkempt keeps many black girls away from the water.
Moule said that black girls, most of whom had their hair straightened back then, “dreaded the
class first period. Just a little bit of water and we would have bad hair days. I remember putting a
thick layer of hair under the edge of my swim cap in order to keep the water out and my
straightened hair straight. I think one of us said we were beginning swimmers even if we were
better than just because then we would not have to put our heads under water as much” (Moule,
2008).
Black women’s fear of their straightened hair reverting because of swimming is, indeed,
rooted in image and notions of respectability, said Ann Mourning, an Assistant Professor of
Sociology at New York University. According to Mourning:
The hair issue is not just a beauty issue for black women. It traditionally has all this other
meaning that went well beyond sexual attractiveness. It has everything to do with being a
respectable, worthy member of the community. [Hair is] not just making them beautiful,

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 but also making them respectable….Giving them the kind of image which is consistent
with that of a 'lady' of society."
Nonetheless, Simone Manuel became the first African-American woman to win Olympic
gold for the U.S. at the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, and Lia Neal won a silver that year.
For her part, Manuel said she is on a mission to get more black girls involved in swimming, and
to get past the image barriers regarding hair. (Manuel, 2017)
Despite Manuel’s historic win, NBC chose not to show her medal ceremony live and
instead aired video from earlier in the day of the Russian women’s gymnastic team. After taking
some heat in social media the network, in an email to Bustle.com, wrote: “We always like to end
our primetime coverage with the National Anthem, and last night we chose Simone Manuel for
her historic performance. We also remained on the air to show the Canadian National Anthem
because there was a tie for the gold medal."

GOLF
The foundation of black women in golf dates back to the 1920s. African American women
answered the bigotry that greeted them with the kind of grit and determination that scholars say is
not unusual. Ann Gregory, for instance, was mistaken for a maid by a white golfer when she was
competing in the U.S. Women’s Amateur in Williamstown, Mass. in 1963 and later endured being
“barred from the public golf course in her hometown of Gary, Ind., denied rooms in white-owned
hotels and refused entry to the players’ dinner at the 1959 Women’s Amateur,” according to the
Los Angeles Sentinel.
Throughout the 20th century, black women simply created their own versions of golfing
enterprises when they were banned from others. When blacks in D.C. were first limited to access
25

 to the city’s public links to two afternoons a week and then shunted to the blacks-only club where
the putting area was sand, they fought back. The Wake-Robin women were part of the challenge,
compelling the Interior Department to open a course along the Anacostia River in 1937 (Johnson,
2010). A few years later, a black hair products merchant, irritated that blacks had no access to
courses in Atlantic City, created her own, a nine-hole enterprise in Pomona, N.J. that is still in use.
African American interest in the sport began to emerge in the 1920s, when the fledgling
black middle class began to clamor for parity with the rest of the nation – and golf diversity expert
Michael Cooper and others familiar with blacks in golf noted the emergence of African American
golf clubs for women. Wake-Robin was the first organization of black women in golf, founded in
1937 in Washington, D.C. Two years later the Chicago Women’s Golf Club was created.
“Being a black woman I am just proud to be in a club that has so much history. I just love it. I
get out there and swing that club and it's like I'm in heaven” Mary Stacker, a Chicago Women’s
Golf Club member who is now in her 70s, told a Chicago newspaper recently.
What emerged from that safe space that African-American women themselves are at least
a dozen prominent golf clubs for black women in the U.S. today, from the Atlanta-based Black
Jewels Ladies’ Golf Association that has affiliates throughout the southeast and Midwest, to the
Greens’ Ladies Golf Club in Philadelphia to Vernondale Golf in Northern California. On the pro
circuit, there are eight women, including Cheyenne Woods, Tiger Woods’ niece, on the Ladies
Professional Golf Association (LPGA) tour (Harriett, 2015).
At the top of black female golf royalty are Renee Powell, whose prowess since 1967 earned
her a place in golf’s most hallowed institution, the Royal and Ancient Golf Club in Scotland where
today’s game took its shape and pedigree in 1754, and the late Althea Gibson, the black tennis
Wimbledon and USLT star, who switched to golf at age 32 and earned a spot in the LPGA tour in

26

 1962.
Meanwhile, there are scores of examples of black women’s golf organizations, such as
Black Girls’ Golf, an Atlanta-based group which offers training in the sport. In addition, there are
female entrepreneurs, such as WNBA team owner Sheila Johnson, who has open a couple of golf
resorts recently, and a Tampa, Fla. woman named Clemmie Perry, whose advocacy for black
women in golf was recognized last September by President Barack Obama as part of the White
House Champions of Change for Extracurricular Enrichment.

However, the path to Perry’s

Women of Color Golf in the 21st century began in the late 19th century when America’s embrace
of golf began. And it was not an easy path for black women.
Trailblazers such as Ann Gregory, dubbed “Queen of Negro Women’s Golf, “by black
newspapers after she stormed onto the scene as the first amateur woman to compete in the U.S.
Women’ Amateur in Meridian Country Club in Indianapolis in 1956, were often relegated to
playing under pressure in low-profile tournaments.

Black women golfers also encountered

resistance from black men. A 1947 Chicago Defender article, for example, reported that at the Joe
Louis Open there were “several disputes center[ing] around women competitors...One in particular
that caused the committee to frown on the gals was the disturbance created by a young woman
who denounced the prize she was given.” It was also reported “The main reason [for the dispute]
was apparently due to instances of a double-standard, even in the black community, as women
were at times excluded from tournaments.”
Because black women golfers were defying stereotypes by excelling in a sport that tended
to be relegated to whites, the wealthy and men, the best black women golfers were singled out for
the highest disdain: death threats. Renee Powell told Morgan State University’s DeWayne

27

 Wickham that she warned that if she competed in a woman’s tournament that she would be killed.
She played anyway.
The trailblazers also include African American women who burnished their golf teaching
skills—a key element of being a golf pro--as college golf team coaches, like LaRee Sugg, an LPGA
tour card holder first black coach of a white college’s team at the University of Richmond. Some
even crossed gender lines to coach men, such as Catana Starks, whose experience organizing
Tennessee State University’s men’s golf team is chronicled in a 2013 film, From the Rough. And
now, the ranks of golfers include women of color from Africa. Nobuhle Dlamini, a self- taught
golfer from Swaziland, is embarking on the arduous journey toward an LPGA card this year. And
Malebogo Morebodi of Namibia recently won second place in the Windhoek Lager Africa Jacket
Golf Championship in June. To diversity expert Michael Cooper, the emergence of black women
golfers shouldn’t be dismissed. It is a “not a boom” but the result of a gradual process that has
nurtured black talent, he said.

CONCLUSION

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 Given the debilitating impact of slavery, in which black women were subjected to playing
roles shaped by perceptions of them being inferior, wanton, animalistic and exclusively for labor,
it is not at all surprising that, for African-American women, their desire to participate in sports, a
wholesome activity whether for competition or recreation, would be marginalized in the racist
and sexist gaze of U.S. society.
What is lesser known, and what the literature and the theory bears out, is that through the
black community’s efforts to create wholesome spaces for itself, black women have, over the
years, carved out a means to incubate themselves against the racism of the larger society through
sports clubs and other venues long enough to excel at many sports without being initially
discouraged.
Through the lens of social identity theory, the literature shows that black female athletes,
in the process of identifying as a group before society and in an effort to exhibit their most
exemplary representations before society, often work to counteract racist stereotypes by placing
a strong emphasis on their femininity and their embrace of feminine identity, (i.e., wearing
colorful makeup and outfits).
The paradox, however, is that as African-American women athletes focus on staving off
stereotypical images of being masculine, they run the risk of becoming caricatured images if
their emphasis on femininity overshadows their athletic accomplishments. However, that’s a
predicament they are forced to grapple with in a society that continues to devalue people of
color.
Hopefully, the community spaces where they can continue to practice sports will
continue to act as sanctuaries for them against a society in which their excellence at sports still,
in many cases, winds up garnering them more denigration than praise.

29

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 AUTHORS
Milton Kent
Professor of Practice, Morgan State University School of Global Journalism & Communication
Edward Robinson
Lecturer, Morgan State University School of Global Journalism & Communication
Ron Taylor
Sports Journalism Fellow, Morgan State University School of Global Journalism &
Communication
Tonyaa Weathersbee
Sports Journalism Fellow, Morgan State University School of Global Journalism &
Communication
EDITORS
Stella Hargett, PhD
Interim chair, Department of Sociology
College of Arts & Sciences
Morgan State University
Jacqueline Jones, Assistant Dean-Programs,
Chair, Department of Multimedia Journalism
Morgan State University School of Global Journalism & Communication
This research was made possible by a grant from ESPN’s The Undefeated to Morgan State
University’s School of Global Journalism & Communication.

36