Days of Grace (30 page)

To me, a nine-to-five job was out of the question. Thanks to my earnings and investments, I did not have to look for a traditional salaried job, and my temperament would not allow me to slip easily into such a harness. I had the freedom to work as hard as I wanted, when and if I wished. I
could indulge my passion for reading; Jeanne and I could continue to travel, which we loved. At this time, and for twelve years altogether, we also had a second home near the sixteenth green at one of the Doral Resort and Country Club golf courses in Florida. There, in the sun, I worked at my tennis responsibilities for the resort, and on my golf game for myself. With my heart condition, golf had superseded tennis as my main sport; with every year I had become more and more entranced by the fairways and the greens.

As much as I enjoyed this leisurely life, however, I found myself continually looking for a chance to do something more purposeful and consequential. My public lectures, in particular, kept me aware of issues and ideas that had relatively little to do with the comfortable life I was leading in Florida or New York. By choice, I was not represented by a professional speakers’ bureau; I wanted to pick my own engagements, without special regard to the size of the fees. (I stuck to this policy for twelve years after my retirement, until my AIDS announcement created too great a demand for me to handle on my own.) As for my talks, I tried to speak out of my own experience, practically; I avoided hectoring young people, but sought to teach them something important about life as I had learned from it. On the whole, I found speaking quite satisfying. And I was seldom more satisfied than when I found myself on a college or university campus, addressing a gathering of young people.

Although the mood of the campuses had changed from the 1960s, when peace, love, folk songs, and marijuana seemed to reign, I was happy to find that idealism still burned brightly among the students, as well as a genuine affection for ideas. Loving books myself, I knew that I would enjoy being a teacher. But what could I teach in a college? Not tennis. I knew that I would soon tire of being a college coach (no doubt, my Davis Cup experience had something to do with this insight). If I could choose, I would teach history, or politics. Unfortunately, my only degree was in neither field.

Nevertheless, I began to receive invitations to offer college courses. To my surprise and pleasure, I also began to receive honorary doctorates, including one from Princeton in 1982. As for teaching, the most attractive offer was probably from Henry Louis Gates, Jr., then a junior professor at Yale. In 1983, I lectured at Yale when I was selected for the Kiphuth Fellowship (named after a man who coached swimming there from 1917 to 1959), which is given annually to someone “of rare character” in sport, physiology, literature, or the arts. A gathering of some five hundred students, faculty, and staff heard me speak on “Collegiate Athletics: A Reappraisal.” Strolling with Gates and some of his students among Yale’s venerable Colonial and Gothic Revival buildings, I felt comfortable. Completing high school with virtually a straight-A average, I had been assured by one mentor with excellent connections that Harvard was ready to admit me, doubtless with an eye on its tennis team. I chose instead to go to UCLA. Although I never regretted this decision, the chance to teach in the Ivy League was tempting.

However, I turned down Yale and chose instead to teach at a college that, in just about every way, is Yale’s polar opposite: Florida Memorial College (FMC), a historically black school of some twelve hundred students in Miami. The college was not far from the Doral. The invitation had come from my old friend the Reverend Jeff Rogers, director of the Center for Community Change there. In 1968, Rogers had invited me to give the speech in Washington, D.C., for which I had been quietly reprimanded by my Army superiors. We had stayed in touch, and after moving to FMC, he was instrumental in having me appointed to the college’s board of trustees.

Excited at the prospect, I proposed to teach an honors seminar on “The Black Athlete in Contemporary Society.” Two aspects of the course stirred me. First, I would be working with black college students in a historically black college for the first time in my life; this was my major reason for declining Yale’s offer, although I hoped to teach a
course there eventually. And second, we would be exploring a fascinating subject, delving into the corpus of scholarship on blacks and sport. I soon had two surprises. One concerned the volume and the quality of material on this subject that meant so much to me. The other had to do with the performance of many of the students in my class.

For the first two or three meetings, my dozen students seemed bright and alert enough. Then I received their first papers, and the first shock. Three students, all women, handed in well-researched, finely written papers. Almost all the others, in varying degrees, upset me so profoundly that my hands shook with disbelief and anger the first time I read their prose. Their command of English was so abysmal, their sense of organization so weak, their mastery of logic and argumentation so pathetic that I could not believe that these young students would ever graduate from college. As I sat at the dining-room table that evening, reading the papers, my mood shifted from anger into depression.

“Jeanne, please listen to this,” I said. I read a sentence or two. “Can you believe that someone in college wrote this?”

“Oh my,” Jeanne replied. “He has a problem.”

“And listen to this one.” I read another.

“Sorry, Arthur,” Jeanne said,
“you
have a problem.”

Indeed I had. The last thing I wanted was to be perceived as a snob come down from New York City eager to heap scorn on the students, or for blacks to think that I had been socializing with rich white people for so long that I had lost touch with reality. Maybe I have, I told myself.

As soon as I could, I went to see Jeff Rogers. I knew I could be frank with him. He listened to my complaints patiently, and was philosophical.

“Arthur, I know what you are saying is true. I’ve seen some of those papers, too. But you have to understand what these kids have been through, what their families have been through, just for them to get to this point. This is not UCLA.”

“But I am
not
just UCLA,” I said. “I grew up in Richmond, under segregation. I went to all-black Maggie
Walker High School. And I went to an all-black high school in St. Louis, too. Nobody wrote like this. Besides, my seminar is supposed to be for honors students. Are these honors students?”

“How do you know that no one wrote like that at Maggie Walker, Arthur?”

“I just know it. There were some awfully bright kids in class with me.”

In our little group, we went on to be professionals of many kinds, doctors and lawyers and serious musicians. My classmate Isaiah Jackson, for example, studied Russian at Harvard, then turned to music. He became a symphony orchestra conductor, and is now one of the most acclaimed younger conductors in the United States. I myself more than held my own at UCLA.

“And what about the kids in the other classes?” Rogers asked. “What about the other schools in Richmond? In any case, you went to school in another age altogether, Arthur. And perhaps you were all put together because you were bright, the children of the strivers.”

Jeff may have had a point there. I hadn’t thought about it before, but I could see now what he was talking about. My schooling indeed had taken place a long time in the past. But had education and its results changed so much?

“All I know, Arthur, is that we at this college, or those of us here who care about students, have to look out for all the young men and women out there. We have to look out for the bright and the dumb, the honest and the crooked, the brave ones and the punks. Here at FMC, sure, we give the benefit of the doubt to some of the kids we admit. But somebody has to give them the benefit of the doubt, after what they have been through in this country. You know the white man isn’t going to do that. Certainly not here in Florida, not anywhere in the United States, really. So we have to be prepared to do it, Arthur. We have to work with the kids, help them to see that there’s a better way to do things. That’s our job. And it’s not always pleasant.”

I went away feeling more chastened than uplifted, almost
as if I had now committed myself to remedial instruction. But when some of the students drifted in late to class, or stayed away altogether without an excuse, or made feeble, trifling excuses to explain why they hadn’t read this book or finished that paper, I felt my indignation rise again. Then, I didn’t want to hear about the effects of history and the legacy of slavery and segregation. At some point, each individual is responsible for his or her fate. At some point, one cannot blame history. Does the legacy of slavery explain why Mr. Jones eased into class ten minutes late this morning? Why Mr. Smith yawned in my face and claimed that he had not known about the assignment? Or why Miss Johnson, who obviously comes from a family with means, asked me to explain what
exactly
I was looking for in the essay I had assigned? Or why those three other young women, out of the same general background, executed their assignments on time, and so well?

Sticking by my rules about grading, I watched one student after another drop the course. The rest of us plodded on. Even those who dropped it were polite, but on the whole I was rather disheartened. To a reporter from
Ebony
magazine in Chicago, I put on a bright face. “I don’t think it’s the teaching
per se
that excites me,” I reported, “but the teaching of black students. There are lots of things that black students need to know and have impressed upon them.” However, that semester was one of the more discouraging seasons of my life. Its main virtue was to make me even more determined to try to make a difference in the area of education, in particular. Certainly it was the major reason for the uncompromising position I took on the question of higher academic standards for athletes governed by the NCAA.

On the other hand, my discouragement did not diminish my high regard for the historically black colleges, which I believe must be preserved. I grew up in Richmond with one of them, Virginia Union University, across the street from my home, and another, Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), not far away. Such colleges are curators of our
culture just as, whether we like to admit it or not, Harvard is a curator of Anglo-Saxon culture in the United States. Harvard may appoint a Chinese president, but it is emphatically an Anglo-Saxon university, a fact about which it need not apologize. Notre Dame and Fordham have a special place in Roman Catholic culture, Brandeis and Yeshiva in Jewish American culture. We as African Americans have Howard, Tuskegee, and Spelman, and should help them.

To this end, I am a veteran supporter of the United Negro College Fund, which is the leading tax-exempt charitable fund in the African American community. I support the UNCF because of the high value I place on these colleges and because the fund is both nonpolitical and highly efficient. Nevertheless, I also believe that if any of the historically black colleges cannot maintain a certain level of excellence or financial stability, it should take steps to change its private status and ethnic identity if that is essential to its survival, or close.

The other shock that came in connection with my course at Florida Memorial College resonated for at least the next five years of my life. It led me to devote much of that time to the serious study of the subject of African Americans in sports, and to publish my findings in three books on the subject.

In preparing my course syllabus, I quickly discovered, to my surprise and chagrin, that virtually nothing had been written by scholars, black or white, on the history of black involvement in sports in America. Hunting in the New York Public Library on Forty-second Street, I found only two books: Edwin B. Henderson’s
The Negro in Sports
, published in 1938, with a revised edition in 1948; and A. S. “Doc” Young’s
Negro Firsts in Sport
. I was baffled by this poverty of information. After all, in major sports such as boxing, baseball, football, basketball, and track, African Americans comprised a disproportionately high percentage of the leading athletes. When one dug deeper, a rich history of black involvement in these and other sports began to appear. I became convinced that I had stumbled onto a story
that had to be told. After all, these were my people in two senses: as black Americans and as athletes.

Burning with a sense of obligation, I decided to forgo the chance of an advance from a publisher and to spend my own money to hire a team to research and write a comprehensive study of the subject. Eventually I spent about $300,000. I hired a personal assistant, Derilene McLeod, to help with typing, typing, and general organization. She turned out to be an inspired choice; falling in love with the project, she kept it on course over the years. As researchers, I hired first Sandra Jamison, a skilled librarian, then Rodney Howard, who brought a sophisticated academic background to the project as well as boundless enthusiasm, which we needed. Francis Harris compiled much of the material in its extensive reference sections. Kip Branch, a professor at Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, polished my prose.

In 1988, dedicated to Jeanne and Camera,
A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African-American Athlete
appeared in three volumes. Together, the volumes cover the subject from 1619 to around 1985.

A Hard Road to Glory
was an emotional experience for me because it dealt so intimately, at almost every stage, with both the triumph and tragedy, the elation and suffering, of blacks as they met not only the physical challenges of their sport but also the gratuitous challenges of racism. No sport was exempt from this painful double history, so that compiling the record was a fairly relentless exposure to disappointment.

One fact, seldom recalled, sums up the bittersweet history we were bent on recovering. The Kentucky Derby is the most celebrated horse race in America. On May 17, 1875, when the first Kentucky Derby was run, all but one of the fifteen jockeys were black. Then, when the law required that jockeys had to be licensed, one by one black jockeys were excluded by the Jockey Club; systematically, whites drove them out of the sport. Starting in 1912, and in nearly every year since, no African American has ridden in
the Derby. Racism destroyed a tradition so effectively that most people, black or white, probably assume that blacks had never been a part of the Run for the Roses.