1. The African American Pittsburgh Courier provided the description of Coachmanâs 1941 high jump victory. âTuskegee Lassie Goes Up and Over to Retain Title,â Pittsburgh Courier, 29 July 1941, 16.
2. Coachmanâs married name is Davis. Alice Coachman Davis, Interview by author, tape recording, Tuskegee, Alabama, 10 February 2003.
3. Many scholars have already explored women athletesâ navigation of such stereotypes. Susan K. Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Womenâs Sport (New York: Free Press, 1994), is the seminal book-length study into femininity/sexuality, class, and women in sport, and its insights remain extremely relevant. Other important works include Gwendolyn Captain, âEnter Ladies and Gentlemen of Color: Gender, Sport, and the Ideal of the African American Manhood and Womanhood During the Late Nineteenth Centuries,â Journal of Sport History 18 (Spring 1991): 81â102; Mary Jo Festle, Playing Nice: Politics and Apologies in Womenâs Sports (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Cindy Himes Gissendanner, âAfrican-American Women in Competitive Sport, 1920â1960,â in Women, Sport, and Culture, ed. Susan Birrell and Cheryl L. Cole (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1994); Gissendanner, âAfrican American Women Olympians: The Impact of Race, Gender, and Class Ideologies, 1932â1968,â Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport 67 (June 1996): 172â82; Patricia Vertinsky and Gwendolyn Captain, âMore Myth Than History: American Culture and Representations of the Black Femaleâs Athletic Ability,â Journal of Sport History 25 (Fall 1998): 532â61; Rita Liberti, ââWe Were Ladies, We Just Played Basketball Like Boysâ: African American Womanhood and Competitive Basketball at Bennett College, 1928â1942,â Journal of Sport History 26 (Fall 1999): 567â84; Pamela Grundy and Susan Shackelford, âBlack Women Embrace the Game,â in Shattering the Glass: The Remarkable History of Womenâs Basketball (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Martha Verbrugge, Active Bodies: A History of Womenâs Physical Education in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
4. While the work of many theoretical scholars has been transformed by what KimberlĂ© Crenshaw called the intersectionality of race, class, and gender, my own approach is grounded less in theory and more in historical analysis and narrative. KimberlĂ© Crenshaw, âMapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,â Stanford Law Review 14 (1991): 1241â99. For a recent overview of the theory, see Michele Tracy Berger and Kathleen Guidroz, ed., The Intersectional Approach: Transforming the Academy through Race, Class, and Gender (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
5. This narrative approach addresses the problem of limited sources, especially for the athletes who competed during the first half of the century. The black press began following women athletes within the black community as early as the 1920s, and, by mid-century, the white press was writing about them as well. However, the details that can be gleaned from the sports pagesâscores, descriptions of games, matches, and track meets, and the names of playersâoften generate more questions than they answer. Where possible, interviews, personal papers, and autobiographies supplement the press accounts, yet oral and archival information are not abundant for âfamousâ athletes and virtually nonexistent for many women who competed against and alongside them.
6. Jacqueline Jonesâs monograph remains a valued overview of the work lives of black women. See Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family, From Slavery to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1986).
1. Randy Dixon, âOra Washington, E. Brown Cop Net Crowns,â Philadelphia Tribune, 29 August 1929, 10. For Washingtonâs strengths on the court, see Sam Lacy, âAlthea Gibson Vs. Ora Washington for Womenâs All-Time,â Baltimore Afro-American, 17 September 1953, 13.
2. Pamela Grundy argues Washington was the âfirst black female athletic starâ in the African American community and, while I have paraphrased the title, I certainly concur. See Pamela Grundy, âOra Washington: The First Black Female Athletic Star,â in Out of the Shadows: A Biographical History of African American Athletes, ed. David K. Wiggins (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2006), 78â92; âBennett Cage Team Facing Two Games,â Greensboro Daily News, 9 March 1934, 12.
3. For the preeminent work on the changing perceptions of gender and sexuality within womenâs sport, see Susan Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Womenâs Sport (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).
4. I am indebted to Pamela Grundy for sharing with me her interview of Washingtonâs nephew, J. Bernard Childs, and for her previous research into Washingtonâs background. See Grundy, âOra Washington: The First Black Female Athletic Star,â 78â92.
5. Because Virginia, still recovering from the financial setbacks of the Civil War, did not issue birth certificates from 1896 to 1912, the exact date of Washingtonâs birth is unknown. Grundy, âOra Washington: The First Black Female Athletic Star,â 81. The age I use for the introductory paragraph is calculated from an age reference Washington makes to a sportswriter late in her career. See âInjury Forces Ora Out of Singles Play,â Baltimore Afro-American, 9 August 1941, 20, in which Washington says she is forty.
6. Grundy, âOra Washington: The First Black Female Athletic Star,â 80â81; J. Bernard Childs, Interview by Pamela Grundy, Bowling Green, Virginia, 4 October 2003.
7. Grundy, âOra Washington: The First Black Female Athletic Star,â 81â82.
8. Literature on the Great Migration is vast, particularly in terms of the conflation of problems driving blacks north and the emergence of black communities in northern cities. Some important works include Peter Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacksâ Migration to Pittsburgh, 1916â1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Milton C. Sernett, Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Victoria W. Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migration of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Davarian L. Baldwin, Chicagoâs New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Lisa Krissoff Boehm, Making a Way Out of No Way (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009); and Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of Americaâs Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010). In contrast to the more traditional narratives on the causes of black migration during this period, Steven Hahn places the movement into a long-standing African American social and political framework. See Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 465â76.
9. The many artistic facets of the Harlem Renaissance have resulted in an extensive literature on the subject. For example, see Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (London: Oxford University Press, 1971); David Lewis Lettering, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981); Cary D. Wintz, Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance (Houston: Rice University Press, 1988); George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995); Cheryl A. Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1995); J. Martin Favor, Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); and James F. Wilson, Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).
10. Allen Guttmann, Womenâs Sports: A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 106, 112; Vassar Catalogue; quoted in Guttmann, Womenâs Sports, 113.
11. Guttmann, Womenâs Sports, 113â16. For more on the emergence of womenâs sports in the U...