A Spectacular Leap: Black Women Athletes in Twentieth-Century America

by Jennifer H. Lansbury

Overview

Through the stories of six athletes—Alice Coachman, Ora Washington, Althea Gibson, Wilma Rudloph, Wyomia Tyus, and Jackie Joyner-Kersee—Jennifer H. Lansbury deftly follows the emergence of black women athletes from the African American community; their confrontations with contemporary attitudes of race, class, and gender; and their encounters with the civil rights movement. Uncovering the various strategies the athletes used to beat back stereotypes, Lansbury explores the fullness of African American women’s relationship with sport in the twentieth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781682262115
Publisher:	University of Arkansas Press
Publication date:	04/21/2022
Series:	Sport, Culture, and Society
Pages:	353
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Jennifer Lansbury is a twentieth-century American cultural historian. In addition to A Spectacular Leap, she is the author of More Than Words Can Ever Tell (December 2020).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 3

1 Queen of the Courts: Ota Washington and the Emergence of Americas First Black Female Sport Celebrity 11

2 "The Tuskegee Flash": Alice Coachman and the Challenges of 1940s U.S. Women's Track and Field 43

3 "A Nationwide Community Project": Althea Gibson, Class, and the Racial Politics of 1950s Black Tennis 75

4 "Foxes, Not Oxes": Wilma Rudolph and the De-Marginalization of American Women's Track and Field 115

5 "The Swiftie from Tennessee State": Wyomia Tyus and the Racial Reality of Black Women Track Athletes in the 1960s and 1970s 151

6 "A Jackie of All Trades": Jackie Joyner-Kersee and the Challenges of Being the World's Greatest Female Athlete 191

Epilogue

Performance-Enhanced Athletes and "Ghetto Cinderellas": Black Women Athletes Enter the Twenty-First Century 231

Notes 247

Bibliography 289

Index 301

Editorial Reviews

"Jennifer Lansbury brings much needed scholarly attention to the lives of African American women athletes. She has written a compelling, readable narrative that uses biography to illuminate black women's place in sport history and, more broadly, U.S. history." —Susan K. Cahn, author of Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women's Sport

“An important addition to the historiography of women and sport.”
—The Journal of American History

“Jennifer Lansbury’s A Spectacular Leap is an example of great scholarship … [it] unlocks better understanding of black athletic achievement by illustrating the intersection of gender, race, and class, which is so intertwined that it is often simply conflated and essentialized for African Americans—all African American athletes are male, coming from eco­nomic hardship, and are encouraged and respected as men for their athletic dom­inance. Lansbury offers a kaleidoscopic image of black femininity attuned to the fact that African Americans, currently and historically, are not monolithic: they have lived throughout the country, with distinguishable regional and local peculi­arities; they have belonged to all socioeconomic classes; and African American male and female experiences have differed greatly. What stands out most in Lansbury’s work is the collective community action that has been a hallmark of black achievement across time and space, albeit, at times carried out under heav­ily gender oppressive conditions. … A Spectacular Leap is an insightful, well-researched, and thought-provoking analysis of African American female athletes in the last century and is more than a historical account, as it considers gender, politics, economics, nationalism, activism, and race.”
—Scott N. Brooks, The Journal of African American History, Volume 102, Nos. 1-2

“A Spectacular Leap does an excellent job extending the conversation beyond gender, explaining how race and class intersected in women’s sport history. Sadly, as Lansbury shows with the Williams sisters, black women in sport continue to face stereotypes based on all three social identifiers.”
—Lindsay Parks Pieper, Sport in American History, December 2014

From the Publisher