Frontline Bodies: Sports and Black Struggles for Justice since the Late Nineteenth Century

Nicolas Martin-Breteau, a French historian, provides an insightful monograph regarding African American sport history from the 1890s to the present. Focusing on Washington, DC, and the city's ample African American elite population, Martin-Breteau outlines Black political and intellectual thought and its evolution since the late nineteenth century regarding African American sport participation in an area that had been a frontier zone between Southern and Northern racial politics. Originally published in French in 2020, this version of the book took three years to translate. It reads clearly and gracefully thanks to the work of translator Lucy Garnier. Martin-Breteau utilizes Black newspapers and other African American publications from over a century in the Washington, DC, area. His extensive research is commendable and demonstrates his academic diligence considering the sheer quantity and accurate interpretations. One of Martin-Breteau's greatest feats, however, lies in the early development of Black sports as a method of corporeal reclamation, as the Black body had historically been subject to external control and regulation.Frontline Bodies is split into three sections, which are organized chronologically with each chapter organized thematically. The first section regards the era of racial uplift and the promotion of African American character between 1890 and 1930. Black intellectuals during this time, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Marcus Garvey, addressed the importance of demonstrating their moral character and healthy body to discredit the white supremacist belief that African Americans were incapable of being “civilized” people. Displaying the body, especially the athletic body, was a sign of Black capability and respectability that elevated the self and the group, thus signifying that African Americans should be worthy of citizenship and equal rights. To display good character, African American elites called for other African Americans to practice cleanliness and utilize sport and athleticism to prove a Black masculinity that the group had historically been deprived of. In this way, African American athletes began pushing back against the notion of the inferior Black body through athletic excellence. African American women are not excluded from this athletic narrative; Martin-Breteau illuminates how the group also used light athletics such as calisthenics to demonstrate beauty and femininity. By the 1920s, however, Black women were increasingly excluded from athletic participation and markers of femininity shifted to makeup and fashion.Section 2 is about the role of sport in pursuit of civil rights between 1920 and 1960. As the popularity of sports increased, African American athletes drew more attention. Black athletes regularly faced racism while also drawing criticisms from certain Black intellectuals who believed the New Negro Renaissance “first and foremost concerned the arts, sciences, and letters,” something Martin-Breteau argues continues to heavily weigh upon the historiography of this period (112). African Americans’ focus of the promotion of their race lay not only within the arts, but in other aspects of American life that deserve more attention. Regardless, not all Black elites believed sports were an uneducated pastime, including physician W. Montague Cobb, who published research comparing Black athletes’ bodies to white bodies in order to dispel popular beliefs of African American corporeal inferiority. After World War II, African Americans in Washington, DC, found themselves barred from attending certain live events, such as ice skating, but not other sports considered brutish, such as boxing. Black activists began boycotting and protesting these segregationist laws prohibiting them from viewing certain live sporting events in the mid-1940s. Here, Martin-Breteau demonstrates that protests against racial segregation occurred nearly a decade prior to the well-known Montgomery Bus Boycott.Section 3 centers on the contradictions of bodily excellence since 1945, as new Black civil rights leaders such as Stokely Carmichael and other intellectuals viewed sport participation by African Americans as a mere attempt to fit into white society or as shifting focus away from successful Black doctors, businessmen, and academics. One of the book's earlier central figures, physical educator and activist Edwin B. Henderson, viewed Carmichael as a new “segregationist” who demanded “separate but equal” just as had been delivered in the Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896 (220). Henderson and his colleagues were never naive enough to believe sports could solve social issues affecting African Americans, but they believed them to be important in the overall promotion of civil advancement. Martin-Breteau observes that baseball trailblazer Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers “only earned a third” of the annual salary of white star Joe DiMaggio of the New York Yankees. However, he asserts that by 1975, twenty-five years later, “it was African American athletes who were paid the best” (236). Martin-Breteau examines the racial stereotypes that affect Black athletes today. It is widely believed that African American overinvestment in sports since the mid-twentieth century has led to stereotypes of physical superiority but intellectual inferiority. With Black athletes today dominating several athletic arenas in numbers and talent, Martin-Breteau allows one to wonder what societal beliefs about the Black body and mind are in store for the future, as they continue to be under great scrutiny and observation.