Association meeting. Amira rose davis is a professed or professor of history at Penn State College in pennsylvania and is working on a book about the lives and labors of women athletes in the age of jim crow. Thanks for joining us on American History tv. Thanks for having me. Let me begin with your book, expected to be published in about a year. What have you learned so far . So many things. I started the project asking, is there a long history of black women in sports . I found more than i expected to find. There wasnt any archive labeled history of black women in sports. By the time i pieced it together, i would say i got started by finding three women who played baseball in the negro leagues in the 1950s. It was a remarkable story. They played with the man. One things that stuck out about that story was that the owner who had brought in these black women to play against the men said he had something called the gal file, where women and young girls were writing in to request tryouts. That stuck in my head as a young graduate student and i thought, if there were a lot of black women and girls in the mid century trying to trying to play baseball, they be there is a longer, head and history. That set me out to find out other stories that take us to track, tennis, from baltimore to rome, really looking at black women in the sporting history in the 20 century. Let me talk about two names, one quite familiar, hank aaron, and the other is tony stone. Those baseball women who i stumbled upon were brought in at the fall of the negro leagues. The negro leagues had been a huge institution in the black community. It provided ownership and upward mobility for business owners, and opportunity to play for black men at the time. And black sportswriters covered the league incessantly but were always pushing for integration with the majors. Jackie robinson broke the color line in 1947, and what we see after that is the exodus from the negro leagues of the toptier talent, and they are largely going into the majors, with no compensation to their teams, the negro leagues are in steady decline and a lot of people are trying to figure out how to save the institution, and they are frankly asking, is it worth saving . And in this moment sid, who manages the indianapolis cloud, tony stone was a semi pro player at the time and was barnstorming occasionally with main with male semi pro teams and he thinks, what if we brought her in . A lot of this is the same market logic that happened with the allamerican Girls Professional Baseball League that pitted winning and pitted women, seemingly feminine and wearing skirts for uniforms, playing baseball during the war years. And it was the same logic, and the indianapolis clowns was a team you think of as the harley him harlem globetrotters, a lot of shelley players, they brought tony in, a lot of showy players, they brought tony and, crowds increased with herb being in the league, and it led to other women being in the league, and tony is replacing hank aaron at second base on the clowns when she joins in 1952. So within that history you have these black women. When did title ix come about, and what are its early origins . Title ix was the educational amendment of 1972. This wasnt an athletic amendment, it was an educational amendment, 37 words that basically say you cant discriminate on the basis of sex if youre getting federal money. It has wideranging effects, but certainly in the world of athletics, it means that if you are high school, a public college, and you are getting federal funds, you have to make sure there is equitable opportunities on your campus so this is largely thought about, correctly so, as the thing that opens the floodgates for women in sports. But there is a longer sporting history that goes way before title ix, which was 1972. You had professional leagues for women in the early 20th century, both black, but certainly within the black community you had increased permissibility around athletics that led to quite a few competitive leagues, and notorious women in sports, before title ix was enacted. This year the olympics take place in tokyo, happening every four years. When did we first see women in the olympics and how did that all evolve . When we talk about women in the olympics, a lot of the focus has been on athletics. Track and field events were a large focus about women being incorporated into the olympic movement. What you see in the 1920s is a lot of women pushing for inclusion in track and field events and the olympic games, and the powers that be, the International Olympic committee and the local federations in the united states, the amateur Athletic Union that covered this, said absolutely not, like, track will compromise your reproductive ability, it will make you more masculine, it is not fit for women, we wont have it read around the world, women were not taking this lightly. And in france there is a movement to start what was called the worlds womens games in 1922. Stateside, at first there was a feeling that nobody who was respectful who would want to go, but there are women who want to go to france and compete in these games, but behold, a lot of women did, and it wasnt just ethnic immigrants, wasnt just quote unquote lower class women, but it was upperclass women who played tennis or who wanted to swim and they also wanted to go to world games. So the president of the aau said, the women have found the games. We cant bar them anymore, we can only control them. So two years later you see women athletic events being added to the stateside competitions, aau competitions, and then into the big games in earnest by 1928. Earlier you were talking about the idea of a negro league. Was that a good thing or a bad thing from your perspective . It is hard to say if it was good or bad. It was what it was. It was a time of jim crow, and we were facing violence and rampant segregation across the country and really black ballplayers had no other choice. Negro leagues, like black colleges, black businesses, black wall street, banks, schools, everything born out of segregation was born out of necessity, born out of a community that said, we will provide for ourselves since we are locked out of your leagues. And the negro leagues were a major source of community development, i talked about business development, but just for the community, the games came a place to congregate, show off your finest bars, if you had that, to see role models that played, to cheer for teams coming into barnstorming that area, and it was a source of entertainment and pride, which resulted in a lot of animosity shown towards the women who integrated the one sportswriter said at the time that it is a sad straight sad state for the negro leagues that they have to tied their strings to a womans apron in order to survive. They considered it emasculating. That is why the three women who receive to play baseball received a very different reaction from the black press than other women playing in sports against white women or other black women. Them playing against men was Something Different and symbolized a bad chapter in the black community, with the destruction of the negro leagues. Did these individuals consider themselves to be role models, or trailblazers . There was a sense of it. A lot of them just wanted to play ball, beacon said it athletes, and they considered this was the way through the door. Sid sid, the allamerican Girls Professional Baseball League, wanted to put toni stone in a dress uniform and she said, absolutely not, im a ballplayer and am here to play ball in that way. What you see in all of their stories, a narrative of looking and seeing the girls and women who fled the stands to see them. Toni stone is barnstorming with the bus full of men, they roll into towns and sometimes she is taken for a sex worker because she is on a bus with 26 men, and she is sent to sleep in a brothel instead of a hotel or house where they are all staying. And yet within this space she connects with women working there and they teach her how to pat her bra so the baseball doesnt hurt her as much, they leave her food and money and come to her games and she explained, they might be wrong women but they were good girls, and that is a way of connecting black women in nontraditional labor markets, whether they are sex workers or ballplayers. And you see that it was of interest to both of them that what toni was doing was significant, and had the ability to be role models to other girls. And in the case of peanut johnson, she tried out for the l american Girls Professional Baseball League, and it was a segregated league. When you watch a league of their own, there is a clip when the ball runs over to the seat of a black woman who throws it back on the field and it is a silent scene. She never says a word. But those 21 seconds are meant to be a nod to the fact of the league was segregated. That is why you see them in the negro league and not in the l american Girls Professional Baseball League. What is the age of jim crow, can you explain for those not familiar . Sure. The age of jim crow refers to a period of time when segregation, being the law of the land, so technically it stretches past brown versus the board of education, when it is ruled segregation is inherently unconstitutional. But the way i use it, i fall into the language of historians looking at roughly the end of the 1800s up to the mid20th century as a time where you had segregated institutions, you have it constitutionally upheld, and you have state sanctioned violence and vigilante violence that threatens anybody who seeks to circumvent the color line and avoid the hardened ideas of jim crow, which say white drinking fountain uncolored drinking fountain, or that you cant ride at the front of the bus. So when i referred to the age of jim crow i am referring to an intense period of approved segregation that was held in place by white violence that threaten the livelihood of black americans, but certainly anybody who dared to try to trouble this color line. What type of primary sources are out there . Who are you talking to, what are you researching, and where . There wasnt an arrow pointing at this history, a lot of the early histories i found was just a stumbling upon womens names in the files of men. I spent a lot of town in time in cooperstown at the Baseball Hall of fame and found these women there, but also i would go to historical black colleges and universities, who desperately need attention and funding and resource allocation towards them, and have amazing repositories that chronicle such rich histories of black life all through the 20th and 19th centuries. And i found in those repositories a lot of papers of young women who played collegiate sports at historical black colleges and universities. That was a rich find for me. And i conducted oral histories with people like the storied coach from Tennessee State university who coached a number of olympians. I talked to olympians themselves, tiger bell is available now as of last year, she was a 1964 and 1960 olympian and stage a protest at the 1968 games. I conducted interviews with her. I think and of course, how could i forget black newspapers. The black press has a running chronicle of sporting events for black girls and black women in the community, from the scores of local games to longform articles about their achievements on the International Stage in the olympic games. So mining the black press, looking at primary sources at hbcus, and conducting oral histories gave me the primary source base i used to conduct this research and do this project. And teaching all of this on the campus of penn state university. What is your background . Where did you study and how long have you been teaching . I did my doctorate at Johns Hopkins university in baltimore and i came to pen straight straight from there i came to penn state straight from there and have been there for four years, living in happy valley, a great place to study sports critically, because nobody can say there that sports dont matter. So you already have a foot in the door to say, we are going to take sports seriously, have critical conversations around sports in power and race and gender and sexuality. And so far it has been great. My classes and students are phenomenal and there is a vibrant intellectual Community Around critical sports studies on the campus. I couldnt ask for a better place to do this work. Amira rose davis is joining us from new york, participating in a conference of american historians meeting in new york city over the weekend. Thank you