Hugh B. Price
President
National Urban League
One might not think to connect the extraordinary triumphs of the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, at the legendary Wimbledon Tennis Championships last week with the announcement earlier in the week from Republican Congressman J.C. Watts, of Oklahoma, that he was leaving the Congress at the end of this, his fourth term in office.
But, in fact, both events, separately and together, speak volumes about, first, the achievement aspirations of African Americans, and, secondly, the barriers that remain to keep them in what some whites believe should be their place.
At one time, just a few decades ago, the"place"of African Americans did not include the world of top-flight national or international tennis-despite the voluminous evidence: Althea Gibson, of course, the great champion of the 1950s; and the crack tennis teams several Historically Black Colleges and Universities continually produced; and, further, the talent that was evident when younger black youth had access to tennis courts.
For example, baseball legend Jackie Robinson in high school in California in the 1930s starred in football, basketball and track as well as baseball. He played tennis only sporadically. But in his junior year, with little practice, he captured the junior boys' singles championship of the highly competitive Pacific Coast Negro Tennis Tournament.
After Althea Gibson, Arthur Ashe, and, now the Williams Sisters have proven what exciting play can come from opening up what was once a racially-restrictive sport-just as Jackie Robinson and those African Americans who followed him did for major league baseball in the late 1940s and 1950s.
Of course, sports is only one arena where African Americans have shown they possess, as writer Albert Murray has put it, the indelible ancestral imperative"to do something and become something and be somebody."
Nowhere is that more evident than in politics, where blacks' desire to participate in the civic life of their communities and the nation has produced during the last three decades a remarkable growth in the number of black elected officials.
The best evidence of that is gathered in the just-released annual report on black elected officials by the Washington-based think tank, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.
The study notes that from just 1,469 officeholders in 1970, by 2000 the lists of African-Americans officials numbered 9,040.
That's still only between two and three percent of all American elected officials; but there is a growing variety within that group: members of Congress as well as state legislators; local school board members and holders of high statewide offices; mayors of large, medium and small cities, and mayors of cities where blacks are not the majority of the electorate. Perhaps most encouraging is the fact that currently six black politicians are waging credible campaigns to be their states' governors.
But, the growth in black political office holding and, more generally, in black political activism, is, still, for all the Republican Party's rhetoric about inclusiveness, virtually all on the Democratic side. For example, there are 39 black Democrats in the Congress.
It's a fact the decision of Watts, the fourth-ranking House Republican, and the only black Republican in Congress, will only exacerbate. Even the announced intention of Rep. Carrie Meek, a pioneering Florida Democrat, to give up her seat at the end of this term, won't change the disproportionate ratio, since she certainly will be replaced by another African-American Democrat.
It's long been fashionable in some quarters to blame this political lopsidedness on blacks themselves. But those so inclined need to answer, for one thing, how it was that in the 2000 Election, while Watts himself was winning re-election handily, all of the 23 other black Republicans across the country who were seeking Congressional office lost.
The GOP's sorry record is all the more ironic given that in the 1960s Edward W. Brooke, the Massachusetts Republican, became the first African American elected to the U.S. Senate since the Reconstruction era and served with great distinction for two terms. Yet, today, Republican officials never even whisper Brooke's name.
Perhaps the same"party amnesia"awaits Watts, since his decision tells us that, for all the high-profile appointments of blacks, when it comes to electoral politics, the GOP appears to be not just to standing still but going backward.
The story of Jackie Robinson offers a dramatic lesson of what they're missing.
As Robinson biographer Arnold Rampersad writes, had Robinson been signed by major league baseball right out of high school in the late 1930s, when his ball field skills were already unmistakably clear, he"would have joined a group of young and still developing baseball players-such as Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, Ralph Kiner, Bob Lemon and Bob Feller-he would meet later either in the majors or in the (baseball) Hall of Fame. But in 1938, the prohibition against blacks in major-league baseball was like iron. The years [of the late 1930s to the late 1940s] … would be in effect the lost baseball youth, never to be recovered, of Jackie Robinson."
In just these last three decades, how many Jackie Robinsons of politics; how many Venus and Serena Williams of politics; how many Edward W. Brookes and J.C. Watts of politics has the Republican Party-and the United States of America-lost?
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