Can you separate sports and politics?
Talking with Lou Moore
Back when I taught high school in Florida, I started every year’s first lecture with the same image:
For me, the image of Colin Kaepernick kneeling alongside his teammates was a startling reminder that we have so much work to do in this country to ever achieve racial justice, and therefore social justice, for everyone. I’d ask students about the image, if they were familiar with Kaepernick’s position, and we’d discuss forms of civil protest and First Amendment rights in the United States.
My decision to use Kaepernick and his protest was informed mostly by Lou Moore, who I’d been following on twitter for some time by that point. As a scholar of Black sports, Lou was keenly positioned to provide context and insight not only the San Francisco quarterback, but about challenges Black athletes faced both on and off the fields, courts, and diamonds.
Lou’s posts (and later, first book) helped me put into words that despite what you might hear, sports have always been political.
A couple years ago Lou let it slip that he was working on a new project talking about the history of Black quarterbacks in the NFL. Like a lot of his fans, I watched and waited.
Lou’s book dropped this past week, and I had the pleasure of both getting to read it early and finally getting to get Lou to come on the pod. We chose 1999’s Any Given Sunday as an entry into Lou’s work. What we found is that the movie may have actually predicted the modern NFL. It features the rise of Black quarterback (played by Jamie Foxx) but also commentary on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), drug abuse, malicious owners, and the political relationships between municipal governments and sports teams. In the clip below, we talk about how Black quarterbacks gradually found acceptance in the NFL:
For historians, one of the things we also talk about was Lou’s decision to go into sports history as his discipline. Lou came out of UC Davis, which produces a Murderer’s Row of historians. Strangely, many universities lack scholars who focus on sports, even though as Lou demonstrates, the field integrates so many other disciplines, such as labor, race, gender, economics, and even environmental history.
About our guest:
Louis Moore is a Professor of History at Grand Valley State University. He teaches African American History, Civil Rights, Sports History, and US History.
His research and writing examines the interconnections between race and sports. He is the author of three books, I Fight for a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood, 1880-1915; We Will Win the Day: The Civil Rights Movement, the Black Athlete, and the Quest for Equality and most recently The Great Black Hope: Doug Williams, Vince Evans and the Making of the Black Quarterback. He has an audible lecture, African American Athletes Who Made History. In addition, he has two audible lectures, African American Athletes Who Made History and A Pastime of Their Own: The Story of Negro League Baseball. He has also written for various online outlets including The New York Daily News, Vox, The Global Sports Institute, First and Pen, and the African American Intellectual Historical Society, and he has appeared on NPR, MSNBC, CNN, and BBC Sports. He is also the co-host of the Black Athlete Podcast.
Read Lou’s work
Listen to the pod
I’m really excited for you to hear this conversation, and even more excited for you to hear about Lou’s work. Find that below.
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Big things coming next month.
JWH