Harvard's Black Athletes Discuss Sports, Race, and Their Future

For blacks, even at Harvard, athletics has long been a highway to advancement and respect.

"In athletics you're judged strictly on how you perform." Ron Winfield, the captain of the fencing team, said. But for most blacks at Harvard, graduation will mark the end of participation in organized athletics.

Winfield is pre-med. Tom Williamson, star safety on the football team, plans to be a legal services lawyer, "a base for becoming a lobbyist for poor people." Bobby Johnson, swingman for the basketbal squad, thinks he'd like to go into psychiatry to study the "irrationality of racism."

"The guys here do not really perceive themselves as athletes," Williamson said. "At Big Ten schools that's a lot more legitimate attitude. But here people have to be shaken out of the idea that an athlete is only a performer. You know if I had gone to a place like UCLA it would have been football a go-go."

At some schools a concern for racial problems has affected blacks' attitudes toward athletics. At Berkeley a basketball player refused to cut his "Afro,"--long hair--and, in support, some other players quit the team.

Harvard's black athletes, however, find little to complain about. John Tyson, an All-Ivy safety two years ago, said that "kids on the football team are more conservative generally. But 'conservative' is a bad word. 'Less radical' is better."

Tyson's generalization seems to have little support among most black athletes at Harvard. "There are radical and conservative athletes," halfback Will Stargel, observed. Williamson added, "I don't think the distribution is much different from the rest of the college. They're a strange bag of guys."

Any tensions which arise for black athletes are related to the larger issue of a black man's identity rather than to problems within the athletic department. "Coaches want to put black athletes on the field." Johnson said. "A lot of times they're given a more than equal opportunity."

The tension is internal. "Black athletes sometimes feel that it is more necessary to succeed and be better," Winfild said. This kind of problem bothered Williamson in high school, and although he finds little such pressure at Harvard, he said that "the basic mentality of society is 'We're doing you a favor and so you've got to earn it.'"

By boycotting the Olympic Games athletes "will show America that black people do make contributions here," Tyson said. But the role that blacks can play as athletes in the rights movement is small.

Because athletic competition tends to be apolitical, any problems that black athletes encounter are those that any black student at Harvard finds. While Tyson said that Harvard's outlook is "definitely racist," Winfield said that the university is "not racist but pretty conservative."

While there is disagreement on the extent of overt racism, black athletes, like the rest of the black community, point to the university's failure to provide black culture courses as the main indication of Harvard's unwillingness to change. "This is latent racism," Stargel said.

Athletic teams seem to avoid interpersonal racial problems because "working together develops more of a camaraderie," Johnson said.

In the rest of the university, however, "everybody is trying to be more liberal but has repressed prejudice." Winfield said. For Winfield it's fun to watch the excessive manuvering: as a black, "You can get away with nearly anything," he said. But Johnson is not amused: "I'm as revolted by attempts to make up for my color as by attempts to subhumanize me."

Winfield, who began fencing only two years ago, has no regrets about joining the ranks of the jocks. "I was a science fiction fiend and a lot of the heroes ran around with swords. I thought it'd be fun to try."

He paused and added, "There are certain sexual myths associated with black athletes, you know, so we meet a lot of interesting girls."