sociologist; psychologist
Personal Information
Born November 22, 1942, in East St. Louis, MO; son of a laborer; married Sandra Boze (an educator), 1970; children: three.
Education: San Jose State College, B.A., 1964; Cornell University, M.A., 1966, Ph.D., 1967.
Career
San Jose State College, instructor in sociology, 1967-69; University of California, Berkeley, assistant professor, 1970-78, professor of sociology, 1978--. Also serves as sports psychology consultant to San Francisco 49ers football team and Golden State Warriors basketball team. Assistant to the commissioner of Major League Baseball, with emphasis on minority hiring in management and front-office positions.
Life's Work
Twenty-five years ago Harry Edwards was a radical spokesman for the rights of black people, especially in the world of organized athletics. Today Edwards carries on his legacy by serving as a sports psychologist and teaching seminars on sports in society at the University of California, Berkeley. At six-foot-eight and 245 pounds, Edwards is himself a former athlete who was courted by several professional sports teams. He chose to remain in academics instead, and has become one of the first nationally known university professors to demonstrate that a nation's sporting community can serve as a model for the professional world at large.
As a young instructor at San Jose State College in 1968, Edwards used Black Panther rhetoric to urge his brothers and sisters to boycott organized athletics--especially the Olympic Games. "For years we have participated in the Olympic Games, carrying the United States on our backs with our victories, and race relations are now worse than ever," he told the New York Times Magazine in 1968. "We're not trying to lose the Olympics for the Americans. What happens to them is immaterial.... But it's time for the black people to stand up as men and women and refuse to be utilized as performing animals for a little extra dog food."
Edwards has mellowed in the decades since, but he is still a strong advocate of black participation in the management of professional sports. He serves as a staff consultant to the San Francisco 49ers football team and to the Golden State Warriors basketball team. He is also actively involved in recruiting black talent for front-office positions in major league baseball. All these efforts are sidelines, however; Edwards is a tenured professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he lectures on sports in society and on race relations in professional athletics. "The establishment has changed to the extent that they decided to invite me in," he later told the New York Times Magazine. "But I'm like the Statue of Liberty. I've been in the same position since Day One."
That position is one of defiance toward white power, a result of Edwards's own bitter experiences as a child, a college athlete, and an academic. The second of eight children, Edwards was born in 1942 in poverty-stricken East St. Louis, Missouri. "I grew up very hard, it took me a long time to build on layers of civility," he told the New York Times Magazine. Edwards's father was an ex-convict who struggled to support his family on a salary of $65 a week. His mother left the family when Edwards was eight. His family boiled drainage-ditch water to drink and once watched as neighbors burned to death in poorly constructed housing. "I pulled my own rotten teeth with my fingers," he remembered.
Edwards has said that he stayed in high school because it was the only way he could get a hot shower. He was an indifferent student but an excellent athlete, playing football, basketball, and taking part in track events like shot put. His father encouraged him to develop his athletic skills, since sports seemed one of the few tickets out of the ghetto for blacks at the time. Indeed, Edwards got his chance to leave East St. Louis when a black attorney there loaned him $700 for tuition at Fresno (California) City College.
Edwards quickly earned an athletic scholarship, excelling in track and field, football, and basketball. His exploits brought him to the attention of San Jose State College, where he moved for his junior and senior years. At San Jose State he became a nationally ranked track star, setting a campus record of more than 180 feet in the discus throw. He played center for the San Jose State basketball team and--thanks to his size and strength--received offers to play professional football with the Minnesota Vikings and San Francisco 49ers.
For all his skill, however, Edwards still fell victim to racial prejudice at every turn; he could not get into a fraternity at his college, could not find decent off-campus housing, and even had trouble getting meals in local restaurants. One of his coaches referred to him in his presence as "a terrific animal." Such attitudes infuriated Edwards, who had by that time become a serious student with excellent grades. He gravitated to the fields of psychology and sociology and began a continuing examination of the threats to black dignity on and off the playing field.
Edwards won a Woodrow Wilson fellowship to Cornell University in 1966. He moved to Cornell site Ithaca, New York, and began work on his master's and doctorate degrees. On weekends he took the bus to New York City to hear lectures by Malcolm X and other leaders of the black rights movement. Edwards's doctoral dissertation was on the Black Muslim religion and its potential for raising minority pride.
By 1967 Edwards was back at San Jose State, this time as a part-time instructor and sports coach. Proclaiming himself "at war with the {white} power structure," he first presented a list of civil rights grievances to the school administration on behalf of black students, especially the athletes. He spearheaded a group that threatened to "physically interfere" with the opening game of San Jose State's football season if the group's demands were not addressed. As Robert Lipsyte put it in the New York Times Magazine, "It was a regional watershed in radical sports activism, and the mainstream reaction was also a first; the opening game was canceled. The undercurrent of racism in American sports was out on the table for good." When then-governor Ronald Reagan heard of the game cancellation he called it "appeasement of lawbreakers" and declared Edwards "unfit to teach." Edwards, in turn, called the governor of California "a petrified pig, unfit to govern."
Edwards then turned his attention to the national level and, from his office at San Jose State, organized a drive to persuade athletes to boycott organized sporting events. The drive gained impetus in the spring of 1968, as the Olympics drew near. "What value is it to a black man to win a medal if he returns to the hell of Harlem?" asked Edwards in Time magazine. "They are only being used to further the racist attitudes of the U.S.A." Edwards's group had its biggest success at the annual track meet of the New York Athletic Club. By coercion in some cases and persuasion in others, he and other black militants saw to it that very few black athletes participated in the meet.
National attention had finally caught up with Edwards, as did the consequences; his two dogs were hacked to death and the initials KKK scratched on his car. Still he persisted, berating the "crackers" in the white power elite. His Olympic boycott appeared at first to be a failure. Instead, it became an international statement when two victorious black runners, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, raised black-gloved fists in a black power salute during the traditional playing of the national anthem after their event. A photographer captured the moment and the two athletes were thrown off the team. Lipsyte wrote of Edwards's disciples: "Their image was burned into history, an icon of nonviolent protest."
In 1970 Edwards moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he quickly became a favorite among students of all races. There he continued his crusade for equitable treatment of black athletes. According to Lipsyte, Edwards's campaigns "were successful by longer-term measures, as consciousness-raisers, as 'teach-ins.' It would never be possible again to regard sports as a never-never land, a sweaty Brigadoon: There was racism in sports; blacks were exploited." Edwards is generally considered the first academic to establish the legitimacy of sport as an integral part--and reflection--of society.
Edwards faced a crucial test in 1976: He had been an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, for six years when he was refused tenure. A university committee voted 10-8 to deny him tenure--the right to continue teaching at Berkeley--because he had failed to publish significantly in professional journals. The uproar at his dismissal went far beyond the boundaries of the Berkeley campus; students, clergymen, fellow sociologists, athletes, and even California governor Jerry Brown wrote letters of protest to the university. In the end, the committee's decision was reversed, and its popular professor was allowed to stay.
Inevitably, Edwards has concerned himself with the physical and psychological well-being of athletes, both professional and amateur. He has urged athletes not to use performance-enhancing drugs such as anabolic steroids, and has pressured coaches not to turn a blind eye to drug use. Edwards has also been a crusader for black participation in the coaching and management aspects of sports. He has developed a sophisticated monitoring system of colleges--following the hiring and promotion of black coaches--and reports his findings to the high school coaches with the most promising young black athletes. The maneuver is far more subtle than his tirades of the late sixties, but is effective nonetheless; college administrators now realize that they must hire black coaches or face the prospect of losing the recruitment race for black talent.
In 1987 Los Angeles Dodgers general manager Al Campanis told a national television audience that blacks lacked the "necessities" to manage a major league baseball team. The Dodgers promptly fired Campanis, but Edwards found cause for hope in the remark. By bringing to light the dearth of black managers, general managers, and front-office staff, Campanis actually did blacks a favor, Edwards said. Baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth agreed, hiring Edwards to help integrate the business end of professional baseball. Edwards discussed his strategy in Time: "On one end, we've worked to create a viable pool of candidates who are qualified now to take over a managerial or front-office position. On the other end, we're bringing younger minorities and women who are not advanced in their careers into lower-echelon positions within a sports organization. The idea is to get them into the loop, learning the business and moving up through the system and into the comfort zone of those who do the hiring. The individuals who tend to be hired are usually those known to the people in authority."
Edwards has also become well known for his work as a consultant to the San Francisco 49ers and the Golden State Warriors, both professional teams in the San Francisco Bay area. He began his work with the clubs in 1988 as a go-between for black players and predominantly white coaching staffs. His job has expanded, however; it now includes traveling with the teams, advising management on the socio-psychological makeup of key draft prospects, and advising players on dealing with management, investments, education, drug use, and post-sports career opportunities. Assessing his impact on the powerful 49ers, for instance, Edwards told the New York Times Magazine: "I don't figure I actually win games for the team. But I've got to be worth two or three plays every game."
From the beginning, wrote Lipsyte, Edwards "has seen himself as one who provokes and incites others to action, a reformer, not a revolutionary. And indeed, no other single figure in sports has done as much to make the country aware that the problems of the larger culture are recapitulated in sports, that the arena is no sanctuary from drugs, racism and corruption." Edwards also wants to serve as a role model--the promising athlete who gave up the possibility of a career in professional sports to become a scholar instead. "We must teach our children to dream with their eyes open," he told Time. "The chances of your becoming a Jerry Rice or a Magic Johnson are so slim as to be negligible. Black kids must learn to distribute their energies in a way that's going to make them productive, contributing citizens in an increasingly high-technology society."
Works
Writings
- Revolt of the Black Athlete, Free Press, 1970.
- Contributor of essays to magazines, including Sports Illustrated and Psychology Today.
Further Reading
Sources
- Jet, June 29, 1987.
- New York Times Magazine, May 12, 1968; May 22, 1988.
- People, April 10, 1978.
- Time, February 23, 1968; March 6, 1989.
— Mark Kram
