Leaders in HBCU Community Have Long Debated Institutional Role of Student-Athlete - Higher Education

Leaders in HBCU Community Have Long Debated Institutional Role of Student-Athlete - Higher Education: Following Jesse Owens’ spectacular record-breaking four-gold-medal performance at the 1936 Olympics and Joe Louis’s capture of the heavyweight boxing title in 1937, a number of African-American coaches and journalists argued that African-American colleges should increase their financial support of athletics in hopes of producing more athletes who demonstrated the ability of the race.

Typical of those calls were sentiments of James D. Parks, a respected track coach at Lincoln (Pa.) University, who criticized the fact that Black colleges had failed to ever produce an Olympian. He acknowledged the financial restraints of the schools, but decried their lack of tracks and track coaches. Parks concluded that Black colleges “do not seem to realize that the development of even a single Owens or (Ralph) Metcalfe would bring more national and international renown to their institutions than a thousand of their so-called football classics (they( play among themselves.” Parks believed that by training champion athletes, Blacks earned a patriotic reputation and that their failure to do so suggested that African-Americans were unable to produce cable patriotic men.