Arthur Wharton was the world

Arthur Wharton was the world's first Black professional footballer and 100 yards world record holder. He was probably the first African to play professional cricket in the Yorkshire and Lancashire leagues. But while he was beating the best on the tracks and fields of Britain, the peoples of the continent of his birth were being recast as lesser human beings. The tall Ghanaian irritated white supremacists because his education and sporting triumphs refuted their theories. In the late Victorian era, when Britain's economic and political power reached its zenith and when the dominant ideas of the age labeled all blacks as inferior, it was simply not expedient to proclaim the exploits of an African sportsman. This shaped the way Wharton was forgotten.

As his sporting powers waned, so did his fame and earning power. He died a penniless coal-miner, and his grave remained unmarked until 1997. His absence from the histories of football, and to a lesser extent athletics, is being righted, yet this book shows that the deeds of many black and working class people suffered the same fate.

The last chapter attempts to explain why Arthur Wharton, such an important figure from the history of sport in Britain, was so quickly forgotten.

THE FORGOTTEN HISTORY OF ARTHUR WHARTON, 1865-1930, THE FIRST BLACK PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALLER

A sporting contemporary of Arthur’s was KS Ranjitsinhji an Indian prince who used the cricket bat to produce fleeting moments of wonder and lasting memories of beauty. During the summer of 1899 he beat the scoring record of the legendary WG Grace by accumulating 3,000 runs over the season. In Beyond A Boundary Trinidadian Marxist CLR James leaves the reader in no doubt as to the elevated status and place ‘Ranji’ held - and still holds - within the sport. He was revered by followers of cricket throughout the British empire. He is irremovable from the pantheon of Great Names of Cricket.

Why has this not been so for Wharton with football? While his achievements in athletics do feature to a limited extent in the histories of that sport, the reasons for his absence in histories of football seems almost conspiratorial. A list of over 1,000 players in Football Who’s Who for both 1900-01 and 1901-02 omit Wharton, as they do the Cother brothers, Fred Corbett of West Ham United and John Walker of Hearts and Lincoln City, all ‘Coloured’ players. The Book Of Football (1906) focused on a number of leading clubs. In its treatment of PNE there is a section on goalkeepers which names four of those who either pre- or proceeded Arthur. But not the man himself. In separate discussions of ‘Good Goalkeeping’ and the longevity of career of some footballers in Football And How To Play It (1904) there is no mention of Wharton although he played professionally to 36 years of age. In the ‘Table of Leading Goalkeepers 1872-1949’ in The Official FA Yearbook 1949-50 Wharton is absent because he failed to play for England, feature in an FA Cup Final or play for the Football League representative XI. The author, Nick Hazlewood, of the most recent book devoted to goalkeepers In The Way (1996) again did not find space to include Wharton. Other writers - Cashmore (1982); Hamilton (1982) and Woolnough (1983) - that dealt specifically with Black footballers and sportsmen ignored or dealt with him in passing.

Both Ranjitsinhji and Wharton were labelled by British sports commentators as ‘Coloured’. This is what united the two sportsmen: they were both the object of colour-coded - racialised - appraisal. However racism took a variety of forms. The ethnicity and culture of the individual or group had also to be categorised. Once these three factors - colour, ethnicity and culture - had been dissected, the Asiatic - yellow - peoples were placed at a more advanced position along the continuum of civilised/uncivilised, than the African. According to this ordering of society as an ethnic Indian, ‘Ranji’ was of a less barbaric, more evolved culture. The justification for this assertion was premised on the view of the South Asian sub-continent as having had a history conveyed from generation to generation through the base language of Sanskrit. Since at least the eighteenth century some European scholars argued that Sanskrit, and the classical languages of Europe, Latin and Greek, had a common source. Indeed some went as far as to propose that Sanskrit was the linguistic base from which all Indian and European languages had originated. This was the view of William Jones writing in 1786. A little later Friedrich Schlegel developed the notion of an ancient Indian ‘Race’ from which was constructed the concept of an Aryan ‘Race.’ The Aryans - Caucasians - had moved from their original territory of the Asian Caucasus and peopled Europe. For Schlegel, the Indian Aryans were responsible for the ancient civilisation of African Egypt. This interpretation of the past in effect de-Africanised Egypt. He felt that the physiological production of sound in a language betrayed the evolutional state of the people who spoke it. Indo-European languages were ‘inflectional’, noble languages able to transmit sophisticated thought; African ‘gutteral’ languages were animalistic and unable to facilitate the transmission of civilised, progressive thought and ideas. Therefore Africans were the least evolved, most animalistic of humans. Arthur was a (sub-Saharan) African - or even worse, a hybrid - having no written language, so without history, having accumulated nothing of worth - only a void of Barbarism.

Both Ranjitsihnji and Wharton came from aristocratic backgrounds, although the public perception of Wharton’s class as a young athlete was that he was a ‘gentleman’, a bourgeois. This perceived difference is important. Ranjitsihnji was accepted by his peers, the public and the press as upper-class. He played as an amateur for Sussex. While Wharton, a resident of the industrial, proletarian North of England played football for working-class clubs and became a professional runner, the antithesis of the amateur ‘gentleman’ athlete.

It was much easier to forget Arthur because the communities in which he played his sport, lived and died did not have the means to ensure his posthumous survival. Working-class people and communities do not generally write their own histories, own printing presses, have editorial control within newspapers, commission art, erect statues, or have power over access to mediums of mass communication generally. While celebration of the defeat of enemies of the ruling-class - Remembrance Sunday, November 11, for instance - is seen almost as a social duty, working people do not in a similar manner collectively remember their victories, as a class, in a manner defined and constructed by themselves as a class. The Peasants Revolt 1381; Ketts Rebellion 1546; Tolpuddle Martyrs 1834; Chartists of the 1840’s; 1919 Rebellions; Cable Street 1936; and the smashing of the National Front at Lewisham in 1977 are just a few examples of events, movements and battles that are not celebrated by the majority of workers in a carnival of joy. Where are the prominent statues, the physical representation of civic memory to honour these historic events of working-class action? Though this one-sided imbalance has token compensations: Winston Churhill has a prime site facing the Palace of Westminster. A constant stream of passers-by thus have a bird-arse view of the pigeons’ restoring his pate to its natural white.

If momentous and inspiring working class acts are suppressed, erased or forgotten it is not surprising that the achievements of one individual are airbrushed out of the contested and congested space called ‘History.’ Wharton was made invisible because he became both Black and working-class. But what of ‘Ranji’? Does not his indelibility in cricket history and folklore negate the theory that racism is to blame? Memory of him has proved durable to the withering corrosion of time. Well, he was an Indian, not an African. I have tried to offer an explanation as to why this difference of ethnicity and culture would affect his recognition.

The place - geographical situation - of their achievements is also important. Ranjitsihnji was an elite aristocratic cricketer who played at the Southern heart of the empire. He was selected for England but did not represent England; rather just the glory of It - a cricketing colonial - as an imperial force. He was surrounded by individuals and institutions of enormous power. This included the power to produce Memory as a cultural commodity. Yet while Arthur was on the margins of influence and power his proletarianisation - the act of his becoming working class - provides the essential clue to his erasure from collective memory. His career was fashioned and shaped by the paradox of opposing forces that at the same time raised and lowered him. He was elevated by his achievements on the sports field to the status of ‘Celebrity’; while his occupational status as a professional runner, footballer and northern leagues cricketer lowered his social class. This is not a value judgement, just as a description of fact brought about by his decision to become a professional sportsman, and through the blocking of alternative careers by others such as the Governor of the Gold Coast. ‘Ranji’ was remembered because of his talent and ability but as importantly because those with whom he mixed socially, of whom he was a part - the elite of cricket and society - also wrote. He also wrote a book on cricket from which CLR James quotes. Wharton did not mix in such company. If he did put pen to paper his reminiscences have been lost, disappearing with all his other personal artefacts save a bible and a small collection of photographs some of which came to the notice of Sheila Leeson via an individual collector who had bought an album disposed of by an elderly member of the Leeson family houseclearing on the death of a relative.

Yet the existence of both the South Asian cricketer and the Black African footballer alerts us to the reality of polychrome sport in late-Victorian - pre-first world war Britain. Other Black Association footballers and runners have been mentioned already. In Rugby James Peters, a Black man born in Manchester played for England between 1906-1908; African-American racing cyclist Marshall Taylor beat British and continental opponents in 1902; in 1907 South African boxer Andrew Jeptha won a world title in London. Ex-slave Bobby Dobbs fought in Britain in 1898 and returned in 1902, staying for eight years. People of Colour were kitted-up all over the place: at the crease; on the field; on the track; at the velodrome; and in the ring.

Boxing was the sport in which Black participation had been longest and most numerous. Because of its core elements - controlled aggression and muscled agility - and the personal qualities required to be successful - strength, character and durability - contests between Black and White had significance beyond the ring. Black prowess caused enormous problems for white supremacists. Peter Jackson, born at Fredericksted, Virgin Island in the Caribbean in 1861, won the Australian heavyweight championship in 1886 ( a significant year!). Ashe (1993) cites Jackson as the first Black man to win an official national title. Shunned by White heavyweights in the USA he sailed to England for a match. On 11 November 1889 the Virgin Islander won the British heavyweight title from Jim Smith. He later returned to the USA and challenged James Corbett. After 61 rounds the fight was declared a draw. Corbett, who was to win the world championship from John L Sullivan a year later, described Jackson as the best boxer he had met. The latter wanted a return against Corbett for the undisputed championship of the world in 1893. Corbett refused. There was a ‘Race’ to lose in defeat.

The whupping of White supremacist ideology by the triumphs of Black athletes, in particular boxers, vexed racists. Public appeals were made for the best sons of the White ‘race’ to come forward to defeat and subdue the animalist threat. The sports editor of the New York Sun was apoplectic.

‘We are in the midst of a growing menace. The black man is rapidly forging to the front ranks in athletics, especially in the field of fisticuffs. We are in the midst of a black rise against white supremacy...Less than a year ago Peter Jackson could have whipped the world - Corbett, [Robert] Fitzsimmons,...but the white race is saved from having at the head of pugilism a Negro....There are two Negroes in the ring today who can thrash any white man in their respective classes....Wake up you pugilists of the white race! Are you going to permit yourself to be passed by the black race?’[1]

The newspaper was widely read and influential. The open letter addressed to it’s (White) readers, expressing the sentiment that Black-White bouts were first and foremost racial - therefore political - contests, was not received as the obscure ranting of an extreme and isolated crank. Ashe argues it ‘was the most provocative piece of racist sports journalism yet seen in America and caused a sensation that lasted for years afterward.’[2]

The success of African-American Jack Johnson in becoming the first world Black heavyweight champion in 1908 - he was forced to wrap the belt around him in Sydney, Australia unable to find a venue in the United States - would no doubt have caused editor Dana another paroxysm of racial fury. In fact the journalist’s tirade merely lifted the lid - but with a public audience - on the latent prejudice that bubbled to the surface when notable Whites athletes were defeated by Blacks in significant sporting competition. The bruising caused by each jab, hook and upper-cut in Johnson’s taunting, smiling demolition of White contenders was felt many times over by racist Whites, whose suffering was further intensified by the boxer’s pride in himself and delight in his blood-spilling achievements. White hostility to Black prowess created an atmosphere in boxing - and other sports - of heightened racism. Johnson’s win led to numerous lynchings and attacks upon Blacks throughout the United States. If the future of the White ‘race’ could not be assured in the ring, the futures of some Black men would be terminated outside it. The defeat of Johnson by a ‘Great White Hope’ became a burning passion. For others, such as the Reverend Meyer the mere matching of Black and White was unfair. He campaigned to stop Johnson fighting ‘Bombardier Billy’ Wells in London in 1911.

‘The present contest is not wholly one of skill, because on the one side there is added the instinctive passion of the Negro race, which is so differently constituted to our own, and in the present instance will be aroused to do the utmost that animal development can do to retain the championship, together with all the financial gain that would follow.’[3]

Identified in Meyer’s lay anthropology are three core concerns - biological, economic and political - of White supremacists: Black athletic success as symbolic expression of the degeneracy of the White ‘race’; the consequent rewards of this success as a threat to White economic (and social) superiority; that the collective confidence and spiritual sustenance given to Black communities by Johnson as an heroic role model may inspire emulation. The champion was not only an Uppity Nigger who kicked White arses but he was also a rich UN; and he sexually aroused, slept with and loved White women. Inevitably the giant Texan was stopped. He lost his title in Havana, Cuba in 1915 to the ‘Great White Hope’ Jess Willard. The modern consensus is that the fight was fixed.

The central tenet in Myer’s explanation for Black success on the sports field - the animal in the Black - was to become the common feature in the apologies offered by the supremacists for defeats of Whites on track and field. The agility, physical dexterity, instinctive endurance and insentient durability of the Black athlete, derived from their animalism, made contests between Black and White unfair. The former would always be at an advantage when human competition included only the physical dimension. Thus it was because Whites were more evolved and civilised, at a more advanced stage of human development, that they were incapable of inflicting those kinds of comprehensive defeats in sport on Blacks that had been achieved - for the ‘race’- in the economic, political and social spheres.

If the animalist thesis represents an attempt to discount Black athletic success by devaluing the victory - and, therefore, the social significance of defeat: unequal bodies in unequal contests - the method of ethnic cleansing used by the administrators of horse racing in the USA to extinguish the economic competition posed by overwhelmingly successful Black jockeys illustrates how Black sportsmen were having to fight on many fronts. During the last quarter the 19th century Black jockeys dominated flat racing. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century riders were almost wholly White. The transformation had been brought about by a simple operation of the colour bar: Black jockeys were refused renewal of their licences to ride. In Britain a similar officially sanctioned colour bar operated in boxing. Black pugilists were not allowed to fight for British titles during much of the inter-war period. It was not until 1948 that a Black British boxer, middleweight Randolph Turpin, was allowed to contest a domestic title with a White Briton.

Racism invested Black athletic achievement with great symbolic value. In such a politicised sports environment the erasure from collective memory of Black triumph was profound. For those Europeans and Americans with an interest in maintaining the status quo, to accept Black success at face value would have undermined the crucial notion of biologically-determined White superiority. If this ideological keystone was shifted, would not other ideas underpinning the hierarchical structure of society, such as those justifying class and gender inequality, also come crashing down? Of course, in reality, sporting contests between Black and White were anything but equal. The opportunity for most White athletes to develop their skill and talent was far in excess of that to Blacks. The operation of the colour bar, official and unofficial, whether in Britain, its empire or indeed any part of the globe dominated by Europeans, sustained inequalities across the board.

Martin Offiah, a Black Rugby player for the England international team is nicknamed “Chariots” by his teamates. It refers to the film ‘Chariots of Fire’, the last two words of the film’s title having a phonetic harmony with the player’s surname. It is the closest association any Black athlete has with the film about, among other things, athletics in the decade after the first world war. Yet one of the greatest sprinters in Britain in the first half of the 1920’s was Harry Edward born in British Guiana in 1895. An African-Caribbean who wore the vest of the Polytechnic Harriers club he first forced attention upon himself in central Europe in 1914 when he ran 200 metres in 21.7 seconds in Berlin in June, following this up with a time of 22 seconds for the same distance in Budapest in July. Though the outbreak of war shortened the duration of his career it did not dull his asonishing speed. In 1920 he won the AAAs 100 yards title with a time of 10 seconds, also running the 220 yards in 21.6 seconds. At the Olympics of that year he won the bronze in 100 and 200 metres. It was said that his faltering start in the shorter distance deprived him of the gold (and silver). In 1921 he beat Harold Abrahams - a British Jew and one of the two central characters in the film - in both the 100 and 200 yards. At the 1922 AAA championship Edward won the 100, 200 and 440 yards titles within an hour. His outstanding performances won him the Harvey Memorial trophy, presented to the best athlete of the championship. Abrahams thought the young Guianan ‘one of the most impressive sprinters I have ever seen.’[4] That the two runners featured - the other was Scot Eric Liddle - in Chariots of Fire both came from ethnic minority backgrounds adds poignant irony to the exclusion of Edward. Furthermore it was Mussabini’s excellence in nurturing the talent of Edward that propelled Abrahams to invite the part Arab-African, part Italian trainer to take him up. (Mussabini also coached another Black runner, Jack London, who won the AAA 100 yards title in 1929 and was an Olympic silver medallist).

The dramatisation, a romanticised and racialised portrayal of real sporting endeavour, was enormously popular and profitable. Both characters, Abrahams and Liddle, are brought together by their achievements on the track. Both had obstacles in the way of their pursuit of athletic excellence. For Abrahams it was anti-Semitic prejudice; for Liddle God - in particular the spiritual turmoil and conflict caused by his attempt to congeal time spent running on the track with persuit of a dialogue with God. The most well-remembered manifestation of this running battle was Liddle’s refusal to compete on Sundays - the Sabbath. Paralleling the lives of these two athletes carried with it another sub-text proclaiming the egalitarian principles and practice at the heart of sport. Liddle and Abrahams evolve as personifications of the meritocratic ideal.

The opening dialogue ‘Let us praise famous men and our fathers that begat us’[5] echoes two themes that have been central concerns of this book: memory and identity. Unfortunately the film commits to celluloid posterity a selective, arbitrary and orthodox interpretation of the social history of British athletics in the 1920s. The Nation is white, overwhelmingly anglo-saxon and ruled by the fathers of God’s Children. The only perceived threat to this structured-by-nature supremacy comes from the Jewish Abrahams. (Liddle, though a Scot, is doing the work of God’s chosen Englishmen as a missionary in China). It won an Academy Award as ‘best film of 1981.’ On receiving the Oscar actor Colin Welland, involved in the making from the beginning, warned the Hollywood audience to beware, with words that had an umistakable symmetry with the narrative of the film: more British winners were sure to follow. However it was the picture’s unspoken and missing dialogue - its silence - that was most eloquent. It pronounced British athletics in this inter-war 1920s to be a monochrome yet egalitarian sport where, upon the track, anti-Semitic racism could be pounded to dust underfoot. An early scene recalling Abrahams’ induction to Gonville and Caius, his Cambridge college, reveals the contemporary texture of anti-Semitic prejudice through the mouth of a sneering porter. Later, at a dinner welcoming freshmen the master of the college pauses to solemnise the memory of those alumni who died in the first world war. ‘They died for England, and all that England stood for.’[6] His Little Englander sentiment - drawn from the same bank of ideas as the prejudice of the porter - and character had been scripted as embodying the values of a disintegrating pre-war hierarchy.

Liddle, as a Christian sportsman, acts as a bridge between the old world and the new. Inhabitants of the former such as the master and porter, with their highly racialised view of the Nation, suffer its decline and degeneracy caused by the introduction of Universal Suffrage - the harbinger of bourgeois subordination to the inferior majority ‘race’ within. The most efficient system of rule - for all - was that premised on the concept of noblesse oblige: rule by the elite in the interest of all. Sport in this order of things had a specific social role: a muscular activity, exemplified by manliness, selflessness and hierarchy, as the path of enlightenment to a moral outcome characterised by Godliness, sobriety, and patriotic duty. Sporting endeavour of this muscular Christian variety was a tool by which character was instilled and developed. This acquired character - that builds empire - forged through study of the bible and exertions of the body was further customised by class. Elite participants at the public schools and oxbridge would be equipped with the guiding principles necessary to rule. For the working class, it taught passive acceptance of higher authority from: the referee; the governing body of the sport; employers; and political masters.

CLR James argued that cricket - the social and ethnic composition of its clubs and their style of play - in the Caribbean was a looking-glass which ‘at any particular period...reflects tendencies in national life.’[7] In Chariots of Fire these ‘tendencies’ are represented as pressures in both sport and society for progressive change away from the stifling know-your-place regime of old. Abrahams as a Jewish student at Cambridge University, which had historically barred Semites from enrolling, was confidently making his place in the new order of things: you were what you did and you did what you wanted to do, unhindered by class or creed. This was - and should be - the measure of you; how you should be judged. The practiced egalitarianism of Liddle and Abrahams, as sportsmen, stood as metaphor for the fresh easterlies - cleansing political winds blowing through from revolutionary Russia - that flavoured this inter-war period. The film’s narrative spoke against a return to an ethos, in sport or society, that advocated the passive acceptance of inequality, hierarchy and elitism. Yet while addressing contemporary social and political tensions it did so in a timid, limited and monochrome style. Where was Harry Edward and Jack London? Indeed Liddle’s record time of 9.7 for the 100 yards at the 1923 AAA championships broke, for the first time, Wharton’s ‘evens’ set 37 years earlier. Incidentally, Liddle too, like Wharton buried far away from his birthplace in China, was not remembered by a gravestone until after his rescucitation in Chariots of Fire.

One Black athlete whose career has not been forgotten, the detail reverberating through time and across cultures, is USA sprinter Jesse Owens. Hitler had intended the 1936 Berlin Olympics - the first to be televised - to be an athletic festival extolling the virtues of Nazism. But Owens packed his own script on leaving Ohio. He won 4 gold medals, Blacking-out the sunrays of Aryan success. His defeat of ‘superior’ German - and other white - runners (in an illusion of effortless grace) re-choreographed Hitler’s intended dramatisation. According to Nazi ideology racial struggle was the motive force of history. Competition at its most naked was not over the control of material wealth and the means by which a society creats that wealth, but between ‘races’ for purity, survival and dominance. Only the unadulterated and non-miscegenised would endure. The salvation of the human ‘race’ - in effect, for Hitler, the biological struggle for Aryan pre-eminence - was only possible through the elimination of all other (sub-) species. Thus the apparatus of racial oppression and destruction so characteristic of Nazism: official denigration of minorities; ethnic ghettoisation; forced and slave labour; concentration camps and the application of eugenic and ethnic cleansing genocidal in scale. Owens, as a Black ‘auxilliary’ of the United States was an ‘untermenschen’, accorded the same racial status as Jews and Gypsies and the same social status as communists. All would be bound for the gas chamber upon the triumph of the Nazi will.

As triumphant Black sportsmen, Owens in 1936 and Wharton in 1886, are united by not only their ethnicity but the symbolic significance their excellence represented. Their athletic success semaphored comparable messages that rubbished notions of Black inferiority. In both Nazi Germany and late-Victorian Britain ideas about ‘race’ - in effect the relationship between physical appearance, behaviour and evolution - dominated and literally coloured any discussion of national, social or cultural similarity and difference. ‘Race’ was used as an instrument to make social incisions: to divide the working-class from uniting in pursuit of their objective material and political goal. It would be foolish to argue that the quality of life for minorities was similar in the two countries. An obvious difference was in the respective role of the State. While the ruling elite of the Nazis enforced a racial hierarchy through decrees of law and active brutality on the part of its militia, the British government did not force minorities and political opponents to shower in a gas chamber. What is argued is that the ruling-class of both countries invested a great deal of worth in the concept of ‘Race’; it was pre-eminent to any discussion concerning the social health and well-being of The Nation. Both were highly racialised societies. This was how a Black resident in London at the turn of the century described the experience of a fellow Black.

‘Recently, three white men, of gentlemanly appearance,...going in the opposite direction to that of a coloured man...called the attention of his comrades to the presence of the coloured man, and then said “Look at that thing”....This laceration of the feelings of coloured people, which has now become a practice in England, is partly due to the fact that Englishmen, having adopted the notion that they are superior to coloured men, have found rudeness and incivility to be the best supports of the imposture.’[8]

Yet there was a qualitative difference between the daily lives of ethnic minorities in Britain and Germany. Though in both countries ‘Race’ - cloaked or naked - was a constantly reoccurring theme in much public debate Wharton, while in Britain at least, was never fearful that the government would arbitrarily take his life in an effort to self-validate a racialised vision of how things should be.

At the time of Arthur’s preparation for his win at the 1888 Sheffield Handicap the local Daily Telegraph reported a speech made by Sir John Lubbock to a

‘meeting of working men at the Drill Hall, Bath. “Our empire” said Lubbock “contained representatives of almost every race of men, and every stage of human progress....It is far from easy to understand savages, they naturally had much greater difficulty in understanding us....Their modes of showing their feelings quite unlike ours.” ’[9]

Lubbock’s aim was to differentiate ‘his’ working men from those of a different colour who were separate not only in pigmentation but also in ideas, customs and importantly, their ability to comprehend. Other Victorians argued there was a more fundamental cleavage. Among these were writer Charles Kingsley and social commentator Henry Mayhew. They spat repelling poison at the ‘Dangerous Classes’ - the bulk of the industrial working-class - who were, like the savages of the Dark Continent, also a ‘race’ apart. (Kingsley considered Celts closer in evolution to Negroes than Anglo-Saxons). In a society ordered by racial science everyone had to be colour coded. Such a categorisation would then act as a predictor of behaviour. The Nazis later attempted to universalise this racialised view of humanity and human development. The difference between the racial universe of Britain in the 1880s and ‘90s and that of Germany in the 1930s was the degree to which the lesser ‘races’ were allowed a place in the New Order. Eugenics - effectively the science of racial purification - was a relatively new discipline in the 1880s. It reached an influential, genocidal maturity in Nazi Germany. Yet both societies were dominated by a ruling-class that viewed themselves as a superior ‘race’. Wharton and Owens confounded these ideas by their athletic skills. Although, as we have seen, the animalist theme was utilised by racial supremacists to escape from this contradiction.

The career of Owens after Berlin did not have the same uninterrupted angle of social descent that characterised Arthur’s post-sport career, though the American did find it extremely hard to make a living through his triumphs during the 1930s. It was not until after the second world war that his fame bought a little fortune. In 1950 he was named as ‘Athlete of the Half-Century’ by Associated Press. Twenty two years later his old college awarded him an honorary doctorate. And in 1976 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, ranked as the highest civilian ‘honour’ in the USA. The reason for this is discernible. While Wharton’s achievements had undermined the ruling ideas of the age of New Imperialism, in contrast Owens four Olympic golds affirmed the meritocratic ideals at the heart of Democratic America. The symbolic message trumpeted to the German masses to the sound of the USA anthem, while Owens stood on his winners podium, spoke of less inequality, less xenophobia and more individualism. Owens success became wonderful propaganda material for the marketing forces of Liberal Democracy. Despite being a willing advocate of these ideals, especially in the post-1945 Cold War period, Owens was still considered a suspect Negro by Hoover and his FBI.

This was not the first time a sporting contest involving an American and German had been coated in numerous layers of ideological varnish. A few months earlier the world heavyweight boxing contest between the Max Schmeling and Joe Louis had been hyped-up to King Kong proportions, particularly by Goebbels. (Louis was the first Black boxer able to fight for the title since Johnson.) The Nazis portrayed Schmeling as a tuetonic superman; an Aryan colossus. He won by a knockout in the 12th round. The German magazine Der Weltkampf outlined the racial ramifications of this victory.

‘The Negro is of a slave nature, but woe unto us if this slave nature is unbridled, for then arrogance and cruelty show themselves in the most bestial way...these three countries - France, England and white North America - cannot thank Schmeling enough for his victory, for he checked the arrogance of the Negro and clearly demonstrated to them the superiority of white intelligence.’[10]

The Schmeling-Louis fight - and the return in 1938, which the ‘Black Bomber’ won inside a round - and Owens’ experience in Berlin illustrate how the social and political context of sporting achievement determines the value that is placed on it. And it is not usually the self-evaluation of the sports man or woman that becomes hegemonic. The German boxer, heavyweight champion of the world between 1930-32, was ‘a decent, intelligent man...who found himself, to his own puzzlement, placed in a series of extraordinary situations owing to the history of his times.’[11] After the second world war he visited the USA and embraced Joe Louis. He also sent his former combatant money when destitute.

And destitution is no stranger to the Black heart of liberal America. (Although it should be pointed out that most poor North Americans are white). This impoverishment has much to do with systemic racism. How else can we rationally explain the disproportionate number of dispossessed Blacks in the USA? Any examination of their lives - today and yesterday - ridicules the inference of progress towards ethnic equality suggested by apologists of liberal democracy on the back of Owens in Berlin. The college at which Owens built his pre-Olympic career, Ohio State, had during his freshman year, 1933, legalised its policy of segregating the accomodation of its Black and White students through the Ohio Supreme Court. Additionally, Black students were not allowed to live on campus. The job offered to Owens as part of his scholarship was goods-lift operator - Whites only being allowed to operate the passenger lift. Columbus, the town in which Ohio State was situated was considered ‘ “a cracker town just like Jackson Mississippi” ’[12] with its of history of racism. Owens was warned by Black newspapers and colleagues that the institution was no place for a Black man.

Looking from the inside out - from the perspective of the runners as Black individuals - the major difference between the two was the public treatment their excellence attracted. Wharton’s success was quickly forgotten because it was politically expedient not to establish it as a worthy remembrance of symbolic importance. This is not to suggest a conspiracy of silence. Many who have achieved - in all walks of life - have been forgotten, yet contrastingly many who have achieved little judged solely by their own efforts once the privilege of birth or wealth are factored out of the evaluation, are remembered. Historical memory is not arbitrary. The theft of Africa continuing apace, it was not convenient to trumpet the doings of a son of Africa conquering those sons of conquerors in their own backyard. The wider political significance of Arthur’s achievements stood in contrast to the national/imperial events of the day. For Owens, it was the opposite. In many ways his Olympic success flowed with the prevailing current of international politics. The Nazis were an economic and imperial threat to the leading capitalist nations. This included state-capitalist USSR, the empire Hitler most wanted to destroy. Probably more than any other state in history, including the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany was a polity constructed around a particular body of ideas. As such it was vulnerable to practical refutations of its ideology by contradictory action and events. Owens should not have happened. His public denial of the nostrums of Nazism, on the track of the Nazis, and to their deepest embarrasement in front of thousands of Germans, provided immense propaganda material to the opponents of Fascism. These Defenders of Democracy - the USA, Britain, France - conveniently and expediently put aside the racial inequality so obvious and profound in their own (enormous imperial and domestic) backyards - a contradiction analysed by George Orwell in his 1939 essay ‘Not Counting Niggers’ - to proclaim the success of Owens. His medals were held up to symbolise not so much a victory for ethnic equality, for this could have dangerous repercussions in house and yard, but rather a defeat for the particular variety of racialism as constructed, implemented and propagandised by the Nazis.

A generation later Cassius Clay, as he was then known, replied to similar hypocrisy by throwing his Olympic gold medal into the river in his home state of Kentucky. His act pointed up the hollow weakness of symbolism-as-propaganda when confronted with a contrary reality: ‘With my gold medal actually hanging around my neck I could not get a cheeseburger served to me in a downtown Louisville restaurant.’[13] This individual response to racism by one Black champion took a collective form eight years later at the 1968 Olympics. Against the background of growing Black anger and hostility to the war in Vietnam, where African-Americans were disproportionately filling the bodybags, Black athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith black-fisted their way through the 200 metres medals ceremony. At the 400 metres equivalent their colleagues Larry James, Lee Evans and Ronald Freeman wore black berets, headgear of the revolutionary Black Panther movement. The lesson of Owens and Clay/Ali had been learnt. These Black athletes were determined not to allow their performances be stolen from them. If they were to stand as metaphor, let them, the practitioners - the producers - be the transcribers, the evaluators.

‘I wore a black right-hand and Carlos wore the left-hand glove of the same pair. My raised right hand stood for the power in black America. Carlos’ raised left-hand stood for the unity of black America. Together they formed an arch of unity and power. The black scarf around my neck stood for black pride. The black socks with no shoes stood for black poverty in racist America. The totality of our effort was the regaining of black dignity.’[14]

In this way does sport reflect global circumstances. It encapsulates both real and symbolic contest - sport and politics become intertwined and inseparable. While the geographical backdrop to Carlos, Smith, James, Evans and Freeman was the Estadio Olimpico, Mexico City, the political backdrop was one of Black revolutionary activism. (Interestingly Rodney Pattison and Iain Macdonald, British winners of the Flying Dutchman yacht competition also wore military caps and saluted when receiving their medals. Unlike Carlos and Smith they were not sent home). Prior to the Olympics Black athletes in the United States had formed themselves into the Olympic Project for Human Rights. Carlos and Smith were both supporters of OPHR. The Project had originally intended a Black boycott of the Olympics. A revision of this plan saw the adoption of a policy that aimed to subvert the unthinking nationalism redolent of the Olympics as a whole. They were determined that the Stars and Stripes would not be wrapped around their bodies. While the dead Black soldier in Vietnam had no choice of what covered him, the athlete did. The conscript had been forced to give his life in service of the State. No such ‘honour’ would be forced upon Carlos and the others. Their wins were for ‘black America’. The Olympics was an opportunity to reinterpret the United in States and proclaim the virtues of Black consciousness. (These two occasions also provided an ideal platform upon which Black, USA athletes could vent their anger at the racist head of the USA Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage. The hostility of Black athletes towards the Chicago millionaire was historic, stemming from his fact finding tour to Nazi Germany in 1935 when he returned emptyhanded. He had been sent by the American Olympic Committee to assess the suitability of Berlin as the Olympic venue, and in particular the treatment of Jewish sports people. He could find no evidence of the mistreatment of Jewish athletes.

The USA in 1968 was certainly not united. Many Blacks felt that the FBI had a hand in the killing of Martin Luther King in April. And in the death of Malcolm X in 1965. Rioting and rebellion by Black Americans in over 100 cities followed the murder of King. 39 were killed in the suppression, of which 34 were Black. The struggle of African-Americans for liberty, justice and equality nearly two hundred years after these principles had been inscribed in the constitution of the country was inextrcably linked to their economic status. Along with systemic rascism, poverty overshadowed most. It was this common enemy - with a common cause - that linked and united Black and White during the ‘Poor People’s March’ on Washington in May, representing 30 million destitute Americans. It culminated in ‘Resurrection City’, an encampment put together by the marchers in the centre of the capital. After 5 days the leaders were imprisoned and the shanty town destroyed.

Mexico City itself was the site of an uprising by students and workers against the government of President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz in the months before the Olympics. Just a week before the opening ceremony soldiers with fixed bayonets charged a crowd of over 15,000. In the stabbing and shooting by the military that followed more than 40 protesters were killed. Indeed 1968 was a year in which the oppressed in many different parts of the world took to the streets: in Ecuador, France, Brazil, Czechoslovakia to name some of those most prominent. The struggle for Black emancipation in the USA was at the forefront of a global phenomenon. The times really did seem to be changing.

While Arthur’s known political activity was confined to small-scale political and economic conflicts - though he was a member of the Miners Federation of Great Britain, forerunner of the NUM, during the General Strike in 1926 - his contribution, as a Black man, to the struggle of British labour for emancipation was not unique. There is a long history of self-activity by Black Britons and Black residents of Britain: in 1780 Charlotte Gardiner was hanged for daring to confront the authorities through her part in the Gordon Riots; the same decade Olaudah Equiano began campaigning against slavery. His daughter, Anna Maria is buried in the grounds of St. Andrews church, Chesterton, Cambridge. She died in 1797, aged 4. (It is within shooting-over-the-bar-and-fetching distance of the home pitch of the Sunday League football team for which I play). A plaque was erected on the outside wall. The words and the sentiment they express stand testament to a history of respect and tolerance of difference.

During the 19th century William Davidson, a Jamaican was hanged in 1820 for his part in the Cato Street conspiracy. The conspirators were seeking revenge for the Peterloo Massacre of 1815 in which 11 demonstrators had been killed by the militia; William Cuffay was a leader of the Chartist movement in London; Henry Sylvester Williams formed the African Association in 1897, to encourage pan-African unity. (In 1900 the first ever Pan-African Conference was held in London. Its ultimate objective was the ending of colonialism).

The black gloves and berets of 1968 was the African-American expression of a movement against oppression that had flowered with Toussaint Louverture’s victorious slave rebellion in San Domingo - Haiti - in 1797. Yet from the anti-slavery campaigns of the 18th and 19th centuries to the Black Panthers of urban America and beyond, the primary characteristic feature has not been the ethnic exclusivity of the participants, but their common socio-economic background. Leader of the Panthers, Malcolm X, came to acknowledge the necessity of unity between peoples - after they had achieved unity amongst themselves - if any were to stand any chance of destroying capitalism.

‘You have whites who are fed up, you have blacks who are fed up. The whites who are fed up can’t come uptown [to Harlem] too easily because the people uptown are more fed up than anybody else, and they are so fed up it’s not easy to come uptown...when the day comes when the whites are really fed up with what is going on - and I don’t mean those jive whites, who pose as liberals and who are not , but those who are fed up with what is going on - when they learn how to establish the proper type of communication with those uptown who are fed up, and they get some coordinated action going. You’ll get some changes. And it will take both, it will take everything that you’ve got, it will take that.’[15]

Arthur owed a debt, as do all sports people, to those who fought to improve the lives of Black and working people. Without pressure from below to change the lot of ordinary people, the small amount of leisure time and money for relative luxuries that did exist would not have. They forced those above, in parliament, in the boardroom, in the courtroom to change laws, working practices and conditions. In Britain it was activity by individuals and groups, such as the Chartists and trade unions in general, that won improved social and economic conditions which enabled men and to a much lesser extent, women, to persue a living in sport. It was activists on the shop floor and on the street who created the space for Wharton to perform.

The argument of Nick Hazlewood In The Way! Goalkeepers: A Breed Apart? is that you have to be a little crazy, unusual, demented to want to play in that position. What other placing holds the prospect of getting your teeth kicked out with your first touch? Where you get the blame for defeat, but no praise in victory? I do not think Arthur was a jockstrap short of the full kit, but he would certainly fit the description to be included in Hazlewood’s ‘Breed’. He was extreme, brave, violent, vulnerable, mad. To my mind the first el Loco.

Anyone who chose to play in goal in the 1880s-90s was considered brave, foolhardy and useless anywhere else. Anyone who was forced to play in goal lacked resolve, was useless anywhere else or both. ‘The small boys, the duffers and the funk-sticks were the goalkeepers...If any player who was playing out showed any sign of funk [cowardice] or failed to play up, he was packed off into goal at once, not only for the day, but as a lasting degradation.’[16]

Goalkeepers were not formally acknowledged until 1871 when the FA inserted a rule that allowed those so designated to handle the ball anywhere in their half of the field. Though Sheffield Rules football had referred to the goalkeeper before this time, defining the position literally: anyone on the defending team who is nearest to his own goal. Until the 1890s a goalkeeper could be downed by one or more attackers (in an onside position), whether or not he had the ball. The more organised teams would use a rusher, a forward whose job it was to do just this. Any goalie foolish enough to catch a ball and hold onto it would almost certainly take a battering from any forwards within diving or lunging distance. All sides played with at least five forwards in the 1890s. This may explain Wharton’s preference for fisting the ball away rather than catching it; and, in part, his reputation as the ‘goalkeeper with the prodigious punch’. Despite his excellent timing and co-ordination, Arthur did not always connect with the ball!:

‘Several times...[Bridgewater of Sheffield United] charged at Wharton [of Rotherham Town] as if he meant mischief. Stand-up fights because of these charges more than once seemed imminent, but the good sense of Wharton and the timely intervention of the referee prevented anything so discreditable.’[17]

The position of goalkeeper suited Arthur’s character. Despite the great risk of personal injury that in the 1880s would have threatened his potential as a sprinter, the potential for freedom of expression appealed to the extrovert in Arthur. Whether he could have played successfully in other positions is a moot point. He certainly could not have done with the same skill, agility, exuberance and longevity of professional career. As goalkeeper he had freedom to roam - to the half-way line, beyond even -and take shots at goal. This would not have been unusual. Only from 1912 were goalies restricted to handling the ball within the newly marked penalty area. Swinging from the bar, as has been noted, was another speciality. A letter writer to the Sheffield Telegraph and Independent, recalled (half a century after the event).

‘In a match between Rotherham and [Sheffield] Wednesday at Olive Grove I saw Wharton jump, take hold of the cross bar, catch the ball between his legs, and cause three onrushing forwards - Billy Ingham, Clinks Mumford and Micky Bennett - to fall into the net. I have never seen a similar save since and I have been watching football for over fifty years.’[18].

For some a cameo that said much about the nature of the player; for others a Black man hanging from the horizontal was second to their nature.

Once Arthur stopped playing football professionally in 1902 though his cricketing exploits continued to be publicised little else was. As such there are many gaps in this study. What we can say that his name is synonymous with numerous firsts, as: Black professional footballer; Black Football League player; ‘gentleman’ professional; 100 yards world record holder. The list could continue. However if his - if anybody’s - life was reduced to a mere recitation of factual achievements it would, by its very nature, be incomplete.

His private relationship with Emma was left unresolved in the sense that the difficulties created out of living together and having separate lives - Arthur’s being very public - was not underpinned by mutual love and respect. It was a journey neither would have chosen had they known the route beforehand. The birth of Minnie and Norah to sister-in-law Martha, assuming that they were Arthur’s children, would have created unquenchable anguish for Emma, Martha and Arthur - for obviously different reasons. For all three the world may have acquired a surreal hue from 1893. Arthur, the nationally-known celebrity ever willing to encourage adulation of him by others yet unable to give of himself fully to his most enduring partner, the woman with whom he had chosen to share his life. Public acclaim versus private grief. For a man so used to winning physical contests this covert emotional conflict may well have overshadowed his public triumphs with its tenacious, sustained impact. Once the door had been shut on the outside world, how much worth did his feats of time over distance, of combining agility and strength carry when faced with the complex emotions of his tumultuous marriage?

What of Martha and Arthur’s anguish? Of lovers doomed from the moment their feelings awoke, enveloped and roused by a love procreative yet inevitably destructive; driven and haunted by the fallible, withering nature of its unsustainable secrecy. How did they cope with their public cloaking of their union; and the impossibility of accepting joint responsibility for the living embodiments of their affair? What was the burden of Emma and Arthur’s barren marriage compared to Martha’s life-long torment of dual denial: of being the mother to her children and partner of her lover?

For a man who was the focus of so much positive attention, who bought excitement into the lives of many, it was surely not lost on Arthur how negative his physicality could also be. Not only to those nearest to him, but to himself . (Can there be anyone closer?) Was not he also prevented from loving fully his children? And them from reciprocating?

While it could be argued that Arthur had a fair amount of power in determining the course of his personal relationships - marriage; his affiar with Martha - he had little influence to deflect or duck the power of systemic, institutional racism and its proletarianising influence.[19] It can be assumed from his application to join the Gold Coast Government Service that he would have swapped his role as Northern Working-Class Hero with that of a non-descript West African civil servant. It is at this point that we find the consistent theme of pardox fusing the public and private dimensions of his life. His elevated status as sporting icon in Britain involved, as part of the Faustian pact, a denial of a return to West Africa on his own terms. As an anonymous official of the Colonial Office commented, his sporting excellence was ‘inappropriate’ training for the career of a bureaucrat. Thus his success, in the sweep of the hand of a pen-pushing official, becomes transformed into a handicap the burden of which is measured in years rather than yards. Though Arthur was not alone. To end a glittering sporting career in poverty is not unusual for working class athletes, especially when they are Black. Joe Louis is a case in point. And Albert Johanneson, the South African winger for Leeds United who became the first Black African to play in an FA Cup final in 1965. Thirty years later for two days he lay dead in his Headingley flat unnoticed, broke and broken.

But racism in and of itself does not automatically cause destitution. Its impact is dependent upon the relation of power between the parties involved: the velocity and damage is dependent upon the social and economic relationship between the firer and the target. To illustrate it is worth recalling the career of another Black sportsman, Learie Constantine, who played cricket in Lancashire twenty years after Wharton. A Trinidadian and Westindies international he was invited, in 1928, to play professionally for Nelson in the Lancashire League. His family - his partner and their daughter Gloria - were later joined by another Trinidadian and family friend, CLR James. According to James there was one other person of colour in the small cotton town, who collected refuse in a pushcart. After initial hostility the Trinidadians became accepted by the working-class community around them. No doubt Learie’s success on the wicket - Nelson won the Lancashire League seven times in Constantine’s nine seasons with the club - endeared him to the hearts - if not the minds - of most. James recalls one incident that Constantine interpreted as a sign of acceptance and belonging.

‘Early one morning a friend turns up, has a chat and a cup of tea and rises to leave. “Norma, I am just going to do my shopping. If you haven’t done yours I’ll do it for you.” Later Constantine said to me, “You noticed?” I hadn’t noticed anything. “Look outside. It is a nasty day. She came so that Norma will not have to go out into the cold.” ’[20]

In 1943 Constantine booked rooms for himself and his family at the Imperial Hotel, Russell Square, London. He was in the capital playing for the West Indies against England at Lords. On arrival the manager, fearful of the effect of public expressions of prejudice from his other guests upon his trade, reluctantly agreed to honour Constantine’s booking - for one night and no more. The family went immediately to another hotel and Learie sued the Imperial. He won £5 in damages. The hotel had chosen a public figure with a high profile, who had the economic means, social status as a civil servant and the social contacts to fight back ‘against the revolting contrast between his first-class status as a cricketer and his third class status as a [Black] man.’[21]

The sports career of ‘Darkie’ - this epithet being applied to virtually all Black professional sportsmen in Britain up until the 1960s - Wharton was distinguished by two primary characteristics: his abilities as an athlete - skills that were the coalition of innate talent and applied toil; and the social reaction to his colour and ethnicity. In respect of the first characteristic, he achieved fame but no lasting material benefit for his physical prowess. In respect of the second the responses to his colour were conditioned by a national and imperial backdrop that held ‘race’ to be as important as social class in determining one’s place in the world. Arthur’s burden was not his colour but the dual identity forced upon him because he was a man of colour. He lived, as a sportsman, in two co-existing but different worlds: in one he was acclaimed and One of Us; in the other he was racialised and categorised as an Other. The Athletic Journal interview, 26 June 1888, told of two personas, the public and the private. ‘Arthur is a most sociable fellow when you know him, “but you have to get to know him first”...taken all-round he is a straight forward good natured chap.’

The words ‘when you get to know him’ can be rewritten as ‘when you get to know him as a man, an individual’ (albeit a social being). An unintended revelation that within the body of Arthur was two identities. It infers a discrepancy between the public and the private image but does not elaborate. Yet there was a distinction between Arthur the athlete and Arthur the ‘Black Man’, a racialised and racially determind Object. This political construction - an edifice of divide and rule and bulwark of the status quo - sought to devalue African civilisation therefore the African. The images of noble and ignoble savage, central to any late 19th century Euro-centric construction of the Negro, were for public consumption by the White masses. Yet the reporter appears to be saying that ‘when you get to know him’ as a individual, stripped of his racialised identity ‘he is a straight forward good natured chap.’

There is little doubt that the level of racism, whether it be the operation of the colour bar or personal abuse was under reported. CLR James emphasises this point. ‘Writers on sport....automatically put what was unpleasant out of sight even if they had to sweep it under the carpet. The impression they created was one of almost perpetual sweetness and light.’[22] Constantine, a committed anti-racist who, somewhat contradictorily ended his days among the political Establishment in the House of Lords, recognised the contrasting quality of his individual experience as a man among friends in Nelson, to his objective status as a Black man in White country.

‘Almost the entire population of Britain really expect the coloured man to live in an inferior area...devoted to coloured people....Most British people would be quite unwilling for a black man to enter their homes, nor would they wish to work with one as a colleague, nor to stand shoulder to shoulder with one at a factory bench.’[23]

For the last 15 years of his working life Arthur was a colliery haulage hand at Yorkshire Main Colliery. He died on 13 December 1930 at Springwell House sanatorium near Edlington, Doncaster after a ‘long and painful illness.’[24] He was buried 4 days later in a third-class grave. That Arthur finished his working days underground is a poignant irony. There is an absurd symmetry between the slow but steady erasure of his achievements from collective memory and his days spent gathering coaldust beneath the surface. During the writing of this book Football Unites-Racism Divides launched the Arthur Wharton Memorial Fund to provide a fitting headstone to mark Arthur’s burial plot. Fittingly the largest donation came from the collective body of fellow professional footballers, the PFA. The headstone was erected, at Edlington cemetery, on 8 May 1997. Among those present were his family, a longtime resident of Edlington - who knew nothing of Arthur - originally from Sierra Leone and a direct descendent of Sir Samuel Lewis the first African to be knighted, professional footballers past and present including the writer of the forward to this book, members of the Black community and workers from FURD, in particular Howard Holmes who has been instrumental in ensuring Arthur is now visible to those that want to find him. The dust was again being kicked-up from below.

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Thabe, GAL and Mutloatse, M It’s a Goal: 50 Years of Sweat, Tears and Drama in Black Soccer (Johannesburg 1983)

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Jenkins, Ray ‘Gold Coasters Overseas, 1880-1919’ Immigrants and Minorities 4, 3, November 1985

Kirkham-Greene, Anthony ‘Imperial Administration and the Athletic Imperative’ in Baker WJ and Mangan, A (eds.) Sport in Africa (London 1987)

RW Lewis ‘Football Hooliganism in England Before 1914’ International Journal of the History of Sport 13, 13

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Vasili, Phil ‘The Right Kind of Fellows: Nigerian Footballl Tourists as Agents of Europeanisation’ International Journal of the History of Sport 11, 2,

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[1] Charles A Dana in Arthur Ashe Junior A Hard Road To Glory vol. 1 (1993 edition) p.27

[2] Ashe vol.1(1993) p.27.

[3] Jeffrey P Green ‘Boxing and the “Colour Question” in Edwardian Britain: The “White Problem” of 1911’ in International Journal of the History of Sport 5, 118, (1988).

[4] Lovesey, op.cit., p.75.

[5] Ibid..

[6] Ibid.

[7] (1996) p.214.

[8] Theophilus E Samuel Scholes ‘Glimpses of the Ages: or the superior and inferior races, so-called discussed in the light of science and history’ II 176, 177 179, 237 in Fryer (1984) p 439.

[9] 12 September.

[10] Ashe vol.2 (1993) p.14.

[11] Gerald Suster Champions of the Ring (London 1994) p.107.

[12] William J Baker Jesse Owens (London 1986) p.39.

[13] Mike Marqusee ‘Sport and Stereotype: from role model to Muhammed Ali’ in Race and Class 36, 4 (1995) p.10.

[14] Ibid, p.20.

[15] George Breitman ‘The Last Year of Malcolm X’ (New York 1967) pp. 206-7 in Kevin Ovenden Malcolm X. Socialism and Black Nationlism (London 1992) p.41.

[16] Hazlewood (1996) p.22.

[17] Rotherham Advertiser 4 April 1891.

[18] T.H. Smith, 12 January 1942.

[19] Many skilled workers from the Caribbean migrating to Britain in the 1950s, found they were forced to take jobs requiring little special training or deployment of their skills. There are many works which cover racism as a means of proletarianisation. See, for example Tony Bogues, Kim Gordon and C.L.R.James (London 1979); A.Sivanandan A Different Hunger, chapter 3, (London 1983).

[20] CLR James Beyond A Boundary (London 1996) p.124.

[21] CLR James Beyond A Boundary (London 1963) p.110.in Peter Fryer (1984) p.364.

[22] CLR James (1996) p.112

[23] L Constantine ‘Colour Bar’ (1954) p.67 in Peter Fryer (1984) p.367

[24] Sheffield Telegraph, 16 December 1930.