Site Review

Exploring the need for and viability of a new product means assessing what is already on the market. The same is true when proposing to add to the legion of sites already residing on the web. The following site review begins with a topical approach – African Americans in Sport – and concludes with a genre review of online teaching sites. What this review reveals is that there is a niche for exploitation within both the topic and the genre.

Topical Site Review
One difficult piece of assessing sport history on the web is locating the academic efforts. The intersection of sport and history attracts both the history “buff” and the sport enthusiast. Moreover, sports journalists with an incredible amount of knowledge have entered the genre to produce a variety of works, in both old and new media, that tend more toward celebrations and antiquarianism than scholarly analysis. For example, the Houston Chronicle, ESPN, and Sports Illustrated web sites all have pages that provide photographs and biographical sketches on African American athletes who, within the context of their sport, made important contributions to the civil rights struggle. However, there is no scholarly analysis or depth to these efforts.

There are a few sites in the field that reach beyond the bounds of sports enthusiasm toward more academic efforts. Probably the best currently available is the Library of Congress’s, Jackie Robinson and Other Baseball Highlights, 1860s – 1960s, created to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s breaking of baseball’s color line. This “web site reference aid,” as the site bills itself, explores Robinson’s baseball and civil rights achievements while at the same time examining the earlier development of the color line and the emergence and growth of the Negro Leagues in response to it. This site is more of an exhibit, but it also provides access to some primary sources – mostly baseball photographs, but also letters, speeches, songs, and screenplays, that cover the breaking of baseball’s color line. One goal of the site is to depict how materials that are physically dispersed (in this instance, throughout the Library of Congress) can be brought together to tell a story and serve as reference materials in one site. For example, the years that Jackie Robinson spent in a Dodger uniform are presented using letters and newspapers, but also such popular culture sources as sheet music, movies, and radio transcripts. For those interested in these baseball and civil rights sources for whom access to the Library of Congress is problematic, bringing them together in one virtual location does more than tell a story – it can also serve as a valuable, if limited, research tool.

Yet the site has certain limitations, particularly in its design. The bright blue background is dated and makes the text difficult to read. Moreover, site navigation, particularly from the cluttered and linear home page, is not immediately clear. Finally, the site is six years old; a little updating could make it more interactive, fun, and useful. Rather than merely clicking on the sheet music for Buddy Johnson’s “Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit that Ball?”, updates to the site could have visitors listening to Count Basie’s famous recording of the song. Movies, radio shows, television appearances – these too offer possibilities for audio and video additions to the site that would allow visitors to explore the ways that Robinson’s baseball career became part of popular culture.

Another sports topic that has been explored in various ways on the web is baseball’s Negro Leagues. Black Baseball’s Negro Baseball Leagues presents a celebratory history designed to showcase twentieth-century ballplayers who were denied the opportunity to play major-league ball due to their race. Most of the background information comes from several popular histories written on the topic that were published by the producer of the site. But the whole tone of the site is melodramatic, overdone, saccharine, and shallow, as the “history” link demonstrates. The three main links – “history,” “players,” and “teams” – consist of photographs and text and provide little depth, particularly in terms of examining deeper cultural issues or context. In terms of design, the color scheme makes reading difficult at times, and the commercial links to buy books or other merchandise, always present somewhere on the screen, are especially annoying.

Another site that examines the Negro Leagues, A Look at Life in the Negro Leagues, was developed by Kansas State University. There is an attempt here to explore the subject in a more scholarly manner and to introduce a look at the integration of the minor leagues. Yet most of the site consists of an interview with Buck O’Neill, the audio for which did not work, and direct quotes from Bruce Adelson’s book, Brushing Back Jim Crow: The Integration of Minor-League Baseball in the American South.[1] While Adelson writes a good popular history on a subject that has received little attention, he is a journalist as opposed to a historian. He draws large excerpts from players’ memoirs without providing the kinds of analysis or context that a rich scholarly work would include. By relying so heavily on Adelson, this web site also largely omits any contextualization of these accounts into an overall narrative of American history or the African American civil rights struggle.

The final academic site that is part of this topical review is The Changing Status of the Black Athlete in the 20th Century United States. This one-page site presents an online essay by John C. Walter, Professor of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. Walter argues that the athletes who began integrating professional sports at mid-century did so under a double burden. Not only did they have to perform better on the playing field than their white counterparts but they also had to conduct their private lives more circumspectly than white players. Through the essay, Walter tracks the slow and uneven progress athletes have encountered in different sports, addresses issues of income and education, and assesses the present dearth in the area of coaching and management positions. His indices of change in comparing the present with the last half century include the number of African Americans in professional sports, as well as the great strides made in the area of income and commercial endorsements.

Unfortunately, this site does not measure up well when compared to either old or new media. When compared to scholarly articles, the depth of analysis, while greater than the other academic web sites, is lacking. In terms of its use of new media, this site lags even further behind. There are no links to other references or related sites, and the only image is a photograph of the essay author. This site does not think to the future. Indeed, it does not even harness the tools of the web of today. In short, except for its potentially wider audience, this site offers nothing over a textual presentation of the essay.

In sum, the topic of African Americans in Sport is simply waiting for someone to use new media to exploit its academic potential. Even the subject of Jackie Robinson has been little explored, and there are virtually no sites that include African American women athletes, allowing for the examination of race and gender issues. When one integrates such a topic into the larger narrative of twentieth-century United States History, the teaching possibilities for AP high school students and college undergraduates are ripe with promise, as the following genre review explores.

[1] Bruce Adelson, Brushing Back Jim Crow: The Integration of Minor-League Baseball in the American South (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 1999).